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

      Water Music       Carmen , the opera by Georges Bizet, is a story of love, jealousy, and murder.  Bizet died of a heart attack when he was just thirty-seven.  He wrote beautiful music.  His L'Arlesienne is one of the most exquisite pieces of music I've ever heard.  I compare him to Jean-Luc Godard in that the filmmaker is drawn often to classics.  Bizet, like Godard, was regarded by critics in his time as an artist making odd moves; a youthful experimenter, perhaps.  Godard, by the time he made Prénom Carmen ( First Name: Carmen ) in 1983, was fifty-two years old with thirty feature films to his credit.  So much experience at conceiving and crafting films should lead one to expect a movie harking back to a nineteenth century story to nevertheless be more Godardian than anything else.      My second viewing of this movie (I saw it many years ago on a rented VHS cassette the first time) brought me ...

      I Remember Having Seen It      I saw Thor: Ragnarok in the theater two weeks ago; although I found it entertaining, I haven't thought about it since.  Bombastic, colorful, action-filled with fights and computer-generated imagery, the third Thor movie has a light touch compared to its predecessors.  Humor predominates in many scenes.  Jeff Goldblum as the whimsical tyrant Grandmaster, with his melting stick that turns people into smelly puddles, offers a performance that seems off base from the high seriousness of the basic Thor story.  Asgard, the Rainbow Bridge, Odin's decrepitude and final words to his sons, Loki and Thor, all seem undercut by a movie bent on fun rather than drama that's also fun.      Cate Blanchett has some spectacular moments as the evil death goddess, Hela, Thor's older sister, a sibling he knew nothing about, who, in their first encounter, destroys Mjolnir, his treasured hammer.  Wit...

     Singing Steel      When I was about twelve, my father gave me a paperback called Conan .  The first in a series, the names Lin Carter, L. Sprague de Camp, and Robert E. Howard are listed as the authors, but it's Howard (1906-1936) who created Conan of Cimmeria and wrote twenty-one tales about him.  Carter and de Camp edited those works and had them published in altered forms, making slight changes or even cutting out language deemed by them as inappropriate for contemporary (1960s and 1970s) readers.      Despite these filtered versions, I encountered the raw intensity of Robert E. Howard's character, a barbarian traveling through civilized lands during a long past era separated from our time by some cataclysm.      Conan has the damnedest experiences.  In one story, contained in that book my father gave me, "The Tower of the Elephant," Conan seeks to rob a temple of its most valuable asset, a fabulous j...