David Vining's Blog, page 16

Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah

There’s narrative danger in taking silly things too seriously: you don’t see how silly the thing actually is. It’s obvious that there is a Japanese contingent of Godzilla superfan who takes the adventures of a giant lizard stomping on miniature buildings very seriously because the first movie had the not terrible subtle subtext of nuclear weaponry. Decades had degraded that, and the Heisei era brought a bunch of superfans into control of the franchise. This led to the decision that space mon...

Star Wars: The Thrawn Trilogy by Timothy Zahn

So, a quick explanation of my history with these books.

In middle school (mid-90s), I was the Star Wars nerd. I rewatched the movies frequently. I read the Expanded Universe novels, buying them or borrowing them from libraries whenever possible. My maternal grandmother once asked me who my favorite author was, and I said Timothy Zahn. I loved these books.

And then in high school I discovered Tolkien and never looked back.

Well, a few months ago, I was looking for copies of those fin...

Godzilla vs. Biollante

This is a mess, but it’s a surprisingly enjoyable mess. The first thirty minutes is borderline intolerable. The last five minutes are ridiculous. The middle hundred minutes, though? The exact kind of fun monster mayhem I like to see from this franchise. It’s just overstuffed with minor subplots that don’t really matter that much, along with more techno-jargon than you can shake a stick at. Overstuffed and fun is kind of the stock and trade of the Godzilla franchise, so this second entry in t...

The Return of Godzilla

Technically part of the Showa Era since the Heisei Era didn’t start until 1989 but lumped with the Heisei Era because of the ten year gap between the previous Godzilla film (Terror of Mechagodzilla) and this, The Return of Godzilla is much more than just a return of the massive lizard to the Japanese silver screen. It’s a return to the idea that Godzilla is scary and a monster and a metaphor for nuclear power (this time very specifically nuclear weapons, the whole Japanese embrace of nuclear...

The Godzilla Franchise, the Heisei, Millennium, and Reiwa Eras: A Statement of Purpose

When I ran through the Showa Era of the Godzilla franchise last year, I was begrudging in my entry. I only did it because I wanted to discover the seemingly ironic contrasts of Ishiro Honda’s career mixing big monster movies with what looked like more standard Japanese studio fare, but I ended up enjoying the largely silly adventures of puny humans facing off against the giant lizard and his enemies and friends.

And I promised myself that I’d discover the rest.

After a little while.

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Next…

Ivan Reitman: The Definitive Ranking

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I did not expect to be so…unentertained by the filmography of the man who directed Ghostbusters, but here I am.

The sense I get from Reitman’s career is that he simply did not understand what made a good script. His early career was defined by Bill Murray being funny onscreen and Reitman filming it. It rocketed up with the mixture of Murray’s sarcasm, Dan Aykroyd’s insanity, and Harold Ramis’ sense of storytelling in Ghostbusters, but Reitman feels almost incidental to that film’s success...

Draft Day

The only bit of comedy in Draft Day is how the Cleveland Browns got a whole lot worse after 2014, the year the film came out. It adds an ironic, metaphysical angle to the whole thing that was completely out of the hands of Ivan Reitman and his writers, Rajiv Joseph and Scott Rothman. Other than that, though, this is the NFL version of Moneyball, Bennet Miller’s masterpiece of a general manager going his own way to create a winning team against conventional wisdom and internal pressures. Reit...

No Strings Attached

Ivan Reitman’s penultimate film is a bog-standard romantic comedy starring two likeable leads. It does nothing particularly well, and it also does nothing particularly badly. It is a milquetoast journey through sexual dynamics of the Millennial generation that relies entirely on sitcom-level dramatics to get from one place to the next. It’s largely inoffensive and mildly entertaining, easily disposable entertainment that’s forgotten almost as quickly as it is consumed.

Adam (Ashton Kutche...

My Super Ex-Girlfriend

Latching onto the nascent comic book hero box office boon, Ivan Reitman takes another script that needed a lot of work and does his level best to get funny people to find the funniness within. To little effect. Another film that’s not nearly as funny as it needs to be while not building in enough terms of character to actually take advantage of the attempted pathos by the end. The drag of attempted emotion by the end contrasts with the ending of Evolution that had completely cast off any att...