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

      Seasick      Since one can hear the denizens of underwater kingdoms in Aquaman quite clearly, as if they're actors speaking in a recording studio, I felt a step removed from the elemental medium they're supposed to inhabit.  I wanted an audio effect on their voices, not some glug-glug sound, but a squelching effect, perhaps, something that would squeeze their tonalities at least a bit, making them sound strange, like one would expect Atlanteans, giant crab men, mermen, to sound like.      On the visual side, this film, based on the DC Comics character, is like an acid trip for the eyes.  The underwater scenes teem with activity, life, huge cities, fantastic vehicles, aquamen riding sharks, killer whales, riding in vehicles shaped like sea creatures.  I got the impression that even barnacles in this world have their own servants.      The physically fit Jason Momoa, who once played Conan of Cimmeria, r...

      Babykiller?      The protagonist of Presidænten ( The President ), is the President of a tribunal of judges who leaves town for a while.  When he returns, he learns that his estranged daughter has been accused of infanticide.  He must recuse himself from the case, appointing his lawyer friend to handle her defense.  Visiting her in her jail cell, he finds out that her mother forgives him for his past rejection.  He had heeded his own father's wishes that he not marry a commoner, not knowing he'd already made her pregnant.  Their child, now almost certain to be executed for allegedly killing her baby, affects the President's heart and inspires guilt over his past behavior learned from obedience to his dead father's will.      It's a film depicting the truism that society often can't figure out who the really damaging human beings are, while aggressively punishing harmless people.  Directed by Carl Drey...

      A Big One      In the 1970s, when network television programmers had the courage to sometimes show unusual movies, Sergey Bondarchuk's roughly six hour long adaptation of Tolstoy's War and Peace , the dubbed American version, aired over a few nights.  My father watched the whole thing--I remember one tracking shot over a battlefield covered with corpses wearing the fancy colorful uniforms of the Napoleonic Era, a memory of death in warfare from my childhood.       Voyna i mir (1965-1967), an epic in four parts and in Russian, with its utilization of the Soviet Army as military extras, features the most colossal battle sequence ever filmed, a depiction of the Battle of Borodino in 1812, soon before Napoleon took and briefly held onto Moscow.  Single shots in this battle sequence literally contain many thousands of men marching in formations, cavalry, artillery, explosions, a brown, white, and gray smoky atmosphere that...

      An Appreciation of K Stew      I'm an unapologetic admirer of the actress Kristen Stewart, most known for her role as the vampire lover Bella in the Twilight films.  I watched those movies, enjoying enough about them to drink in the whole series.  My enjoyment of Kristen Stewart's work has been ridiculed by others much the same way as my appreciation for Britney Spears has been mocked; by people who also don't know anything substantial about her or her music.  Some people are famous enough to get "known about" even though the "knowers" really don't know shit.      Since the Twilight series is so associated with teenaged viewers (girls especially), it's not cool, I guess, for a serious adult like myself to enjoy such cinema.  Nevertheless, I got into watching those films a few years ago because I saw Kristen Stewart in Snow White and the Huntsman , a magnificent epic retelling of the familiar story, going back t...

      Union       Under the Skin (2013), directed by Jonathan Glazer, is an eerie and unnerving science fiction film starring Scarlett Johansson as an alien in contemporary Scotland, cruising about in a white van and picking up men.  Her (its?) appearance as Johansson (hair dyed black) is really a membrane covering the alien.  Behaving like a serial killer, "she" approaches the men in her van, offers them rides after some flirty small talk, then takes those who get into her vehicle to a crummy derelict of a house in Edinburgh.  She has bizarre sex with them resulting in their absorption into herself--a process never explained and also depicted in an abstract manner.      Glazer shows her method of annihilating her victims in a non-literal way, the seduction and absorption a set of visual ideas on a special stage with black liquid.  It could be that the broken down house conceals a room made with alien technology. ...

     Back From the Dead      Orson Welles in 1970 began work on The Other Side of the Wind .  Forty-eight years later we can finally see it.  This film, for many years mostly unedited, with 100 hours of footage to work with, was finally shaped into a version mainly by director Peter Bogdanovich (one of the movie's main stars).  Welles had left behind, after his death in 1985, notes and plans for how he wanted the film to be edited and arranged as a whole.      In the 1980s, I first read of this film in books about Welles.  It was mired for years in a weird legal bind I didn't fully understand, something about Iranian money financing part of it; thus, due to the post-1979 Revolution political situation between Iran and the U.S., an unfinished film lost in controversy, perhaps irrecoverable.      Recovered, years of work went into its restoration.  As it is, the film is still in all likelihood an appr...

     The Thrill, Though It's Long Gone, Is Still Interesting To Think About      When I was a kid, Star Wars was a big fucking deal.  At thirteen I was the right age for exposure to the first film, then called just Star Wars , years before anyone besides George Lucas knew there might be sequels, or, for God's sake, prequels.  In July 1977, when I saw the film in Seattle, I couldn't get enough of it.  Back then, before Internet, nobody had a clue as to what that movie was like--one had to see it.  Battles in space, funny robots that could do interesting and particularized tasks, unknown actors and actresses, along with at least two familiar faces (Peter Cushing and Alec Guinness), laser pistols, swords in the form of light sabers, and a cool villain in black with a deep voice and an ability to squeeze the air out of victims' throats using the specially developed powers of his mind.  Holy shit, it was cool!      T...