David Vining's Blog, page 152

Bucking Broadway

This is better. Obviously built from the ground up as a feature length film, Bucking Broadway, John Ford’s fourth feature length film (and only second surviving), as the sinews of a story that fills its screen time healthfully. It’s another simple tale with broadly drawn characters and situations, but it’s told with care, energy, and clarity, creating a fun fifty-three minute film.

Harry Carey plays Cheyenne Harry (not the same character from Straight Shooting, presumably, because, yo...

Underworld: Evolution

This feels like the next episode in a serial, picking up right where the previous episode left off to tell just the next adventure in the exciting life and times of Seline, vampire Death Dealer. It’s a good thing that I have such affection for the first film because I’m not sure I would have tolerated the rather empty genre exercise that is the second entry in the Underworld series as much as I do. Len Wiseman proved with his sophomore directorial effort that he could manage action scenes we...

Straight Shooting

You can do subtlety in silent film, but it requires a certain attention to specific moments that go well beyond what we normally expect from sound films. You need to focus down with a small scope and bring out details that are harder to do without some level of explanation that can happen through dialogue or even tone of voice. John Ford’s first silent feature length film is not at all interested in subtlety. This is a land war in the West with very clear good guys, bad guys, and stakes. Thi...

Underworld

This vampire and werewolf monster mashup takes itself too seriously for how silly it becomes. The performances are all over the place and the lore is overcomplicated. However, I do have a soft spot for it. Len Wiseman has a strong eye and a strong sense of action mechanics, so even if the script isn’t up to the task, there’s still a fair amount to enjoy. Oh, and Bill Nighy demonstrates that he’s the best by acting the crap out of a silly costume and monster makeup.

There’s been a war betw...

Carl Theodor Dreyer: The Definitive Ranking

Carl Theodor Dreyer made two of the greatest films ever made. He made one of the most important early horror films. He made dramas, historical epics, chamber dramas, prestige dramas, comedies, and even a fairy tale. He was a versatile, talented, and literate filmmaker who made nine of his fourteen films in the first decade of his career. The last five were spread out over the final 32 years as he struggled to find any kind of funding source, eventually becoming a film critic, court repor...

We Interrupt the Danish Film Festival for DUNE!

Gertrud

If anyone tried to say that Carl Theodor Dreyer’s final film wasn’t heavily inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s 50s and early 60s output, I would call that person a dirty liar. This movie is infused with a Bergmanesque sensibility and would have felt right at home in Bergman’s body of work in the late 50s. I don’t know if it was intentional homage, if Dreyer just absorbed so much of Bergman’s work in the decade after he finished Ordet that it seeped into his basic approach to filmmaking, or if it w...

Ordet

This movie snuck up on me. I’m used to Dreyer’s films having great endings where the building blocks of the first three-quarters of the film come together in incredibly elegant ways to create a surprisingly emotionally effective finale. It happened on The Parson’s Widow, Master of the House, Day of Wrath and even Love One Another. However, this cuts deeply.

Dreyer was apparently not much of a religious man himself, though his films would seem to indicate otherwise. Raised by a Lutheran mi...

Två människor (Two People)

Made immediately after Dreyer’s magnificent Day of Wrath, Två människor is the one movie that Dreyer completely disowned. This happens from time to time. Kubrick famously disowned Spartacus and Lynch disowned Dune. There were questions of authorship around both, and the same goes for Dreyer’s work here. Hired by Svensk Filmindustri to adapt the play “Attentat” by W.O. Somin, Dreyer was stymied from the start. He wasn’t allowed to hire the actors he wanted. He was forced to film a flashback s...

Day of Wrath

After a decade in the cinematic wilderness where he had to give up the trade completely to go back working at a newspaper (first as a film critic and then as a court reporter), Carl Theodor Dreyer proved that he could make something on time and within budget with his informational short film Mødrehjælpen. With that under his belt, Dreyer was able to secure financing for one of his scripts, an adaptation of Hans Wiers-Jenssen’s Anne Pedersdotter, an early 20th century Norwegian play. Quiet, a...