David Vining's Blog, page 151

Dark Star

I have a special place in my heart for first films of directors who went on to have successful careers. Very few of them come close to reaching the same heights as the films that come later, but they often display the seeds of the greatness that is to come. There’s an innate roughness to many of them that end up both working against the films to some degree and also have their own charms. John Carpenter’s Dark Star is a good example of a talented director finding a way to make his shared vis...

Just Pals

I remember reading a quote from someone who worked with John Ford late in his career that Ford understood how to assemble individual sequences, but he didn’t really understand the connective tissue from one sequence to the next (it was either one of his screenwriters or his editor, I can’t remember). Anyway, with that piece of information in the back of my mind, a lot of the looseness of Ford’s earliest films ends up making a lot of sense. He was making short feature length films (almost all...

The Suicide Squad

I think it’s pretty obvious that James Gunn doesn’t agree with me about ensemble movies, not that he thinks they’re easy, but that we differ on how good ones are constructed. I feel that ensemble movies are hard because you have to create a variety of different characters all swirling around one thing, and that their journeys need to interrelate on some level beyond the mechanics of plot to help reinforce the central point of the film. Gunn sees ensemble pieces differently. He seems to see t...

The Private Life of Don Juan

I wasn’t going to review this movie. I was just going to watch it, rate it, and then move on with my life. However, The Private Life of Don Juan ends up doing everything right that Casanova would try to do more than 70 years later wrong. Without that connection, I would have enjoyed the film just as much but felt no need to write about it. Having this contrast to write about was my intellectual hook that got my brain going with about half an hour left in the film.

Don Juan is the purely f...

Hell Bent

The amount of material covered in John Ford’s Hell Bent, his ninth feature overall and third surviving, is enough to comfortably fill an 80-90 minute long film. At fifty-one minutes, though, everything ends up feeling stunted and shallow. Remove a couple of things and allow the rest to fill out the abbreviated runtime fully, and you could have an entertaining little western on your hands. As it stands, Hell Bent just feels too threadbare to really garner any interest. There isn’t even a big ...

Inferno (2016)

My wife and I started going through the Robert Langdon movies about a year ago with The Da Vinci Code. We were both so bored by it that we never bothered to revisit Angels and Demons, and then Netflix DVD sends me Inferno in the mail. Ugh…this series is awful. I do remember seeing Angels and Demons in Rome and seeing the movie theater I was sitting in on screen during a large panning shot of Piazza del Popolo, but I didn’t even get that kind of thrill of Inferno. These movies are dumb.

To...

The Underworld Franchise: The Definitive Ranking

This is a middling franchise, at best. A couple of halfway decent movies to start things off, a surprisingly good little third entry, and then the dregs of incoherence to end with two more.

There’s room for greatness in most story ideas, and Underworld had potential in its derivative world building, but it could never really escape from its self-seriousness, love of lore, and a weird propensity for palace intrigue in place of actual drama.

Kate Beckinsale has been talking up a return t...

Underworld: Blood Wars

Was your favorite part of the previous Underworld movies the boring palace intrigue? Well, you’re in luck, because that’s about 75% of this movie. The franchise’s propensity for dull lore exposition, clamoring for position from dull, uninteresting characters, and half-thought out world building reaches its crescendo here in the final film of the Underworld series. The whole affair comes to a poorly structured mess of a film that feels like it’s over at the hour mark but just keeps chugging a...

Underworld: Awakening

It did not surprise me to read that this movie was going through new drafts even through filming. It feels like a movie built out of at least a dozen different script ideas, each one thrown into the mix after the next because one producer didn’t like that but did like something else. There was no clear direction to take Selene’s journey after the second film, so the third film wisely went in a completely different direction. Going back to her, though, and we see that the franchise is unsurpr...

Underworld: Rise of the Lycans

You know, I can dig this. One of the things that had dragged down the first two Underworld movies was the preponderance of lore that got intensely explained with a great sense of import. Here, that’s not a problem because this is the lore. I’m also actually quite surprised that the film really limits itself to the lore that it explores, refusing to bring in too much of the stuff that had been discussed previously, creating a remarkable (considering the series) sense of focus to the storytell...