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

      Remote Viewer      Stylized fashion photography based on crime scenes, car accidents, 1970s models posing as corpses: subject matter of controversial and successful photographer Laura Mars (Faye Dunaway) in Irvin Kershner's Eyes of Laura Mars (1978), screenplay by John Carpenter, who directed Halloween .      Tommy Lee Jones, before he became such a familiar face, plays New York police detective John Neville.  He investigates a string of ice pick murders of friends and colleagues of Laura Mars, a woman suddenly cursed (for no explained reason) to view these killings through the perpetrator's eyes.      As a photographer obsessed with death and violence, Laura attracts police attention.  In one instance she sees herself stalked but escapes, necessitating twenty-four hour protection.  Carrying on with her job, she continues creating set pieces along the lines of Helmut Newton stylization.  Newton ...

      xXx: Return of Xander Cage      Rollercoaster cinema without a rollercoaster.  Vin Diesel's second appearance as stunt freak Xander Cage in xXx: Return of Xander Cage reveals the character as even calmer amidst death defying action than in xXx , made fifteen years earlier.      A second xXx , starring Ice Cube, came out in 2005.  Lengthy separation between the first two films and the third might seem indicative of a lack of audience interest (the Ice Cube installment failed at the box office), but I suspect that Diesel's participation in several Fast and Furious films as well as steady work in movies throughout the fifteen year period until his "return" kept him away from this peculiar franchise blending government covert ops premises with an anarchistic anti-hero into extreme sports.      Xander Cage, once again, demonstrates right away his anti-establishment credentials by climbing a communications tower ...

      xXx, or James Bond Plus Extreme Sports Plus Terrorism      Rob Cohen's next movie starring Vin Diesel, after The Fast and the Furious , dwells on "non-stop action," including a firefight in Colombia with attack helicopters and off-road motorcycling, cocaine, electrified fences, and more explosions than the Omaha Beach landings.      Vin, as Xander Cage, i.e. xXx from the tattoo on the back of his thick neck, never suffers hearing loss or the deleterious effects of shock waves generated by big explosions.  Like Dom Toretto in the Fast and Furious films, Xander is a comic book protagonist.      Into extreme sports, he steals a politician's Corvette, drives it to his cohorts who attach it with cameras.  Driving fast to a high bridge over a river, he lectures into the camera, calling out the corruption of Dick the politician.  He zooms the pretty red car off the bridge, rides it part of the way like it's a...

      Undead Fun      Egypt.  1955.  A cult worshipping a pair of mummies.  A treasure.  A sexy brunette willing to do anything to get that wealth.  A medallion showing where the loot is buried.  A murdered archaeologist.      An Agatha Christie novel?  No, it's Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy .      Richard Deacon (Fred Rutherford in Leave it to Beaver ) plays Semu, cult leader and Professor of Egyptology.  Marie Windsor plays his rival, Madame Rontru.  Both of them have no problem with ordering their devoted henchmen to murder people, Rontru to get the treasure, Semu to protect it.      Abbott and Costello play two bumblers with a knack for getting involved in trouble generated by the Semu/Rontru rivalry.  Coming into possession of the medallion showing the treasure's location, they try to sell it at a pawn shop, only to find it's either cursed or else i...

      Permit Me This Indulgence      Is it pretentious or just too much to write a review of a movie I've made?  As Rhombus, I've made sixty-eight films--some of them are on YouTube channel John Berner.  They haven't been seen by many people although there have been three screenings of my various films thus far at a local art gallery.      If Roger Ebert had made a movie he might've had his colleague Gene Siskel review it, in the interests of objectivity.  I'm not here to be objective or subjective.  The point is, I watched a movie I made in 2012 (so I'm writing about it) shot on videotape with a 1998 Sony videocamera.  My ninth film, Stressed Plastic  is a sequel to Stressed Meat .  They take place in the same historical continuum, but the second film deals with events in A.D. 2999 when Earth and nine other planets are ruled by the whimsical absolute dictator, Wacksecker.  He wears a Hitler mustache...

