David Vining's Blog, page 126

PlayTime

Jacques Tati spent about a decade prepping, raising money for, and making his magnum opus of gentle comedy and visual gags, and it pretty much ended his career. He managed to get two more films off the ground before he died (one on Swedish television), but the expense of the film combined with its financial failure at the box office sent him into bankruptcy personally. That’s really unfortunate because PlayTime is one of the most wonderful, warm, and genuinely funny comedies ever made. It en...

Mon Oncle

The Tati brand of comedy is what I would call delightful. He doesn’t go for many huge laughs. It’s a gentle kind of humor that is out to find a smile on the face of the audience. I have laughed out loud at several moments through his body of work, but they’re the exception to how Tati’s films work on me. Mostly, I’m just smiling at what I see as the titular M. Hulot navigates the eccentricities of Tati’s vision of the modern world at its most absurd. In Mon Oncle, Tati fully embraces this sk...

Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday

This is a positive evolution in Jacques Tati’s style. The film, much like the previous Jour du Fete, still feels like a series of skits strung together, but they have a common idea that runs through them in much stronger fashion than before. The idea is a simple modest one, but Tati manages to find the humor, absurdity, contradictions, and joy of a typical French vacation to the sea. He’s also changed his central character in performance. The bumbling bicycle postman Francois is gone, replac...

Jour de Fete

Jacques Tati followed one of the normal paths towards feature film directing: through short films. He wrote, starred in, and eventually directed a handful of shorts, culminating in his directorial debut of “School for Postmen” with Tati playing a smalltown French postman named Francois who rapidly moves through his small town to deliver the mail with his own personal flair. When he got his chance to make his feature film directorial debut, he seems to have simply decided to expand on the ide...

The Superman Franchise (Theatrically Released Feature Films): The Definitive Ranking

Superman was the first real cinematic superhero. That opening from the first Richard Donner film was meant to open up the world to a new world of films based on comic books, a new kind of mythic story for the modern child in all of us. But…the Salkinds owned the rights through the seventies and early eighties and they sabotaged everything about it from the start, beginning with the firing of Richard Donner before he had finished filming the large dual production of the first two live action ...

Superman Returns

Batman Begins came and went to great fanfare, and Warner Brothers needed someone to help them reboot the long-neglected Superman franchise. Who better than Bryan Singer, the man who made the well-received first two X-Men movies? It helped that he was a big fan of the original Superman films by Donner and Lester, so he would bring the right kind of attention to the film. Well, he made the interesting choice (later mimicked across other franchises like Halloween) to simply ignore the events of...

Superman IV: The Quest for Peace

The Salkinds sold their ownership of the film rights to the Superman character to Cannon after the dual financial failures of Superman III and Supergirl, and Cannon pushed out a rushed, incomplete, overlong mess of a vanity project for Christopher Reeve to keep him in the title role that got cut down to a brisk 90-minutes, probably sacrificing any semblance of narrative cohesion in the process of trying to save the disaster of a film. The effort to placate Reeve’s anti-nuclear views ends up ...

Supergirl

Well, that was something. Reeling from the financial failure of Superman III, the Salkinds were banking on this spinoff to rescue the franchise and their financial stake in the Super characters. It…it did not work. This silly look at superheroes versus witches lacks any sense of urgency even though the action is supposed to undo terrible things. Instead, we get a full act of filler that derails everything that the movie never recovers from, not that its first act was anything terribly specia...

Superman III

What is this? With Richard Donner definitely not coming back, the directing job went back to Richard Lester who played nice with the Salkinds and did what they wanted on Superman II. Given complete control (or, as complete control as the Salkinds would allow), Lester created a Saturday morning cartoon of a live-action Superman film. I wouldn’t really mind, much like the Schumacher Batman films aren’t bad because they take lighter tones, but Lester doesn’t seem to know how to build a story ac...

Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut

It’s interesting, but I really feel like every element of Donner’s director’s cut of his film that was taken from him with only 75% of the material shot is an improvement over the original except the ending. The ending is just as dumb as the original ending. It may be dumber. Still, it feels more like a single movie. The action moves earlier. There’s greater purpose to the taking away of powers and the giving back. It’s structured better. It’s also significantly rougher visually since it had...