David Vining's Blog, page 160

The Chronicles of Riddick

So, Pitch Black came and went in theaters to a very mild reaction, but it blew up on DVD enough so that Universal decided to get David Twohy over a hundred million dollars to make a follow up to his $23 million budgeted thriller. Faced with the kind of money that went to making an individual entry in The Lord of the Rings film, he and Vin Diesel had little idea of how to use that kind of money. They came up with a trilogy of movies, smartly moving beyond the small film idea of the first, but...

Pitch Black

I’ve never quite understood this movie’s appeal. It’s fine as a little sci-fi thriller. It works on a purely technical level narratively, but it’s not the most engaging thing in the world. It’s not terribly scary, or emotional, or thought provoking. It’s okay but over stylized and unfocused.

In the future, a commercial interstellar ship with everyone in cryogenic sleep and months away from their destination runs into a the trail of a rogue comet, killing the captain and sending the ship o...

Midnight Run

Why do some of the best comedies last? Why are some comedies still beloved decades after their release when comedy notoriously ages rather horribly? It’s about story construction. Much like how Ghostbusters isn’t just a funny movie but a well built story, Midnight Run still works decades later because of the effort put into making all of the different pieces of the story work together in unison, to come together in a cohesive singular narrative with a finale that has all of the pieces interl...

American Psycho

“No new knowledge can be extracted from my telling. This confession has meant nothing.”

Well, I guess we’re done here, then. There’s nothing to talk about it seems since nothing in the movie means anything.

I start with a poor attempt at a joke to highlight the difficulty of talking about this movie at all. It’s easy enough to talk about the pitch-black humor centered around Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman and his murderous impulses, but what do you do with a main character that inten...

Oblivion

I know that this started as a graphic novel by the director Joseph Kosinski, but it has the feel of a movie adapted from a short story. Instead of cramming in too many characters, we get a solid amount of time dedicated to a smaller number of them. Instead of world building bursting at the seams, we have a simple enough concept fleshed out enough for the story’s purposes. This movie has room to breathe, offering a completely self-contained science fiction story that has no need for sequels. ...

Possessor

I don’t think this movie fully works, but I don’t want to dismiss it completely. It’s aggressively unpleasant for long stretches with a wildly unappealing main character and some unclarity about who’s who for a while, but the main character has an emotional (or one might say emotionless) journey that’s well built around unpleasantness and the unclarity actually feeds that some of that at the same time. I’m mixed on this, having never really engaged with it on any level while watching it, but...

The X-Men Franchise: The Definitive Ranking

What a fascinating little franchise. Cohesive, then fractured, then cohesive again, and finally whimpering out into nothing, the X-Men movies are a grab bag of entertaining movies. There’s legitimately good stuff in here, but there’s also misguided and downright boring stuff as well. Like most franchises, it got handed from one creative team to another, lucking out to get Bryan Singer at his height, Matthew Vaughn’s anarchic spirit, and James Mangold working professionally to bring in the se...

The New Mutants

I always thought this movie was a great idea. You take an established franchise/brand, use that to open the film’s box office opening weekend potentially even completely covering the cost of the film that was made with a smaller budget in a new direction. Instead of the fantasy action spectacles that have become de rigeur for the X-Men franchise, we were going to get a stripped down horror film starring a new cast. If it paid off, the studio makes money and they suddenly have a new cast to b...

Dark Phoenix

For the first directorial effort of a long time screenwriter, Simon Kinberg, you’d expect Dark Phoenix to have some semblance of narrative structure, but you’d be wrong. The adventures of the X-Men under Fox ends with a whimper of an adventure, so unfocused and meandering that the first time I watched it I completely forgot everything about it as soon as it was over. This movie, for all the visual flair brought on by its expensive visual effects, is bland and unengaging from beginning to end...

Deadpool 2

They made a mistake regarding Deadpool as a real character. In the first film, we had a barebones story told out of order in order to help provide the skeletal structure on which to hang the character’s attitude and fourth wall-breaking antics. In the sequel, they try to give him an emotional arc, which goes against the how the character works as entertainment, and then throw in two other stories at it without ever making anything all that satisfying.

The movie begins with Deadpool failin...