David Vining's Blog, page 138

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon

The second entry in the unofficial Cavalry Trilogy (bookended by Fort Apache and Rio Grande), John Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon is an entertaining and leisurely look at life in the US Cavalry centered around the final week of service of a retiring captain. It’s also the first film that John Ford made with John Wayne after his famous quote about Wayne’s performance in Howard Hawks’ Red River, which led to a more nuanced and complex performance from Wayne that Ford directed. It’s a solid ro...

No Time to Die

#21 in my Ranking of the James Bond Franchise.

Well, that was not very good.

This is a movie that feels like it was written by committee with anything resembling a central idea having been diluted to nothing in Cary Fukunaga’s No Time to Die, Daniel Craig’s last outing as the secret agent James Bond. I could be okay with that if the film operated on some basic entertaining level, but the committee-like script destroys any sense of structure to the story, creating stops and starts that ...

3 Godfathers

A remake of a 1916 film starring Harry Carey, one of the earliest movie stars in general and star of several of John Ford’s earliest features, including Westerns, 3 Godfathers is an easy entertainment filled with winning performances and a nice tribute to the passed movie star by a long-time friend.

The titular godfathers are three bandits, Bob (John Wayne), Pedro (Pedro Armendariz), and The Abilene Kid (Harry Carey Jr.) who go into Welcome, Arizona Territory with the plan on robbing the ...

Fort Apache

This is a complex portrait of a man sent to the furthest outskirts of civilization with a chip on his shoulder and desire for glory. He has to manage his command in the face of a potential Indian threat, and that new command is laxer than he wants. And then there’s Shirley Temple having a romance with one of his officers. This is the first Ford film where I feel like the movie was going for a four-quadrant approach (which wasn’t really an explicit concept for a while afterwards), including e...

The Lethal Weapon Franchise: The Definitive Ranking

Not a great series, but it has its amusements. What started as a rather serious look at a policeman with suicidal depression finding reason for life quickly became a corporate product, driven by opening weekend grosses hinging entirely on recognizable elements and the charm of its leads.

I can easily see why Shane Black found a way to direct his own scripts with Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. His script for Lethal Weapon 2, supposedly some kind of masterpiece, was rewritten to the point where it b...

The Fugitive (1947)

Have you ever found yourself wondering what John Ford would have made if he had decided to direct an art house film? Well, you don’t have to wonder because he made the adaptation of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, retitled as The Fugitive. And I thought The Long Voyage Home was Ford’s art house film… Tossing most of the script written by long term collaborator, Dudley Nichols (harming their relationship rather strongly by all accounts), Ford went borderline experimental with minimal...

Lethal Weapon 4

This series was never great, but it’s nice to see it return to some level of entertaining after the pits of the third entry. Giving the writing reins to Channing Gibson, who had a solid professional relationship with producer Joel Silver (meaning he did what Silver wanted), Richard Donner helmed a moderately entertaining action flick that seems to be more in line with the apparent desire to make this franchise some kind of James Bond-esque series of action spectacle, but in Los Angeles.

T...

The King’s Man

I can see why this is disappointing some people. It’s marketed with videos like this while following up on the anarchic insanity of the first two movies, and yet it’s not really like that for the bulk of its running time. In addition, the movie does have elements of the craziness, but they never really gel with what came before while also clashing on some level with everything around them. The bulk of the film is decidedly different, a surprisingly sober look at how World War I affected the ...

Lethal Weapon 3

In retrospect, I was probably a tad overgenerous to Lethal Weapon 2. It was a made by committee mess, but it still managed to entertain me. Well, the second sequel in the franchise continues the heavy downward trend, becoming pretty much nothing more than an interconnected series of ideas that never actually gel in any way, shape, or form. It relies heavily on charm and chemistry from the actors, but that really only goes so far when the scenes of chemistry between our two stars end up feeli...

The Matrix Franchise: The Definitive Ranking

I guess I should make one of these now, huh? Four films is the bare minimum of movies in a franchise that I want in order to make a list. Three films ends up feeling too small for it, and I did the Airport movies, a franchise with four. So, here goes.

For a lot of people, the franchise begins and ends with the first film. They see it as a perfect movie to some degree, beginning and ending a tale in great style that the sequels never match up to. I am not so hot on the first film, find...