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

      The Coincidence       The China Syndrome premiered on March 16, 1979.  It deals with a potential nuclear meltdown at a nuclear power plant.  Jane Fonda's in it.  The nuclear power industry got into a tizzy about the film, calling it "sheer fiction."  Fonda was outspoken about her opposition to nuclear power.  Still, her costar, Michael Douglas, had produced the film with his production company, so the oppositional blame should've gone his way, too, but Jane Fonda's a woman; plus she has a reputation, since the Vietnam War years, for being a pain in the establishment's ass, although not so much since the 1970s.      The film, directed by James Bridges ( The Paper Chase , Urban Cowboy ), got boosted twelve days after its release by a real nuclear power plant accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania.  As it's written in Wikipedia:      "The accident began with failures in the non-nucle...

      Skipping Stones Across the Pacific      Documentaries don't always present reality as some stage observed in presumed total objectivity.  The documentarist has a point of view based on personal beliefs, thoughts, opinions held at the time of the film's creation.  Even in Direct Cinema, an objective style that shows its images and records its sounds without any apparent authorial intrusion, is made subjective by what the cameraperson aims the camera at.  Point of view is hard, maybe impossible, to escape.  Even a space probe sent to another planet, a robot explorer that loses operational touch with Earth-based communications and then takes a series of random images, can be regarded as non-objective since it was built by humans and sent into space by them.  Total objectivity implies a vast awareness attributable to God, perhaps, but even God, in the Old Testament for instance, is not objective, interfering in human affairs oft...

      Cell Phones, Western Sahara, a Cow Named GPS      The Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako's 2014 film Timbuktu deals with people of that city and its surroundings adjusting to life under occupation by the al-Qaeda-connected group Ansar Dine, which came into power there for a while in 2012.  As fundamentalist Muslims practicing Sharia law, Ansar Dine (with its black and white flag so similar to that of ISIS) bans music, long trousers, exposed female faces, football.  Their punishment of adultery is to bury the couple to their necks and then throw stones at their exposed heads.      The people of the city and surrounding countryside get on with their lives as best they can.  Some women openly defy the automatic rifle-toting men--a fish seller, told to put on gloves refuses, saying they can cut off her hands if they want to, but she's not going to wear gloves while cleaning fish; it isn't practical.     ...

      Everything's Fine Now      Having been through the turmoil and shocks myself, I can say with authority that John Cassavetes' 1974 film depicting mental illness and its effects on the family of the afflicted one is accurate to the point that in some scenes I felt sick watching it.       A Woman Under the Influence can be interpreted variously, depending on the experience-based viewpoints of viewers.  Because Mabel Longhetti (Gena Rowlands in the finest depiction of a mentally ill person I've ever seen) drinks alcohol frequently, some health professionals who specialize in substance abuse treatment might conclude her problem is based in alcoholism.  Others, like myself, will conclude she's mentally ill, suffering from schizophrenia (possibly) or a borderline personality disorder (more likely, but still, given the clues provided in the film, who knows?).  Early on she exhibits weird physical behaviors symptomatic of anti...

      The Means of Escape       Robert Bresson's 1956 film A Man Escaped ( Un condamné à mort s'est échappé ou Le vent souffle òu il veut ) is a suspense film of the highest order.  Based on a memoir by World War Two French Resistance fighter André Devigny, the film takes place mostly in a prison run by Germans in Lyon, part of Vichy France, but by then, 1943, the Germans had occupied this former section of France that had been run, after the 1940 Nazi conquest, by a puppet regime.      The film details in the minutest focused way, the persistent efforts of the prisoner (his name changed to Fontaine for the film) to escape first his cell, then make it over the inner wall, then the outer wall.  He thinks in terms of one thing at a time, helped here and there by other prisoners in their note-passing system, their possession of forbidden pencils, their brief verbal communications while they communally wash themselves.   ...

      Prelude      I had a bad cold during the week the Persian Gulf War started.  I spent the time reading Robert Fagles' new translation of Homer's The Iliad , a seminal poetic account of a long ago war fought in what is now western Turkey.  I had the thick library book open against my thighs as the skies over Baghdad brightened with anti-aircraft fire.  Air Forces of many nations pulverized Iraq for a month and a half.  The brief ground war to expel the Iraqi occupation forces from Kuwait demonstrated the impracticality of relying on belief in the strength of huge numbers of troops who then get challenged by better equipped, more mobile, and more professionally trained adversaries.  Kuwait's occupation by Iraq lasted half a year, but the aftereffects of those months are with us today in a region still blazing with metaphorical fires set by first world powers and lesser powers inconveniently located above vast amounts of oil. ...

      Hear No Evil      Cornell Woolrich's novel The Black Path of Fear from 1944 was adapted into the 1946 film The Chase , directed by Arthur D. Ripley, starring Robert Cummings, Steve Cochran, Peter Lorre and French actress Michèle Morgan.  The presence in the film of Lorre and Morgan points out the cultural benefit one nation may receive when another nation transforms into a totalitarian society.      Hollywood became the wartime home and workplace of numerous performers and film artists, a holding pool from the brain drain caused by Adolf Hitler's policies toward the arts.  Once war came, French and British film stars, directors, and composers crossed the Atlantic Ocean to work in a warmer (figuratively and literally) environment.  They brought with them original artistic ways of working and crafting a cinema that became, by war's end, a less light-hearted enterprise, generally, than Hollywood's wartime output of musi...