David Vining's Blog, page 123

The Hills Have Eyes

It took Wes Craven five years from his controversial The Last House on the Left to get his second film released, and it’s obvious to me that, while he might not have become the fully mature horror filmmaker he could eventually grow into, he was becoming more assured in his ability to tell his stories and imbue them with ideas. He still doesn’t have the actual narrative and dramatic elements down quite enough, but it is a step in the right direction. I think it also helps that he takes a step...

The Last House on the Left

Wes Craven came up to filmmaking through the thin line between exploitation and pornography, but he was approaching even his earliest efforts with an eye towards making them more than just splatter and T&A features. He wanted to say something. However, Craven, at this age, was either too young, too inexperienced, or simply working in a sliver of the film industry that was too disreputable for him to fully mine the ideas he seemed to be going for. Sidelining character for the pursuit of uglin...

Family Without a Dinner Table

#4 in my ranking of Masaki Kobayashi’s films.

I really had no idea what I was getting into with Masaki Kobayashi’s final film. Extremely difficult to track down at all, I had to settle with a copy at Rarefilmm that seems to have been filmed on a VHS recorder from a television broadcast. The quality of both image and sound is…less than ideal. And yet, and yet, I got completely caught up in this tale of the complete disintegration of a family after the eldest son partakes in a very public a...

The Fossil

Originally made for Japanese television, The Fossil feels like Kobayashi leaving behind his anger at systems and confronting mortality, as does his main character. In a surprisingly close telling of a very similar tale to Kurosawa’s Ikiru, Kobayashi confronts a life of workaholism that suddenly and definitively will come to an end. Combined with a travelogue that dominates the first two-thirds of the film, there’s real emotion in a few days of introspection over a life seemingly mislead befo...

Jacques Tati – A Retrospective

Moving from one French director to another, it’s emblematic of why I don’t like genre labels in general and the Foreign label in particular. Jean-Pierre Melville was a cold, exacting, and precise filmmaker who worked firmly in movies about men who lived dangerous lives in constant threat of being found out and killed. Jacques Tati, on the other hand, was a comedian and mime. He told stories of the individual getting lost in the modern world with incredible production design, sometimes taking yea...

Masaki Kobayashi: The Definitive Ranking

I decided to discover the complete works of Masaki Kobayashi for two reasons: I loved Samurai Rebellion, and I had purchased The Human Condition a couple of years ago (after having seen it years back) and was simply not getting around to the nine-and-a-half hour long feature film, especially when I’m filling most evenings with other movies.

I was not disappointed at all.

I was also surprised at the variety of films that he had made, necessitated by his early period of being the low run...

Inn of Evil

Kobayashi continues his combination of social commentary with the remnants of his early melodramatic and dramatic work in Inn of Evil, a tale of a group of criminals at the lowest end of corruption in a corrupt society needing to deal with conflict from every side. I think it’s also Kobayashi’s most obvious film in a while, limiting its thematic impact, while a certain character moment ends up feeling a bit off and unbelievable undermining the character journey at the same time. And yet, the...

Hymn to a Tired Man

Adapted from the Shusaku Endo novel Lord, Have Mercy, Masaki Kobayashi’s Hymn to a Tired Man is a combination of his own The Thick-Walled Room and Kurosawa’s Ikiru, a re-evaluation of war crimes of the Japanese Army during World War II and the embrace of what can be done with one, small life. It has the hallmarks of a carefully considered novel while, at the same time, feeling distinctly cinematic at the same time thanks to the combination of Endo’s source and Kobayashi’s cinematic talents. ...

Some extra thoughts on Samurai Rebellion

I don’t know if it’s the presence of Toshiro Mifune that pushes this over the top for me in terms of Masaki Kobayashi’s filmography, but there are a host of things in Samurai Rebellion (I prefer how Kobayashi always just referred to it as Rebellion) that makes it stand above the rest, no matter how great the rest is.

The marvelous use of the house set, with the pristinely raked sands that get disturbed at specific times for intentional reasons, the perfect use of flashback to build a grea...

Kwaidan

There’s a streak in a lot of filmmakers where they want to make a film that’s obviously fake. Most of what they do is heavily realistic, and yet they all have this desire to tell a story that’s inherently formalistic. Fellini largely made a career out of it after leaving behind the Italian neo-realist movement, and Kurosawa tried a few times to different effect (Throne of Blood and Dodes’ka-den in particular), but it’s rare to see a filmmaker move from something like Harakiri to Kwaidan so e...