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

      I first saw Pierce Brosnan in the light-hearted private detective TV show, Remington Steele .  He and Stephanie Zimbalist played a sleuthing team with shades of Nick and Nora Charles from The Thin Man movies.        Smooth, debonair, great-looking in a suit, dark hair perfect, cool British Isles accent, Brosnan seemed destined after a few years on that show to play James Bond, but his contract with Remington Steele forced him to do one more year, the opportunity passed, the role went to Timothy Dalton.      Later, Brosnan played James Bond four times and was surprised when he wasn't asked to return in Casino Royale (2006).  Instead, he's acted in thirty-four films to date.  Damn, this man is busy!      In 2014 he was in A Long Way Down (which, from the trailer, appears to be a comedy about suicide, with a Richard Curtis vibe, i.e. shite) and then, washing his previous effort with blood and hard hi...

      Underwater (2020, directed by William Eubank) was shot in 2017.  Disney bought 20th Century Fox, delaying its release.  The film cost eighty million dollars, grossed forty million worldwide.  I entered the casino with a hundred dollars in my pocket, left with fifty.  Do I feel good?  Did I at least have a good time?      The title, Underwater , might make a viewer picture a murder mystery set near a lake.  A body, maybe, weighted with chains at a depth of thirty-seven feet in murky water.  This film, though, takes place at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, 36,069 feet below sea level, in A.D. 2050.  The Tian Corporation, a mega-business participating in what seems to be a final desperate bid to extract oil from the most remote spot on Earth, has constructed stations in the Trench, including Roebuck Station, the drilling platform serving as the destination of the small number of survivors from a different relate...