David Vining's Blog, page 148

Andrei Rublev

In production for a whole month before Nikita Khrushchev was deposed as head of the Soviet State and the cultural thaw he had led was forcibly ended, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev was a thorn in the side of the Soviet authorities for years. Explicitly religious with a clear-eyed look at the oppressive nature of Russian history, it was far from the sort of nationalistic fanfare about a Russian hero of the arts the authorities wanted for propaganda purposes. Finished in 1966, but not releas...

The Shamrock Handicap

I had no idea what this movie was about beyond the very brief description on its IMDb page, and I thought it was going to be a little drama about the Irish poor trying to make the rent. Boy, was I wrong. It’s almost a remake of Kentucky Pride in plot and structure except told from a purely human perspective. Taking the racing world from a different angle, we see a more cohesive experience with an ensemble approach that almost comes together well enough to work. The Shamrock Handicap ends up ...

The Ward

#13 in my ranking of John Carpenter’s films.

You know, I was expecting far worse. The little I’ve heard of Carpenter’s last feature film as a director, The Ward, was outright bad, and the IMDb rating is not kind. I was fully prepared to be bored stiff for 88 minutes, but Carpenter actually produced something halfway decent here. It’s fine, a couple of small decisions away from being good, and not near the top of his body of work. However, I’ve seen other directors go out far worse than th...

Pro-Life

#23 in my ranking of John Carpenter’s films.

Do you love irony? Do you love irony above character, plot, or basic narrative structure? If you do, then do I have the episode of television for you. John Carpenter came back for the second season of Masters of Horror with another script co-written by Drew McWeeny, this time co-writing with Scott Swan, to deliver one of the least compelling pieces of filmmaking in Carpenter’s career. Always feeling like it’s on the edge of being edgy but settl...

Cigarette Burns

#7 in my ranking of John Carpenter’s films.

This is what John Carpenter needed after Escape from L.A. He didn’t need to keep trying to make big films after his largest production bombed critically and commercially. He didn’t need to try and keep making action films into his 60s. He needed to pull back and find the kind of filmmaking language that he started with, crafting a more focused and less ambitiously scoped story on a smaller scale, and the Masters of Horror television show on Show...

John Carpenter: The Definitive Ranking

John Carpenter hasn’t made a movie since 2011, and it’s obvious he’s done. He had quite the run from 1978 to 1988, though. Despite my somewhat less enthusiastic reactions to some of the work here, there’s no denying the cultural impact he had with films like Halloween, The Thing, and They Live.

His reputation is greatly outsized compared to the box office receipts, though, which I find interesting. His most financially successful film, both in terms of profit and raw dollars, was Hallowee...

Ghosts of Mars

Vampires felt like a misstep. Ghosts of Mars feels like John Carpenter had lost all sense of what made him appealing as a filmmaker. A combination of Assault on Precinct 13 and The Fog (In SPACE!!!), Ghosts of Mars is pretty much a complete disaster. Carpenter gave an interview a decade after this movie’s release where he said that everyone had misjudged it. It wasn’t meant to be taken seriously. It was just a silly action movie that you’re supposed to enjoy as a silly action movie. I read t...

Vampires

Well, this is disappointing. I was ready to declare the 90s Carpenter’s field of hidden gems, but his 1998 feature kind of ruins that. Vampires is the result of a last second script rewrite originating from a sudden and massive cut in budget right before filming and Carpenter pretty much phoning it in visually (again, probably related to the budget cut). It’s poorly written, touching on several different story ideas without every telling enough of them to feel convincing, and the action beco...

Escape from L.A.

I’m going to get so much shit for this. I mean all the shit. 100% of the shit. Oh, well. Here goes.

I love this movie. I unabashedly, unironically, and unashamedly love this movie. I think this is one of John Carpenter’s best films, and I think it’s a large step up from Escape from New York.

In my review for the first cinematic adventure of Snake Plissken I wrote that it was hampered by extreme budgetary constraints and some odd structural issues with its narrative, insisting that it r...

Village of the Damned

Ugh…just…it’s hard to believe that John Carpenter, who took the duties of remaking Howard Hawks’ The Thing from Another World and executed so well could remake another 50s science fiction film and fall on his face so thoroughly. Carpenter has gone on to say that he took this job as merely a paycheck, but his comments from the time show a surprising enthusiasm for the project, revisiting another childhood favorite film. I think some of my problems with this extend to the source material (thou...