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

      Water the Greatest Treasure      Henry Hathaway's movies can be relied on to provide good entertainment, competently executed and well-acted.   Niagara (1953) and True Grit (1969) stand out in my experience as excellent dramas, highlighting their respective stars, Marilyn Monroe and John Wayne.  Wayne appeared in Legend of the Lost (1957) along with Rossano Brazzi and Sophia Loren.  Though it takes place in the 1950s present, starting in Timbuktu, the journey undertaken across the Sahara by Paul Bonnard (Brazzi), Dita (Loren), and the amusingly named Joe January (Wayne) extends the modern characters seemingly into the deep past.  On a search for a lost city, they encounter nomadic Tuaregs and end up in a Roman ruin, Timgad in modern Libya.  The Libyan location shooting itself makes this film unusual, considering the chaos and strife in that nation during this decade.      Dunes, drifting sand particles, la...

      Ridley Scott's Cop Drama      In Black Rain (1989) we never see Nick Conklin (Michael Douglas), a New York policeman, driving a car.  In the first scene he challenges a motorcyclist to a race.  After winning, he's home playing a message from his ex-wife about not getting the kids this upcoming weekend.  He rides his motorcycle to work, runs into his partner, Charlie Vincent (Andy Garcia), gives him a ride.        Later, during lunch in a restaurant/bar, three Japanese tough guys enter and challenge some older men seated at a round table.  The tallest and most menacing man, Sato (Yûsaku Matsuda), slices the throat of one of the seated Japanese men while covered, gun-wise, by the other two toughs.      It's Yakuza business, Japanese mafia.  Sato takes a box from the man he's just murdered.  They leave, pursued by Nick Conklin.  He later collars Sato.  Charlie and Nick are...

      Carl Theodor Dreyer's Ordet      Danish director Dreyer's penultimate film, Ordet (1955), meaning The Word , based on a Kaj Munk play, takes place in 1925.  The affluent Borgen family--an elderly father with three sons, one of whom is married with two daughters--must deal with two problems concerning religion.  The youngest son, Anders (Cay Kristiansen), loves the daughter of a tailor, Peter (Ejner Federspiel).  Peter, apart from being poorer than the Borgens, also belongs to a Fundamentalist sect and will not have Anders for a son-in-law unless he converts from Lutheranism to Peter's religion.      The other religiously related problem for the Borgens derives from the middle son Johannes (Preben Lerdorff Rye) and his absolute conviction that he's Jesus of Nazareth.  Regarded as crazy, he's nevertheless gentle and harmless, although he tends to run away for days at a time.  He also freaks out visitors unfami...

      Invasion U.S.A.      In 1985, America lived in simmering Cold War fear of nuclear annihilation, President Reagan doing his best to chill citizens who didn't vote for him and those who did with stories about Reds, Marxists, Sandinistas, Communists, Russians, all making trouble for freedom-loving democracies.  His bullshit could replace the Democrats' Russiagate hysteria these days without alteration in theme, if not in details.      The same president who ordered the mining of Nicaragua's harbors while backing an illegal war in that country, also supporting massacres by death squads in El Salvador, was himself a terrorist.      In the Good Guys versus Bad Guys belief system of Chuck Norris--himself, to this day, a rather brainless Republican--the enemy is without, a force willing and able to invade the blameless U.S. of A.       Invasion U.S.A . starts with a massacre of Cuban refugees on a boat wi...

      The Mechanic (1972)      Michael Winner's The Mechanic follows a hit man, Arthur Bishop (Charles Bronson), as he goes about his normal work routines resulting in killing people for money.  He has a talent for making his kills look like accidents, as when he stakes out a man's apartment, takes photos through a telescope of belongings, the location of a box of tea and the brand.  He picks the lock to the man's place, replaces tea bags with others of the same variety, these new ones treated with some knockout drug.  He smears plastic explosive into the inside cover of a hardcover book, devises a way, using wax, of making the gas stove pilot light but not ignite right away, goes across the street to the temporarily rented crummy room he's inhabiting and waits for hours for the man to come home, make his tea, relax on his bed with a book (one different than the volume with the explosive).  Bishop puts together his rifle, takes aim, a...

      What We Do in the Shadows      From 2014, What We Do in the Shadows , a "mockumentary" from New Zealand, shows the nightly lives of four vampires sharing a house in Wellington.  Captions at the beginning inform the viewer that the camera crew wore crosses throughout filming and were granted protection by the vampires.      The film itself was directed by Taika Waititi (also directed Thor: Ragnarok ) and Jemaine Clement.  Waititi plays Viago, Clement plays Vladislav, a vampire based loosely on the fifteenth century nobleman, Vlad the Impaler.  Jonny Brugh plays Deacon, the "young" hell raising vampire among the group.  At 8,000 years, Petyr (Ben Fransham) is the oldest, looks like Nosferatu, says very little and due to his appearance never goes out on the town as the others do.      The film deals a lot with petty disputes among the flatmates.  No one does the dishes; Deacon is lax in doing hou...

     Invaders from Mars (1953)      An imaginative and curious boy, David MacLean (Jimmy Hunt), sets his alarm for four o'clock so he can look through his telescope at Orion's Great Nebula.  The sound wakes up his parents, Mary (Hillary Brooke) and George (Leif Erickson).  George enthusiastically takes a look at the Nebula while Mary tells David to return to bed.  At 4:40 A.M. a thunderstorm wakes up David.  He looks out his window, sees a flying saucer hovering over a nearby sandy field.  It disappears below the horizon.  He wakes up his parents to tell them about it.  They don't believe him, playing the condescending act of caring mentors humoring a smart kid with too many fancies they don't have time to hear about.      "It was just a dream," Mary tells her son.      He knows what he saw, though.  At dawn he gets up and investigates.  There's nothing where the saucer apparentl...