Screen Screed: Thoughts on Movies From a Lifelong Eater of Cinema

      A Science Fiction Noir Grotesquerie      At the drugstore Walgreens last winter, I bought three marked down DVDs for two dollars each.  They have one thing, at least, in common.  Badass female protagonists on the covers.  I finally watched one of them, The Gene Generation , starring Bai Ling, a stunning and skinny athletic Chinese actress born in 1966.  I'll write about the other two marked down DVDs in later posts.       The Gene Generation  is the feature film debut by Singaporean director, Pearry Teo.  The film deals with a grim future, setting of the aftermath of a man-made biological catastrophe which poisoned cities.  Genetic experiments gone bad have left one of the chief scientists, Josephine Hayden (Faye Dunaway), in such an extreme state of biologic mutation that she resembles something out of an H.P. Lovecraft story, all squishy mobile intestine-like organs writhing about a torso, with th...

      What is a Movie?      Jean-Luc Godard, born in 1930, still active as a filmmaker, has made movies of many kinds: narrative, revolutionary, experimental, comical, dramatic, some would include the adjective, "boring."      Indeed, I heard American playwright David Mamet quote Godard's famous remark that a movie should have a beginning, middle, and end, but not necessarily in that order.  Mamet then added, "That's why his movies are so boring."      I don't find them boring.  I've watched many of them, some multiple times.  What happens often for me is that a new experience of a Godard film produces in my mind a sense of not grasping the gist; of missing meanings both overall and particular, yet, I remain trusting of Godard's artistry, his freshness as an experimentalist which makes even his most difficult films fascinating, if at times "boring," while I struggle to figure out what I'm experiencing. ...

      A Hitchcockian German Film That Hitchcock in 1931 Wasn't Yet Capable of Making      The "M" in Fritz Lang's 1931 crime thriller, M , stands for Mörder (Murderer).  Made two years before the end of the Weimar Republic and three years before Lang left Nazi Germany for Paris, the film is part psychopathological case study of a child murderer (played by Peter Lorre) and part police procedural, with the workings of the criminal underworld added to a multilayered plot which examines mental illness, social stratification, police overreach, and capital punishment.      Lorre's masterful and scary portrayal of the killer, Hans Beckert, occupies less of the film's running time than is usual for a protagonist.  He's more the film's catalyst.  He appears first as a shadow approaching a little girl on her way home from school.  His silhouette covers a reward poster pertaining to himself.  He's already killed eight childre...

      Jocasta Was a Cougar      Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) was a poet and novelist who made films.  The movies he made from 1961 until his premature death (a shocking murder that eliminated one of Italy's greatest filmmakers) glow with a poetic sensibility that make these works experiences unlike any others in cinema.      His sixth feature film, Edipo Re ( Oedipus Rex ), from 1967, has the usual Pasolini-style handheld camerawork; long distance, focusing in tightly on faces at times, moving along with characters, in all a human movement feel to the images, including subjective shots that wander about as if we're looking through someone's eyes.  Early in the film, a baby looks at the surrounding tree line, the camera moving along nearly in 360 degrees, taking in the setting of the film's first part--a framing narrative about a husband and wife, their baby, the husband's jealousy of the newborn, this giving way to the ancien...

      Ask Alice      Styles shown in movies reflect the grand diversity of human experience from action to non-action, conversation to silence, excitement to calmness.  Films also show expressions of human psychology, sometimes verging on and embracing surrealism, expressionism, subjective viewpoints inaccessible in life to the outside observer looking at someone seized by an interior state explained conventionally as "crazy."      I accept multiple forms of cinema because I view as equally interesting the languid atmosphere of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant , a film taking place mostly in a woman's apartment with conversations throughout, and a recently viewed James Bond film, Skyfall , with its thrilling action scenes and reckless violent protagonist.      What happens inside a film's borders, its rectangle, represents a vision made to happen by any number of people, but the intellectua...