David Vining's Blog, page 130

Alexander the Awful

Gladiator made a mark on Hollywood in 2000. Financially successful and well regarded by both critics (except for Roger Ebert) and the Academy, Ridley Scott’s sword and sandals epic ignited Hollywood’s love of epics for the first time in decades, something even the success of Mel Gibson’s Braveheart could not do. The love affair didn’t last very long, though, because none of the movies that followed where nearly as successful critically or commercially, and the genre rebirth died out.

Wolfgang...

John McTiernan – A Retrospective

I’ve previously written retrospectives on three directors: Ingmar Bergman, Terry Gilliam, and Quentin Tarantino. So, looking out over the sea of film directors, I came across John McTiernan’s name. He’s a director I’ve known for his most popular work (Predator and Die Hard) but never really thought about holistically. So, sitting down to watch all eleven of his films was instructive.

For the other three, there were strong thematic concerns that connected all of their work, but any thematic co...

Dersu Uzala

Ikiru felt like the work of an old man looking back on a life wasted. Dersu Uzala feels like the work of an old man who knows his time is coming to a close soon. His efforts to find independent financing had ended with the financial failure of Dodes’ka-den. No one in the Japanese film industry wanted to fund him. He had broken professionally with his main star of the previous twenty years. He attempted suicide, cutting his wrists and neck. And then the Soviet Union, through the tyranny’s cin...

Dodes’ka-den

This is the film that led to Akira Kurosawa’s suicide attempt. After Red Beard, Kurosawa had gone to Hollywood and attempted to put together a pair of films, most notably the Japanese segments of Tora! Tora! Tora!, a process that ended up getting Kurosawa fired after a few weeks into the production, the efforts to conform to American production methods too great a divide for the heavy drinking master filmmaker. Together with three other Japanese filmmakers (Masaki Kobayashi, Keisuke Kinoshit...

Red Beard

This is the film that ended the working relationship between Toshiro Mifune and Akira Kurosawa, a production that went for two years, required a massive amount of art direction to bring Kurosawa’s vision of a 19th century village to life (that we barely see in the film), involved sickness across many cast and crew, and required Mifune to keep a full beard for the whole time. It apparently went so far that Mifune was unable to find other work at the time due to his commitments to the long pro...

High and Low

This is a mixture of two film genres that end up complimenting each other rather perfectly. The main character disappears from half the movie, and yet it still works. This is one of Kurosawa’s most experimental films, and it’s couched in seemingly straightforward styles of storytelling, a character drama and a police procedural that are both kept fairly separate and yet intertwine together expertly at the same time.

The film begins with an informal business meeting in the house of Kingo G...

Sanjuro

After the large success of Yojimbo, Toho asked Akira Kurosawa to create a follow-up using Toshiro Mifune’s main character in a new adventure. Taking a previous script that adapted the novel Hibi Heian by Shugoro Yamamoto and inserting the character of Sanjuro, Kurosawa made a solid follow up that entertains, but I’m pretty sure the first film was a fair bit better.

Sanjuro (Mifune), is asleep in a remote shrine where nine young samurai have gathered in earnest to discuss the corruption in...

Sergio Leone – A Retrospective

Great Directors

I’ve gone through the work of a bunch of directors, every feature length film they ever made from Carl Th. Dreyer to Christopher Nolan. I’ve chosen directors whose work interests me, who have made films that I love. As I’ve gone through these dozens and dozens of films by recognizable filmmakers I’ve found myself processing the idea of a “great director”. Why do I easily place the label on someone like Howard Hawks and struggle with the idea of placing it on someone like D...

Hitchcock, The Early Years – A Retrospective

I’ve gone through all of Alfred Hitchcock’s filmography, and I can easily say that the man made a lot of movies over a long period of time. From the mid 20s to the late 70s, he has directing credits on fifty-three feature films that still exist. That’s a lot of ground to cover, and it’s far too much ground to cover in a single Saturday Evening Movie Thread. I may or may not follow this up with other Hitchcock threads, but for tonight I’m going to focus on a single period in the man’s illustr...

Yojimbo

Akira Kurosawa’s most purely fun film, Yojimbo is the work of a master simply out to give his audience a good time. With a light and playful tone that gives way to an earned feeling of peril, Kurosawa’s seemingly frothy ronin tale ends up one of the most thoroughly entertaining films of his entire career. Anchored by a wonderful score by Masaru Sato and a pitch-perfect central performance by Kurosawa’s main star Toshiro Mifune, Yojimbo is a pure delight.

A masterless samurai who calls him...