Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 4, Week 13
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
85/365: Shallow Grave (Danny Boyle, 1994) (Vudu, YouTube, Apple TV, Amazon)
Boyle’s first film is a devil’s food cake with a saw inside, a slick nightmare of greed and dread and giggly malice. Set in Edinburgh, and run appropriately through with Scotch acidity, the film thrusts before us three young and insufferably self-satisfied, but nonetheless hilarious, flatmates: cub reporter Alex (Ewan McGregor), accountant David (Christopher Eccleston) and intern Juliet (Kerry Fox). In their brassy, abusive search for the perfect fourth flatmate, they happen upon Hugo (Keith Allen), who fits the bill for at least as long as it takes him to OD in his room. The trouble only begins when Alex discovers a suitcase stuffed with a few million pounds under Hugo’s bed. It takes them a day or two, but eventually the three decide to dispose of the body and keep the money. This is not done flippantly, despite a cavalier trip to the hardware store — the difficult process of lugging a corpse down a circular stairwell is a set-piece on its own. Not to mention sawing off the feet and hammering in his teeth, actions that can change the person doing them. From there, of course, catastrophe creeps into the scheme, as it must, and the three protagonists descend several rungs down the social-norm ladder. Trucking in high Hitchcockian discomfiture, the film is dominated by its flashy, snarky filming choices, but the cast goes it all one better, especially McGregor in a career-making performance as the smartarse of the three, with a quick tongue and arch manner that suggests Malcolm McDowell’s like-named scoundrel in A Clockwork Orange. From its opening salvos to the final showboaty camera pan through the floorboards, it can be easily regarded as the best film the Coen brothers never made.
86/365: I’ve Always Loved You (Frank Borzage, 1946) (YouTube, Amazon)
From Lazybones (1925) to Moonrise (1948), at least, an expansive stretch that leaves out dozens of silents and includes perhaps another dozen forgettable studio projects, Borzage unleashed a distinctive sensibility upon the clockwork of glam Hollywood storytelling: naturalistic sensitivity in the service of a mythopoetic romanticism that often careened into pure magical thinking. In a throng of Golden Age romantics, Borzage was the bullgoose ur-romantic, a true but never naive believer in the unpredictable gravity of the heart, treating with reverence absurd lovesick plot twists other directors would employ as kitsch, and attaining in almost every film a tincture of thoughtful heartbreak that fires out of the formula trappings like a rocket. Here, Borzage crafts what may be the best and most serious film ever made about classical piano, centered on the impossible romantic bond between Philip Dorn’s faithless, egomaniacal concert Euro-master and his protege, cornfed Pennsylvania schoolgirl Catherine McLeod. A discovery of Borzage’s who was quite apparently trained as a pianist, McLeod makes for an oddly awkward heroine, but the film around her is so music-drenched and so devoted to the details and romantic aura of its world that the cast and characters don’t come to matter so much as the swoony ideas they embody. A few major set-pieces make the point, including the majestic, almost wordless 15-minute long tour de force portrait of the heroine’s Carnegie Hall debut, playing Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto №2 under her master’s conduction, just as their relationship is crippled by betrayal and jealousy. The performance is immediately seen as a contest of wills — stagehands, rooting for McLeod’s ingenue, commend her by signing their own names to a delivered bouquet of flowers — and bitternesses and fear arise during the playing, palpable to everyone but never articulated, as the music pours on and the pianist begins to cry as she pounds through the achingly sad concerto. It’s a movie onto itself, and the most emotionally tortuous exploration of concert culture in the Hollywood annals.
