Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 4, Week 10
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
64/365: Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson, 2009) (YouTube, Apple TV, Amazon, Disney +)
Anderson has always devised bustling terrariums that reek faintly of yesteryear and pulse with gentle irony, so this stop-motion animated adaptation of Roald Dahl seems like a natural fit, and it is a fast-talking, zesty riot, in which the George Clooney-voiced egomaniac hero jeopardizes his tabletop country’s animal denizens by stepping outside of his tamed middle-class life and succumbing to his essential fox-ness, looting the local corporate farmers’ hen houses and cider bins for sheer fun and thereby inviting the full wrath of angry human profit-privilege to lay siege. Anderson and cowriter Noah Baumbach have of course added in Fox’s inner conflict (Dahl’s book was simply about stealing food to survive), and though the character arc is pleasantly dark for an animated film, it’s also rather routine. The rest of Anderson’s concoction is not, and as long as it is inventing furry character tics or roving-shot mini-panoramas or droll animal conversations or meta-cricket sports rules or Rube Goldberg story cascades, we’re comfortably in the realm of the inspired. It’s a film that remembers and does not mourn childhood, in all of its cobbled-together, dirt-digging, plan-hatching dizziness. The supply of high spirits, in the characters’ miniature world and in Anderson’s creative play, cannot be corked, and with its rambunctious mix of Brit and American modes and its deliberately unpolished animation, it evokes the actual afternoon daydream of an old-school third-grader far more distinctly than any Pixar film.
65/365: Black Test Car (Yasuzo Masumura, 1962) (Arrow Video Channel, Apple TV , Amazon)
The wide-screen cinematography and no-holds-barred ratpit drama of a Masumura movie are to be savored — running neck and neck with notorious auteur maudit Seijun Suzuki as the most outrageous and breakneck Japanese pulp force of the ’60s, Masumura is an all-but-unknown figure here. The two men, both in their own ways suggesting samurai Samuel Fullers with crank habits, had careers that ran roughly parallel from the mid-‘50s; whereas rock ‘n roll gangsta Suzuki has survived into eccentric lionhood, nihilistic sex fiend Masumura died, after scrounging for TV work, in 1986. This movie is a ridiculously feverish thriller about industrial espionage — automobile makers trying to screw each other over in the run-up to releasing a new sports car. As cynical as any American noir, the film has nothing nice to say about the ways postwar Japanese culture does business, and it says it in baroque, wide-screen black-&-white compositions that makes the film look like a bastard child of Kurosawa’s High and Low and Welles’s Touch of Evil.
66/365: Helas pour Moi (Jean-Luc Godard, 1993) (Kino Now, Amazon, Kanopy)
Let us belt the battle cry of Godard, cinema’s own Robespierre and Whitman and Dylan all rolled into one transfiguring powerhouse, reinventing film from Day One and never letting the rest of the world quite catch up. If his formal voice has remained furiously consistent over the decades, he has been perfectly frank about his maturation from a crazy jukebox meta-movie youth to a pensive, cynical old man finding irony and poetry less in the buoyant fantasy of movieness than in the captured simplicities of earthly life: young girls with translucent skin, meadows in the breeze, European metropoli cooling at dusk, spectators frozen by the beauty of landscapes. This late-stage film takes as its structure the Greek myth about Zeus and Alcmene, but as Godard has aged, his movies became even more fragmented and contemplative, making this essentially a creative-nonfiction essay, built from multi-layered tableaux of random incidents and gestures and dramatic dialogues and arguments with God, on love, devotion and memory, which to Godard all translate to regard for The Past, and our pitiful disregard for it. Godard is still attentive to pure cinema: the long composition-in-depth featuring a park, a couple, a voyeur, a trash collector and a canal ship, is breathtaking, as is the simple close-up that Godard morphs into a emotional statement by beginning in sub-irradiated overexposure and moving slowly to brooding, portentous underexposure. But his primary movies-are-life idea still stands. The reality of cinema is all there: the experience we have watching, the experience Godard and his team had filming, the passage of minutes, the affectionate distance between the actors (including Gerard Depardieu) and their “roles,” between the camera itself and what it photographs — all of it happily naked to the eye and mind, none of it slickly masked by editing sleight-of-hand or “story.” What the work may be “about” at any given moment is never prioritized over the beauty of a morning garden, a woman’s watchful eyes, the political injustice currently burning in the filmmaker’s conscience, or the fact that he may be eating an apple. For Godard, it’s all good.
67/365: Quiet City (Aaron Katz, 2007) (Ovid, SundanceNow)
“Mumblecore” might be an obsolete mode/trend by now, but there’s no denying its authenticity and yen for realness, however banal that might be. Katz’s aesthetic is on one hand Ozu-by-way-of-high-def (lots of lovely haiku cutaways to New York City skylines and textures), and on the other de-accelerated realism (twentysomethings chatting aimlessly and guardedly). This film, his second, is so delicate and spare it could crumble in a stiff breeze: Jamie (Erin Fisher) is an out-of-town girl come to visit a scatterbrained friend in Manhattan, and finds herself stranded on a subway platform. She asks for directions from a passer-by, Charlie (Cris Lankenau); he eventually, and rather gallantly, decides to stick with her until she can find her way in off the street; they end up at his apartment, chastely, and end up spending what amounts to a long weekend together, before and after finding Jamie’s dead-beat buddy. Nothing cataclysmic happens between them, and their talk is almost entirely banal and insignificant, but of course Katz is after what’s not being expressed between them, until we finally see a single, simple expressive gesture that was, in its gentle way, worth all the waiting. (Fisher and Lankenau share improv-ed screenplay credit.) It’s a difficult balance to strike if you’re working this close to mundane realities; Katz gets props just for keeping his focus and staving off the impulse toward broad narrative gestures, and casting his film with such surprisingly ordinary yet compulsively watchable actors. Quiet City is filthy with intimate images of the kind that epitomize cinema’s infectious glow, whether it be of Fisher’s unsure smile or the Brooklyn Bridge.
