David Vining's Blog, page 134

The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail

This is one of those films that has a really interesting historical footnote. It was in the middle of filming that Emperor Hirohito announced the surrender of Imperial Japan to the US Forces in the Pacific, also meaning that this was being filmed with two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. You can’t tell from the film itself, it was a quickly written adaptation of existing kabuki material, filmed mostly on a single set and lasts only an hour. There are no sudden subtexts of the apocalypse o...

Sanshiro Sugata, Part II

The first film about the titular judo hero was such a success that Toho demanded a sequel from its director, Akira Kurosawa while also dealing with intensified wartime pressure from the Imperial government of Japan to produce material conducive to the Japanese cultural efforts to win the fight against America. What we end up getting is essentially just a repeat of the final conflict of the first film along with a shoehorned (but well-told, in a certain way, I must say) bit of anti-American p...

The Most Beautiful

Can outright propaganda lead to a great film experience? I think so. Mikhail Kalatozov’s Soy Cuba was nothing but propaganda for the Cuban Revolution, and it’s a remarkable watch. The problem in general, I think, is that the demands of propaganda and drama are almost always diametrically opposed. Drama requires certain stakes and potentialities that propaganda is naturally resistant towards. It also requires a certain level of subtlety that is anathema to propaganda. You don’t need a subtly ...

Sanshiro Sugata

Akira Kurosawa’s first credited film as director (he said he had as much control over his last few films as assistant director as he had over this) is missing about seventeen minutes of footage from its original release. Cut for various reasons by the censors in wartime Imperial Japan shortly after its release, the lost footage has never been recovered and the end result is incomplete. It’s not so incomplete as I can’t make heads or tails of it, but I’m pretty sure the film suffers for the l...

Mel Brooks: The Definitive Ranking

Mel Brooks started out in one direction and ended up following another for pretty much the rest of his career. His genre parodies, starting with Blazing Saddles in 1974, defined his career, erasing all memory of his second film, The Twelve Chairs, and casting his first film, The Producers, in a new light as a more pure comedy.

I wish to visit the alternate universe where The Twelve Chairs was a financial success, allowing Brooks to make more films in that vein without ever getting into th...

Dracula: Dead and Loving It

Mel Brooks’ final film is more of a piece with Robin Hood: Men in Tights than Young Frankenstein, which isn’t really a surprise how artist careers go. However, it is simply less funny for long stretches of its runtime, feeling like Brooks and his writing team of Rudy De Luca and Steve Haberman settled on the first gags and jokes they came across while writing without trying to figure out how funny they actually were. There are sporadic laughs here and there, especially as the film moves into...

Robin Hood: Men in Tights

I think this is the movie that Spaceballs was trying to be. Funnier, with a better lead (though I do like Bill Pullman), and a better understanding of the source material, Robin Hood: Men in Tights is a consistently amusing comedy from a pigeonholed filmmaker. Life Stinks was either an earnest attempt by Brooks to reclaim the kind of filmmaking he had started out doing with a movie like The Twelve Chairs or a deeply cutting satire of a subgenre of movies, but either way it failed miserably a...

Life Stinks

Is this an earnest entry in the subgenre of “the homeless are magic” that Hollywood cranked out from the late 80s to the early 90s, or is this a satire of that genre? On the one hand, there’s a certain feel similar to Mel Brooks’ earliest films, The Producers and The Twelve Chairs. On the other hand, the film goes so far into weird, misplaced comedy like Three Stooges routines, and ends so far over the line of what these movies do in the end that it feels like a satire of the entire idea of ...

Spaceballs

The funniest movie Mel Brooks had made since Silent Movie, Spaceballs is an amusing film with solid jokes and a misplaced sense of satire that eludes actually hitting the intended target, George Lucas’ Star Wars franchise, instead creating a generic space fantasy adventure without a satirical bite, relying entirely on the comedy to carry things through. It would be enough if the film embraced comedy completely, instead of spending the absolute minimal amount of time to try and tell a heartfe...

To Be or Not to Be (1983)

This is one of those movies I grew up with, it having been a key cornerstone of my father’s small VHS collection. This is probably the Mel Brooks movie I’ve seen the most, and like many films from my childhood, I haven’t seen it in years. The movie was instantly recognizable and new all at once, and while it is a remake of an Ernst Lubitsch film of the same name from 1942 (a film I’ve seen once many moons ago and remember little of), I’ve always seen it as its own creation. It’s also the one...