David Vining's Blog, page 140

The Grapes of Wrath

Adapted from the novel by John Steinbeck, John Ford reunited with the star of his last two films in The Grapes of Wrath, the tale of a family of Okies moving from their lost sharecropping home in Oklahoma to the promise of a new life in California, only to find that reality is not the promise they had expected. Sanding down much of the more pointed political points of the source material, the end result is a very handsome, well-performed, but somewhat flagging portrait of life on the bottom ...

Drums Along the Mohawk

I don’t think there are enough movies about the American Revolution. They’re sprinkled throughout the century of movies here and there, but they are kind of rare occurrences. It was a pleasant surprise, then, to learn the John Ford had made one about some action on the New York frontier. It was an even more pleasant surprise to discover this hidden film was actually quite good.

Ford’s first film in color (the existing print is an Eastman duplicate of the Technicolor original, making it fa...

Young Mr. Lincoln

It’s pretty evident that John Ford idolized the 16th president of the United States. Abraham Lincoln has appeared as a cameo in a couple of his earlier films, but it’s here that Ford finally tackles him head on in a borderline hagiographic take on the man that eludes any sense of fault and robbing him of a certain sense of humanity. Combined with a rather rote courtroom drama sourced from a real case Lincoln tried (though only loosely based on it), the total of the film actually ends up surp...

I did not die

And I think I looked snazzy while not doing it.

The Pirates of the Caribbean Franchise: The Definitive Ranking

Another franchise, another definitive ranking.

I have more affection for the entirety of the first trilogy that Gore Verbinski delivered than most people seem to have. The movies that followed, though, had no idea what was appealing at all about those first three. Diluting the weirdness, pushing Jack Sparrow forward even though he ends up with little to no reason for being around, and then introducing new characters with a great need to connect them familially with established charact...

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales

This is more of what I might have expected from a corporate driven sequel to the first film in the series. A somewhat competent repackaging of the original elements, essentially replaying everything one more time. After the profitable (but less so) On Stranger Tides where Jack Sparrow was finally made the main character to less entertaining effect, Disney seems to have pushed for the soft reboot route by creating a new pair of characters to be the new Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann of the c...

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

I think it would be difficult to find another better example of the emptiness of corporate filmmaking than the fourth entry in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, On Stranger Tides. Taking the interesting bits from the earlier films, tossing them completely, and placing the largest side character front and center in an aimless adventure that simply drags from one empty conversation of plot points to another, the film is a dreary exercise in a corporation deciding that hitting a release d...

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End

This is the least of the three original Pirates of the Caribbean movies, more overstuffed, unfocused, and all over the place tonally than the previous two films. However, it still has that overarching and earnest desire to entertain, this time on a larger scale, with a solid balance of emotional catharsis and spectacle, concluding what has to be the weirdest trilogy of big budget films ever made. It also has my favorite moment in the whole franchise as well. It’s a bloated, unwieldy film, bu...

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest

I’ve always considered Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest to be the best of the franchise pretty purely because of its tone. It feels most like the kind of fun adventure tale that each movie seems to shoot for. It has a better balance between its tragic villains and adventurous antics so that it never gets weighed down with heavy moments, allowing them to come and go quickly to establish what they need to establish before moving on to something lighter. The movie never gets super lig...

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

I remember when this movie came out in 2003. It was a bit of a cultural phenomenon just thrilling people left and right. I saw it in theaters at the time and thought it was a generally fun adventure movie with a strong visual sense brought by this guy with a weird name, Gore Verbinski. I never saw the rapturous experience that others of my generation seemed to get from it, and here I am, twenty years later, after occasionally watching it from time to time, wondering about the difference in o...