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

     Il Casanova di Federico Fellini ( The Casanova By Federico Fellini ) from 1976 can be understood simply from the title: it's Fellini's vision applied to an historical and literary figure whose name became a noun meaning "a man notorious for seducing women."        Giovanni Jacopo Casanova de Seingalt (1725-1798) was a man with many interests; economics, politics, literature (his memoirs are considered classics illuminating eighteenth century European society), but he's best known as a prolific fucker of women.  Fellini's film emphasizes this last aspect of Casanova's life.  The voiceovers by Donald Sutherland in the eponymous role (the film's in English) hint at his inner life, that deep down he was a serious man, but his taste for bedroom adventures consumed him for most of his life, getting him into trouble with the law sometimes, too.      The movie's mix of theatrical moments, like showing a roiling seascape as litera...

     William Wyler's The Big Country (1958) reminds me of Marlon Brando's One Eyed Jacks (1961) in that both Westerns sprawl in screen time, 166 and 141 minutes respectively.  Both films also remind me of Sergio Leone's "Spaghetti" Westerns in their use of narrative space: the amount of time given to primary and even the supporting characters creates a richness of detail and interlocking events leading to powerful climaxes in all such epic Westerns.      Better known for leading a successful invasion of Continental Europe, President Dwight Eisenhower said The Big Country was his favorite film.  I imagine he appreciated the story of a decent man, an Easterner, Jim McKay (Gregory Peck), journeying West to marry his fiancée, blonde Patricia "Pat" Terrill (Carroll Baker).  She's the pampered daughter of hard-edged retired Major Henry Terrill (Charles Bickford), a cattle rancher who employs a small army of hands led by foreman Steve Leech (Charl...

     Big blonde hair power, 1985, L.A., station wagons and rust-free Pintos.  LCPD, Sergeant T.J. Hooker's fictitious unit, a police academy combining classroom, outdoors training, plus on the street patrol experience.  Hooker (William Shatner), or is he a time-stranded Captain Kirk?, leads these youths through their paces, waddling in his black, tight cop uniform.  Why wear black long-sleeved shirts and long black pants, everything tight, as the LAPD and fictional LCPD do?  It's the often very hot Greater L.A. Area!  Is it simply a tactic to make the cops more likely to snap, using sartorial discomfort as an excuse to discharge firearms?      Watching T.J. Hooker three and a half decades after it was made, the show comes across very pro-police,  Dragnet fashion.  That popular TV show had Jack Webb glorifying the LAPD each week with dramatizations of actual cases.       "Only the names have been chang...

      Lost in Alaska , directed by the prolific Jean Yarbrough, came out in 1952 when Alaska wasn't yet a state.  The film wasn't shot in Alaska.  Universal Studios in Universal City, California, served in an obviously ersatz way as late 1890s San Francisco and Alaska.  The "snow," with dim lighting sometimes, reminded me of the same piles of white fake snow substance in the World War Two movie that scared the shit out of me when I was a kid, Battleground (1949).        Hollywood snow, so dusty-looking, when kicked and settling again to the ground, resembles moon dust disturbed by astronauts as they hop-walk in films from another world.      1952, another world from 2022, yet, 1952 had its big war, too, in a small country, biggest powers arming and fighting and killing, spawning a Robert Altman film and a long-running TV series about a mobile hospital in Korea.       Starring Bud Abbott and Lou Costel...

     Five movies I haven't seen:       Chariots of Fire  (1981, '82 in the U.S.): Slow motion running on the beach, Vangelis, Olympic runners in the twenties, running on a Scottish beach, many locations in Britain, wearing of tweed, runners look like they're in a Marine recruitment video, or a detachment of pray-the-gay-away Republican congressmen.  Ooh, dig on the Republicans!  Don't worry, Democrats, I bitch at you, and plenty!       The film looks like a professional English prestige picture, like The English Patient .   Chariots  director Hugh Hudson made Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan (1984).  I saw that with my brother in a theater.  Pretty fucking hot, Andie Macdowell as Jane.  Real jungle scenes, so different from a set.  Not quite like Gilligan's Island is what I'm saying.  Ian Holm is really in the fucking jungle!  Yes, Ian Holm, Bilbo Baggins, is in the fucking jungle! ...

     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...