Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 52
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
359/365: Heaven’s Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980) (Amazon)
It remains inevitable that this infamous epic rang the death knell, in 1980, for what has since been called the American New Wave — that gustiest of Zeitgeists was too indulgent of individualism, too grown-up, and too contemptuous of base consumer capitalism to survive. Cimino was the moment’s Von Stroheim, too successful for the wrong reasons at first and then so outrageously profligate that his public lynching was a ritual the Industry had to perform in order to reassert mindless Lucasian profit as its god. The film is not to blame, and in the decades since the film’s been reevaluated as a neglected masterwork whose size and distended length has become part of its unique nature. Re-viewed in its uncut, nearly 4-hour form, the film plays like an opium vision of American bloodshed, recreating and ballooning the Johnson County Wars — cattle barons and their private armies vs. starving immigrants — into a self-mythologizing prophecy of corporate mercilessness. The lie of frontier idealism is debunked — spearheaded by an idealistic marshal (Kris Kristofferson) and a conflicted hired gunman (Christopher Walken) — and Vilmos Zsigmond’s mistily gorgeous cinematography is virtually an act of mourning in and of itself.
360/365: Doctor X (Michael Curtiz, 1932) (Vudu, Apple TV, Amazon, YouTube)
Shot in early two-strip Technicolor, this landmark Warner early talkie appeared in answer to the great roar of Gothic spirit represented by the classic Universal horror cycle of the ’30s and ’40s, as saturated in German Expressionism and the masochistic masquerades of Lon Chaney, but more attuned to the legacy of Freud. Set on a Long Island as seen through a deliriant’s fever, all anonymous Vienna-like side streets and baroque laboratory interiors, the pulpy story is abetted by the not-quite-color imagery, which envelopes the action in an algaeic sea of queasy green, as if the universe around the narrative’s secret ritual was stagnant and rotting. The narrative was outlandish in ’32 but stunningly familiar to the Hannibal Lecter generation: a serial killer kills and cannibalizes every full moon; the police and a squirrelly newspaper reporter (Lee Tracy) sniff out clues leading to the private medical research college run by Lionel Atwill’s defensive big-brain. A screamer the way W.C. Fields was a mutterer, Fay Wray is the resident femme, but the suspicion falls on Atwill’s eccentric staff, including shock-haired Preston Foster as a one-armed obsessive with a recipe for “synthetic flesh!” (Make-up by Max Factor!) Whereas the impossible myths of Frankenstein, Dracula and the Mummy over at Universal apparently provided some kind of cathartic succor to Depression-era moviegoers, Curtiz’s film mucked around fearlessly amid sociopathy and nihilistic rage — just a few years after the stock market crash. Tracy, one of the forgotten wonders of the ’30s, acts as comic-relief ballast, emitting a ceaseless Gatling-gun assault of fidgety ticks, wise-guy cracks and wormy double-talk. You can tell just by watching him that Tracy was an incurable brat and a famous drinker, whose career was seriously crippled after being fired from Viva Villa! in 1934, after he’d urinated on an actual Mexican military procession from a hotel balcony.
361/365: Reality (Matteo Garrone, 2012) (Vudu, Tubi, Kanopy, Amazon)
Garrone’s follow-up to 2008’s Gomorrah, this satire begins with a helicopter shot over a Felliniesque-yet-assiduously realistic wedding party so grotesquely overwrought you feel the teeth marks of Garrone’s irony-loaded title in every faux-aristo explosion of zeal and cartoon opulence. Is this real? Not for a moment, but it gets only more hyper-unreal, when the nuptials, are guest-visited by a beloved former cast member of the Big Brother reality show, whose mere presence electrifies the crowd. The family patriarch, Luciano (Aniello Arena), is bedazzled, watching the quasi-celeb get choppered away like a dignitary from another planet. Soon the show is staging auditions in Neapolitan mall, and to please his kids Luciano submits to an interview — despite being middle-aged and far from telegenic. His enthusiasm nets him subsequent auditions, and his threadbare life selling fish and running pension scams in his warren-like neighborhood begins to shred. Garrone’s film carefully explores nothing less than a mass delusion, personified by this one eager schmuck, a savvy Everyman who gradually descends into paranoid magical thinking, and obliterates his family and his sanity in order to, effectively, cross over into the broadcast afterlife. Garrone is in complete control of his thematic dynamite — the movie is as scalding a vision of televisual simulacra and its maddened victims as Scorsese’s The King of Comedy.
362/365: On the Bowery (Lionel Rogosin, 1957) (SundanceNow, Apple TV, YouTube, Amazon)
Coming a few years after Morris Engel’s Little Fugitive, Rogosin’s modest, chilly semi-doc influenced Cassavetes and the French New Wavers, and American independent cinema was on its way to becoming an identifiable species. Anyone who’d like a near-first-hand familiarity with the boozy human ruin of the Lower East Side in the postwar years need look no further. The film was, in fact, nominated for a Best Documentary Oscar, and won a doc prize at Venice — without being a documentary at all, or, more precisely, using of real-life, on-the-street footage in a fictional context. A young, hard-drinking rail worker (Ray Salyer, looking like Ed Burns Sr.) arrives on the Bowery with a suitcase and a thirst; the suitcase he loses, after he hooks up with a gaggle of old-paperbag-faced drunks in a gin mill. He befriends Garmon, played by an old, cirrhosis-beset storyteller named Garmon Hendricks who went on a binge when shooting ended and promptly died. Ray hits bottom, swears off, hits it again, gets lost. There isn’t much more story than that, and Rogosin’s intent was to simply erect a narrative to hang his neighborhood portrait on, filling it with found objects called Bowery drunks, men who sell each other their own clothes for Muscatel, swill Sterno when they must, and have long since forgotten what their real lives once were about. A verite version of The Iceman Cometh, On the Bowery is a tumbler-shot of Walker Evans blues.
