Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 51
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
351/365: Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou, Hsaio-hsien, 2008) (SundanceNow, Apple TV, Amazon)
Hou-ness has the delicacy of a paper butterfly, and can easily be squashed by impatience or insensitivity. His slow-moving camera (never dictating the action but, rather, cautiously circumscribing it), his long observational passages, his respect for real behavior (so real people often simply play themselves), his modest metafictional slippages, his daunting evocation of off-screen space — all of it amounts to arguably the most humane vision at work in today’s moviescape. This is a slightly different kind of Hou movie — shot in Paris as a commissioned project to remake Albert Lamorisse’s beloved 1956 short The Red Balloon, indulging the rambling metaphor of the self-motivated balloon as an observer — like Hou, and like us — of a random slice of modern urban life. This wedge revolves around an emotionally rocky actress/performance artist (Juliette Binoche), her rather Scotty-Beckett-ish grade-school son (Simon Iteanu), her absent husband, her goldbricking tenants (in a second apartment downstairs), and Taiwanese film student Song Fang, playing herself, who begins work as the boy’s workaday nanny, as she simultaneously remakes Lamorisse’s film herself, with a handheld DV camera. It’s just life, full of disappointments and incidentals, piano lessons and crepes, petty frustrations and wholesale raptures. The manner in which Hou shoots this weft is inherently kind: at a relaxed distance, from room to room, patiently, unjudgmentally. In almost every way the film climaxes with a breath-robbing eight-minute one-shot scene in which the mom handles a phone call from her college-age daughter in Brussels, a blind tuner attends to the family’s pivotal piano, the tenants disrupt the cluttered apartment’s equilibrium, and the little boy tries to ignore it all. Hou’s camera tiptoes around like a tolerant family member, shifting perspectives, and the purpose of every reframing is compassion, not dramatics.
352/365: My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946) (Vudu, Hulu, Sling TV, Philo, Apple TV, YouTube, Amazon)
Often troubled by drunken sentimentality and militarism, Ford had a master’s run in the ’40s, culminating — after a few years making documentaries for the U.S. war effort — with this emotionally pregnant western, still cinema’s greatest adaptation of the Earp-Clanton-Gunfight-at-the-OK-Corral legend, brimming with brooding shadows, darkening skies, noir-like silences, gazes that speak fear and vengeance louder than words. The story is rote: the four Earp brothers, after one is killed on a cattle drive outside Tombstone, Arizona, take jobs as the town’s marshals and eventually face off, with the help of the local gambler Doc Holliday, against the local clan of criminals, the Clantons, in a shootout in and around the famous corral. The film has a distinctive weight to it, as if something epochal and catastrophic was on the verge of happening at any moment; the characters handle the dialogue like they were sticks of dynamite. Henry Fonda, at his peak in the 1940s playing angry young men, is magnetic as Wyatt, but look what Ford does with Walter Brennan, a premier character whirlwind used to fast-talking crotchety comic relief. As Pa Clanton, in an untrimmed beard, Brennan was as quiet, understated and wary as a mountain cat, and the startling power of his diminutive presence catches your attention like a magnet. The same can be said for Victor Mature, never anyone’s idea of a versatile or expressive actor, who as Holliday strides through the film menacingly, with a truckload of bad history on his back, his eyes half-lidded with a self-hatred to which he can never own up. It’s a great western finally, because of exactly what it delivers that westerns normally didn’t: a measure of emotional maturity, a sense of dread and cost in regards to violence, a notion of frontier life being difficult and soul-hardening, not breezy and schoolyard fun. Ford didn’t make this case all the time, but when he did it made westerns in which a grown man could get lost.
