Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 4, Week 2
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
8/365: Moulin Rouge! (Baz Luhrmann, 2001) (Vudu, Netflix, Apple TV, Amazon, Disney +)
Attention-challengingly rambunctious, Luhrmann’s popular meta-musical is a stand-alone thing, an in-your-face, anachronistic debauch so absurdly designed and festooned it makes a Beyonce concert look like a three-card monte game. It’s the turn-of-the-century Hollywood equivalent to a shaken-up case of canned champagne. Streaming it is easier — in the theater, the movie came at you like a volley of cannonballs. Ostensibly set at the turn of the century in Paris, when the titular night club was gaining eminence, the film simply revolves around the doomed romance between consumptive star Nicole Kidman and penniless songwriter Ewan MacGregor, and revolve it does, at 100 rpms. Luhrmann edited the movie in a full-on montage fever, mixing in contemporary songs (Elton John, Nirvana, Madonna, etc.) and jumbling fantasy and reality so that, in the end, what we’ve got isn’t a movie so much as a speed-rock daydream of tragic love, musical impertinence, and smiling moons. Of course, the final upshot is not story, character or even the stars’ gorgeousness, but Luhrmann himself, and his uncorkable filmmaking zest — you can virtually see him, dancing around the editing room in an amphetaminic fit.
9/365: Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street (Samuel S. Fuller, 1972) (Hulu, Amazon, Google Play)
Routinely puzzled over as Fuller’s semi-autumnal attempt at spy-movie pastiche, this grizzled piece of skylarking is actually Fuller’s bid to join the New Wavers that worshipped him so ardently — it’s the old-guard pulpster’s most overtly Godardian film, a freeform, mock-genre sibling to Band of Outsiders and Made in U.S.A. You can smell the rule-breaking JLG-envy all over the place: declarative title cards, impish cutaways, self-reflexive gags, cartoonized violence (including a climactic quote of Breathless), a visit to a theater playing Rio Bravo, an actual clip borrowed from Alphaville, and the simple fact that as in Godard it’s a movie in which the characters know they are in a movie, and that movie is driving them a little crazy. A booze-reddened Glenn Corbett plays the American dick tracking an extortion ring (a farcical riff on the Profumo Affair) in order to avenge his murdered partner; a thoroughly game Christa Lang (Mrs. Fuller) is his double-agent flirtation. Stephane Audran (as Dr. Bogdanovich), Anton Diffring, Eric P. Caspar (as Charlie Umlaut), and Fuller himself pop in and out, in what was originally intended as a particularly strange episode of the long-running German crime-anthology show Tatort. The Godardian penchant for ignoring plot and just hanging out dominates the action; winding exposition scenes are played for the nonsense they are, and the sense of drunken fun had on set is really what’s being served up (to a soundtrack by krautrock pioneers Can). It may not be top-shelf Fuller, but it’s a unique call-and-response tissue-sample from the New Wave zeitgeist, and a lovely visit to downtown Cologne.
10/365: Super Size Me (Morgan Spurlock, 2004) (Crackle, Tubi, Vudu, Sling TV, fubo TV, YouTube, Apple TV, Pluto TV, WatchDocumentaries.com, Amazon)
This widely-seen activist doc remains a must-see, and has found its proper place in the public discussion and as a tool for educators, even as Americans continue to grow fat as elephant seals, and get fatter as they grow poorer, and do it, quite obviously, via annual metric tons of genetically-engineered Frankenfoods and processed fat products and more sugar and salt than any earthbound mammal should ever consume in a lifetime. Spurlock can be smugly obnoxious, but his life-on-the-line demonstration of obeyance to the evil food empire is as salient as ever. (Of course not even McD’s recommends eating their food three meals a day, but the point is not McDonald’s — sub in virtually any form of highly processed, “convenient” American food, and you’d get the same result.) Certainly, Spurlock’s animated obesity map, where decades of increased mega-fat-itude are illustrated as the years tick off (takeaway: in 1985, zero of the 50 states had more than 10% of their citizen defined as obese; by the film’s present-day 2004, 100% of the states had over 50% obesity), should leave a dent in your life. One of the handful of modern documentaries that should be a viewing requirement in order to graduate high school.
11/365: A Scandal in Paris (Douglas Sirk, 1946) (Vudu, Kanopy, Amazon)
An early lark among the American programmers Sirk spent a decade making in Hollywood after emigrating, before the vivid, big-budget Ross Hunter melodramas that eventually formed his reputation, this luscious matinee daydream is virtually constructed wholly out of studio-set cobblestone, costume-bin chicanery, and fog-machine atmosphere. Sirk’s eloquence and exuberant staging is as manifest as his high-culture European-ness. It’s tailor-made for the recent emigre (you couldn’t say that about a dozen other films he made between 1943 and 1952): a tongue-in-cheek biopic of the late-18th-early-19th-century French bandit-detective Vidocq, with George Sanders handily smirking over the frilled collars and rolling his vowels like bocci balls. It’s a film that conscientiously looks as though it were a Lang film designed by Aubrey Beardsley (the design team included famous designer/compatriot Eugen Shufftan); at times the actors become subsumed by a welter of giant friezes, ornate murals and faux icons. The cast nevertheless shines: Akim Tamiroff, as Vidocq’s apish criminal sidekick, is unsubtle, but Sanders is in classic silky form, while Signe Hasso and Carole Landis, as the anti-hero’s love interests, are fierce, funny and ravishing. Sirk even gets a spot-on performance from a capuchin monkey.