87/365: Beach Red (Cornel Wilde, 1967) (Vudu, Apple TV, Amazon)
Primitivist, wild man, heavy-brushstroke hyperbolist, leading man-turned-auteur Wilde remains autuer non grata in the American canon, but, among a handful of other geysers to duck, there may never be or have been a less sentimental American war film than this WWII saga. After a big-gulp opening on a Pacific beachfront invasion, where the title-sequence pulp-art paintings suddenly segue without a cut onto the real deal, and palm trees explode a decade before Apocalypse Now, the movie reinvents even the limits of Sam Fuller’s vulgar modernism by way of unpredictable metafictive splats, feverish slo-mo close-ups, step-printed hallucinations, freeze-framed memories, blood syrup dripped on the lens, warped POVs, Vaseline-ed home movie flashbacks, overlapping streams-of-consciousness, Pudovkinian montages, and so on. Symptomatic of its post-New Wave day, it’s also ‘Nam-ishly empathic — both Americans and Japanese have their thumbnail moments in the sympathetic sun, before disembowelment — and Wilde’s more eloquent poetic moments (a terrified soldier obsessing in flashbacks about the roach he skilled on the boat, a maimed soldier wondering where his arms are) are scrambled in with comically flat cutaways and visual schtick so crude it recalls Monty Python. Not that Wilde was being ironic — he was just a torrential moralist with more reckless energy than he cared to harness. Beach Red was the daring experience that Saving Private Ryan started out wanting to be; indeed, almost every American war film worth seeing in the last 40 years owes DNA to this hot potato.
88/365: Venice (Jan Jakob Kolski, 2010) (EasternEuropeanMovies.com)
Never released theatrically in this country, the magic-in-the-dirt films of Polish taleteller Jan Jakub Kolski are rare, golden wonder cabinets of rough-hewn conjurement, reimagining Poland (particularly during WWII) as a dangerous fairy tale, clotted with mossy overgrowth, shadowy unknowns, mythic apparitions, fecund wildlife, and incipient doom. Adapted from stories by Polish lit star Wlodzimierz Odojewski, this cool-blooded fairy tale begins in 1939, as the Nazis invade, with an eleven-year-old in military school sent by his narcissistic mother to his aunt’s country estate, where he waits out the first years of the war in classic coming-of-age style, dreaming of someday going to Venice and ending up happily recreating the City of Bridges in the mansion’s flooded basement. Peppered with glimpses of the forgotten things lost in the floodwaters, and visualized with Kolski’s characteristic lambent beauty (in this era of CGI gilding, he gets blasts of flaxen light the old-fashioned way — he films them), the movie is a paperweight-globe mini-world filled with other mini-worlds, all fashioned as escapes from the world of warcraft gradually impinging from the foggy landscape beyond the lawns and leafy country roads. Kolski’s films all have this narrative form (even his 2003 adaptation of Witold Gombrowicz’s Pornografia), as mythos are spun like webs and then destroyed by reality. Kind of like movies.
89/365: Who Killed Teddy Bear? (Joseph Cates, 1965) (Tubi, Archive.org)
A slight but stylish and oddly watchable stew of urban deviance from the grindhouse alleys of yesteryear, TV producer Cates’s film may never acquire the cult it still seems to beg for. Juliet Prowse is a self-reliant ingenue lost in New York, waitressing at a discotheque, auditioning, and being obscene-phone-called and stalked by developmentally arrested man-boy Sal Mineo, who is often shot through a ‘70s-Penthouse-style soft-focus halo. The disco scenes are overdressed go-go malarkey — however surprisingly Dion-esque the songs are, the dancing is just a gas, man — but that seems appropriate, too, for the gutter oeuvre of Phoebe’s dad Cates, who also helmed the Phyllis Diller comedy The Fat Spy. But what makes this creep-out interesting is its spot on the continuum between A Streetcar Named Desire and Taxi Driver, dramas of degenerated masculine frustration, building from ordinary misogyny to slaughter. The muscly, t-shirted Mineo often comes off like a high schooler doing Brando doing Stanley Kowalski, while Prowse, with her soft blondness, flustered South African accent and sexual vulnerability, reeks of Blanche-ness. The Bickle interfaces crop up throughout: the lonely obsession with porn, the moral rage, the hatred of sex, the mad exercising, the awkward pursuit of a Cybill Shepherd-esque blonde. For good measure, Teddy Bear throws in a brain-damaged sister, incest, a twisted cop who reads Teenage Nudist magazine (game-show host Jan Murray) and Elaine Stritch as a snapdragon lesbian who gives no quarter to psychos or cops. As in Scorsese, the city’s the culprit, although downtown stores that sell Naked Lunch and zipped underwear pass in 1965 as proof of Gomorrah.
