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

      Water Music       Carmen , the opera by Georges Bizet, is a story of love, jealousy, and murder.  Bizet died of a heart attack when he was just thirty-seven.  He wrote beautiful music.  His L'Arlesienne is one of the most exquisite pieces of music I've ever heard.  I compare him to Jean-Luc Godard in that the filmmaker is drawn often to classics.  Bizet, like Godard, was regarded by critics in his time as an artist making odd moves; a youthful experimenter, perhaps.  Godard, by the time he made Prénom Carmen ( First Name: Carmen ) in 1983, was fifty-two years old with thirty feature films to his credit.  So much experience at conceiving and crafting films should lead one to expect a movie harking back to a nineteenth century story to nevertheless be more Godardian than anything else.      My second viewing of this movie (I saw it many years ago on a rented VHS cassette the first time) brought me ...

      I Remember Having Seen It      I saw Thor: Ragnarok in the theater two weeks ago; although I found it entertaining, I haven't thought about it since.  Bombastic, colorful, action-filled with fights and computer-generated imagery, the third Thor movie has a light touch compared to its predecessors.  Humor predominates in many scenes.  Jeff Goldblum as the whimsical tyrant Grandmaster, with his melting stick that turns people into smelly puddles, offers a performance that seems off base from the high seriousness of the basic Thor story.  Asgard, the Rainbow Bridge, Odin's decrepitude and final words to his sons, Loki and Thor, all seem undercut by a movie bent on fun rather than drama that's also fun.      Cate Blanchett has some spectacular moments as the evil death goddess, Hela, Thor's older sister, a sibling he knew nothing about, who, in their first encounter, destroys Mjolnir, his treasured hammer.  Wit...

     Singing Steel      When I was about twelve, my father gave me a paperback called Conan .  The first in a series, the names Lin Carter, L. Sprague de Camp, and Robert E. Howard are listed as the authors, but it's Howard (1906-1936) who created Conan of Cimmeria and wrote twenty-one tales about him.  Carter and de Camp edited those works and had them published in altered forms, making slight changes or even cutting out language deemed by them as inappropriate for contemporary (1960s and 1970s) readers.      Despite these filtered versions, I encountered the raw intensity of Robert E. Howard's character, a barbarian traveling through civilized lands during a long past era separated from our time by some cataclysm.      Conan has the damnedest experiences.  In one story, contained in that book my father gave me, "The Tower of the Elephant," Conan seeks to rob a temple of its most valuable asset, a fabulous j...

      Splashdown       The Man Who Fell to Earth is a film I've known about for a long time.  I didn't see it, though, on television in the 1980s and 1990s, since the movie's great amount of nudity made broadcast presentations severely truncated.  I like to see a film in its uncut form; I can no longer stand watching a film interrupted by commercials.  In the past, this is how I and everyone else experienced films shown on television, but cable channels, internet services, and video formats (VHS and later DVD types) have changed this for the better.      Mentioning television in an essay about Nicholas Roeg's weird and avant-garde science fiction film from 1976 is appropriate, since Thomas Newton (David Bowie in the eponymous role) spends much of his downtime watching televisions, having set up multiple sets in his hotel rooms and his home, as he simultaneously keeps in telephone contact with his gopher/dealmaker Oliver Far...

      Winter Story      A Cold War melodrama from 1948, The Iron Curtain , directed by William A. Wellman, tells the true to life story of a Soviet defector, Igor Gouzenko (Dana Andrews).  In 1943, when the U.S.S.R. was Canada's ally against Nazi Germany, Gouzenko was sent to Ottawa to work secretly as a cipher clerk.  His job entailed going to a building run by the Soviets, entering a series of high security rooms and deciphering communications; in effect, spying on the Canadian government and also the Americans.  His work, completed at the end of every shift, would be burned.  He had access, though, to master files, was able to spend a great deal of time working by himself, Russian music always playing loudly in the complex of rooms on a sound system to drown out possible surveillance.      The music by Shostakovich, Prokoviev, and other Russian composers, acts as a real, practical background, while it also highlights...

      If Thinking Gives You a Headache, Don't Watch This Film      I've been listening to an Australian duo, Pleasure Symbols--two women, one playing bass and singing, the other playing keyboards.  Musical minimalism, rather haunting, and in the case of my favorite song of theirs, "Ultraviolence," magnetic, addictive, and beautiful, yet, a song so heavy in tone it resembles a dirge.  I've listened to that one song on YouTube about once a day for the past few weeks.  It occupies a category by itself; something that can be said for a small number of art works.     John Boorman's Zardoz , from 1974, exists in a category by itself.  It is a social satire of the class system, an extrapolation to the year 2293, presenting types of people evolved or devolved from present day humankind.  In this way it resembles H.G. Wells's The Time Machine , with its airy sun-loving humans, the Eloi, and the dreadful underground Morlocks. ...

      Trucks!       I was fourteen the first time I saw Claudia Jennings.  My parents and I were staying with my brother's family in Minnesota.  A TV set in the basement had some movie channel.  Turning it on one afternoon the channel was showing a film I later knew is called The Great Texas Dynamite Chase .  Two women on a crime spree with a lot of action and nudity.  The woman who stood out for her screen presence and overall loveliness was Claudia Jennings, a former Playboy Playmate of the Year and, more significantly for cinema, a much-loved B movie actress who died at the age of twenty-nine in a car wreck in 1979.      What's come to impress me about Claudia Jennings is her full embrace of a career in the B movie drive-in theater fare genre.  I know nothing about her acting ambitions, but a look at her IMDB page reveals someone working continuously in film and television during the eight years after her P...