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

      Trumpeters in Competition       Second Chorus (1940), directed by H.C. Potter ( Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House ), starring Fred Astaire, Paulette Goddard, and Burgess Meredith, with additional lousy acting by Artie Shaw, who nonetheless plays a great clarinet in several scenes, ranks as an enjoyable light entertainment containing no war propaganda, since Hollywood was still a year away from suffusing a great percentage of its cinema with too many reminders of the Great Struggle.      Astaire and Meredith play two swing band trumpet players, college students (!) who've been living the campus life for seven years, coasting along on shitty grades and a national situation not yet calling for them to learn how to throw a hand grenade.  Astaire unexplainably dances like Fred Astaire, clearly a stronger ability than his trumpet playing.      Meredith and Astaire vie for the attention of Paulette Goddard.  Je...

      Godard 1970       Le Vent d'Est ( The East Wind ) refers to revolution, to Marxism, to Mao.  In 1970, two years after the French societal upheaval of May 1968, the Dziga Vertov Group, headed by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, made this anti-Western, a film shot in the French countryside, dealing with unions, strikes, philosophical musings about leftist politics.  The role of language in shaping perception.      The film proved to be more than I could absorb in one sitting, Godard's ideas spoken to the viewer by unseen voices, by characters that aren't characters as we see them in their real selves but also dressed up in nineteenth century costumes.      A cavalry officer (the great Italian actor Gian Maria Volonte, so memorable in For a Few Dollars More and Le Cercle Rouge ), a factory owner's daughter (Anne Wiazemsky, Godard's second wife), and fifteen or so other performers and crew acting out sc...

      James Bond in the Disco Age      In 1992, in Santa Monica, California, I met and conversed with actress Barbara Bach at a friend's birthday party.  She was nice, poised, patient with me--a somewhat drunk and definitely stoned midwesterner.  I talked too much.  I had little knowledge of her film work, other than her acting in a Bond film I hadn't seen, The Spy Who Loved Me (1977).  I'd seen Caveman , which she made with her husband Ringo Starr, but I didn't mention it.  I was a nobody hanging out for a half hour with a Beatle's wife, an elegant actress who'd worked with Roger Moore and Franco Nero.      In her Bond outing, she plays a top Soviet secret agent.  Her spy boyfriend gets killed on an Austrian ski slope by Agent 007 before the credits roll.  Carly Simon sings the opener; it's good to hear her distinctly American voice, so prominent in the 1970s, in a film taking place nowhere near the Unit...

     A Graham Greenesque Spy Movie      International intrigue movies often create the impression of exotic settings, but is London exotic to a Londoner?  It's certainly familiar to viewers of films going back many decades.  The Thames bends past landmarks like Westminster Hall and Big Ben.  Big Ben makes itself known through sound in the backgrounds of scenes, something sounding ominous in Night Train to Munich (1940), directed by the man who made The Third Man , Carol Reed.      The spies involved work for the Gestapo (Paul von Hernreid, who became Paul Henreid, cuckolded husband of Ingrid Bergman's character in Casablanca ) and for British Army Intelligence (Rex Harrison).  The Nazi poses as a prisoner in a concentration camp, rescuing the daughter (Margaret Lockwood) of a British-based Czech scientist who's developed new technology for tanks.  Using the daughter as leverage, the Nazi gets the scientist to re...

      Child's Play 2      I had to continue with the Chucky series.  It's too funny to resist, plus, Jenny Agutter, an English actress I've liked for a long time, stars in Child's Play 2  (1990) as a foster mother to Andy Barclay (Alex Vincent), son of Karen (Catherine Hicks in the first film, her character just referred to in the sequel since she's in a psychiatric ward).  It's likely she's not mentally unstable or hallucinating, since normal societal viewpoints don't accept the notion of a doll killing people.      Andy, too, has problems every time he tells the truth about Chucky, who's been put back together by a doll scientist working at the Good Guys factory.  The skin, the eyes, the clothing, the batteries are new, but the malevolent soul of Charles Ray (Brad Dourif), serial killer and voodoo practitioner, is all too mortifyingly real.      Andy gets placed in a foster home with Jenny Agutter and ...