90/365: Local Color (Mark Rapapport, 1977) (Fandor, Amazon)
One of American independent cinema’s secret weapons, Rappaport is most famous for his AIDS-era postmod wedge of movie-movie rumination Rock Hudson’s Home Movies (1992), but actually he’s been toiling on the fringes since the post-New Wave days, with films that are neither entirely avant-garde nor dramatic narratives; generally, you could say they’re post-“art film” launches of studied unease, so Godardian in their autocritique that they feel frozen in the headlights of their own doubt and questioning. His third feature, this film is an arch, stylized chamber piece in which eight relentlessly self-analyzing “characters” break up, make up, rationalize, swap and link up, as if like its inhabitants the film itself is stuck in a Zeno’s paradox of relationship conundrums. The eight personae include a pair of eventually incestuous twins, a paleontologist, a barber, and his discontented wife; everyone seems to be whimsically bisexual (including the male-female twins), and no one can communicate properly or effectively, a struggle that consumes the film. Grittily black-and-white, it’s also something of a Rorschach blot — depending on where you stand, you can see it as soap opera camp (as Vincent Canby did in 1977, dismissing it in a survey of the New Directors/New Films series), semi-Surrealist dream film, melodrama parody, threadbare feminist/gay research into interpersonal oppression, or experimental interrogation of cinematic-dramatic conventions. A movie that reflects in every frame on what a film image “means,” Local Color wears its postmodernism on its sleeve; as if following a semiotic manual on film noir, the characters keep discovering the same revolver in different places, using “Chekhov’s gun” principle as a running gag, and yet insistently suggesting that sooner or later the film, by way of gunfire, will eventually coalesce into an “normal” plot-driven, escapist melodrama, instead of the analytical exercise in personal politics it defiantly remains. Deliberately slippery about perceptions and presumptions — how much do we actually know about our loved ones, anyway? — Rappaport’s film is by now a bit of cinema history, an expressive window upon a small moment in American film, when the underground began creeping into theaters on shaky New Wave legs, at the same moment that “blockbuster” became a genre and not a box-office demarcation.
91/365: Chop Shop (Rahman Bahrani, 2007) (Sling TV, Tubi, YouTube, Amazon)
This raw indie’s setting exudes sociopolitical commentary without anyone saying a word: it’s the hunk of Flushing, Queens known as Willets Point, a resident-free neighborhood that floods routinely and is comprised entirely of auto repair shops, junk dealers and the titular stolen-car-processing outfits. Seen from the orphaned 12-year-old hero’s perspective, it’s a lawless frontier of make-it-on-your-own American Dreamism; for us, it’s the asshole of the global economy, a squalid proto-slum that’s indistinguishable from unremarkable slices of Bombay or Rio, thriving on manufactured leftovers and cannibalized industry. But there’s Shea Stadium looming in the near-distance, and there’re the airliners flying out of LaGuardia overhead — this is an America we don’t see much in movies, and Bahrani, whose Man Push Cart (2005) had a similar torque to it, knows how to make his semi-doc ultra-realism jump out at you as neo-Kafka-esque metaphor. We’re in the tradition of Satyajit Ray and Ken Loach, but we’re in New York, and for that overdue transplantation we should be thankful. Alejandro (Alejandro Polanco) is a relatively simple character — bullet-headed and ambitious, but still only a kid, wrestling with his love and shame for his older sister (Isamar Gonzales), who moonlights hooking at night, and becoming obsessive about his own get-rich schemes. (We never learn what became of their parents.) Chin-deep in convincing texture, Bahrani never quite takes the daring next step for which his symbolic realism cries out — into a realm (epic, absurdist, satiric, visionary, what have you) where the broader meaning of his narratives overtakes his oppressive everyday details. But those details leave a bruise.
Year Four Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12
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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