This is a book of movie reviews and cinema discussions. In some cases, I have even forgotten their titles. With no tag, they are gone for good. Each falls out of contextโlives or filmsโwhile some fuse with others in the memory. When I rewrote my own teenage novel Salty and Sandy into New Moon more than thirty years later, I recovered important childhood events I had completely forgotten. Before that, we watched VHS cassettes and went to movies. Sometimes a preview pulls the movie back from amnesia.
Yet each was still worth living or watching at the time; else why write Macbeth or Hamlet and The Tempest? Why go through the trouble of making a movie at all? I soon realized that I distorting my book, so I removed the piece and continued it as a separate work.
This embarrassing quirk got translated into Russian too. The growth of the internet between and made the right venue obvious. Personal websites and blogs were a robust new medium much as substack is now. I posted my reviews, then added to them through the years. I have arranged films by their own chronology rather than my chronology of seeing and writing about them.
Instead of giving up entirely on lost films, I have prepared a prologue made up mostly of excerptsโnot reviewsโfrom older pieces of writing.
The emphasis is on the writing rather than the films. This was the first adult movie to which I was taken. I remember the steamy tropics, the leaches, and the chance mine that blew up the German ship and freed Bogart and Hepburn without killing them, opening a halcyon era.
