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

      For Underarm Freshness      Rabid (1977), written and directed by David Cronenberg, is one of the funniest horror films I've seen.  It bears some resemblances to his earlier Shivers in that there's a plague turning ordinary people into flesh-rending zombies.   Shivers , though, benefits from a premise made plausible by the filmmaker's attempt to create a science fiction scenario based on biological experimentation.  In Rabid , there's no explanation given to account for why Rose (Marilyn Chambers), a motorcycle accident victim needing plastic surgery and skin grafts, develops a puckered orifice in her left armpit, concealing an extensible stinger that seeks out human bodies from which to extract blood in a parody of sexual assault.      Yes, this may be Cronenberg's most bizarre film.      Because of that, it's quite entertaining.  From the opening shot of Rose seated on her boyfriend's motorcycle...

      You Do Get To See Jennifer Lawrence Naked, But...      I saw a preview of Red Sparrow in a movie theater quite a few months ago.  It looked as slick as The English Patient , as intriguing as a Bond movie.  The preview emphasized the time Jennifer Lawrence spends at a special Russian school training to be a spy who uses sexual techniques to achieve victories on behalf of the modern Russian state.  Hard to go wrong, right?      Having seen the movie on DVD, I can say that it seems like something out of 1966, like a Cold War espionage film combining heightened reality with a Manichaean view of U.S. versus U.S.S.R.  Every Russian character in Red Sparrow speaks in Russian-accented English.  For some reason this really bothered me after a while.  It was as if the characters, already not developed as believable human beings, further lost their humanity by not speaking their own language, sounding instead like...

      Turned On      I didn't watch a movie for an entire month.  A multitude of films to see always tickles my awareness, but I sometimes have a difficult time making a selection, as if I want to find the right movie for my intellectual mood.  All these thoughts get in the way of just watching something.      As if to break up this ennui, I came across a film from 1926, Filmstudie , clocking in at three minutes, fifty-four seconds, directed by the Dadaist Hans Richter.  A study in geometry, the film whirls the viewers' eyes as if the watcher is stuck in a kaleidoscope.  How Richter achieved his hallucinatory effects doesn't matter to me; what matters are the associations coming about from linking one shape to the next: circles and disembodied eyeballs, the sudden appearance of a sledgehammer striking a big nailhead.  Seagulls appearing in a startling cut, the whole film a turning stew of shapes that can be broke...