68/365: 20 Million Miles to Earth (Nathan Juran, 1957) (Tubi, Fubo TV, Sling TV, Vudu, Amazon, YouTube, Crackle, Apple TV)
An essential nostalgic couch-idyll: Juran and Ray Harryhausen’s pulp artifact is not an auteurist relic full of rich subtextual ore, God knows, but best remembered by an entire generation of postwar psychotronic-movie geeks as one of the preeminent moments in American pop culture when frame-by-frame F/X — so simple and manual in process, so damnably magical in the viewing — rejiggered one’s burgeoning view of the world. Harryhausen’s reptilian-humanoid creature rampaging around Rome still glues your eyeballs; the fantastic tangibility of his creations (from, also notably, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, Jason and the Argonauts, Mysterious Island and It Came from Beneath the Sea) is their lynchpin — unlike CGIs, Harryhausen’s homely behemoths obey the same laws of movement that constrain the actors, and inhabit the same space, turf, gravity and sunlight. Their three-dimensionality is not illusory, and their hesitant, unblurred motions remain strangely poignant. For a certain age of cinephile this film is a ticket to the B-movie gray heaven of the ’50s, down to the way suited men sit on desks, and how the stolid hero (William Hopper) lights up after electrocuting the alien from Venus. (Warhol could’ve air-written the moments when an American says “Venus!” and an Italian peasant replies, “Venice?”)
69/365: Blind Mountain (Li Yang, 2007 (Kanopy)
There are two ways to take on Li’s potent, concise film, and both have horns: as the howling social-critique screed it was intended to be, and as a Chinese realist version of the “white trash” exploitation epics of the American ’60s and ’70s — which makes the dynamic of the story universally human, not exclusively Chinese. But Chinese it is in actuality, through and through: simply put, unemployed college grad Bai (Lu Huang) accepts a job to collect medicinal herbs in the remote northern country, and after landing in a secluded village wakes up to find herself literally sold into slavery, as a bought-&-paid-for bride for a local ne’er-do-well. Li’s approach is dead serious, and he’s helplessly critiquing not a single issue or socioeconomic condition, but the mercenary callousness of an entire people. Bai tries to escape, of course — for a good part of the film you’re convinced these hicks got more than they bargained for with this fiery waif. But we discover that the village, which is apparently suffering from a chronic woman deficit, is all but constructed around the verities of keeping captured women in and outsiders out; there’s only one, faithfully guarded road to town, mountains form natural barriers, and the townspeople all conspire together. Bai is even met by two other young wives, both of whom confess to having been sold and implore her to give up her resistance. Soon enough, of course, she is raped by her “husband” (a witless jerk who is the constant source of derision and impotence jokes around town), and his eager mother begins the vigil for a grandchild, which we know would more or less seal Bai’s fate. An organic aspect of Li’s film that particularly stings western eyes is how little Bai is shocked or appalled by her situation when the reality dawns on her — as bizarre as the scenario appears to us, for Chinese girls it appears to be a viable threat, and an at least semi-common problem tolerated by the authorities. It is obvious by virtue of its gravity and realism that Li’s movie is not hyperbole, but in fact (like his Blind Shaft) nearly reportage.
70/365: F.T.A. (Francine Parker, 1972) (Netflix, Amazon, Vudu)
By 1971, America’s involvement in Vietnam had steamrolled onward in full combat-&-bombing mode for six solid years — as we see in this long-censored, long-buried, long-bootlegged docu-record, it was then, more then mid-way through the first Nixon term, that a couple of full-on movie stars (Donald Sutherland and Jane Fonda) helped gathered together a band of lefty anti-war musicians, actors and activists, and devised a cheesy vaudeville show to act as counterpoint to the Bob Hope, pro-war paradigm. And then they toured, but not at home for other activists or mere American voters, but on or around military bases, for G.I.s, beginning at Fort Bragg (which wasn’t filmed) and ending up bouncing around the Pacific Rim, from one installation to another. The delighted enlisted men showed up by the thousands, having been rebelling themselves in huge numbers by then, and it’s their catchphrase fuck the Army that the show adopted as its own. The resulting rough-hewn documentary opened for a single week in 1972 and then was suddenly pulled (Parker thinks after a White House phone call was made to the distributor), never to be legally seen again, until deep into the 21st century. It was a different world, certainly — imagine, movie stars risking their careers by singing risible ditties about military injustice and genocide to grunts at bases in Baghdad and Kuwait. It hardly matters that the skits are self-consciously awful, the songs worse (except perhaps when balladeer Len Chandler belts out a Vietnamese folk song on his guitar, to the crowd’s approval), and the speeches are, mostly, tailored to the specific concerns of the enlisted men, including officer racism and the injustice of huge U.S. bases in the Philippines and on Okinawa being little more than massive chunks of real estate stolen from the natives. As a document of disarming anti-authoritarian nerve, the spirit of the thing is infectious and energizing, for as much of what the performers do as the grunts, who were sick of delivering bombs and laying waste, and were openly thankful for the opportunity to say so on camera. The film is, in any case, remarkable for how little it is known and how rarely it’s been seen, shepherded around only in illegal video dupes like samizdat, a minor footnote to the American-Vietnam era that has only gained volume because of its suppression.
Year Four Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
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, 52
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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