David Vining's Blog, page 132

Damien: Omen II

This is one of those really frustrating franchise films. On the one hand, you can see that someone along the pipeline had exactly the right idea of where a franchise guaranteed at least a couple of sequels should go narratively. On the other, you see the hands of a producer dumbing things down and demanding more of what made the first one, supposedly, popular. I cannot forgive it the latter, but I cannot dismiss the former. What I end up getting is a film that frequently (really frequently) ...

The Omen (1976)

And now, to take a break from our Japanese film festival, I bring my thoughts on The Omen franchise.

This movie is trash, but it’s exceptionally well-made trash. I think Richard Donner, in his first assignment for a feature film outside of television, thought he was making another The Exorcist, but I also don’t think that Donner was particularly good at the whole narrative side of filmmaking. After the film, I read up on it a bit, and he apparently had a bunch of the supernatural elements...

David Lynch – A Retrospective

Why David Lynch?


David Lynch first appeared on the movie scene with his debut feature Eraserhead in 1977. Since then his reputation as a rather strange filmmaker has been cemented through his body of work that spans ten feature films, one television show, and more than 40 years. He’s won the Palme d’Or at Cannes once while nominated four times, been nominated for the Best Director Oscar three times, and has become a critical darling. However, larger mass audiences resist his films.

And it make...

Howard Hawks – A Retrospective

Howard Hawks


Before I begin, a big thanks and shoutout to Mark Andrew Edwards who suggested Howard Hawks as my next cinematic excursion. This has been a fun one, and I wouldn’t have considered it without Mark’s prompting. Thank you!

In 1954, the French cinema magazine Cahiers du Cinema was in turmoil. The younger generation of film critics, led by Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, were rebelling against the stuffy, unimaginative, and immoral work of the contemporary French film industry. ...

I Live in Fear

Kurosawa followed up one of his greatest commercial and critical successes with a small movie about fears of nuclear weaponry that lost money at the box office where his star, Toshiro Mifune, played a 70-year-old man at 35. This is about as far from populist, humanist fare that Kurosawa was becoming known for. I think it has some niggling issues that hold it back from greatness, but this is a really mature character portrait of a man consumed by fear.

The immediate concern of the film is ...

Seven Samurai

If tasked with finding the ideal script for an action spectacular, I think you’d be hard pressed to find a better example than Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. The steady build of situation, characters, and, finally, action create a grand entertainment that steadily, but never slowly, unfolds over three-and-a-half hours. The precise construction of the story allows for the time to get to know the rather large cast of characters, invest in them emotionally, and feel real tension as the action ...

Ikiru

The only film Akira Kurosawa made between 1948 and 1965 that did not include Toshiro Mifune in any way, Ikiru is one of the most tenderly human, aesthetically beautiful, and deeply moving films I’ve ever seen. I labeled it my favorite Kurosawa many years ago, long before I’d seen all of his film (I still haven’t as of this writing), and yet I seriously doubt that any film will topple it from that spot. This is one of the pinnacles of cinema, a work of such unbridled and touching emotion that...

The Idiot

Akira Kurosawa followed up his international success of Rashomon by going serious literary adaptation with an adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. Transposing the action from Tsarist Russia to postwar Japan (including the first explicit mention of the US occupation in a Kurosawa film), Kurosawa set out to make a two-part, over four-hour long film that the studio, Shochiku, suddenly got cold feet about releasing at such length. Given the ultimatum of cutting the film down to less than three ...

Rashomon

This is one of those movies that has become so influential that it almost feels like homework to talk about it. However, it really shouldn’t be. Rashomon is a tight 88-minute film that’s alternatively funny and incredibly taut while leaving a mountain of material to talk about. It’s the kind of art film that can easily break into mainstream conversations because of the kinds of questions that it leaves with its audience. Which of the four stories that we hear are true? It’s a very literal qu...

The Batman

When I heard that Matt Reeves, director of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, was making a noirish, 70s inspired, epic three-hour Batman film, I was excited. To come out of the experience thinking that it was merely pretty good feels like a disappointment. I wasn’t jonesing for this movie like I had been Dune, but I had been really looking forward to it. And, it’s pretty good. It really needed at least one more rewrite to more properly coalesce its three distinct parts into a cohesive whole, bu...