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

      For Underarm Freshness      Rabid (1977), written and directed by David Cronenberg, is one of the funniest horror films I've seen.  It bears some resemblances to his earlier Shivers in that there's a plague turning ordinary people into flesh-rending zombies.   Shivers , though, benefits from a premise made plausible by the filmmaker's attempt to create a science fiction scenario based on biological experimentation.  In Rabid , there's no explanation given to account for why Rose (Marilyn Chambers), a motorcycle accident victim needing plastic surgery and skin grafts, develops a puckered orifice in her left armpit, concealing an extensible stinger that seeks out human bodies from which to extract blood in a parody of sexual assault.      Yes, this may be Cronenberg's most bizarre film.      Because of that, it's quite entertaining.  From the opening shot of Rose seated on her boyfriend's motorcycle...

      You Do Get To See Jennifer Lawrence Naked, But...      I saw a preview of Red Sparrow in a movie theater quite a few months ago.  It looked as slick as The English Patient , as intriguing as a Bond movie.  The preview emphasized the time Jennifer Lawrence spends at a special Russian school training to be a spy who uses sexual techniques to achieve victories on behalf of the modern Russian state.  Hard to go wrong, right?      Having seen the movie on DVD, I can say that it seems like something out of 1966, like a Cold War espionage film combining heightened reality with a Manichaean view of U.S. versus U.S.S.R.  Every Russian character in Red Sparrow speaks in Russian-accented English.  For some reason this really bothered me after a while.  It was as if the characters, already not developed as believable human beings, further lost their humanity by not speaking their own language, sounding instead like...

      Turned On      I didn't watch a movie for an entire month.  A multitude of films to see always tickles my awareness, but I sometimes have a difficult time making a selection, as if I want to find the right movie for my intellectual mood.  All these thoughts get in the way of just watching something.      As if to break up this ennui, I came across a film from 1926, Filmstudie , clocking in at three minutes, fifty-four seconds, directed by the Dadaist Hans Richter.  A study in geometry, the film whirls the viewers' eyes as if the watcher is stuck in a kaleidoscope.  How Richter achieved his hallucinatory effects doesn't matter to me; what matters are the associations coming about from linking one shape to the next: circles and disembodied eyeballs, the sudden appearance of a sledgehammer striking a big nailhead.  Seagulls appearing in a startling cut, the whole film a turning stew of shapes that can be broke...

      Back Roads, Dirty Blouse      Roger Corman's third film as a producer, The Fast and the Furious (1955), is a drive-in type movie with dialogue blunted in its potential sharpness by its ridiculousness.  The novel premise works, since Corman was able, with his typical small budget, to fit his plot (involving race cars, a kidnapping, an accused murderer running for Mexico) into file footage of a California speedy roadster race to Baja California.      Connie Adair (Dorothy Malone, two years before she won an Oscar for Written on the Wind ) has a beautiful white Jaguar two-seater.  On her way to enter the race, she stops at a cafe for an egg salad sandwich and a glass of pineapple juice.  She gets neither, having seated herself next to Frank Webster (John Ireland), a sullen dude in a black leather jacket scanning a newspaper.  The waitress and another customer get nosy about Connie and then about Webster.  They t...

     Beef      Joanne Dru (1922-1996), born with the remarkable name, Joanne Letitia LaCock, had a catlike appearance to her eyes and eyebrows.  I associate her with Westerns, with tight long skirts and long-sleeved blouses with fancy ruffles.  The woman waiting for her love interest to come home from the cattle drive; giving her deadbeat gambler husband an ultimatum he fails to live up to.      In Vengeance Valley (1951), directed by Richard Thorpe, Jen Strobie (Dru) is married to Lee Strobie (Robert Walker), a shit with a gambling problem and a talent for losing money.  Lee's foster brother, Owen Daybright (Burt Lancaster), is a ranch foreman who runs afoul of two brothers (John Ireland and Hugh O'Brian) whose sister (Sally Forrest) has given birth to a bastard child, father unknown--except to the brothers, who assume the perpetrator is Daybright.  Lee Strobie is the actual father.  The brothers, who lack disc...

      The First But Not the Last      Alice Guy-Blaché made 444 films from 1896 to 1920.  In 1906, she directed forty-two films alone, including an account of the story of Jesus of Nazareth, La vie du christ  ( The Life of Christ ).  I don't know if the following fact has anything to do with why she chose her subject, but Guy-Blaché was thirty-three when she made the film, the traditional age of Jesus at the time of his crucifixion.        The film, too, runs to just under thirty-three minutes.  Divided into twenty-five scenes, the camera set-ups, in keeping with the years of early cinema, remain still, except for one shot with a pan to the left following Jesus bearing his cross up the hill of Golgotha.  This short camera movement looks like an innovation, although it most likely isn't.  Alice Guy-Blaché did pioneer some visual effects and used interracial casts.  One of the striking things about L...

      Don't Call Him a Parasite       Venom , a PG-13 Marvel film that, given its violence and subtexts, would've been more effective as an R movie, is nevertheless an entertaining, funny, and well-executed effort directed by Ruben Fleischer.      An advertisement for Venom says, "The world has enough superheroes."  The anti-hero in question, Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) is a journalist given to doing stories on the homeless, murders of the poor, and other subjects not covered in mainstream news.  He seems to be the one outsider-type reporter tolerated by a corporate news outlet, that is, until he interviews billionaire Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed), who sends rockets out to comets and other extraterrestrial locations to research the possibility of life on other worlds.  One rocket returns, crash-landing in Malaysia, bearing a cargo of four utterly strange alien symbiotic life forms that take hold in hosts, operating that person but...