      Voodoo Dolly      Child's Play (1988) was shot in Chicago in wintertime.  This atmospheric background, one of the film's most interesting features, is as much a draw as the debut of Chucky, a redheaded doll possessed by the spirit of a dead voodoo-practicing serial killer (Brad Dourif).  Animatronic Chucky is an impressive feat of special effects.  As we are used to seeing CGI in so many fantastic films these days, it's enjoyable to watch what is essentially a puppet operated with electronic frequencies, technology going back several decades--one thinks of the Abraham Lincoln simulacrum at Disneyland.      Chucky is even more enjoyable for being so ridiculous and malicious.  His sense of humor, based on cruelty and cynicism, sarcasm and hatred, coupled with his overalls, little shoes, red mop of hair, battery hatch in his plastic back, face that can go from tranquil and dopey to vicious in a second or two, all mak...

      Anarchy in the Rear View Mirror       I've now seen three fourths of the completed Fast and Furious franchise.  A ninth film is scheduled for release in April 2020, so maybe I've seen two thirds?      Two people have told me on separate occasions and independently of each other that the franchise diminishes in quality with each new entry.  My assessment?  I thought the fourth film dragged at times.  The fifth film, Fast Five , restores the essential Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel) to the storyline and introduces DSS agent Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson).  Diesel and Johnson comprise the muscular bald component of Five and Fast and Furious 6 , the latter bringing back from the assumed dead, Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), a woman so hot that Toretto will leave his hot Brazilian former cop girlfriend for whom he believed is his shot in the head girlfriend.      Wrinkle--this in 6 --comes when Letty, who was...

      Fast and Furious--2009      Is it because I had to wait a month to see the fourth Fast and Furious movie that my expectations were too high to regard Fast and Furious (the simply named entry in the series from 2009, directed by Justin Lin) as a good movie?      Or is it not as exciting as the previous three?  The first one used its dialogue scenes (the mellow touches in the film) well; the characters interacted with recognizable humanity.  In this fourth piece of the saga, the elements don't add up to a good film, but parts of the movie don't suck.      I feel too harsh in writing that barb, but a CGI preponderant set piece in a long bending tunnel connecting Mexico with California goes on for too long, just as the downtime scenes in the film go on for too long.  It's not a well-edited film.  Fred Raskin and Christian Wagner did the editing.  Why two editors?  Is that what keeps the fil...

     Door to Door Greeting Card Salesmen Nearly Get Killed      Door to door salesmen in Paris, played by Oliver Hardy and Stan Laurel, console a lonely wife (Mae Busch), married to a hotheaded painter (Charles Middleton).  Stan writes the verse, Oliver does the designs on greeting cards they peddle door to door.  At twenty-one minutes, The Fixer Uppers is a typically wild Laurel and Hardy short (from 1935).  These two often played well-meaning fellows getting into absurd and sometimes dangerous situations.        Emotionally neglected by her intense career-obsessed husband, she gets into a conversation with Laurel who tells about a "friend" who got her husband interested in her again by making him jealous with another man.  The husband reignited his love for his long-suffering wife and gave the other man a lot of money.  Read between the lines and it sounds like the husband paid the man to have sex with hi...

      The Bridge At Remagen      March 1945: a bridge across the Rhine River at Remagen ordered destroyed by Hitler.  Wanting to prevent U.S. troops from using it, he's willing to leave tens of thousands of German soldiers on the western side, backs to the river, facing American tanks.  Hitler by this point is in the habit of giving the order, "Fight to the last man, to the last bullet!"      German Major Paul Krueger (Robert Vaughan) is the German officer tasked with overseeing the bridge's destruction in The Bridge At Remagen (1969), one of many big World War Two-themed films of the 1960s.  Main setting is the Rhine River, spanned by what turns out to be a very sturdy and well-made railroad bridge that can be driven across with vehicles, foot traffic lanes on either side.  German sappers on swing set-like seats plant massive amounts of explosives, fist-sized reddish-pink packages clustering most of the bridge's u...