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

      Adult DC      Director Zack Snyder's preferred cut of Watchmen (2009), a DC Universe movie with an alternate world history timeline, taking place in 1985 with lots of flashbacks to the 1940s when a previous bunch of Watchmen battled evil, left me wondering often who these characters are and why I should care about them.      I didn't expect to feel this way about this movie, such a praised work, a favorite of one of my relatives.  What it has going for it is an original look, a premise depicting a 1980s America run still by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, surely a nightmare scenario by itself.  The film seems ambiguous in its showing of America as a relatively innocent country, when in fact Vietnam was the idea of American politicians and intelligence men.  The desire on the part of the CIA to corner the market on Southeast Asia heroin is not a subtlety this film addresses.  In fact, Nixon sends to Southeast A...

      The Scariest Prop in the Movies       The Screaming Skull (1958), directed by and starring Alex Nicol, is a loose remake of Rebecca , directed by Hitchcock, from the Daphne du Maurier novel.  Eric Whitlock, played by John Hudson, is the kind of father figure-type husband who says to his wife, "I forbid it," and other controlling directives.  Jenni Whitlock (Peggy Webber) is new to Eric's house out in the country, a big white place with long columns, a big property, a cement-enclosed pond with lily pads and frogs, and a worker, Mickey (Alex Nicol), missing some brain matter, but intensely loyal to the late Mrs. Whitlock, whose body, nothing creepy about this at all, is buried on the property under a trimmed lawn by a marker shaped like a squat white obelisk.      For some reason, Mickey has Mrs. Whitlock's skull.  He dug it up, I guess.  He uses it to terrify the mentally fragile new Mrs. Whitlock.  In Reb...

     Berlin Alexanderplatz      In West Germany in the 1970s a theatrical film director could easily switch back and forth to making TV movies, also.  Rainer Werner Fassbinder's epic thirteen part plus feature film length epilogue, Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) aired on German television and was somehow released theatrically in a small number of venues in the U.S.  Maybe audiences went to it over a few days, in installments?  In any case, I recall Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, Chicago film critics with their own TV show, giving it their almost trademarked, "Thumbs Up!"      Ebert or Siskel mentioned how the long format of the fifteen hour thirty-one minute movie allowed the viewer to roll along with a big story full of many subtleties.      Having watched the film myself--it took me about three weeks to watch it--I can attest firsthand to the raw power of the film, starting with its protagonist actor, Günter La...

      Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders      Rick Morales, director of TV and cinematic animated movies, made this film in 2016, a year before star Adam West (Bruce Wayne/Batman) died.  Batman, Robin, Commissioner Gordon, Catwoman, and the rest, exist in a seemingly pre-twenty-first century milieu.  Batman's car, a 1955 Lincoln Futura concept vehicle, is seventy-one years old in our 2016 viewing eyes, but somehow it still looks futuristic, comic book style.  Batman's power supplies run on nuclear energy.  As a wealthy man, a billionaire probably, Bruce Wayne, unmarried with just one servant, a ward and the ward's aunt to support, has mega-money to spend on crime-fighting supplies.  He also makes donations to charities, supporting Gotham City arts.  A diva visiting from Italy is likely to be introduced to bachelor Wayne and his always present "youthful ward," read catamite , Dick Grayson.      In this anima...

      Vengeance for the Lost Tribe      Hundra (Laurene Landon, her character's name pronounced Hoon-druh), a blonde warrior woman in her mid-twenties, goes hunting one day, returns to her all-female village to find her relatives, friends, and every other villager dead, victims of a raid by "men from the South, worshippers of the Bull."       Hundra (1983), released a year after John Milius's Conan the Barbarian , has, like the previous film, a village attacked and destroyed, a revenge story, and was shot in Spain, a Western European country with enough remote locations to make it resemble an ancient land of legend.  Dry, irregular rock formations, a castle on a height, livestock, a sense of nothing having changed for 2,000 or 3,000 years.      Hundra, a blonde, well-built tall woman armed with throwing knives, a bow and arrows, and a sturdy shiny steel sword, predates Xena by a dozen years, although Lucy Lawless, who ...