12/365: Man on the Moon (Milos Forman, 1999) (Vudu, Netflix, Apple TV, YouTube, Amazon)
Making a normal Hollywood biopic out of the life of legendary ‘70s-‘80s anti-comic Andy Kaufman, who died at 35 from cancer, was a deranged gamble at best, and having a massive star-at-the-time like Jim Carrey perfectly, creepily embody Kaufman made the project seem even stranger. With Forman’s gentle touch and a typically savvy script by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (Ed Wood, The People vs. Larry Flynt, Dolemite Is My Name), the film works like gangbusters, and stands as a surprisingly passionate testament to the will and courage of an exceedingly bizarre Long Island boy determined to beat American entertainment culture at its own game. Kaufman’s risky, alienating approach to comedy and performance — reading whole novels aloud on stage, wrestling women audience members, taking an entire Carnegie Hall audience out for milk and cookies, masquerading as an abusive lounge singer and never confessing to the ruse, etc. — gives the film its juice, as he (and Carrey) push the boundaries of the craft way beyond what’s normally considered funny or fun. Living his whole life out as a walking-talking, out-of-control showbiz hoax, Kaufman defined himself as the man popular culture couldn’t grasp, and the film, though very sad, embraces the enigma.
13/365: Cloak and Dagger (Fritz Lang, 1946) (YouTube)
The Langian universe meets WWII espionage in this postwar, post-Manhattan Project spy saga, in which scientist Gary Cooper is recruited by the OSS to parachute into Occupied Europe, on a mission (co-written by Ring Lardner) that multiplies and complicates itself with each undercover identity, each murdered contact, each skirmish with the Germans. The not-entirely-serious yarn is aboriginal, of a type that became immediately ubiquitous and became a mainstay everywhere for the duration of the Cold War, but we come here for the Langometrics, the sense of the wartorn continent as a maze-like playground, where “secrets” are sought after in a neverending game of homicidal make-believe. As always, the violence is for 1940s Hollywood exceptionally nasty, fast and unpredictable (including a great bone-breaking brawl off an Italian street with bad guy Marc Laurence, scored by an opera aria sung outside and climaxing with a conspicuously allusive children’s ball bouncing into the resulting corpse). But Lang’s geographical camera and abrupt cuts and matrical evocation of gazes dominates the action, and musters a definitive experience of the master’s bemused philosophy of moral folly. Cooper generally seems to be having a little too much smug fun (as always, casting him as an intellectual seems inattentive), but everyone else is perfect in their iconic roles. (At the height of her beauty, especially in a sheer slip hefting a machine gun, Palmer brings to mind Bugs Bunny when he dressed up in eyelashes-&-pumps drag, and that’s not an insult.) The first independent product of Harry Warner’s son-in-law Milton Sperling’s United States Pictures, Lang’s movie waves no flag; the landscape of the war is not a battlefield, but an ordinary, ambiguous Europe harboring secret shadows and hidden conspiracies.
14/365: Sling Blade (Billy Bob Thornton, 1996) (Hulu, Vudu, HBO Max, Amazon, Apple TV, YouTube)
An anti-glam indie embraced by Hollywood, Thornton’s debut has the unforced rhythms of a day in the hillbilly boondocks, as inhabited by Carl (Thornton), a retard/brain-damaged man telling us a story from the Arkansas mental hospital he’s lived in most of his life, about how he’s a murderer, having hacked his mother and her lover to death when he was 12. Now, 30-odd years later, the inexpressive Carl finds himself released into the world, where he has no family to speak of but where he makes quick friends with a lonely, fatherless boy (Lucas Black) whose mother dates an abusive redneck (Dwight Yoakam), who’s wary of both the kid and his silent, Lenny-from-Of-Mice-and-Men buddy. Of course, Carl’s relationship to this sordid little domestic disaster eventually reaches critical mass, but in the meantime the film is mostly committed to watching Carl negotiate the world and vice versa. Thornton plays Carl so flatly you can practically see the empty corridor behind his eyes (and of course, in the end we realize he’s not quite as dim as we, or he, thinks he is); he’s got a face like a badly folded towel, the slack body language of a Halloween scarecrow, and a voice like gravel under a tractor wheel. It’s pure and simple filmmaking as well: Thornton shot the movie in a distinctive sit-back-and-watch-it-happen style; whole scenes are simply played out as the camera looks on implacably from across the room. The other perfs ring true, too, particularly John Ritter as a gay friend of the family’s, and James Hampton (Dobbs in F Troop!), having his long career’s first three-dimensional character as Carl’s reluctantly involved doctor.
Year Four Archive: Week 1
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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