Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 42
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
288/365: Such Good Friends (Otto Preminger, 1971) (Apple TV, YouTube, Amazon)
As Preminger’s stock value continues its slow ascent in the last decades, we come up against the less heralded and recognized corners of his filmography, where the filmmaker’s distinctively ambivalent, unjudgemental, Fontane-like voice becomes tinctured with egomania, celebrity and the demands of a changing industry. This late career detour is a poser, and maybe his oddest career choice, a quasi-Woody Allen farce about Manhattan’s smugly wealthy culture class that is overwhelmed by Elaine May’s pseudonymously-scripted zingers and structured queasily around the passive agony that insecure rich mom Dyan Cannon endures while her faithless husband slips into an accidental coma and never comes out. (In its tense machinations around a beautiful woman in a posh New York apartment, it could be seen as the fizzy, sex-comedy alternative to Preminger’s Laura, made 27 tyears earlier.) Too odd to be accepted by audiences but too conflicted to be beloved by Preminger fans, this rather misanthropic farce is packed with crusty New Yawk-Jewish character bits (plus Joseph Papp as himself) and loopy doses of subjective imagery (as a self-promoting author, Preminger buddy and fellow Batman villain Burgess Meredith is seen dancing naked with a shill-placard over his crotch), building to James Coco’s epic struggle with a corset, but it also helplessly poses the question of why the utterly lovely and Swiss-timed Cannon wasn’t the commanding star she should’ve been. Then and now, Hollywood seldom knows what to do with women that are both gorgeous and hilarious.
289/365: Swingers (Doug Liman, 1996) (Hulu, Vudu, HBO Max, YouTube, Amazon, Apple TV)
A now-classic, full-throttle indie comedy that created careers for virtually everyone involved, Liman’s debut film follows a specific subculture with almost anthropological scrutiny: out-of-work actors on the fringes of 90s Hollywood caught in a proto-Sinatra mindset and patois. Women are “beautiful babies” who want “Daddy” because he’s “so fucking money,” and if it sounds silly, just watch newcomer Vince Vaughn wrap his snake eyes and lizardy lips around this dynamic with conviction and gusto he hasn’t matched since. Jon Favreau wrote the screenplay, and gives himself the the movie’s hub-role, a neurotic, whining would-be comic who’s only funny when he’s not trying to be (in an Albert Brooks-ish kind of way), and who can’t stop vomiting about the girlfriend he left behind in New York to make it big in Hollywood. Like Diner, a several ways this film’s protype, Liman’s film is a goldmine of fresh ways to handle hackneyed movie ideas, down to a parking lot stand-off with a handgun. (“You asshole!” Favreau bellows at a hair-trigger friend, “Didn’t you see Boyz N the Hood? Now one of us is going to get shot!”) Like most modern comedies when they actually begin with a rich script and have a lot of real gas in the tank, the movie’s filthy with details you want to slow down and hang with — even a barbed game of Sega hockey is a comic set-piece.
290/365: Nightmare Alley (Edmund Goulding, 1947) (YouTube, Amazon)
Into every Hollywood glamour god’s career must once come a counterpoison, a film role that rubs creepily against the grain of everything that made the star in question a star. Tyrone Power, one of the most beautiful men to ever dash across a Golden Era soundstage, had Stan, the carny miscreant in this infamous film, one of the oddest of all noirs, and Power’s presence is key: as an ascendant sideshow huckster, Stan lies with every fulsome grin — you can never trust Power again, in any movie. As Stan employs his looks, actory charisma and snakeoil patter to cheat nearly everyone he meets, it becomes apparent that Stan’s schtick isn’t far from Power’s own, that using your long eyelashes and perfect teeth to empty a mark’s pockets isn’t so different from using them to become a movie star. Stan climbs from carny pit to nightclub eminence with a clairvoyance grift, and as he does Power beams with the conviction and ego of a matinee idol momentarily confused between illusion and reality. But then comes the descent into the maelstrom, and the film itself (we’re soon to see a Guillermo del Toro remake) goes menacingly dark, seething with a sense of booze-sodden fringe-America misery that remains distinctive and unforgettable. The film pivots, ultimately, on the old classic traveling-carnival defintion of the word “geek,” reaching a pit of hopelessness that might be film noir’s ultimate subcellar.
291/365: The Safety of Objects (Rose Troche, 2001) (Amazon)
It’s not too much to say that this modest but expertly observed indie satire-drama is one of the best films directed by an American woman in the aughts. Adaptated from from A.M. Homes’s celebrated collection of creepy-suburban short stories, the film portrays four suburban families whose barely repressed troubles all center around a single devastating — but utterly common and mundane — incident. Start with Glenn Close’s meticulous mom, doting over a comatose son (Joshua Jackson) at the expense of her teenage daughter (Jessica Campbell), who harbors seething resentment toward a neighboring single mom (Patricia Clarkson), whose young, slightly androgynous daughter (Kristen Stewart) becomes preyed upon by the local handyman (Tim Olyphant), who turns out to be far from the scavenging pervert we imagine him to be. A hotshot lawyer on the block (Dermot Mulroney) gets passed over at work and, before he knows it, he falls off the grid and begins loitering at the mall, while the son of another mom (Mary Kay Place) is having an intense love affair with his sister’s Barbie doll. In fact, none of the characters turn out the way we think they will, and their relationships are all real-life complex, defying our expectations and mix up our preliminary judgments.
