Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 46
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
316/365: Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) (Vudu, Apple TV, YouTube, Amazon)
The film that started so many things in modern culture, it’s actually just about a middle-class community, and eventually three unglamorous men, trying to kill a large wild animal. In that, it’s a transition movie — the first step toward Hollywood’s balls-out blockbuster-dom, and yet still a gritty, detailed, average-guy ’70s film, where 95% of screen time is taken up with the grizzled and utterly ordinary characters, and not with the very analogue-F/X monster. Make no mistake, the movie is a tension machine engineered with a deftness, visual care and flamboyant control that became Spielberg’s trademark, but it’s also got room for watchful personality, idiosyncrasy, sharply observed real-people moments, inset strands of class conflict and weary Americana, and a way of keeping the actors so realistically busy you never doubt them. It is of course also an unbeatable summer film, arguably nailing down the seasonal beach town vibe better than any other film, via of an almost documentary use of real crowds, Martha’s Vineyard natives, and actors that look like people you know. The giant mechanical shark remains impressive in its pre-CGI authenticity.
317/365: Eureka (Shinji Aoyama, 2000) (Amazon)
Mysterious, elliptical, and potent, Aoyama’s film, at 3.5 hours, is a study of social trauma and familial yearning, and as the sheeny filmmaking (shot in black-&-white on color stock, resulting in a coppery veneer) focuses very often on minutiae and idiosyncratic details, you are only going to get impressionistic fragments of the action as it is experienced by several characters. This begins with a bus ride that is abruptly (off-camera) hijacked by a maddened middle-class worker who parks the bus in an empty lot and begins killing passengers. By the time this ordeal is done, the only survivors are the driver Makoto (a masterfully melancholy Koji Yakusho), and a young brother and sister (Aoi and Masaru Miyazaki); Aoyama follows Makoto’s travails when, after a long time away, he returns to his province and tries to reassemble his life. Only after he finds the siblings again — living alone in a big, filthy house, and completely mute — does he find a sense of belonging, moving in with them and eventually, with their savvy cousin Akihiko (Saitoh Yohichiroh), hitting the road again in a refurbished bus. Synopses are useless in evoking films like Eureka — it’s all about experiencing the time of it, and in the fourth hour, because it is the fourth hour, everything these characters do is weighted with importance and sadness.
318/365: The Academy of Muses (Jose Luis Guerin, 2015) (Tubi, Amazon, Kanopy, Apple TV)
One of global cinema culture’s secret weapons, and the sweetest, subtlest movie-movie provocateur we have in a post-Kiarostami world, Guerin made this film out of pure talk: academic classroom debate and romantic discussions and couples’ quarrels, all revolving what could be called the academization of love. We’re in the University of Barcelona classroom of balding, aging but still intense classics prof Rafaelle Pinto, playing a semi-savory version of himself, doing some deep reading of Dante to a classroom of mostly attentive women. Can, or should, or might, love be an infinite quantity? Where are the Muses today? From there, Guerin crochets a light fabric, from the school to intimate conversations in the prof’s car to his wife at home, in which it becomes clear that A) Pinto is dedicated to a project of seducing and dallying with his students, one after the other, and B) the project is fueled by his express, literary belief in every woman’s power to become a Muse. His wife doesn’t buy into this White Goddess stuff for a second, and smells danger; his students’ 21st-century perspectives always raise more objections, particularly once their (off-screen) romances are involved. Made up almost entirely of seminar back-and-forth and emotional tete-a-tetes, the film almost guarantees that the Romanticism-vs.-modern feminism arguments will spill over onto viewers. Guerin shoots it like a lover’s daydream, subtly manipulating reflections, focus, and exposure and sometimes getting lost in the sheer beauty of women and sunlight. In effect, he seems to be making Pinto’s case — the intellectual necessity of passion and Muse-force, in order to compel men toward Art — while utterly enjoying the messy, unpredictable, real-world tumult the women make of it.
319/365: Bullfighter and the Lady (Budd Boetticher, 1951) (Amazon)
The only filmmaker to make films about bullfighting who had actually at one point been a professional matador, Boetticher was already a master of the Bs by the ’50s, at which point, for his first screenwriting credit, he decided to fictionalize his own youthful experience as a nervy gringo in the Mexican bull ring. The resulting film, Budd’s 11th film, has the reputation of a debacle, but this brooding, nuanced study in tragic masculine existentialism — not to mention ugly-American hubris — is enthralling and mature, without rival as the best film ever made about el torero, and one of the most evocative American movies ever made about Mexico. Shot largely on location, the film follows Boetticherian Yank sportsman Johnny Regan (a sinewy and blonde Robert Stack) as he bullies his way into the circle of famed torero Manolo Estrada (Gilbert Roland), in order to be trained in the fighting of bulls and become a corrida star himself. As he barges through centuries of custom and ethnic defensiveness, his ambition is fueled by his yen for a limpid and sweet senorita (Joy Page) in Estrada’s cohort, and complicated by his dawning awareness of the sport’s cost to life and limb. The film is a miracle of authenticity — authentic textures, landscapes, craft process, longueurs, adult intercourse, and details about Mexican culture, all obviously born of firsthand experience and observation, and making Boetticher’s film something of a startling anomaly in mid-century Hollywood, where roughly applied totems and accents were all a movie usually needed to evoke a foreign culture. The cast, even hammy ethnics like Roland, is imbued with ambivalence and quiet reason; Page (best remembered as the young Bulgarian refugee in Casablanca) and Paul Fix (as a weathered scholar of corrida casualties) are standouts, but the movie’s lynch-pin is Stack, whose abrasive cock-of-the-walk gains humanity with every dreadful gaze out at the animals.