363/365: Vice (Adam McKay, 2018) (Hulu, Vudu, Amazon)
A homerun biopic/docudrama/satire of a kind that McKay, with The Big Short, has made his own, this celebrated rip addresses the toxic historical ingredient known as Dick Cheney, from his sorry beginnings as a drunk Yale dropout to, in McKay’s argument, the man responsible for nearly everything that’s evil about American empire since the Reagan administration. The film is both 100% true and an outrageous Hollywood charade, executed in a rambunctious formal style that mashes up winking biopic cliches, stunt-casting flourishes (here, Christian Bale limns Cheney in impeccable fat-face make-up), sardonic direct address, side lectures, slide shows, news footage, faux-Oliver Stone-ish backroom fantasies, and goofy Michael Moore-ish editing gambits. Virtually everything, in short, is grist for McKay, whose high-spirited tone and breathless pacing deliver on an impudent moral rage about the real world that’s rare in mainstream American movies. Given the stakes, McKay knows that nothing he could pack into his film would be too extreme, noting how Cheney established offices for himself everywhere (including the CIA, the Pentagon, and both houses of Congress), how he cultivated the run-up to the Iraq war via market research, how he found the right kind of lawyers to craft torture-memo rules of engagements, and how he twisted and crippled the procedural and regulatory rules ordinarily checking the Executive Office. Perhaps the film’s master stroke is a single climactic image — of Cheney’s old, discarded, post-transplant heart sitting on an OR table, all by itself. This is only one man, but, the narration proposes early on, a man responsible for “forever changing the forces of history for millions and millions of lives. And he did it like a ghost.”
364/365: 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967) (Criterion Channel, HBO Max, Amazon)
One of the most troublesome films of Godard’s golden decade, this classic is frankly and fiercely personal, marking a definitive break with genre (only ever used by Godard as a toy, but still), and with Anna Karina, but as always with Godard what seems at first to be a vulnerability or failing becomes the movie’s unique personality and identity — we acclimate to it. The “Her” of the title is not the heroine (a middle-class mother who works as a call girl during the day, this shot in Paris a few months before Bunuel made Belle de Jour there), nor the actress Marina Vlady, who is recognized in the film both as herself and as the wife/whore, but Paris herself, which Godard envisions as a cataract of industrialization (a freeway’s arduous construction is recorded from every angle, and at all stages), soulless exploitation, brand-name salesmanship and reflexive prostitution. People talk, signs are read, commerce plows on, all montaged up and crystallized by Raoul Coutard’s bold, pop-art cinematography. Story-less, it’s a new kind of film: an active exploration of ideas, suspicions and critiques the filmmaker is sharing with us directly, not through the scrim of character or plot. The object of the film may be Paris, but the real subject is the conversation we and Godard are having, the fragmented sense we’re trying to establish together about why our culture is so hollow, how the atrocities of Vietnam could be publicly rationalized, how images have been drained of their meaning by the imperatives of capitalism. Life and truth are what matters, not dogma — Godard’s whispering narration notes the time (“It’s 4:45”) because that’s what time it was; famously, a swirl of coffee and sugar prompts one of cinema’s most personal and moving existential discourses.
365/365: Raw (Julia Ducournau, 2016) (Vudu, Shudder, Amazon)
Firsttimer Durcournau (whose new film, Titane, just won top prize at Cannes) comes charging out of the gate uncompromised by taste and logic with this quasi-horror thing, which plays like an angry Jane Campion movie (think Sweetie or Holy Smoke or In the Cut) writhing through a menstrual fit. We meet Justine (Garance Millier), an unpretty, shy freshman student of a stridently vegetarian family being driven by her parents to school, where her older sister also studies. The nature of this very, very strange school is revealed in elusive fragments, but essentially it’s a remote veterinary college that is beset so intensely by a maniacal hazing culture that you soon realize the film’s whole set-up is an expressive, almost surreal place-holder for something else — as in, for a young girl, every kind of identity crisis, loss of autonomy, and sexual uncertainty. As part of their ordeal Justine and her classmates are soon all fed raw rabbit organs — she refuses but then relents and predictably pukes, but also turns an unforeseen corner. Privately, the pressure changes her, and her meticulously cultivated veggie-ness gives away to a fascination with flesh, in any condition, alive or dead, off any animal. Justine’s sense of individuality — her identity, her diet, her control over her own body — is under siege from the gitgo, as she harassed and as she now secretly pursues meat, as though compelled by her absurd environment to change what she inherently is. All of this reaches its first apex of lurid oddness when Justine’s sister Alexia (Ella Rumpf) insists on hot-waxing Justine’s hairy crotch — another bid to homogenize and hetero-sexualize her — and the resulting hair-removal debacle, desperately deploying scissors, ends up lopping off Alexia’s middle finger. The girl faints in a puddle of blood, and a frayed Justine takes the moment to lick, then nibble, then completely chow down on the severed digit. And then Alexia wakes up. Honestly, sometimes the movie’s lust for outrageousness makes hay out of its body-politics syllogisms, but we get an articulate vision of a woman under absurd siege, from within and without. Eventually, Durcournau’s story bends the premise into a screaming family psychopathology that leaves many questions, even metaphoric ones, unanswered. It’s a troublesome, crazy film, and may well leave viewers with a Rorschach-y variety of feminist reactions — is it interrogating oppression and exploitation, or manifesting them? Are its metaphors apt, or too nasty to resonate?
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, 51
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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