292/365: The Confession (Costa-Gavras, 1970) (Vudu, YouTube, Apple TV, Amazon)
There’s no overlooking the systemic shock Costa-Gavras provided to European art film with his first six films, and particularly the Elvis season of Z (1969), The Confession (1970) and State of Siege (1972). In a stroke, the European political thriller was born but also cranked with both the energy of genre film and the balls-of-the-feet pertinence of protest usually reserved for anti-war documentaries. More than even that, Costa-Gavras’ nervous, head-swivel, slam-cut filmmaking reinvented the idea of political film — righteous outrage now came at you in fifth gear, sober but white-knuckled and urgent. Those three films mattered because they attacked state powers that were still very much in action — The Confession depicts the tribulation of Artur London, a Czech bureaucrat suddenly and for purely whimsical Stalinist reasons sucked into the vortex of Eastern Bloc persecution and torture, leading to the black parade of the 1952 Slansky show trials. It’s a brutally methodical film, elucidating the process of converting a man of staunch Communist principles (Yves Montand’s troubled soulfulness has never been more convincing) into a soulless puppet, and there may be no clearer depiction on film of the Orwellian tools by which modern autocracies control their citizens. This may be the first film explicitly about the machinations of torture, which alone makes it a sociocultural touchstone just as relevant today as it was during the Cold War. But the movie is also made with Costa-Gavras’ customary brio and confidence; a potentially repetitive or even dull movie spectacle (sleep deprivation, etc.) is fashioned into a mega-charged ordeal, with even the most ordinary two-people-in-a-room scene galvanized by a hunting camera, breathless cuts, and a scrupulous attention to gazes locking and crossing over space. Raoul Coutard’s rather astonishing color cinematography only ticks up the amperage, with some of the most fascinating and haunting interior lighting ever committed.
293/365: What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (Lasse Hallstrom, 1993) (Netflix, Apple TV, Vudu, Amazon, YouTube)
Something of a quiet miracle, this beloved nowhere movie captures a difficult thing: the sense of the members of a family and the community around them actually having known each other, and each others’ eccentricities, for a long, long time. The Grapes have their fair share of oddities, too: Dad committed suicide years before, and the 400-pound Mom (Darlene Cates) hasn’t left their collapsing, handmade house since. Gilbert (Depp), easily the sanest person in town, works at the local grocery store, dallies with a banana-bread housewife (Mary Steenburgen), and works hard at keeping his wacko clan (which includes two younger sisters) together and happy — though most of his effort is spent on his brother Arnie (Leonardo DiCaprio, an Oscar nomination), the center of the Grape cyclone, a mentally retarded teenager who finds trouble like a fly finds dogshit. Keeping Arnie occupied, happy, clean and off the local water tower is a fulltime job, and one Gilbert begins to resent once a particular mobile home breaks down in town and he strikes up a romance with a free-spirited, winsome proto-hippie (Juliette Lewis). Though the acting, particularly DiCaprio’s, is flawless, it’s Hallstrom’s touch and Peter Hedges’ screenplay (from his novel) that crafts the experience: the film loves the Grapes with the same genuine affection and healthy sense of humor it holds for the whole town: Steenburgen’s scatterbrained adulteress, Kevin Tighe’s bursting-at-the-seams insurance salesman, Crispin Glover’s content, philosophical mortician, the genuinely enormous and exhausted Cates, a firsttime actress whose actual girth landed her on Oprah just as it helplessly cancels her chances at a movie career beyond Ma Grape. It’s a strange movie with its own rhythms, where the simplest scenes — swimming in a pond, watching a fast-food franchise open, visiting a new supermarket (and its infamous lobster tank) — are fresh, funny and touching.
294/365: Ludwig: Requiem for a Virgin King (Hans-Jurgen Syberberg, 1972) (Vimeo)
Syberberg became a global figure with Hitler, a Film from Germany (1977), which in its brazen length (nearly seven-and-a-half-hours) and form as a Wagnerian discourse-voyage through the meanings and ramifications of Hitler’s place in the 20th century did not attract a wide audience but certainly beguiled the right one — Susan Sontag’s immediately famous The New York Review of Books essay proclaimed the film to be “on another scale from anything one has seen on film,” and made it a legend. But it was only the capper, as it were, to a brace of decidedly unique movies laying German history out on the table like an autopsied corpse. Syberberg’s films aren’t outraged or dramatic, but dissertative; coming in at a modest two-and-quarter hours, this historical masquerade established the filmmaker’s proscenium style, enacted entirely before a looming projection screen throbbing with stylized and vintage background “sets” (often the only forebear you can think of is Melies) and dallying as much with the infamous Bavarian monarch’s narcissistic biography as it does with Jarmanesque camp, operatic kitsch, nude girls, Weimar cabaret schtick, children with mustaches, stuffed swans, and so surreally on. Relatively tongue-in-cheek, compared to Syberberg’s more ambitious epics, it resembles a somber carny sideshow orchestrated by a guilty Teutonic madman, but it still echoes (and beats out) Visconti’s famous and turgid Ludwig (released the following year) in its dogged logorrhea and straight-faced dress-up.
Year Three Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41
Year Two Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52
Year One Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52
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