David Vining's Blog, page 167

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

This movie exists in a weird little spot. It’s almost like a franchise film that can use shorthand to work with character relationships, but it’s a prequel to the television series that preceded it in production. Could you watch this before the show? Not at all, you’d be completely lost about who is who and what is what on a very basic level, and that’s before you even bring in David Lynch’s surrealism into the mix. Who’s James and why is he important before showing up for a single scene in ...

The Better Angels

A.J. Edwards is an acolyte of Terrence Malick, and I ended up getting my hands on this movie because of the Malick connection since he acts as producer on the film. I really didn’t expect that I’d be getting what is essentially another Malick film from it. The voiceover, the capture moments, repeated motifs, and the wide-angle lenses all feel like Malick made the film himself. The little that’s written about the film, since it was barely released and mostly forgotten, tends to call the movie...

Christopher Nolan: The Definitive Ranking

Christopher Nolan’s done a lot in just over 20 years in the industry. With a meteoric rise from nothing as a former English Literature student with a camera in Following to the director of heady, wildly expensive Hollywood entertainments like Tenet, Nolan has become one of the true auteur voices in big budget modern filmmaking. Heavily inspired by Stanley Kubrick and Graham Swift’s novel Waterland, Nolan’s films are the work of an active intellect looking to engage his audience, usually thro...

Following

This is the rougher form of manipulation and time jumping that Nolan would use to greater effect in Memento, making this almost feel like a practice run for his real breakout film. That being said, Following, the tiny $6,000 movie Nolan made on weekends for a year is still a fun neo-noir that manages to use its fractured structure to effectively deliver an entertaining experience that, while unrefined, still shows real promise. It reminds me of Kubrick’s Fear and Desire in terms of look and ...

Memento

This has one of those endings that so completely recast everything that came before it that it actually makes the rest of the movie better. It’s easy to see why this blew a lot of minds when it first came out. The finale takes actions from the very beginning and gets the audience to reconsider them in completely new ways, all while keeping the incredibly complex structure clear as the film moves both backwards and forwards to a point in the middle. It really is a bravura performance from a s...

Insomnia

It’s weird watching this in the middle of watching Twin Peaks. Both are about out of town lawmen coming to an out of the way small town in the heavily wooded parts of the American northwest to investigate the murder of a high school girl whose body had been dumped, naked, in plastic bags. The lawmen stay at lodges, and there’s even a use of the name Leland. Based on the Norwegian movie of the same name, Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia, at some level, feels like the more literal version of David...

Batman Begins

I saw this movie twice on opening day way back in 2005. I went by myself, and then, about fifteen minutes after I got home, a girl I had some interest in show up at my door and asked if I wanted to go see it. I immediately said yes, in part for the girl, but mostly so that I could see Batman Begins again. I was gob smacked by this movie. For a while I held that it was perfect, and I quietly held onto that bit of insistence for years as a quiet gnawing worked in my mind. Now, having watched i...

The Prestige

A combination of John McTiernan, Brian DePalma, and Stanley Kubrick with Christopher Nolan’s signature brand of non-linear storytelling, The Prestige is a tale of obsession, narrative storytelling, and trickery. Having the advantage of over a decade and several viewings, I feel bad for those tasked with the assignment to write about this film upon its initial release. This is a very clever movie, and it can be hard to discern, on an initial viewing, if there’s more than the cleverness so cle...

The Dark Knight

The marriage of the crime epic with Batman was kind of perfect in concept from the beginning. Batman, as a superhero, was always more commonly concerned with more down to earth problems, so taking those down to earth problems in the direction of something like Michael Mann’s Heat was such a natural fit that it’s a wonder no one really thought of it before in cinematic terms.

Hinging on the final exchange in Batman Begins, The Dark Knight takes on the idea of escalation, extending it into ...

Inception

Christopher Nolan’s first James Bond movie that’s not a James Bond movie is an entertaining and sustained heist film. I feel a little distant from its main character, never really investing in his emotional journey and I feel like the intricately explained rules of the world end up getting a bit broken by the end, but none of that diminishes the movie’s fun and spectacle which buoy the whole experience.

Technology has found a way to allow people to enter the dreams of a particular subject...