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

      Splashdown       The Man Who Fell to Earth is a film I've known about for a long time.  I didn't see it, though, on television in the 1980s and 1990s, since the movie's great amount of nudity made broadcast presentations severely truncated.  I like to see a film in its uncut form; I can no longer stand watching a film interrupted by commercials.  In the past, this is how I and everyone else experienced films shown on television, but cable channels, internet services, and video formats (VHS and later DVD types) have changed this for the better.      Mentioning television in an essay about Nicholas Roeg's weird and avant-garde science fiction film from 1976 is appropriate, since Thomas Newton (David Bowie in the eponymous role) spends much of his downtime watching televisions, having set up multiple sets in his hotel rooms and his home, as he simultaneously keeps in telephone contact with his gopher/dealmaker Oliver Far...

      Winter Story      A Cold War melodrama from 1948, The Iron Curtain , directed by William A. Wellman, tells the true to life story of a Soviet defector, Igor Gouzenko (Dana Andrews).  In 1943, when the U.S.S.R. was Canada's ally against Nazi Germany, Gouzenko was sent to Ottawa to work secretly as a cipher clerk.  His job entailed going to a building run by the Soviets, entering a series of high security rooms and deciphering communications; in effect, spying on the Canadian government and also the Americans.  His work, completed at the end of every shift, would be burned.  He had access, though, to master files, was able to spend a great deal of time working by himself, Russian music always playing loudly in the complex of rooms on a sound system to drown out possible surveillance.      The music by Shostakovich, Prokoviev, and other Russian composers, acts as a real, practical background, while it also highlights...

      If Thinking Gives You a Headache, Don't Watch This Film      I've been listening to an Australian duo, Pleasure Symbols--two women, one playing bass and singing, the other playing keyboards.  Musical minimalism, rather haunting, and in the case of my favorite song of theirs, "Ultraviolence," magnetic, addictive, and beautiful, yet, a song so heavy in tone it resembles a dirge.  I've listened to that one song on YouTube about once a day for the past few weeks.  It occupies a category by itself; something that can be said for a small number of art works.     John Boorman's Zardoz , from 1974, exists in a category by itself.  It is a social satire of the class system, an extrapolation to the year 2293, presenting types of people evolved or devolved from present day humankind.  In this way it resembles H.G. Wells's The Time Machine , with its airy sun-loving humans, the Eloi, and the dreadful underground Morlocks. ...

      Trucks!       I was fourteen the first time I saw Claudia Jennings.  My parents and I were staying with my brother's family in Minnesota.  A TV set in the basement had some movie channel.  Turning it on one afternoon the channel was showing a film I later knew is called The Great Texas Dynamite Chase .  Two women on a crime spree with a lot of action and nudity.  The woman who stood out for her screen presence and overall loveliness was Claudia Jennings, a former Playboy Playmate of the Year and, more significantly for cinema, a much-loved B movie actress who died at the age of twenty-nine in a car wreck in 1979.      What's come to impress me about Claudia Jennings is her full embrace of a career in the B movie drive-in theater fare genre.  I know nothing about her acting ambitions, but a look at her IMDB page reveals someone working continuously in film and television during the eight years after her P...

      Who Knows?      Jacques Rivette's films borrow from theatrical methods of presentation, yet also employ purely cinematic space and time.  Dialogue, far in excess of what one gets in a typical Hollywood film, dominates the scenes, as do depictions of characters going about their own often mysterious activities.  The mystery comes from Rivette's withholding of interior information, from the revealing of actions without our necessarily knowing what lies behind the actions.   You never know what's going to happen next in a Rivette film .  Comparisons to the films of David Lynch have been made by critics partly because of these tendencies of Rivette's.  We don't know why Diane Ladd smears red lipstick all over her face in Lynch's Wild At Heart , but the action indicates something deeply troubled inside the character.      Similarly, Rivette shows the combination of exterior and interior in the actions of his cha...

      Make the Boss Proud      For a short time in the Spring of 2002 I worked as a solicitor of donations for police charities based in Kentucky and Montana.  I lived in neither state, but my company did contract work for those charities.  The job involved wearing a headset, sitting before a computer screen with a keyboard.  N meant "no sale," Y meant "success," and Enter automatically dialed the next number.  The screen displayed the "script," what the worker reads when talking to the mark on the other end.  Donations of twenty-five, fifty, or a hundred dollars were offered, each given a metallic name, respectively, Silver, Gold, Platinum.  Clever.      The job made me sick sometimes, not physically, but it discomforted my heart to convince people in Kentucky and Montana to give up their money to cops.  Most of my calls resulted in no sale, but over the course of an eight hour shift I would talk a goo...