320/365: The Makioka Sisters (Kon Ichikawa, 1983) (Criterion Channel, Kanopy)
Made in Ichikawa’s fourth decade of directing, this national epic is familiarly Japanese: a large, well-off family faces the crises of modernity, and the weightiest things at stake are properly vetted marriages and the bonds between grown sisters who each have their own distinct battery of priorities. The two married older sisters (Keiko Kishi and Yoshiko Sakuma) wrestle gently for control of the haughty clans’ destiny and its lingering fortune from an old kimono business, while the rebellious youngest sibling (Yuko Kotegawa) wants her dowry money now, despite having to wait until shy sister #3 (Sayuri Yoshinaga) can find a suitable husband, a process that has already gone on far too long. The mix includes, crucially, the two brothers-in-law, one of which (Koji Ishizaka) harbors a sad, barely suppressed pining for the third sister. Set during the ’30s, in the cherry-blossom heaven of the still-preurban Osaka countryside, the film is a scrupulously delicate affair, as carefully primped and refined as a vintage kimono, haunted but also exhilarated by the beauty of tradition. The sense of cultural elegy — headlocked by the Vangelisy theme by Toshiyuki Watanabe — is powerful (it’s sometimes called the Gone with the Wind of Japan), and the film pulses with fascinating moments and details: the slow covering of Yoshinaga’s demurely exposed leg, three spiteful sisters dissolving into tears as one packs to move, the vision of the misty hillsides precisely evoking ancient 2-D screen paintings.
321/365: Performance (Nicholas Roeg & Donald Cammell, 1970) (Vudu, YouTube, Apple TV, Amazon)
The legendary ur-movie of the English late-‘60s moment, this “swinging” art film starts outrageously enough, with a nudity-packed intro to our protagonist, Chas (James Fox), a violent, bling-devoted London gangster in the middle of a hedonistic bedroom encounter; from there, the film sketches Chas’ gangster-enforcer lifestyle in classic New Wavey jump cuts and surreal leaps, until he retaliates with a killing, and decides to hide out — by accident, in the basement apartment of a reclusive rock star, Turner (Mick Jagger). Then Roeg and Cammell’s movie slows down and starts turning the worm: Turner and his two free-loving consorts (sultry Anita Pallenberg and boyish Michele Breton) are hedonists par excellance, living a shuttered, pillow-bedecked, incense-odored head-trip existence of unremitting sex and drugs. Worlds collide, as they say, as Chas is slowly transformed into a meta-Turner, and almost vice-versa, while the real world and its vicious capitalist priorities vanishes, replaced by a sense of fluid identities and anything-goes hippiedom. For that, it’s still a film of glum, brooding, decidedly unfrivolous action; “Nothing is true, everything is permitted,” as someone quotes William S. Burroughs, and that stakeless anomie permeates the movie. Mushrooms, guns, candles, bathtub threesomes, Eastern music, cross-gender dress-up — the film itself becomes a druggy dorm party bordering on the dangerous, suspending all judgment on virtually all behavior — even the moment when Pallenberg injects heroin into her bare butt cheek (though Pallenberg remains the most sensible adult in the house, she also revealed later that the hit was real). It’s strange, watching a film in which conventional moral attitudes are suspended so entirely, and it’s that strangeness, which may not have seemed so strange in London in 1970 if you were high and/or in revolt against your parents, that quite obviously made the film a hit.
322/365: Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai (Takashi Miike, 2011) (Vudu, Tubi, Kanopy, Amazon)
Growing older, Miike, the genre-mincing Tasmanian Devil of Asian pulp psychosis, takes a grown-up perspective for once (after some 50 movies), and this may well be his best film, a patient, ominous piece of epic storytelling that conscientiously rips the scabs off the old-school samurai mythology about honor that has always permeated the Japanese mindset. Readapting Yasuhiko Takiguchi’s novel (Masaki Kobayashi had an international hit with it in 1962), Miike takes on the portentous shogunate territory of Mizoguchi and Kurosawa with authority; architecture dictates composition and iconography speaks for itself. In a feudal lord’s palace news comes from the gate that an unemployed samurai wishes to perform honorable seppuku in the estate courtyard. Times are so tough, we’re told, that legions of desperately jobless warriors have resorted to claiming desire for hara-kiri, telling their sob stories and secretly angling for a job or a donation instead. It’s all about the money. Spinning yarns as lives hang in the balance is the crucial activity — coupling stories-within-stories, the film weaves a broad but detailed canvas. The would-be gut-cutter in question (Ebizo Ichikawa) appears resolved until he is told the story of the last seppuku petitioner, who despite being young, wracked with doubt and armed only with a dull bamboo sword is forced by the Lord’s badass samurai minions to carry through with his task. Ichikawa’s steely hero knows the story, of course, and his agenda has layers — not the least of which is to confront the heartless neo-con samurai ethos head-on. Miike’s version is both a melodramatic deepening and a grisly doubling-down of Kobayashi’s great original, and though its good taste may frustrate the bloodthirst of Miike’s fanbase, the movie satisfies more classical movie hungers. Certainly, Miike never mustered acting this authentic and wise from his cast; as the Lord, Koji Yakusho, and, as the most uncompromising of the lord’s henchman, Munetaka Aoki are indelible, but the movie belongs to Ichikawa, a big star in kabuki and here a nuanced, righteous Everyman worn down to a single doomed purpose.
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, 45
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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