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

     I don't always watch a film all the way through.  The films I write about are usually ones I've seen all the way through.  Within a week I write about the film, sometimes right after seeing it.  Sometimes I write during the viewing, making note of scenes, characters, then rewriting the whole thing as a crisp post.  Sometimes I don't write about movies I've seen.  Sometimes I don't watch movies.      A few thoughts:      Every movie has a Gollum.  Fredo in The Godfather Part Two .  Herman in The Vampire Bat, Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy .  Deep Throat (Hal Holbrook) in All the President's Men is a Gollum.  He appears only in a parking structure, a cave, he has precious information, but then, short (Hobbit-like) Dustin Hoffman is in All the President's Men as Carl Bernstein, the less famous of the intrepid Washington Post reporters.  Bernstein now offers a pundit's views, for the last...

     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! ...