David Vining's Blog, page 131

The Bad Sleep Well

By the end of this film, I could have sworn that The Bad Sleep Well was made by Masaki Kobayashi not Akira Kurosawa. The film ends up too cynical about contemporary Japanese corporate culture without the balance of tender humanity that I know Kurosawa for. It’s also pure noir with a jazzy and almost threatening score by Masaru Sato, a certain nihilism, and a constant sense of unease. All it’s really missing is a femme fatale and voiceover.

A very loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, ...

The Hidden Fortress

Famously one of the main points of inspiration that George Lucas used to write the first Star Wars film, The Hidden Fortress was Akira Kurosawa chasing financial success with a big, brash action adventure after his last film, an adaptation of a Maxim Gorky play, didn’t exactly set the box office on fire. The film feels like a boys adventure story brought to life with close calls, chases, and danger around every corner. I could have done with a slightly different focus and the earlier introdu...

The Lower Depths

Adapted from the play of the same name by Russian author Maxim Gorky, The Lower Depths is an effort on Kurosawa’s part to be experimental to a small degree. Trying to replicate the theatrical experience in film form, it’s a far more engaging and cinematic effort to film a play than the one movie I keep in mind for filmed plays, Alfred Hitchcock’s Juno and the Paycock, made under far different circumstances. Given sixty filming days, Kurosawa brought some of the best Japanese actors of the ti...

Throne of Blood

This is a director’s showcase, Akira Kurosawa showing off with all of his skills, adapting Shakespeare’s Macbeth to feudal Japan while heavily using Noh as a source for visual influences. Everything is heavily stylized from costumes to performances, the play has been cut down to its core, and Kurosawa is in complete command of the entire production, giving us an ideal adaptation that retains the point of the original play while transposing it convincingly into a new cultural space at the sam...

Billy Wilder – A Retrospective

Billy Wilder was born in Poland to Austrian Jewish parents in the first decade of the 20th century. He moved to Germany where he studied journalism and got involved in screenwriting. Fleeing from Germany with the rise of Hitler, he came to America and became a citizen in 1939 while beginning work in Hollywood as a screenwriter writing such movies as Ninotchka starring Greta Garbo.

He liked to work with a writing partner and developed a working relationship with Charles Brackett with whom ...

Mel Brooks – A Retrospective

The comedian who made movies like Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, and History of the World Part I, Mel Brooks left an indelible mark on American comedy.

So, of course, I’m going to talk about the one movie everyone wants to forget exists, Life Stinks.

Brooks began his career on Sid Caesar’s television writing staff (dramatized to some effect in My Favorite Year) and got into the film directing gig through his original film The Producers, cementing his career with Blazing Saddles. ...

The Omen Franchise: The Definitive Ranking

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The Omen franchise is an odd duck. Begun as a one-off that seemed to try and build off of the success of The Exorcist, the franchise always felt like it had an idea of where to go in creating the story of the Antichrist’s rise to power, but it was constantly hobbled by desires to return to convention. What makes it so odd to me is that the conventions it was pursuing weren’t well-worn ideas of decades of film about the Antichrist, but elements introduced in the first film tha...

The Omen (2006)

If I somehow found myself in Hollywood and given the chance to direct a remake of The Omen, literally the only reason I would take the job would be to have a chance at correcting the mistakes of the original sequels. The original is some kind of stupid mix of operatic absurdity that I somehow find immensely entertaining, but the sequels always take some decent ideas of where to take the story and squander them under 70s and 80s studio notes (the less said of the fourth entry, the better). Jo...

Omen IV: The Awakening

There were stretches of this where I was wondering if the film had been intended satirically. I’m talking about laugh out loud moments of hilarity that never once winks at the audience, everything supposedly meant to be taken super-seriously. There are just so many weird choices throughout, from narrative, to structural, to musical, and to performance that never really come together into anything really coherent, entertaining, or even remotely scary. I doubt that it’s much of a mystery why t...

Omen III: The Final Conflict

I went on a rollercoaster of appreciation for the third Omen movie. There was even a moment, about halfway through, when I wondered if this was going to be my favorite of the series. And then it pretty steadily and completely fell apart. It was never great, juggling a couple too many subplots, but the clear-eyed approach to demonic horror hit a real high point, and then the film had no idea what to do with it after that. When looking ahead through the series, I was mostly excited about disco...