David Vining's Blog, page 144

RoboCop (2014)

Jose Padilha took up the mantle of the RoboCop franchise and, fighting studio mandates all the way, came up with what is essentially a drama with action beats. The satirical elements that helped make the original fun are replicated in some diluted form, but they seem to miss the mark. The drama elements are a mixed bag. But, hey, the action beats are actually pretty neat, so it’s got that going for it. In terms of Batman Begins style reboots, there were worse ways to go with this, but the ra...

RoboCop 3

The third entry in the RoboCop franchise is a great example of what was going wrong with a lot of franchises in the 90s. Toned down to appeal more to kids while only retaining the barest amount of talent from the original films no matter how unimportant to the actual story, Fred Dekker’s RoboCop 3 is the Saturday morning cartoon version of a hard R-rated satirical action movie. Where the second movie went wrong by trying to be too much and satisfying nothing altogether, the third firmly sets...

RoboCop 2

This movie is a mess. It’s often entertaining in small stretches, but it’s definitely a mess. That has a whole lot to do with the torrid history of the screenplay, going through so many drafts across so many writers, eventually settling on a rewrite of a script by comic writer Frank Miller that director Irvin Kirshner was reportedly tearing pages out of as unusable on a daily basis on set. It begins to take some ideas in new directions, but ultimately settles in for a mindless ending that ca...

RoboCop

A staple of the 80s, Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop is an almost ideal mix of satire, black comedy, and action, bringing a combination of European arthouse sensibility and spectacle driven action filmmaking that turns what could have been just a dumb sensationalist exploitation film into something rather special. There’s an energy, humor, and anarchic spirit, all of a decidedly 80s flavor, that gives this 104-minute long movie (the shortest of the franchise) real entertainment value.

Omni-Consu...

Dune News!

After a better than expected weekend box office (and surely strong numbers on HBO Max) along with strong international box office, Legendary is going forward with the sequel to Dune.

I’m happy with this.

Air Mail

Before Howard Hawks made Only Angels Have Wings, before he made Ceiling Zero, John Ford made Air Mail. I was struck at how pretty much identical the first act of Air Mail was to Ceiling Zero. There’s the introduction to a small commercial airport that specializes in delivering mail, bad weather conditions (including the use of the term “ceiling zero”), and a pilot crashing because he couldn’t accurately gauge the ground. There’s also a hotshot pilot flying in, making a show of his first appr...

Dune (2021)

Reminding me of the ending of The Fellowship of the Ring without the assured satisfaction that the next part is definitely coming, Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part One is a beautiful looking film that sets out to accomplish the impossible: telling the first half of a story. David Lynch managed an adaptation in the 80s that stuffed the whole plot of the book into a single two-hour and seventeen minute film, but Villeneuve has about two and a half hours to tell just the first half. The story ...

Arrowsmith

It’s interesting to note movies that were nominated for Best Picture from decades past. Occasionally you’ll find something like Citizen Kane, but most of the time the also rans are simply forgotten (sometimes even the winners). Arrowsmith is one such movie. Quite popular in its day, it’s been overshadowed mightily by other Ford films and lost to Grand Hotel at the Oscars. Looking at the film almost 90 years after the fact, it’s clear to me that Arrowhead is a perfectly respectable film, a sa...

The Brat

With the feeling of a filmed play adaptation from the original stage production by Maude Fulton, John Ford made The Brat as cinematic as he could. It’s a similar spot as Hitchcock’s Juno and the Paycock, though Ford was able to use some advances in sound technology to keep the camera from staying in one place to just film dialogue. He makes the most of the limited locations, but the sixty minute runtime works against the film, taking on enough to easily fill 100 minutes but having to skip th...

Seas Beneath

John Ford had little good to say about this movie decades after the fact, and I think he simply hadn’t seen it or even thought of it for years. His experience was colored by one particular and unprofessional actress that was forced upon him, and he couldn’t see anything else. I’ll grant him that the actress in question (Marion Lessing) is quite simply not very good on screen (I, of course, can’t comment on her professionalism on set), but there so much more around her within the film that’s ...