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

     I was wrong about Russian intentions towards Ukraine.  It could be that Putin seeks to secure Donetsk and Luhansk from Ukrainian forces backed by NATO nations.  Dirty war is upon Ukraine it looks like.  Was it Putin's intention to say, "Back off, NATO."  Will Ukrainian forces, bristling with new shipments of arms from the United States and Canada, to name just two, attack the annexed regions?  Will Biden's and Trudeau's favored Nazis go apeshit on Russian troops and separatists?  Is this all a very dangerous and stupid game played by the worst people on the planet?      I leave it to the reader to decide.      I saw a movie called Patterns (1956), written by Rod Serling, starring Ed Begley Sr., Van Heflin, Beatrice Straight (who won an Oscar for her small role in Network ).  Everett Sloane plays Walter Ramsey, a workaholic CEO of a New York corporation.  He's exactly the type one would expect to b...

     This could be about anything.  I don't know the subjects just yet.  Working my way towards them.      Obeying the concept of a screen, a place defined usually as a rectangle, I write here this time about what I've seen on screens, weaving ideas together and so on, the usual Neptunian mishmash.      I've seen videos of war drums beaten by people on CNN and MSNBC.  On my iPhone screen, I've seen and read articles in the Wall Street Journal , Popular Mechanics , CNN, NBC News, all gung ho for military maneuvers, airstrikes, and force exerted and displayed by the U.S. and NATO.      Ukraine 2022, Hunter Biden's War!!!      After the 2014 coup in Kyiv carried out by the Obama administration, Ukraine's internal political processes bloomed hard rightward.  The Ukrainian Army has a Nazi battalion, supplied at least in part just recently by the United States in a 200 million dollar shipment of "le...

      I first saw Pierce Brosnan in the light-hearted private detective TV show, Remington Steele .  He and Stephanie Zimbalist played a sleuthing team with shades of Nick and Nora Charles from The Thin Man movies.        Smooth, debonair, great-looking in a suit, dark hair perfect, cool British Isles accent, Brosnan seemed destined after a few years on that show to play James Bond, but his contract with Remington Steele forced him to do one more year, the opportunity passed, the role went to Timothy Dalton.      Later, Brosnan played James Bond four times and was surprised when he wasn't asked to return in Casino Royale (2006).  Instead, he's acted in thirty-four films to date.  Damn, this man is busy!      In 2014 he was in A Long Way Down (which, from the trailer, appears to be a comedy about suicide, with a Richard Curtis vibe, i.e. shite) and then, washing his previous effort with blood and hard hi...

      Underwater (2020, directed by William Eubank) was shot in 2017.  Disney bought 20th Century Fox, delaying its release.  The film cost eighty million dollars, grossed forty million worldwide.  I entered the casino with a hundred dollars in my pocket, left with fifty.  Do I feel good?  Did I at least have a good time?      The title, Underwater , might make a viewer picture a murder mystery set near a lake.  A body, maybe, weighted with chains at a depth of thirty-seven feet in murky water.  This film, though, takes place at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, 36,069 feet below sea level, in A.D. 2050.  The Tian Corporation, a mega-business participating in what seems to be a final desperate bid to extract oil from the most remote spot on Earth, has constructed stations in the Trench, including Roebuck Station, the drilling platform serving as the destination of the small number of survivors from a different relate...

     A movie review I will write and other things I will write about.        No Yoda in this one, Solo: A Star Wars Story , directed by Mr. Commercial Filmmaker Himself, Ron Howard.  Howard directed a great love story/urban fantasy, Splash , in 1984, bringing Daryl Hannah to my attention--thank you, Mr. Howard.   Splash starred Tom Hanks and John Candy, Hanks before he was in everything.  He had done  Bachelor Party and his in-drag role on the TV sitcom, Two Cocks in Dresses , i.e. Bosom Buddies .      That show starred Donna Dixon, a reason for my sixteen to eighteen year old self to watch it.  Hanks and Peter Scolari dress as women to live in a sorority because campus housing is full to the max, like it's  World War Two.  Scolari, shorter, like a woman, pulls it off more so than Hanks's Buffy Wilson woman impostor.  Buffy Wilson is a beast.  Picture Tony Curtis as Josephine in Some Like It...