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

      Theater of Smoke      The Wikipedia article about the Lebanese Civil War, which lasted from 1975 until 1990, killing approximately 120,000 people and repelling nearly a million from the country, features a table listing the belligerents.  It shouldn't surprise anyone that the United States and Israel were involved.  Others included France, Italy, Saudi Arabia, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Syria, Sudan, United Arab Emirates, Libya, South Yemen, Hezbollah, the PLO, Iran, and several Lebanese military and paramilitary organizations, with Christian and Muslim tensions added.      It was a clusterfuck in a complex ancient country about 7/10s the size of Connecticut.      The World War Two American battleship U.S.S. New Jersey  in 1983 and 1984 fired its sixteen inch guns at Lebanon, causing me even then to recall Marlowe's amazement in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness when he remarks that the ship he's on, firin...

      A Snowy Story With Arms Trafficking      When I was a kid one of my favorite movies was Where Eagles Dare , starring Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood.  It deals with a secret British mission to infiltrate a German fortress built on a high mount in the Bavarian Alps.  The Germans have captured a British general who has knowledge of the upcoming Normandy invasion.  Burton and Eastwood are to rescue him, but they run into many obstacles, with Eastwood's U.S. Army Ranger character left in the dark by Burton as the story gets increasingly complex.      The film was based on a novel by Alistair MacLean, who also wrote Breakheart Pass , a movie set mostly on board a train in the American West in the late nineteenth century.  This film, from 1975, is also very complicated, with the protagonist (Charles Bronson) not who he seems to be, guarding his secrets just as Burton's character does in Where Eagles Dare .  On o...

      Something From an Alien Garden      In 1956, in the middle era of 1950s science fiction films, a genre composed of great, good, mediocre, and bad movies, Roger Corman (who went on to become the most successful B movie producer and director) directed his second science fiction effort, It Conquered the World .      I've seen this film at least three times.  It doesn't make much sense.  The writing is too off-kilter at times for the film to be taken seriously as drama.  The depiction of military men is played for comedy, with two of Corman's later lead actors from legendary films, Jonathan Haze ( The   Little Shop of Horrors ) and Dick Miller ( A Bucket of Blood ) portraying a silly fool/straight man combination having nothing to do with the plot.      Even so, the film fascinates me because of Lee Van Cleef's performance as a scientist somehow in radio contact with an alien from Venus.  The Venu...

      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...