David Vining's Blog, page 165

Writing Update – 2/17/21

I finally finished it.

I finished the first draft of my 6th novel. It took me over a year, far longer than it should have, but it’s finally done at 412 handwritten pages.

Why did this take me so long? First was the lockdowns. I had a writing system in place at my office where I would take my lunches for writing. I could pick up my binder and my pen, find a quiet corner of the office and write without interruption for an hour. That went away when my job decided that we should all work from ...

The King of Comedy

This is a pitch-black comedy about fame, celebrity, and the lack of communication in a world dominated by the illusions of mass media. It also feels like an alternate universe treatment of Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver where, instead of getting a job with a taxi company he went to a comedy club and saw Jerry Langford’s premiere performance.

Rupert Pupkin (sounds a lot like bumpkin to me) is a celebrity and autograph hound who has a very low-level job as a courier (which he calls communic...

Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart in the Land of Demons

Kenji Misumi returns to the Lone Wolf and Cub franchise as director for the last time, and he provides the sort of competent professionalism that was missing from the previous entry, Baby Cart in Peril. Unfortunately, he brings little else, creating another rather bland entry in a franchise barely interested in any kind of cohesive storytelling, unable to quite figure out how to fill out a single story any other way than throwing in a second one to help fill the time.

The movie begins in ...

Raging Bull

This feels like a companion piece to La Strada. Both are about violent men who have trouble expressing anything other than aggression, ultimately left alone as little more than sideshows at the end of a long life, having cast aside everything that really mattered to them. Jake LaMotta ends up sitting in a crummy little dressing room, reciting the words of Budd Schulberg from On the Waterfront, long past his glory days, talking like he’s been denied by outside forces from his happiness. Anoth...

New York, New York

Martin Scorsese was at the height of his drug abuse phase when he conceived of New York, New York, a movie about two musicians that can never be together even though they love each other, told in the style of a big budget musical from Hollywood’s golden age. I actually think this movie could have worked with its contrasting visual aesthetic and subject matter, except that the technique that Scorsese leaned into undermined a lot of what he was building. I think the movie gets better as it goe...

Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart in Peril

The franchise loses its original director, Kenji Misumi, for Buichi Saito, and Saito takes the fourth movie into a much more purely exploitative direction and the semblance of serious consideration of the samurai code that had been intermittently addressed gets tossed aside fully for empty action and titillation. This is the low point of the franchise up to this point.

Like every Lone Wolf and Cub film up to this point, Baby Cart in Peril is made up of multiple, barely connected storyline...

Taxi Driver

Rarely has a movie set out to create a sense of uncomfortable loneliness and succeeded so well as Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader did in Taxi Driver. Born from Schrader’s own sense of isolation at a particularly unpleasant low point in his life, this tale of a loner cabbie is one of a man lost in a sea of people, unable to make any kind of connection, and left to his own delusions that take him into dangerous places. Unmoored from anything but his one-way conversation with his parents thro...

Casanova (2005)

Having watched Fellini’s take on the historical figure recently, I jumped at the opportunity to watch the more modern take starring Heath Ledger when my wife suggested it one night on a weekend. I wanted to compare the two, and they are vastly different films. I’ll talk a bit about the different takes later, but first I must address the film as it is.

The 2005 film by Lasse Hallstrom is a standard romantic comedy that takes a historical figure and makes him believe in true love. Heath Led...

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore

Scorsese seemed to be following the path of a director determined to maintain his own voice in cinema but also understanding that he needed to work with producers at the same time. Mean Streets was purely an independent production eventually picked up by Warner Brothers. His next film, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, was purely a studio production driven by Ellen Burstyn’s love for the script and desire to help an up and coming director. This would never fall under Scorsese’s films that wou...

Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart to Hades

Finally, three movies in, I feel like this franchise pulled together its disparate elements into something approaching a cohesive whole. It’s not entirely successful, but I do think that it’s successful enough to work overall.

The movie starts as has become routine with these films with a moment allowing Itto Ogami, former Shogunate Executioner, to demonstrate his incredible skill with a blade against those sent by the Yagyu Clan to kill him. He dispatches a group of ninjas with ease and ...