David Vining's Blog, page 10

Halloween: A Retrospective

The Halloween franchise is a mess, a complete and total mess. It resets to one degree or another five separate times. It has a serious identity crisis from almost the beginning. It doesn’t know what to do with its main draw, its central monster. Out of the three major slasher franchises of the 80s, it’s the least cohesive and, arguably, the worst through that heyday. For all of the faults of Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street and their sequels, they at least understood what th...

Tony Scott: A Retrospective

Tony Scott is synonymous with 1980s and 1990s big-budget action cinema. Mostly through his partnership with Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, he made a series of high-profile movies like Top Gun, Days of Thunder, and Crimson Tide, meeting success for the most part as his career flourished. He was well known for his work with some of the biggest stars in Hollywood like Tom Cruise, Denzel Washington, and Bruce Willis. He directed the biggest movies of the year in 1986 and 1987 at the box ...

The Young Savages

John Frankenheimer returns to feature filmmaking after retreating to television at the behest of Burt Lancaster and United Artists. This feels like Frankenheimer, a New York based television director, being a director for hire for Lancaster, liking both Lancaster and the material, and throwing himself into the project at a level that he couldn’t on The Young Stranger. For the handsomeness of Frankenheimer’s first film, The Young Savages is a shotgun blast of interesting angles and compositio...

The Young Stranger

John Frankenheimer was an established television director, doing mostly live dramatic broadcasts, when William Dozier became head of productions at RKO, inviting the young, talented director to make a new, feature film version of a teleplay Dozier’s son, Robert, had written based on his own life. The experience turned Frankenheimer off of feature filmmaking for a few years, reportedly because he didn’t like working with an unfamiliar crew which, he thought, limited his ability to accomplish ...

John Frankenheimer: A Statement of Purpose

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Time to step away from Japan.

John Frankenheimer is really known for a handful of movies very early in his career. From 1962 to 1966 he made Birdman of Alcatraz, The Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days in May, The Train, Seconds, and Grand Prix. I don’t care who you are, that’s an amazing run, especially over 5 years.

And he kept making movies for more than thirty years. I have almost no knowledge of any of his films after that except for Ronin. It’s the kind of filmography I’m always eag...

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Yasujiro Ozu: The Definitive Ranking

I’ve always known that Yasujiro Ozu was off to the side of the cinema world, receiving homage from certain sections of the filmgoing world. His quiet cinema is unassuming and does not invite attention like many of the other great filmmakers, but he should. I think there’s an argument to be made that Ozu should be considered the best of them overall.

His films are technically proficient, well-written, intricately performed, and have this subtle, sneaky, unsuspecting emotional power that re...

An Autumn Afternoon

I wish Yasujiro Ozu had lived another 30 years and worked every single one of them making movies well into his 80s. I doubt he would have done well with the collapse of the Japanese studio system in the 70s, but 1963 just feels far too early for a man of his talent to go. However, it’s hard to imagine a better film for him to go out on. There are directors who end their careers on low notes, and then there are those who end careers on shockingly high ones. Ozu was at the absolute top of his ...

The End of Summer

Yasujiro Ozu made only three films for studios other than Shochiku, and The End of the Summer was the last of those, this one made with Toho, home studio to Kurosawa and Honda. It was something of a big deal within Toho because studio systems worked by keeping actors within the studio walls as much as possible. Setsuko Hara, though, was a Toho contract player, despite Ozu’s affection for using her at Shochiku, meaning that for Late Autumn, Shochiku had to borrow her from Toho with the exchan...

Late Autumn

Sometimes, you just want the ability to rate things one step higher. Late Autumn hit me hard with about thirty minutes to go, and it never stopped hitting me until the final Japanese character showed up on screen. Obviously, this is an Ozu film, so the story is deceptively simple while hiding a wonderful depth of emotion, and this one just hit me right. A reworking of the central idea of Late Spring, a child being convinced to marry only once their widowed parent agrees to remarry, Late Autu...