      Tokyo Drifters      In 2006, director Justin Lin made The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift .  I remember the ads; I remember thinking, "Tokyo Drift?"  What does that mean?      It sounded like the title of a video game; appropriate, considering the gaming vibe I get when I look at the visuals in these films, of which Drift  is the third.  Except at the end, there's no connection to the other two films, but then we get a sense of the international scope of street racing in this film saga.       Tokyo Drift deals mostly with a young southern American kicked out of high school.  He has to go to Tokyo to live with his father after his mother decides to pass him on to her divorced husband.  Lucas Black is Sean Boswell, street racer come to Japan where he gets in, against his father's wishes, with the in-crowd of drift racers.  Drifting is when these little cars swing out with their rear...

      More Fun, Furiously      Enticed again to watch more of the Fast and Furious franchise, I conclude, having seen 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003), that the series is junk food cinema--you want to keep crunching the Cheetos.      Beginning with its hang-loose-with-English-grammatical-conventions title, 2 Fast 2 Furious embraces the fantastic world of street racing presented video game style.      Again, undercover man Brian (Paul Walker) gets saddled with another task working for the FBI and police, this time in Miami.  The job is to infiltrate crooked export-import man Carter Verone's (Cole Hauser) operation.  Brian insists on the assistance of driver Roman (Tyrese) an ankle bracelet wearing ex-con given the chance for a clean record if he comes through on the Verone job.      Verone, it turns out, has a spectacular-looking girlfriend (Eva Mendes), in reality a Customs agent working a long burn aga...

      Chassis      Yesterday I watched The Fast and the Furious (2001), first in a series of popular car-oriented action films starring Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, and Michelle Rodriguez, herself a 9.9 on a one to ten scale of hotness.  Three-fourths of the way through, a phone call interrupted me; the conversation stayed in my mind for a while as I resumed with the movie.  My brain wasn't present for the film's next twenty minutes.      I watched it a second time in the evening, full concentration.  The shiny cars, fast and zippy, street racing coordinated with police scanners.  Smoldering gazes.  Music video editing, basic dialogue consisting of grunts and brief egocentric statements.  An undercover LAPD cop (handsome Paul Walker) driving as an infiltrator of the street racer world, investigating four teams (Black, Hispanic, Vietnamese, White/Off-White) as potential suspects in armed robberies of trucks movi...

      Caring For Children in Wartime      Free play periods outside, young children doing anything they want to under adult supervision.  Getting dirty, playing with farm animals, dogs, cats, and ducks.  Not just boys but girls on tall jungle gyms.  The kids move rocks to construct a pool.      For most of the nineteen minutes of A Child Went Forth (1942), happy children play at some property in the country.  A narrator (Lloyd Gough) quotes Walt Whitman, about how a child went forth and the first thing that child encountered became part of him.  The poem itself comes from Leaves of Grass , a big book I haven't read.  My father read it many times, taught it in universities.  My copy is his old Riverside Editions trade paperback copy, pages softened by frequency of reading them and pencilling notes in the margins, underlining, circling specific page numbers.  The cracked spine predicts that one ...

     What If Bobby Fischer Ruled the Universe?      I was eighteen when TRON came out in July 1982.  I remember seeing ads for it.  It seemed like a hot new movie but for some reason I wasn't interested in going to it.  It could be that my lack of interest in computers at that time influenced my decision.  The animation, too, looked weird and unnatural; by that time in my life I was no longer wasting money at the mall's video arcade, as I had been during my early teens.  It could be I didn't want a reminder of those years when I hadn't even yet  kissed a girl.  A friend told me our local arcade was owned by the Mafia.  I didn't believe him, but every time I went after he revealed that "fact," I looked at the adult security man with wariness.         TRON features a video arcade, a lively place operated by a computer programmer, Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges at his grinning self-confident best), ...

      When Producers Thought, Let's Put Goldie Hawn in Anything and See What Happens       Bird On a Wire (1990) was shot mainly in British Columbia, Canada, though it takes place in Atlantic City, Detroit, Racine, Wisconsin, and rural Wisconsin.  The Wisconsin shots looked unlike Wisconsin.  I've often been disappointed that movies take the route of pretending to show specific locations, but they really just get shot in one area.  Hollywood and surroundings in southern California have stood in for ancient Babylon, the Old West, and just about anywhere else, including the surfaces of other planets.       Bird On a Wire cost $20 million in 1990, $39 million in today's dollars.  It made around $138 million in box office, though it was reviewed negatively by a majority of critics.  I suspect they didn't care for the sprawling nature of the story, given that it deals with Rick (Mel Gibson) and Marianne (Goldie Hawn) ...