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

      I Suspect This Film Has Its Defenders, But...       Strip Nude For Your Killer from 1975 has one good suspense scene.  A model (Femi Benussi) walks naked in a house, looking for the source of strange sounds.  Her voluptuous body, pretty face, her majestic walk, add to the suspense since she's unshielded from danger.  We already know the killer has stabbed three people to death, all of them connected to a modeling agency.  It's the best scene in the film, known in its original Italian as Nude per l'assassino  ( Nude for the Killer ).      The killer wears black all the way to the top--a motorcycle helmet.  The graphic murders employ many splashings of red liquid resembling paint more than blood.  Showing dead naked women and at least one dead naked man splattered with blood appears to be a goal of the filmmaker, Andrea Bianchi, one of whose films, Commando Mengele , has this for an IMD...

      Good Night's Sleep      Every film of intrigue requires a cryptic message.  That's probably not true of all intrigue-driven films, but the motif seems to manifest often in cinema.  It's a hook, a pattern, a lure for the audience to guide them through sometimes weird plots that may be hard to believe.  In the case of a big Hollywood movie like The Da Vinci Code  the message is right there in the title.       D@bbe , a Turkish horror film from 2006, also contains the message in the title, but unless you've seen the movie, the way it's printed makes it seem like a peculiar e-mail address.  The film deals with a Koranic prophecy come to life in modern (2005) Turkey.  Since the Internet is the new communication system, the supernatural comes through technology.      A man, Tarik, has missed work for a few days.  His coworkers, worried about him, can't get ahold of him.  Hande (Ebru A...

      Yup, William Tecumseh Sherman Was Right      The War Department in World War Two was, among other things, a film production operation that sent combat cameramen "armed" with 16 and 35 millimeter handheld film machines to record behind the scenes and during the scenes actions in Europe, Asia, and the Pacific Theater of War.      Hollywood film directors like George Stevens, Frank Capra, John Ford, and William Wyler received officer's commissions, shot films showing, in Stevens' case for example, the liberation of Paris in 1944.  What sets these short films apart from ordinary war documentaries is the artistic skill of the directors.  Their abilities as storytellers in command of their medium meant that the results wouldn't be amateurish.  Frank Capra's Why We Fight series is a masterful example of propaganda within the storyteller's art, so good that the viewer may not even realize it's propaganda.  These films, h...

      One of the Greatest Films Ever Made      Jacques Rivette, a filmmaker whose time has come, made movies that exist in their own genre.  Watching a Rivette film, always a singular experience, brings me close to a display of original genius unconnected to others' work.  Carl Theodor Dreyer, the Danish director of unique masterpieces like La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc and Day of Wrath , said in an interview that he rarely went to see movies because he didn't want to be influenced by other directors, so that his own work would stand out.  Rivette, in contrast, liked to watch a great variety of films.  He said also that artists are imitators; one emulates what another has done, but creates the same kind of thing differently.      If Out 1 , from 1971, has a precedent in cinema I don't know what that is.  Rivette's nearly thirteen hour long film resonates as a monumental work on the art of acting, as a meditation on...

      Fractal Man      Cinematic entertainments of the 1930s, when they weren't playing on the level of intimate drama or even broad comedy, were similar to each other across nations in that screen extras moving in organized formations created a look of orchestrated masses.      The 1930s, too, was a decade characterized by peoples reacting to worldwide economic depression.  Germany began to recover from these financial circumstances sooner than other nations due to its Nazi leaders' commitment to building a new militarized society.  The United States sputtered under Herbert Hoover's inept leadership, but under Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, the country's workforce grew and became purposeful.      The organization and rise of major world powers after depressed times leads to economic competition, leads to new wars, to a struggle for dominance of certain natural resources required by societies powered by such resou...

     Pasolini Again      Filmmakers in the past have tried to adapt big classic works.  John Huston made a movie called The Bible which concentrates on some stories from that thick volume, giving an overview narrated by Huston himself, while he plays Noah and the voice of God--Huston talking to himself inside the frame of a multi-million dollar "sober" presentation of every politician's favorite book.      Cecil B. DeMille, though his epics are spectacular, focused on small parts of the Bible, as in his two versions, one silent, of The Ten Commandments , and his entertaining retelling of the Samson and Delilah story from The Book of Judges.  Any movie with Hedy Lamarr is worth watching, but seeing her dominate the screen as Delilah is pure viewing pleasure.      In Italy, a different approach to adapting great literature came from the brilliant and incisive mind of Pier Paolo Pasolini.  In his Trilogy of L...

      Except That He Only Has Two Legs      Michelle Pfeiffer played Catwoman in Batman Returns in 1992.  In 2018 she's the Wasp, a.k.a. Janet Van Dyne, wife of Dr. Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) in Ant-Man and the Wasp .  Pfeiffer has bridged the DC and Marvel universes.  Someone should make a film about how that's possible.      There's another Wasp, Janet and Hank's daughter, Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly).  Paul Rudd is Ant-Man, who, like Tony Stark, a.k.a. Iron Man, is a guy in a suit.  He's not a god, like Thor.  He's not a mutant green anger machine, like the Hulk.  He's not a kid altered by radioactive spider venom, like Spiderman.  He's not an android from another planet, like Vision.  He's not a time-traveling via cryosleep hero soldier, like Captain America.  He's a happy go lucky dude with a small daughter and he wears a technologically advanced suit enabling him to shrink to the...