Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 45
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
309/365: Corpse Bride (Tim Burton & Mike Johnson, 2005) (Tubi, Apple TV, HBO Max, Vudu, Amazon, YouTube)
Surely retro-auteur Burton’s sublimest elegy for lost time next to Ed Wood, this black-velvet comedy for modern tweens takes the tools and design of The Nightmare Before Christmas several steps further into the storybook abyss, and integrates archives of semi-forgotten culture into its glib gothica — The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Charles Addams, the St. James Infirmary blues of the Fleischer brothers, the fossilized legacy of Ray Harryhausen. A sallow youth (Johnny Depp’s voice), avoiding a marriage arranged by greedy adults, mistakenly practices his vows in the presence of a half-buried skeleton in the woods (Helena Bonham-Carter’s voice), and is thus inopportunely wed to a dead woman. What we have here is a rare Hollywood thing: a humble slice of Old World folklore. Claude Levi-Strauss would be whipping out the graph paper. The film isn’t just roughly “based on a Russian folktale,” but a knowing thievery from S.Y. Agnon and Sholom Aleichem, who in turn made their careers converting centuries of Jewish mythology into fiction. Set in a monotonal Mitteleuropa as archly dour and decaying as the underworld is jumpin’ with bone bands, pop-eye jokes and Peter Lorre-voiced maggots, the scenario (written by John August, Caroline Thompson and Pamela Pettler) has tidbits that can be traced back to 17th-century tales and traditions, including the Ukrainian-shtetl “Cholera wedding,” a bridal ceremony held in the cemetery and featuring danses macabre hoofed between the tombstones. The variety of the cadaverous style is inspired; never had the human skull’s natural grin been redeployed so exhaustively for yucks. But its heart, beating or not, belongs to the pre-industrial ages of black forests, tenuous life spans, and the mysteries of evanescent flesh.
310/365: Pitfall (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1962) (Criterion Channel)
Japanese New Waver Teshigahara cut history with Woman in the Dunes (1964), exactly the sort of confrontationally metaphoric movie that got heads buzzing in the day, both fearsomely tactile and abstract, with a harrowing dead-end existentialism that belonged to avant-garde novelist/scripter Kobo Abe, who also wrote this film, Teshigahara’s debut. Never released in the US, it’s just as startling in its concept and its priorities as the film that famously followed. A miner and his son, escaping from slave-like employment, wander into the remains of a deunionized coal-mining town, followed by a company assassin and soon faced with the town’s population of company-murdered ghosts. The melodrama that plays out is strictly pro-labor and anti-corporate in ways with which any nation’s history — including ours — can sympathize, but with the extra added frisson provided by angry, meddling ghosts and more than a few puzzling doppelgangers. By itself, the ghost town and the surrounding mountainsides offer subtextual fuel aplenty, all of it restlessly, inventively shot by Teshigahara as if this were his first film and last — it is by a substantial nose the most impressive film debut of 1962, beating out, we’d dare say, even Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood.
311/365: Czech Dream (Vit Klusak & Filip Remunda, 2004) (Vimeo, Amazon)
A lance plunged into the abscess of reality programming, and visit to the far side of satiric documentary self-reflection, this film festival hit chews on an entire social paradigm, by way of an outrageous socioeconomic film-school stunt. Grad-student cineastes Klusak and Remunda decide to interrogate the Czech Republic’s newborn mega-consumerism by launching a vast advertising campaign hawking a huge “hypermarket” that will never open and doesn’t actually exist. The film itself is a record of the developing hoax, from concept to execution and public reaction. Never before has a mere movie opened a window this wide on this pernicious reality — the massive brain-rape conscientiously perpetrated upon the civilian populace of this planet by a sophisticated global industry whose sole purpose is to tell lies. In the still-evolving CR, craven admen, image consultants and marketeer vultures, eager to prove their skills, happily join the two nascent filmmakers in their unsavory project, which boils down eventually to the chilling moment when thousands of shopping-primed Czech citizens appear at the grand opening (in the middle of an empty field) and end up only with egg on their faces. The suckered populace may be rubbed raw in the end, but the movie’s primary task is simply handing the uber-salesmen who control our public desires enough rope to hang themselves. (The filmmakers are relentlessly postmod about their comedy, constantly interrupting their own documentary with product plugs.) The end result is a lacerating view of modern consumerism’s manufactured consent and self-hype.
312/365: Happiness (Alexander Medvedkin, 1935) (Kanopy, YouTube, SovietMoviesOnline, Mubi)
One might think that back in the day Soviet filmmakers had two choices — propaganda or the Gulag — but Medvedkin’s absurdist fairy tale-parable says otherwise. Taking on human foibles as they clash with the ideals of collective-farm community, the still-silent-in-‘35 film is as bizarrely funny as it is lacerating about both tsar-era economic inequity and the futility of the kolkhoz. Medvedkin’s lampooning lark sees weakness and mercenary greed everywhere, to the extent of summoning, in the film’s outrageous compositions, anti-clerical zeal and moments of startling satire (tithe-collecting nuns in transparent blouses, a platoon of soldiers wearing identical cartoon-face masks), the very inappropriate influence of the Surrealists. There’s no record of when Un Chien Andalou might’ve made its way to Muscovite screening rooms, but its footprint is all over this crazy classic.
