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

     A Four Film Review for the New Year       Basic Instinct 2 (2006) cost 70 million dollars to make, lost 31.4 million at the box office.  A failure, financially and critically.  The late movie reviewer guru Roger Ebert assigned 1.5 stars out of four, an F Plus if it were a grade.        Sharon Stone is the plus in this film.  Every one of her scenes electrified me.  Her gaze is one of the greats of cinema, along with Monica Vitti.  The way she holds her eyes in this film reminds one of a predatory cat (some would joke, a cougar).  She returns as Catherine Trammell, a torrid novelist writing under the giveaway name, Catherine Woolf, a nod to the individualistic crankiness of Virginia Woolf, but also the name for another predator, a night hunter.  She drives off a pier with a footballer in the passenger seat.  She's engaged in receiving a finger-job from him, doing most of the work since he...

     Workplace Accident      Shaking things up in the Bond appreciation fellowship I declare here that License to Kill (1989), with Timothy Dalton as Agent 007, Bond James Bond, is the second best Bond film.  The best is Thunderball .  My blog, my opinions.       License to Kill came out at a time when Latin American drug cartels were in the news and entertainment media quite a bit.   Miami Vice used the motif of Colombian cocaine traffickers, scoundrels and murderers, "Colombian punks," Rico calls them, Rico played by Philip Michael Thomas opposite Don Johnson as Crockett.      So the drug lord in this film (Robert Davi at his cold best) has a big operation going on as well as a pet iguana.  He gets arrested but sprung from the van transferring him to prison.  His operation involves cocaine but it's bigger than that, but I'm honestly unaware of what his business is besides drugs.  He's cruel...

     A Twitch of Chrome      I saw John Carpenter's Christine (1983) a week ago, so whatever lack of specific memory of plot details derives from that.  Keith Gordon plays a glasses-wearing "nerd" friend (Arnie) of a high school football player (Dennis, played by John Stockwell) popular with girls, including a sweet blonde played by a young Kelly Preston (later on John Travolta's scientologist wife).  Whether Arnie is drawn to something malignant or not, he becomes immediately attached to a For Sale 1958 Plymouth, rusty and falling apart, but with a living purring engine.  The crusty old man who sells it to him for 250 dollars, accepting a check, which looks uncool as opposed to just paying with cash, tells his friend later on that someone committed suicide in the car.  It's evidently haunted.  The radio comes on emitting a strong puke green light, playing rock and roll, the genuine kind of the 1950s.  When that radio activa...

      The Snowmen, an Independent Film From Chicago      On Monday, November 18, 2019, in Jambalaya Arts, Inc., Oshkosh, Wisconsin, I had the honor of showing my film Francium (available for viewing on YouTube Channel John Berner) to an audience including two people in independent film from Chicago, Olivia Lilley and Harley Foos.       Francium preceded The Snowmen  (2019), a twelve minute film with a dynamic presentation in sight and sound.  Olivia Lilley, the film's writer and director, has a theater background, works well with the actors.  A theater director making her first film, Olivia Lilley uses widescreen and a color palette often saturated with overhead lighting.  The sometimes garish lighting reflects on the situations of the group of friends acting as irritants towards each other.      Regretfully, I've seen the film just once--there were several stoppages caused by buffering, too--so my tota...

      Anonymous Gambler       Wild Card (2015), directed by Simon West, showed me that Jason Statham is a good actor.  I got a glimpse of his abilities in Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels (1999).  As part of an ensemble cast with many memorable performances, Statham held his own at a time when he wasn't much known in cinema universe.  By the time of Wild Card , Statham had joined the Fast and Furious franchise and had appeared in several of his own star vehicles, emphasis on "special set of abilities a characteristic of someone capable of kicking ass."      In Wild Card , Statham's name is, improbably, Nick Wild, not Gunther Horgendorfer or some other uncool-sounding name.  He's a hardcore gambler, will blow fifty-thousand in one night.  A woman friend of his gets raped and beaten by a slick gangster who needs protection in the form of chunky bodyguards.  The gangster put his gun barrel into the woman's ...

      An Amorphous Mass Is Coming To Get You!      John Carpenter's The Fog (1980) underwhelmed me.  Horror films are supposed to be scary.  I haven't seen his most famous film, Halloween (1978), though from what I've seen it's quite a scarefest, with a maniacal masked knife-wielding villain and an atmospheric and relentless musical score by Carpenter himself, plus a great performance by a young Jamie Lee Curtis      My expectations for The Fog spoiled my viewing, I guess.  Having enjoyed Adrienne Barbeau in Swamp Thing (reviewed in this blog) I assumed she would enliven Carpenter's film as she did the swampy movie.  Adrienne Barbeau is a good actress as well as a very good-looking woman with a killer body.  I don't apologize for noticing the hotness of Barbeau, a quality on display, too, in The Fog .      She plays a radio disc jockey putting in long hours at a station located at the pinnacle o...

      The Seventh Victim, a Val Lewton Production      1943, mid-war, Val Lewton continues his series, beginning with Cat People (1942), of low budget black and white horror films that will include I Walked With a Zombie , Curse of the Cat People , and the most sinister one, The   Ghost Ship .      Kirk Douglas in The Bad and the Beautiful plays a director/producer based on Val Lewton.  Kirk makes a popular low budget horror film utilizing shadows and suspense to great effect, kind of like Cat People , right?  Lewton's artistry is not reflected in The Bad and the Beautiful ; Douglas's Lewton is a go-getter, a climber, a man willing to compromise his principles, a fast-liver, the kind of man who'd toss Lana Turner in a swimming pool.       The Seventh Victim (1943), produced by Lewton and directed in a debut by Mark Robson ( The Ghost Ship , Von Ryan's Express , Earthquake ), shows Kim Hunter in her first...