David Vining's Blog, page 168

The Dark Knight Rises

For a while, I maintained that this was the best of the Dark Knight trilogy. Watching it for the first time in a few years, I can certainly see why. The second half is pure spectacle filmmaking at an epic scale with an extended set piece that feels expansive and alive and huge all at once. However, that first hour or so is much messier, and I think that last half of the film, largely got me to ignore some of the niggling issues that frontend the film.

The Batman has been absent from Gotha...

Interstellar

I have a bias for movies that at least seem to take space seriously. I think it explains why I put Contact atop my list of Robert Zemeckis movies, and I think it’s why Interstellar is probably going to end up at the top of my list of Christopher Nolan movies. It’s the kind of story that I gravitate towards naturally so that when several movies are at about the same level of esteem in my mind, it’s the space stuff that just ends up winning out. The movie still needs to be good though, and Int...

Dunkirk

This is the work of a very clever genius, a filmmaker in complete command of every aspect of filmmaking and able to bend it all to his will. Christopher Nolan is able to combine art house construction with broad filmmaking appeal to create one of the most invigorating big screen adventures of the last few years, with one very small exception. Much like 1917 by Sam Mendes, Dunkirk represents a new generation of elite filmmakers tackling the subjects their forebears repeatedly mined for storie...

Tenet

I’m gonna be cute. Nolan loves time, so I’m going to review his filmography backwards, watching his filmic technique devolve back to his indie feature film debut.

There’s high concept, and then there’s Christopher Nolan’s Tenet. It’s really two movies in one. The first is a standard spy thriller full of twists and turns. The other is a high concept science fiction action epic that is designed to provide the audience a new action experience unlike they’ve seen before. The complexities of t...

Brick

This is a perfect movie. Rian Johnson started his career with the kind of introduction to audiences that directors never really get. This ranks with Citizen Kane and Eraserhead as one of the best debut films of a director ever. Adapting the hard-boiled detective genre to a California high school, Johnson provided new color and energy to a long moribund genre that he grew up loving through Dashiell Hammett stories, writing an exceedingly tight mystery with shocking emotional depth. Using San ...

Federico Fellini: The Definitive Ranking

Federico Fellini was a wonderfully distinctive voice in cinema. It’s easy for me to see why he was so beloved at the height of the art cinema era of the 50s and 60s because he’s honestly just a lot of fun. I obviously don’t love everything he did, but so much is carried by a light air. At the same time, though, he was a fiercely intelligent filmmaker who had something distinctive to say about the world he was in, the world he left, and the world he saw coming.

Alternatively bright and col...

The Voice of the Moon

Fellini’s last movie. He started his directing career with Variety Lights in 1950 and ends it here, in 1990, with forty years of change to his beloved home country in between. It turns out, though, that Fellini didn’t have a whole lot more to say. He’d been repeating certain ideas since the fifties, but he’d been able to provide new twists and variations, the most interesting in his late career being his self-reflective turn in City of Women where he provided a critique of his own view of wo...

Intervista

I ended up with the opposite reaction I’ve had over the last few movies with Intervista. I was deliriously in love with everything until the ending when I felt like it just petered out. Each of the disparate pieces was wonderful as I waited for Fellini to bring it all together in the end, but that ending felt like a stop rather than a culmination, undermining the sum total of the individual episodes, making the entire film feel like a cute exercise more than anything else.

It’s essentiall...

Ginger and Fred

Federico Fellini’s two most frequent actors, his wife Giulietta Masina and the star Marcello Mastroianni, come together for the first time in a Fellini picture, and the result is a rather wonderful little gem of a film late in Fellini’s career. It’s about getting old and reflecting back on the past that’s gone, told through two characters that made their livelihoods dancing like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers around the start of the Second World War. Touching on the kind of off-kilter forms ...

And the Ship Sails On

It seems odd for Fellini to have picked the Belle Epoque to be the subject of his satirical eye. Ending more than seventy years before And the Ship Sails On‘s production and ending six years before Fellini’s birth, La Belle Epoque was a Franco-centric period marked by peace and cultural and technological advancements. It all came crashing down with the violence and bloodshed of World War I. And it’s on this cruise from Italy to a small island, designed to honor the recently departed and grea...