313/365: Brother’s Keeper (Joe Berlinger & Bruce Sinofsky, 1992) (Apple TV, Amazon)
Like a rotting slice of apple pie, this famous doc presents us with a 20th-century America we’ve actually worked hard not to see. That the action takes place in tiny Munnsville, New York — a short drive from nearby college-hub Syracuse — makes it a real American Gothic, a sympathetic trip to the moth-eaten outskirts. Lyman, Delbert, Bill and Roscoe Ward, aged 59 to 71, were ramshackle dairy farmers living in abject squalor on the rural skirt of Munnsville (making up four of the town’s 499 pop.), having spent their whole lives sharing beds in a two-room farmhouse with no running water or indoor toilet (their clock is stopped at 5:30, and stays that way throughout the film). Normally ignored by the Munnsville citizenry, the brothers became a national cause celebre in June, 1990 when Bill, 64, dies in his sleep, and his brother Delbert, 59, is arrested the next day for second-degree murder. At first Delbert admits to smothering the ailing Bill — putting him out of his misery — and subsequently insists the confession was coerced. Sinofsky and Berlinger became a semi-permanent fixture in Munnsville for a whole year, and the story does have the depth and texture of the best fiction: as Delbert faces trial, Munnsville mobilizes around the old codger, pays his bail, hires a lawyer and throws fund-raising soirees. On another front, the inevitable presence of the media — and even of Sinofsky and Berlinger’s camera — turns the town’s usual apathy toward the Wards a sweetened shade of rose, and transforms the three surviving brothers into ersatz celebrities, complicating an already enigma-rich human drama. The Wards themselves are illiterate, disheveled, subintelligent, almost completely asocial, and essentially dislocated from traditional concepts of hygiene, comfort and orthodoxy. That they sleep together in the same filthy beds was enough of a freak gossip item to raise the speculation of incest, augmenting the prosecutor’s mercy-killing case with a sex crime angle. It’s a jigsaw puzzle whose key pieces are forever lost under a heap of debris, fossilized memories and pre-industrial weirdness.
314/365: Arch of Triumph (Lewis Milestone, 1948) (Amazon)
An unjustly neglected romantic epic of postwar Hollywood (from a novel by Erich Maria Remarque), set in a 1939 Paris awash with refugees of the rising Nazi machine. The film glowers and broods like a noir on barbiturates — after all, the war and the Holocaust are still to come by the time the credits roll. Charles Boyer is a damaged-goods doctor without papers or traceable identity trying to lay low in Paris after escaping from a concentration camp, and all is well and savvy for him in this densely evoked refugee underworld until he stumbles upon Ingrid Bergman’s lost girl, who’s wandering in the rain because she left a dead body in a hotel room somewhere and doesn’t know where to go next. They fall in doomed love, of course, but the film presses on for 133 minutes, and stretches several leagues beyond an ordinary romance, to recrimination and disenchantment and cynicism, even as the Third Reich begins its march toward Paris. Eventually, historical forces intercede, but not as you’d expect: torture, impulse killing, assassination, whoredom, much of it surprising to us but not to the characters, who turn out to be tougher and darker than we thought. It’s hard not to also lopve the movie’s high degree of political literacy, referencing the quagmire of the Spanish Civil War and the alliances of Italian fascism and France’s Third Republic as if audience could be expected to know exactly what the characters were talking about. Of course then they did.
315/365: Jesus’ Son (Alison Maclean, 1999) (Vudu, Amazon, NordVPN)
Maclean’s chilly, mopey materialization of Denis Johnson’s celebrated story-cycle might be the supreme screen portrait of 70s drug culture, except there’s very little culture: Johnson’s lovable dopenik, referred to only as Fuckhead and embodied in a guileless trance by Billy Crudup, spends the movie of his life between places, waiting for something, waking up in the dead center of nowhere or wandering rain-sodden highways. Talk about unreliable narrators: FH hallucinates, jumbles his timeline, chases after free associative memories, and focuses on ephemera, and the film leaps and lallygags with him. An opening car crash doesn’t get completely told until deep into the first hour; the narrative frazzling is ingenious but impulsive. The vignettes have a hilarious integrity, particularly the hang-out with a Stetson-sporting hot dog (Denis Leary on fire) who takes our easy-going hero to rip out an empty house’s wiring and sell the copper for a fix, and the unforgettable sketch-comedy of FH and a pill-scarfing buddy (Jack Black) working as very stoned hospital orderlies the night a man calmly wanders in with a hunting knife buried in his eye. Much of FH’s tribulations, however, focus on Michelle (Samantha Morton), an evasive junkie sprite with unmeetable romantic demands. Crudup is best at passive characters, and here he’s dazzlingly authentic, with a sublimely awkward junkie walk. Like so many novels that beckon filmmakers, Johnson’s is largely attitude and rumination, and since Maclean can’t make up for the missing inner voice, we never quite get into Crudup’s mellow loser, and instead see him, via Maclean’s incisive eye, like we’d eyeball a dozing wastrel at a bus station.
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, 42, 43, 44
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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