David Vining's Blog, page 166

Mean Streets

Scorsese moved beyond homage and made his style in his third feature film, the first one born from himself completely and with a single, consistent production schedule. This makes it the first real feature film that could be called Scorsese’s, to a certain degree. The first two films essentially amounted to practice, and he worked out so many kinks in those two outings. His third film, Mean Streets, is a down and dirty independent film that evokes a specific time and place to great degree wh...

Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart at the River Styx

I’m beginning to feel like there’s a disconnect between me and these films that many of their fans do not share. I can appreciate the action elements, but the artistic ones feel shallow and poorly assembled to me. I had expected the narrative construction problems from the first film to get addressed in the second because the second no longer needed to tell Ogami’s origin story, however Baby Cart at the River Styx continued the dual story construction, and, once again, I think the film suffe...

Boxcar Bertha

Martin Scorsese released his first film, Who’s That Knocking at My Door, spent some time editing the documentary Woodstock, and then Roger Corman scooped him up to make a quick and dirty adaptation of a fake woman’s life story. John Cassavetes watched the film right after Scorsese made it, embraced him, and told him to never make an exploitation film again. Cassavetes was right. Scorsese probably did the best he could with the limited material, but the need for exploitative elements undermin...

Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance

This is really two movies in one. The first is the origin story for Itto Ogami, the Shogunate Executioner, and his son Daigoro and how they were framed for a thought crime, sentenced to death, and escaped with their lives. The second feels like just the next in a series of continuing adventures with the pair. I think that there’s going to be a larger connection to Ogami’s story in that continuing adventure, though. It wouldn’t make much sense otherwise.

Ogami is a highly respected swordsm...

Who’s That Knocking at My Door

Martin Scorsese’s first film was made in three distinct blocks. The first was when he set out to make a short film about the character J.R. played by Harvey Keitel titled Bring on the Dancing Girls. A couple of years later it was expanded with the story of J.R. courting The Girl and the title was changed to I Call First. A major scene, the fantastical sex sequence, was added at the insistence of the film’s purchasing producer, Joseph Brenner, in order to help market the film as a sexploitati...

Elizabethtown

This was the beginning of the end for Cameron Crowe. He has made two movies since, and neither was terribly well received, but it was Elizabethtown that went from anticipation to antipathy, marking what seems to be the rest of his career. It didn’t help that the reception at the Toronto International Film Festival was so resoundingly negative that Crowe did an emergency cut that drastically reduced the film’s length before its wide release.

The movie begins with the main character, Drew B...

Twin Peaks: The Return

This really is an 18-hour movie. From beginning to end, it’s the same pair of writers, Mark Frost and David Lynch, the same director, Lynch, and the same cast in the same production telling one very long story. That it was released in individual episodes on Showtime makes little difference, I think. It’s also my favorite piece of storytelling from the entire franchise of Twin Peaks. The first season is good, but its adherence to a pretty much dead genre, the primetime soap opera, limits my e...

The Naked Prey

Mel Gibson was heavily inspired by The Naked Prey when he made Apocalypto. The second half of Gibson’s film is almost a remake of Cornel Wilde’s 1966 film about a man with nothing having to run through the wilderness back home being chased by several warriors. Where Gibson’s film was an expert and ever-increasing exercise in tension, Wilde’s film does feel like a first draft form. Gibson seems to have learned all the lessons from Wilde’s film, correcting most of his mistakes, for Wilde’s fil...

My Favorite Year

Mel Brooks welcomes Errol Flynn to Sid Caesar comedy television show in the 1950s, and Jimmy Hoffa tries to ruin it all. That’s essentially the plot of this fictionalized recounting of a week in the Saturday evening comedy showbusiness, a vehicle for Peter O’Toole to play a drunk and out of control actor of yesteryear with his best years behind him, guiding the young Mark Linn-Baker through the intersection of movies and real life to find the truth of the man who entertained the world as a s...

Defending Your Life

Here’s a little gem from the early 90s that I hadn’t heard of until recently. It’s an unchallenging bit of wit centered around Albert Brooks’ humor using a view of the afterlife that functions around the idea of reincarnation. There’s something about overcoming fear to become a better person which feels surprisingly thin, but it’s the sort of thin that is a nice veneer to a little story of the afterlife.

Daniel Miller (Albert Brooks) is an ad executive who, on the first day he gets his sm...