David Vining's Blog, page 127

Akira Kurosawa – A Retrospective

There are few names in cinema more intimately associated with the medium than that of Akira Kurosawa. A painter by trade, he rose through the Japanese film industry to the rank of director in the middle of the Second World War where he had to balance between commercial, artistic, and imperial interests. He learned his trade as an associate director, getting his first directorial assignment in 1943 with Sanshira Sugata, a film about judo and based on a Japanese novel of the same name.

He went ...

Superman

I have had an issue with Richard Donner’s 1978 Superman for a while. I’ve never watched it particularly critically until now, and now it seems pretty clear to me why I simply can’t get into the whole exercise. I like parts of it quite a bit, but overall this is a hodgepodge of a film. It represents so much of what is wrong with origin stories in superhero films, and yet the spirit is so innocent and guileless that it’s hard to actively dislike.

I have to say that I kind of love the first ...

Superman and the Mole Men

Filmed as a glorified television pilot before they were all that common place, Superman and the Mole Men feels like a subpar two-parter of a series. It eventually become a two-parter in the series Adventures of Superman that filmed after this, starring George Reeves as the eponymous hero, and that’s where it probably appropriately belongs. This is technically a feature film, even at only 58 minutes, but it’s more accurately remembered as a forgettable entry in a hardly remembered television ...

Jean-Pierre Melville: The Definitive Ranking

Jean-Pierre Melville, ne Grumbach, was one of the most influential French filmmakers that the overall cinematic culture seems to have largely forgotten. He and his approach to filmmaking in the underworld is alive and well for certain filmmakers like John Woo and Quentin Tarantino, but much like the references Tarantino puts into his movies, no one gets them anymore.

I think it’s too bad, but I also get it. Melville’s films are cold, offering little in terms of help to an audience in the...

Un Flic

Save for one sequence, this feels like an imitation of Jean-Pierre Melville’s style instead of his own work. The style feels out of place with the story, and it makes me wonder if Melville cut down the film heavily before release. The story and character elements, when told through the stylistic choices Melville relied on, are simply too much for the hundred-minute running time. It also feels like a repeat of Le Cercle Rouge, like Melville was simply covering the same ground again. That woul...

Le Cercle Rouge

This is pure genre style done through the Melville lens, and it’s fun. It’s not his best work, but it’s the more refined version of Le Deuxieme Souffle. It’s a steady build up through escapes and an extended heist with just enough character to build up for the audience to attach to through it all. There’s no real emotional involvement, giving us an exercise in almost pure style. In terms of effect, I’m reminded of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.

The film begins with two men leaving police c...

Army of Shadows

This is the most perfect combination of Melville’s cool, dispassionate style and subject matter. He works well in the gangster/crime genres, but taking this sort of subdued, quiet approach to telling a story works extremely well when combined with the complete and total sense of danger felt by the Resistance in the early days of German occupation of France in World War II. The all encompassing sense of fear and dread is materially different when talking about the Resistance in its early days...

The Northman

Looks like I’m going to be in the minority on this one. I think the trailer is awesome, but this one of those cases where the trailer is significantly better than the movie. I think that has to do with the uneasy mixture of Robert Eggers’ more arthouse approach to storytelling and the needs of a studio fronting $90 million for an action epic. The trailers made it seem like a John Wick but Vikings and even crazier, but Eggers goes for something more emotionally subtle. I don’t think he hits t...

Le Samourai

After the self-indulgence of Le Deuxieme Souffle, Jean-Pierre Melville actually pulled back a fair bit in his next film, Le Samourai, creating a smaller, more focused telling of the French underworld, centered around the extremely subdued performance by Alain Delon. What becomes obvious is that Melville was concerned mostly with describing process in his films at this point. That can feel mundane, but he was a smart enough filmmaker to give us a grounding and obstacles that move beyond just ...

Le Deuxieme Souffle

I don’t often say this, but this movie needed to be shorter. A fair bit shorter. I enjoyed it, and it’s easy to see its influence especially over Quentin Tarantino, but I don’t think it does quite enough with its time, especially in the first half. The story of an escaped convict who joins in on a heist outside of Marseille in order to help fund his life on the lam outside of France is full of the right characters, motivations, and twisting plot to entertain, but when every scene feels like ...