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

           Triffids from outer space, some alien race, land in meteorites all over Earth, the light show causing blindness in people watching it.  Some didn't see the lights.  Howard Keel was unconscious in the hospital recovering from an eye operation.  He gets up, it's similar to the scene in the first episode of The Walking Dead when Sheriff's Deputy Rick wakes up after getting shot on duty.  The disaster has already happened, we don't see it happen, like Rick.      In The Day of the Triffids (1963), space seedlings turn into carnivorous ambulating plants.  They look great as sci-fi horror special effects at first, menacing, gross, scary, their mouths like chocolate pudding- covered alien vaginas.  The first assault of a human is a night watchman at the Royal Botanical Gardens, where lurk several alien plants.      The lighting in the room is dark, so we don't see the thing too clearly, makin...

      In 2018 I wasn't in the mood to see Avengers: Infinity War in the theater.  I'd seen and disliked its predecessor, Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), a 141 minute long CGI crapfest inspiring in me, by the climax, a mounting need to stand by a urinal.       Infinity War , at 149 minutes, seemed to me to be more of the same, though, like an asshole, I judged it without seeing it.  In reality, I'd burned out on comic book-based movies by 2018.  I've seen a few in the theater since then, but the CGI-heavy blueprint of this genre bores me except when fundamentals of storytelling, good dialogue, direction, and acting, all work together, or, as in this third Avengers film, work together enough to produce a satisfying viewing experience.      There's a real son of a bitch with light purple skin, Thanos (Josh Brolin), who seeks to insert six Infinity Stones into a gauntlet worn on his gauche, or left (sinister), hand.  The St...

      If they never make another Star Wars movie that's fine with me.  I don't care one way or the other.  Will I watch a tenth Star Wars , or an eleventh?  Yes, but I won't pay to see them.  I've seen the seventh, eighth and ninth episodes on DVDs borrowed from my local library.  Otherwise I would've had to have spent up to thirty dollars paying a company that used to make quality entertainment, Disney, a corporation employing for its Star Wars projects a Spielberg producer named Kathleen Kennedy.        Kathleen Kennedy would be a good fit for the Star Wars  movie franchise if she gave a shit about it.  In true Hollywood liberal politically correct style, Kennedy has transformed the most beloved series of space   epics in cinema history into preposterous CGI-heavy extravaganzas featuring unbelievable characters (Rey the exemplar of the incredible), as well as flabby, murky plots, hosts of forgettable charism...

     It's a pleasure to encounter the work of a great actor for the first time.   Nayak ( Hero , in Bengali), from 1966, directed by Satyajit Ray, stars in the lead role Uttam Kumar, among the finest film actors I've ever seen, judging at least by his remarkable performance in this entertaining drama about a film star's spiritual crisis unfolding as he journeys by train from Calcutta to Delhi to receive an award.      Satyajit Ray, one of India's greatest directors, wrote the screenplay with Kumar in mind and intended to not even make the film if the actor refused the part.  The film got made, though, and at the height of Uttam Kumar's popularity, a perfect confluence since the story deals with a famous actor's growing doubt about the price that success has wrought on his moral character, spirituality, and his past connection to ordinary people when he was just a nobody working as a theater actor in a small company.      Ray at the...

      After his memorable performance as Pepe le Moko in Algiers (1939), Charles Boyer in the same year starred opposite Irene Dunne in Love Affair , a romantic comedy directed by Leo McCarey, whose credits include famous funny movies like Duck Soup (1933) and The Awful Truth (1937).   Love Affair , as insubstantial as it is compared to McCarey's best known films (he also directed Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary's ), nonetheless has its two stars' interpersonal chemistry lending weight to a light though melodramatic love story about a transatlantic crossing lasting eight and a half days, during which a professional woman, Terry McKay, falls in love with Michel Marnay, a playboy who's never worked before.      He's dabbled in painting but never sold anything.  Later in the film, in New York, he sells lots of paintings.  Of course, this is how unknown artists succeed in life--selling out all but one painting, held onto for sentimenta...

      At work during a dull two hour period, no customers, I searched the phone for a movie to watch.  Ten minutes later I selected Speak Easily (1932), director Edward Sedgwick's fifty-fourth of his seventy-eight feature films.  Sedgwick worked with Laurel and Hardy, directed Buster Keaton in The Cameraman , his last film a big screen I Love Lucy  (1953) I had never heard of prior to ten minutes ago.      Directors in Sedgwick's era worked all the time, working with movie to movie, under contract, making livings, buying houses, marrying, having children and pets, their jobs backed by a strong union.  Directing seventy-eight feature films by the age of sixty--how old he was when he died--is quite the cinematic achievement, so I respect the work of those days when directors each made shitloads of movies.  As Rhombus, YouTube Channel John Berner (Blue circle with a J in it for the thumbnail), I've made eighty-one movies since 200...

      Lotte in Italia  ( Struggles in Italy , from 1971) and Un film comme les autres ( A Film Like Any Other , from 1968) resemble abstract paintings; cinema not meant to conform to narrative practices typical of storytelling from Hollywood or anywhere else.      After May 1968, with France's explosive general strike, workers walking out from their jobs and demanding progressive changes from their employers, leftist intellectuals like Jean-Luc Godard tried to make sense of what happened.  In A Film Like Any Other , Godard went from making One Plus One (featuring the world famous Rolling Stones) to directing a group of non-actors sitting in a field of overgrown grass near boxy apartment buildings reminiscent of the geometric backgrounds in his film, 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967), an amazing movie revealing its riches more and more with each viewing, yet possessing the spirit of experimentalism present, pungently, in A Film Like Any Oth...