353/365: Mock Up on Mu (Craig Baldwin, 2008) (Vimeo)
Baldwin, whose 1991 masterpiece Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America set the high bar for Pynchonian-satire found-footage features, has since moved into incorporating new footage into his free-associative mix of old pulp, educational film, government footage and other outrageous moments of ephemeral cinema, all of it emerging from his Frankenstein surgery with a boggled head of Freudian free-associations, a lust for forgotten history, and an insurrectionary temper. A “not untrue saga,” this oddity wormholes through the origins of Scientology, bopping back and forth from the postwar past and the indeterminately cosmic future, via by the pentagrammatical influence of, in turn, Aleister Crowley, L. Ron Hubbard, Jet Propulsion Lab co-founder and occult wingnut Jack Parsons, aerospace manufacturer Lockheed Martin (here personified by a person named “Lockheed Martin”), and New Age progenitor Marjorie Cameron. Like much of Baldwin, it turns out to be partially a true story: the sexual/mystical/financial history of Parsons, Cameron (both Crowley devotees) and Hubbard in the 1940s makes for stampede reading wherever you find it, but of course Baldwin fictionalizes the characters’ wacko ambitions into “reality,” cheesily invoking Hubbard’s blowhard pseudo-ideas about the future of the human race. At its least a fugue of speculations voiced by psychotic characters and illustrated by hunks of Star Trek, Things to Come, Logan’s Run, THX 1138, industrial project films, real news footage, NASA clips, Kenneth Anger images (borrowed and recreated, including shots of Cameron from Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome), and an uncatalogueable river of other materials, the movie often succumbs to megalomaniacal confusion, befitting its subject. It’s actually less a movie than a farcical jet stream of all-American utopianism that makes about as much sense as the past itself.
354/365: Strike (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925) (YouTube, Criterion Channel, Amazon)
Eisenstein was once regarded largely as cinema’s most formidable intellectual; today, he’s historical bedrock, rarely watched for pleasure. But this film, his first, for all intents and purposes the film that launched Soviet political filmmaking, is a razor-crisp blast from the past that’s not nearly as burdened with grim, commanding Communist purpose as Eisenstein’s subsequent silents. It is, in fact, spritely, jaunty, ceaselessly inventive and, surprisingly enough if you haven’t seen it in a few decades, witty. As the title suggests, the story is a deliberately generic template for revolutionary action — Russian factory workers protest ill-treatment and poor wages, and are then spurned to a full-on strike after a framed compatriot hangs himself. Here, a strike is no dull narrative affair — the capitalists (all fat, cigar-smoking, cartoonish gluttons, of course) employ spies and Cossacks and even the fire department, and the espionage runs both ways, at a gallop. As with Eisenstein’s other vintage agitprop classics, there is no single hero or villain, just crowds of collective will, in this case two colliding masses of human self-interest. But the electric pace and visual tumult keeps things charged with an almost slapstick personality. Eisenstein pulls out the stops: multiple exposures employed in an uncountable variety of ways, radical angles, cameras moving with/on top of factory equipment, expressionistically shaped iris ins and outs, even cut-out frames for creating a “fake” split-screen. Of course it’s edited at a maniacal pace, full of rapid contrapuntal contrasts, as well as introducing the jump cut (not the Godard jump cut but the Scorsese jump cut), while also taking the time to follow a few pigeons lighting down on the stilled factory equipment, as the battles rage elsewhere. The plastic thrust is rascally and comedic — the sheer speed and esprit of the film lets him get away with a lot, as fast comedies can often get away with crude jokes if they keep moving quickly enough. The politics, too, emerge as stirring and lovely if you let them, since the film so relentlessly frames the workers’ conflict as one of muscular courage, and since the workers were explicitly demanding the same rights — like an eight-hour work day — that workers all over the industrialized world had also been vying for in the pre-Revolutionary decades in which the tale is set. The famous dramatic peaks of the film — particularly the Cossack maliciously dropping an infant three stories to its death — remain powerful, enough so that it’s the only silent film to bear a tiny warnings in its 21st-century video release about “violence” that some “may find disturbing.”
