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

      Brando in The Wild One      Johnny Strabler (Marlon Brando) has a chip on his shoulder.  The head of a motorcycle gang, he rides into a town with his men, watches the end of a cross country motorcycle race, accepts the second place trophy one of his men steals, ties it to his front fender.  Stolen glory.      In The Wild One (1953), directed by Hungarian born Laslo Benedek (who made the first screen adaptation of Death of a Salesman ), authority figures like the Sheriff (Jay C. Flippen) conclude that Johnny and his kind don't know what they're rebelling against.  We're left wondering as Johnny and his gang take off at the end, after terrorizing a different town.      A member of a rival gang formerly associated with Johnny's, Chino (Lee Marvin), a drunken yet almost amiable lout, gets arrested after getting into an altercation with a prominent townie.  The police chief, Harry Bleeker (Robert Keith...

      Siberiade      I've seen three films directed by Andrey Mikhalkov-Konchalovskiy: A Nest of Gentry (which got me into reading Ivan Turgenev), Runaway Train , and now Siberiade , a four and a half hour epic about  the village of Elan in Western Siberia from the beginning of the twentieth century to the 1960s, dealing with two families.      One strong aspect of this 1979 film is the imagery.  The village, perched on top of a bluff above a winding river, surrounded by dark evergreen trees and a great deal of silence, has a gate through which several characters, in the same kind of repeating slow motion shot over many decades, run down to the river--to escape, to greet someone, or to find out something.  The location amounts to a character, bracketed at the beginning and end by images from the most recent story set in the 1960s, when oil begins to gush from beneath the village.  The well catches on fire, gets out o...

      Walk Cheerfully      Yasujiro Ozu's Walk Cheerfully (1930), in spite of its title, is a crime melodrama.  Kenji--Ken the Knife (Minoru Takada)--is a thief working with a small gang.  One day, he sees Yasue (Hiroko Kawasaki) emerging from a jewelry store and getting into a big expensive car.  He believes she's a wealthy young woman, but his associate and past love interest, Chieko (Satoko Date), works in the same office with Yasue.  Ono (Takeshi Sakamoto), their boss, comes on to Yasue.  He sent her to the jewelry store in his car, and evidently wants to make her his mistress, Mad Men -style.      Later, Kenji nearly runs over Yasue's little sister.  This only in a movie-type coincidence commences his relationship with Yasue, who, finding out he's a criminal, insists she'll not have anything to do with him unless he adopts a straight life.  He loses friends, including the embittered Chieko, when he ...

      Curse of Chucky      Of the seven Chucky Child's Play movies, Curse of Chucky (2013) is the sixth.  I would've liked to have reviewed Child's Play 3 , having reviewed the first two in the series, but I haven't seen it yet.  I figured I could watch Curse of Chucky without much confusion.  I was right.  A red-haired doll possessed by the malevolent spirit of a dead serial killer, Charles Lee Ray (Brad Dourif, who's provided Chucky's distinctive voice throughout the series) comes into the hands of a new family, the Pierces--mayhem follows.      Fiona Dourif, Brad's daughter, plays a wheelchair bound young woman, Nica Pierce, daughter of a woman with mental problems.  The mother spends her free time painting one subject: sunflowers.  She was traumatized and terrorized in the past by Charles Lee Ray, a friend of her husband's.  Ray killed him, obsessed with the wife who was nine months pregnant with...

      Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge!      I watched this film from 2001 because I have a DVD of it given to me by my sister a few years ago, and also because Nicole Kidman stars in the lead female role.  Having finally gotten around to watching it, I'm not sorry I did, but I found my attention wandering at times.  It's so colorful and edited with such music video style flair that it reminded me of the cinematic equivalent of the candy Pop Rocks, sweet powdery stuff bursting on the tongue, leaving behind no nutritional experience.      On the other hand, the film's doomed love story affected me uncomfortably, since the love triangle connecting singer/dancer Satine (Kidman), the Duke (Richard Roxburgh), and Christian (Ewan McGregor) reminded me of a similar situation in my past, causing me to think too much of that as I watched the film's rather dark second half.      Movies evoke emotions, or should do so, even w...

      Vladimir et Rosa       Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin made several films together in the late 1960s and early 1970s using the name Dziga Vertov Group, after the Soviet 1920s experimental film director.  Today I read a long interview from 1970 with the two filmmakers published on the Seven Stories Press website.  Just eight days before the Kent State massacre, in which four students protesting Nixon and Kissinger's bombing of Cambodia were murdered by the National Guard, Gorin predicted that American college students would soon face the fire given out by their own government, as French students had been experiencing, especially during the mass protest events of May and June 1968.      The tone of the interview suggests a pair of engaged French intellectuals embarked upon the thankless job of using cinema as a tool for new expressions, subordinated to a political intent never giving way to the lucrative temptation of c...

      The Teahouse of the August Moon      Like Le Silence de le Mer , Daniel Mann's The Teahouse of the August Moon  depicts a narrow slice of World War Two; in this case, the U.S. occupation of Okinawa in 1946.  Where the former film is grim and dramatic, the latter is a somewhat satirical comedy from 1956 featuring Marlon Brando's now incredible-seeming performance as an Okinawan interpreter.  With makeup, his epicanthic folds mask the familiar face, but below, especially when he smiles, he's Brando.      Still, as Sakini, he does a good job relating a story of how Army Captain Fisby (Glenn Ford), assigned to a poor village to supervise the building of a schoolhouse and bring American democratic values to the people there, goes native.      Colonel Wainwright (Paul Ford), who puts up an excess of signs and goes on at length about Mrs. Wainwright's morals as they relate to the fundamentals of democracy--a g...