David Vining's Blog, page 17

Evolution

I’ve had a soft spot for this movie for a while. It’s not good, but I get a certain kick out of it, especially its third act. It’s stupid, intentionally so, and doesn’t make a whole lot of sense with a whole lot of, “Why don’t they just do this?” moments to tarnish things. But, I chuckle pretty consistently. After the dreary messes that were Ivan Reitman’s previous three films, Evolution is something of a return to form. It still doesn’t work, but at least it mildly entertains without any pr...

Six Days, Seven Nights

Really, was Ivan Reitman…always bad at making movies? I mean, the opening gambit of his real career (ignoring Foxy Lady and Cannibal Girls) was three fairly solid (one a stone cold classic) comedy movies dominated by strong personalities, mostly Bill Murray. Since then, it’s been mostly middling fare also dominated by movie stars, but largely hinging on how funny those stars could make things. Efforts at more serious filmmaking almost never worked (the sole exception being Dave which struck ...

Back on Vacation

Just as an fyi to my handful of loyal readers, I will be gone all of next week. I have posts scheduled to go up, of course (I’m actually set for the next month), but I can’t respond until I get back.

So, I’m not dead. Probably not.

I’ll get back and enjoy your comments on my comments about the tail end of Ivan Reitman’s directing career when I return.

Father’s Day

Did Ivan Reitman…not understand comedy? For a film director known exclusively for comedies, two massive misfires in a row in the genre is…weird. Remade from a French comedy, Father’s Day is another drag of a comic effort, this time inexplicably including two of the best film comedians of the 90s. That it doesn’t work is much more fascinating than Junior, anchored by non-comedians, failing to elicit chuckles. There are such a myriad of failures here, all done with obvious and proven comedic t...

Junior

This is a film caught between genres, and that catch deadens everything about the film’s comedic delivery. It’s a screwball comedy mixed with melodrama, and it’s hard to imagine a more contrasting pair of genres to try and mash up. The melodrama simply sucks all the air out of the screwball comedy creating this void where laughs should be. Throw in the fact that the film never gets past the silly, nonsensical science (oh, what Roger Corman would have done with this…probably something terribl...

Dave

A nice Joe Schmo goes to DC fantasy in the vein of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Dave is a thin fairy tale with a lot of charm and precious little to say about American governance. The portrait of corruption is far more interesting, and gets a lot less screentime, than the portrait of the fix itself which is mired in the kind of gauzy, indeterminate definition of fantasy without any real attachment to the real world. Mr. Smith also had this certain detachment from the real world, but it neve...

Kindergarten Cop

This is probably the most rote and standard script Ivan Reitman had made a movie from at this point in his career. Continuing his trend of working with big name stars on high concept comedy/thriller combinations, he makes a light, entertaining film with the best balance between the looseness of the comedy with the tightness of the thriller/dramatic elements since Ghostbusters. It still goes for earnest pathos by the end, which Reitman had never successfully done, but he actually sort of pull...

Ghostbusters II

A tortured screenwriting process to get a sequel to the biggest film of 1984 to screens ends up feeling like little more than Ghostbusters fan service. I mean…I don’t hate it. However, it feels safer, more random, less well built, and to less of a point than the original. In some ways, it also reminds me of Back to the Future Part II in needing to find needlessly complicated ways just to get a movie going. As a piece of entertainment, it has its charms that mostly get me through the film, bu...

Twins

This feels like a compromise film for Ivan Reitman. It’s a continued use of established film stars in a comedy, but with a much looser script that allows them to play around for longer stretches. However, instead of comedy, the film runs on charm. It’s nice for good lengths of time, but it has this extremely obvious tension between different script ideas cobbled together in order to find a way to get an action-themed ending and pad out the thin idea to feature length. I mean, I can easily im...

Legal Eagles

This feels like Ivan Reitman trying to go legit. Instead of a movie star he created, Bill Murray, he brings in a movie star of prominent stature, Robert Redford, and makes a romantic comedy/thriller/courtroom drama. I’m usually not one to complain about combining genres into one story. I welcome it when done well, but Legal Eagles does not do it well. I really get the sense that Reitman was expecting Redford to carry a film like Murray could, improving his way through scenes to find comedic ...