355/365: Lars and the Real Girl (Craig Gillespie, 2007) (Hulu, Vudu, Apple TV, Amazon, YouTube)
A hit indie dramedy stemming from a rather a Bunuelian idea (shades of The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de le Cruz): a mentally impacted smalltown man (Ryan Gosling), grieving for his dead mother, solves the problem of his lonely neurotic existence by ordering a full-size, anatomically correct sex doll, and then puts her forward to his family and close-knit Midwest community as his new, wheelchair-bound girlfriend. What comes of that for us, in the endurance of scene after scene, is a queasy balance between ghastly Bunuelian comedy and devastating melancholy — we’re never instructed by the movie to react one way or the other about Lars’ blank-eyed insistence on the doll’s humanness, so every sequence is an undulating bout of subjective seasickness. But then the film becomes something else: the focus imperceptibly shifts away from Lars-as-problematic-protagonist and onto the busily populated neighborhood around him, who for their own reasons accept Lars’ doll as a real person, and end up inadvertently allowing Lars to find an emotional escape hatch out of the impossible corner into which he’s painted himself. Along the way, Gillespie’s film balances cataclysmically hilarious social unease and beautifully wrought family tragedy, and then as an answer to both paints one of the most convincing and generous portraits of smalltown American life movies have seen in years. It’s an easy movie to be cynical about (though impossible to ignore the performances; even Gosling’s characteristically leveling portrayal was overshadowed, I thought, by Paul Schneider as Lars’s guilty, exhausted brother and Emily Mortimer as his relentlessly proactive sister-in-law), but it doesn’t arrive at its pathos and affection cheaply, unoriginally and/or dishonestly.
356/365: Basket Case 2 (Frank Henenlotter, 1990) (Shudder, Amazon)
Henenlotter’s Bosch-on-sweet-air sequel triumph takes his narrative-visual style — yowl-slither-splooge-splat — as far as it would ever go. A giggly, New-York-alley-trash cousin to Cronenberg by way of E.C. Comics and sideshow taboo, Henenlotter made his first film, 1981’s Basket Case, so cheaply the lights are rarely turned on, but the parable about a Times Square inhabitant plagued by his separated-at-birth, basket-dwelling “half-brother” is so loaded with urban-Gothic family dread that the subtext is barely sub-. The sequel hyperextends the Tennessee Williams-with-slime-monsters scenario away from fraternal angst and toward social conflict, like Tod Browning’s Freaks, happening upon an entire commune of ludicrously distorted freaks to which Belial the throat-ripping-mound-with-arms and his “normal” twin Duane (Kevin Van Hentenryck) become intimate, as the evil world of ordinary humans threatens the secret community’s respect for “differences” from the outside. Henenlotter knew some of us were wondering if Belial was sexually active, and so he showed us. Acted terribly but with wild-eyed zest, Henenlotter’s magnum opus remains biting for the outrageous subtexts (biological, sexual, racial, you name it) worming around not far beneath the even more outrageous surface.
357/365: Sicko (Michael Moore, 2007) (Tubi, Vudu, Pluto TV, YouTube, Apple TV)
Moore is an unsubtle slob with no respect for the ethics of discourse, but he is absolutely imperative, and here he asks, quite sensibly, if our fire departments and police forces and schools and libraries are socialized public services everyone loves, uses and is thankful for, why can’t our medical care be as well? Why isn’t everything socialized? There are moments when this doc matter-of-factly exposes the real machinery of our oligarchy — the insurance company lobbyist payouts to supposedly moral politicians, the ex-claims reviewers who confess to having knowingly killed people by denying care, a Brit ex-Parliamentarian who shruggingly asserts that if England’s national health service were to be abolished by politics, “there’d be a revolution.” Presenting case after case of honestly, seriously sick Americans reamed and often sent to their graves by insurance companies — one trip ends up with claim-denied 9/11 rescue workers in Cuba, yet another socialized-medicine nation far higher up than the U.S. on every health-standard scale — Moore’s film leaves out the gray, but so? He’s an activist (not, please, one in the practice of “propaganda,” which should be redefined as persuasive media designed by state power, not individuals acting in resistance to that power), and he isn’t interested in fighting fair or attempting a “balance”; he’s scrapping with Karl Rove, Rupert Murdoch and Sean Hannity on their own terms, and movies like Sicko aren’t freestanding essays on social issues, but fireball volleys fired across the landscape. Inciting social change — Moore’s real target — is more important than the integrity of cinema, and who could argue? So, the films tend to shoot low, beneath the eye level of the educated audience who commonly see documentaries and more directly at the brain pans of Americans for whom passionate criticism of Fox News would come as a shock. The movies might suffer, but the country might benefit.
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, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50
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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