Welcome to The Penny-Pinching Cinephile, a weekly spotlight of the best free flicks on the web. ‘Cuz sometimes you gotta eat.
1.) The Last Picture Show
Based on the novel by Larry McMurtry, Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 film is one of the crowning achievements of New Hollywood, an evocative and elegiac look at a small North Texas town and the simple people who inhabit it. In his review, Roger Ebert summed up the mood: The Last Picture Show “is about a town with no reason to exist, and people with no reason to live there.” Charting the passage of time from fall 1951 to fall 1952, the film stars Timothy Bottoms and Jeff Bridges as Sonny and Duane, high school seniors and co-captains of a football team so bad that the old men in the town glare and curse at them after every game. The object of both boys’ affections is Jacy (Cybil Shepherd), the most beautiful girl in town (and one of the richest). Besides earnest attempts at teenage sex, nothing much happens to these characters. They graduate from high school; Sonny engages in a furtive affair with the football coach’s wife; Jacy leaves Duane for a rich kid on the other side of town. Shot in beautiful, stark black and white, The Last Picture Show is a portrait of a town and its people, a deep, rich well of character that finds desperate pathos in even the most ordinary of lives. Watch on Crackle
2.) The Messenger
A remarkable directorial debut from screenwriter Oren Moverman, The Messenger netted a Best Supporting Oscar nomination for Woody Harrelson, but failed to make a ripple at the box office. In 2009, Hollywood was in the midst of a spat of Iraq War-themed dramas, almost all of which were rejected by moviegoers (In The Valley of Elah, Stop-Loss). It seemed that America just wasn’t ready to see their current war dramatized (even Best Picture winner The Hurt Locker grossed less than any previous Best Picture Oscar winner). Now, post-troop withdrawal, it’s high-time viewers caught up with The Messenger, a film about two war veterans (Harrelson and the great, underrated Ben Foster) now assigned as casualty notification officers for the Army. The scenes of the notifications are uncomfortable and heart-wrenching. The reactions of the next-of-kin range from intense anger (the father of a soldier played by Steve Buscemi) to almost instant acquiesence and gratefulness (the wife of a soldier played by Samantha Morton). Amidst their day-to-day duties, Foster struggles to re-adjust to life in the States, while Harrelson tries to maintain his sobriety and deal with the isolation and loneliness of the job. The cast of The Messenger gives uniformly excellent performances, and Moverman’s direction is straight-forward and understated, matching the film’s serious and dramatic tone. You owe yourself a view of one of recent cinema’s most underrated films.
3.) Dogville
If Lars Von Trier hadn’t gone on to make Antichrist, I’d be tempted to call Dogville his most controversial film. Not coincidentally, it’s also one of the director’s best and most challenging films. A Brechtian parable of the potential, lurking dangers of small town Americana, Dogville is unique in its set design, which is reminiscent of black box theater, using only sparse props and minimalist sets. The ambitious, 3-hour film has been criticized as too didactic and vehemently anti-American, although in my opinion, it’s more a meditation on the dangers of groupthink that just happens to take place in America, rather than a specifically anti-American diatribe. Nicole Kidman stars as Grace, a woman escaping from the mob who takes up residence in the small town of Dogville, Colorado. There she is given shelter in exchange for physical labor, and she, along with the liberal-minded writer Tom (Paul Bettany), set about to reform and re-educate the townspeople. The film becomes darker and more sinister as more is revealed about Grace’s past and the townspeople’s secrets. Thematically similar to Brecht & Weill’s Pirate Jenny, Dogville is a potent and morally complex film that is bound to disturb first-time viewings, although its challenges are directly tied to its rewards.
4.) Crazy Love
When I watched the documentary film Crazy Love in theaters in 2007, I was absolutely floored by the twists and turns in the “love” story of Burt Pugach and Linda Riss. Firmly in the category of truth that’s stranger than fiction, directors Dan Klores and Fisher Stevens craft a compelling, sensational, entertainingly bizarre yarn that must be seen to be believed. The obsessive love of Pugach, a nebbish, bespectacled New York lawyer, for Riss, a glamorous beauty way out of his league, initially seems like the stuff of typical romantic fantasy. Slowly, however, the viewer becomes aware of the truly twisted nature of their decades-long relationship, which included a horrific act or violence, a 14-year prison sentence and a 35-year marriage. Whether it was love of mutual psychosis that brought Pugach and Riss together–and kept them together despite insane tribulations–Crazy Love casts no judgments on the pair, who seemed to have found some form of happiness together. Unfolding like a juicy tabloid mystery, the film is absurdly entertaining, if at times a bit lurid and exploitative. But that’s part of the fun of this love story–one for the books. Watch on Hulu
5.) In The Mood for Love
Wong Kar-wai’s masterpiece In The Mood for Love features two totally mesmerizing performances from Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung and is undoubtedly one of the most romantic films ever made. When Chow (Leung) rents a room in an apartment building next door to Su (Cheung), the two lonely hearts become friends and engage in a series of dinner dates. Over noodles and tea, they commiserate over the absence of their respective spouses, who both work and travel incessantly, leaving them alone and hungry for a connection to another human being. When Su and Chow find out their spouses have been seeing each other, their connection only deepens, providing an intimacy neither of them had while married. Lushly photographed by Christopher Doyle in a palette of gold and deep reds, and featuring a hauntingly beautiful soundtrack, In The Mood for Love perfectly captures the unfulfilled longing and soulful heartache of Wong’s story. Universally acclaimed, the film is one of only two films from the 2000s to rank in Sight and Sound‘s 2012 critic’s poll of the best films of all-time.
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