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

      C.C. & Company      A year before C.C. & Company (1970), quarterback Joe Namath had taken the New York Jets to a surprise victory over the Baltimore Colts.  Hollywood beckoned.       C.C. & Company , directed by TV director Seymour Robbie, was Namath's second film.  He plays motorcycle gang member, C.C. Ryder, in with The Heads, led by Moon (William Smith), for only a month when the film begins in an Arizona grocery store.      Happy go lucky soundtrack music accompanies C.C. as he puts some canned foods in his cart, then pushes it around, taking ingredients to make himself a sandwich, enjoying the era of no surveillance cameras in grocery stores.  He drinks a small carton of milk to wash his lunch down, replaces the canned foods to their shelf, and buys a pack of chewing gum for ten cents.  Outside he gets on his motorcycle in the brilliant dry country southwest sunshine and drives of...

      Liquid Sky      Slava Tsukerman's Liquid Sky (1982) reveals a portrait of early 1980s New York through its new wave/punk/avant-garde and fashion scenes.  It's also a science fiction film depicting an alien ship the size of a dinner tray landing on the roof of model Margaret's (Anne Carlisle) penthouse apartment with a majestic view of the Empire State Building.        The tiny alien inside the ship seeks heroin but discovers that feeding off someone's energy at the point of orgasm makes for a better high.  Margaret finds that her climaxing lovers, and in one case, her rapist, are crunched down into nothing, dissolved by some force.  Meanwhile, fashion photographers, journalists, hangers-on in one scene enter her apartment even as her sense of reality warps, causing her to believe she's causing the strange deaths.      "I kill with my cunt," she says; a line I suspect has never been spoken in a ...

      Katzelmacher      Rainer Werner Fassbinder's second film, Katzelmacher (1969), meaning "Troublemaker," or, more directly, "Cat Screwer," was shot in nine days.  Fassbinder wrote, directed, and starred in the film as Yorgos, a "Greek from Greece."  A circle of friends in Munich frustrated by money problems and interpersonal squabbles gets to know Yorgos in various ways, manipulating him mostly, teasing him, finally beating him up, even as he provides steady rent money to one of them.  He's a guest worker, an immigrant from Piraeus with a wife and two children back home.  The only one among the Germans who treats him well is Marie (Hanna Schygulla).  The others take advantage of his lack of German (beyond some basic phrases and words), speaking terrible things about him in his presence.  They're intrigued by the alleged impressive size of his penis.  One of the women claims to have been raped by him--not true. ...

      Three Films Having Nothing To Do With Each Other      Because I was away for a short time I didn't write about two movies I saw several days ago, The Dogs of War (1980) and Cry-Baby (1990).  The latter was directed by John Waters, an independent Baltimore, Maryland, film director whose work has been characterized as outrageous, over the top, flamboyant.  I realized to my surprise that Cry-Baby is the only Waters film I've seen to date.  I've been aware of John Waters the person for a long time, seen him interviewed often.  He's one of a small number of American "celebrity" directors, like David Lynch, Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino.  Waters' thin mustache, slicked hair, sharp wit have encouraged other directors to cast him in character roles, and late night TV talk show hosts like David Letterman would have him on fairly often.      While Waters' work seems not only light but also goofy, Cry-Baby de...

      Fassbinder's Gods of the Plague      I saw my first Rainer Werner Fassbinder film, Effi Briest (1974), sometime in the 1980s.  A black and white, lengthy (140 minutes) adaptation of an 1894 novel by Theodor Fontane, the film mesmerized me, its slow pace seeming perfect for its subject matter--the story of its eponymous heroine, played by a riveting actress I'd never seen before, Hanna Schygulla.  My father, sitting next to me in the university's theater, watched the same film but didn't like it.  I remember him saying to my mother, "It's very Germanic."      Even then, in my early twenties, I was beginning to realize I had a high tolerance for long, slow movies, a capability coming in handy when, many years later, I watched Jacques Rivette's close to thirteen hour long Out 1 (reviewed in this blog), as well as other Fassbinder films I've seen since Effi Briest .      Fassbinder will show you people l...

     The Eternal Love Affair With The Most Dangerous Game Premise       Turkey Shoot (1982), directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith, is an Australian film shot in Queensland, with various interesting types of vegetation and landscape, including a beach scene.  The beautiful scenery, including jungle, gullies with roaring waterfalls, lush valleys, agricultural fields, make the movie a plus for nature watchers, but the movie lacks when it comes to something we're supposed to take seriously.      A totalitarian near future state puts "deviants" in work camps out in the country for political dissent and anything else deemed unpalatable by the state, including cases of mistaken intent, like the situation faced by Chris Walters (Olivia Hussey).  During a riot, a man chased by the police sought refuge in her shop.  The cops assumed she was sheltering him and arrested her.  She finds herself, after being drugged, in the back of a v...

      Mr. Arkadin      Here's the Orson Welles film I've had the most difficulty enjoying, finding it even more impenetrable than his Othello .  With the Criterion Collection's restoration, however, I've finally found, after two previous viewings of shorter versions, an experience of Mr. Arkadin (1955) I can appreciate.  Earlier versions had run around ninety minutes.  There seemed to be something drastically missing from the film--it lacked a sense of continuity, plus its burden of a bad soundtrack made it a strain to hear all the dialogue.  Welles's tendency to throw a lot of narrative material at the viewer in brief stretches of his movies also contributed to what I found to be an incomprehensible film the first two times I saw it.      The restoration, fifteen or so minutes longer and restoring scenes not in previous versions, also has a cleaned up soundtrack as well as an excellent picture.  Still, the plot i...