David Vining's Blog, page 119

The Wandering Shadow

If I had been a contemporary of Fritz Lang in his early career, this is about the point that I’d begin writing him off. There was some entertainment in the first of the Spiders episodes, but the only real positive attribute of the next two films was the production design. Here, in The Wandering Shadow, there’s still a strong visual element that comes up from time to time, mostly when filming in the mountains, but the story is a complete jumble. Not helped by the fact that a good chunk of the...

The Spiders Episode 2: The Diamond Ship

The first Spiders movie was a relatively small and focused adventure. The second is bigger and far less focused, moving from one to location to the next in an amorphous mystery that doesn’t so much escalate with increasing stakes but just kind of lurches from one thing to the next. There had been planned two more episodes in the Spiders saga, but they got canceled. I can’t find reasoning for it, but I would imagine it to be simply financial. They didn’t make the kind of money needed to recou...

Harakiri (1919)

In the end, I think I may be a bit more kind to the whole of Harakiri than I should be, but the ending refocuses a lot of what came before, giving it a power that the rest of the film didn’t seem all that interested in pursuing. It’s still not good, but I think its final moments right wayward ship. And yet, it demonstrates a lot of the problems with adaptation into cinema, especially taking a two-and-a-half-hour opera, Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, and turning it into an 87-minute long silent ...

Mauvaise Graine (Bad Seed)

#25 in my ranking of Billy Wilder’s filmography.

This bothered absolutely no one but me, but back when I did the run through of Billy Wilder’s movies I missed his first film, Mauvaise Graine, also known as Bad Seed. It’s a minor work, made in the brief period he lived in France after he fled Germany with Hitler’s rise to power and before he settled in Los Angeles to start his career as a screenwriter and, eventually, celebrated director. I didn’t skip it because it’s minor, though. I skip...

The Spiders Episode 1: The Golden Sea

German critics were apparently dismissive of this, Fritz Lang’s third feature film (and first surviving one), deriding as sensationalism and nothing more. I don’t disagree, but I also don’t really see much wrong with it. The narrative and thematic ambitions are modest, focused more on purely entertaining spectacle rather than self-conscious art, but there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s not the most successful entertainment of the silent period or anything, but it functions well enough.

K...

The Scream Franchise: The Definitive Ranking

The Scream franchise thinks it’s far smarter than it actually is. The first film in the entry seemed to understand that it actually wasn’t that clever, its meta elements being introduced late and almost as a joke, but the franchise became completely enthralled to its own conventions. There will never be any room for any genuine creativity within its borders as long as it continues.

The Scream movies are, as a character puts it of the in-universe version called Stab, slasher whodunits and ...

Scream (2022)

This is probably the best sequel to the original Scream, and that ends up kind of sad. The 2022 entry in the franchise is a perfectly acceptable, if unimaginative, reboot/sequel thing that balances new and legacy characters to varying degrees of success. It also seems to want to have its cake and eat it too about what it actually is. It is a beat for beat remake of the first, consciously so, with only the most superficial of changes to the formula, pretty much like every sequel the franchise...

Wes Craven: The Definitive Ranking

I was really disappointed in Wes Craven’s career. I knew of the highlights before embarking on the whole journey, but I didn’t expect pretty much everything outside of those highlights to be something close to dreck. What makes it most frustrating is that his earliest films, horror films made because they were the only things he could get financing for, demonstrate a real attempt to intellectualize concepts through the horror genre. He felt like someone who could elevate the genre, but he si...

Scream 4

For all the façade of being rule and genre breaking forays into the slasher flick space, the Scream movies sure do stick to a formula pretty closely. They mess with details here and there from movie to movie, but ultimately they’re all slight variations on the same formula. When I was watching the second film, I was bored and imagining a sequel that actually did break the rules, the rules that the first film had set up, instead of just finding new, less interesting ways to do the same thing....

My Soul to Take

This movie is dull, drawn out, confused, over-stuffed, and generally kind of boring. I also kind of hate it. However, it’s one of the last pieces of evidence that points to Wes Craven’s potential as a storyteller. He had real ideas buried under the mess that get ignored for long stretches of time. He just needed a good writer to sit him down and work through it. Instead, the first movie he’d written in over a decade since the entertaining mess that was New Nightmare feels like Craven trying ...