David Vining's Blog, page 171

Faust (1926)

FW Murnau made the most expensive film in German history with Faust, and it bombed horribly making back only half of its production costs. That is a shame, because this movie is a real joy of German Expressionism. The two main centers of that fun are with the overall production design, which is a real height of the entire film movement, and the performance of Emil Jannings as Mephisto. Having made the wildly successful The Last Laugh, Murnau was given carte blanche with this project, and whi...

A Beautiful Mind

I’ve never loved this movie. Upon it’s original release I liked it fine, but I simply could not understand why it won Best Picture over The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. It was partially pique on my part, but revisiting this film for the first time in over ten years, I was surprised at how muted my reaction to the film was far removed from that “controversy”. From the beginning of Ron Howard’s dramatization of John Nash’s life, I felt that the treatment of Nash’s mental illn...

The Man in the White Suit

Out of the Ealing Studio comedies I’ve seen, this is probably my favorite. There’s always a gentle undercurrent of satire to them, but this is the one with the sharpest edge, all while still packaged as a zany mid-century British comedy full of gentle humor. It’s a delightful mix that manages to cast a wonderfully satirical light on the split between capital and labor.

Sidney Stratton is a malcontent genius scientist who has an idea but no funds, so he goes from job to job at different te...

Apocalypto

Mel Gibson decided to make an action movie in Mayan America, in Mayan. He really is a crazy person, and he’s the exact kind of crazy person who should be getting tens of millions of dollars to make movies, because he took one of the weirdest ideas for a relatively large budgeted action movie and made it work pretty much flawlessly. He understands character, escalating tension, theme, and the mechanics of action filmmaking so well that he can seemingly do this in any environment and setting.

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Overlord (1975)

Born from an idea to document some embroidery to commemorate Operation Overlord in World War II, Stuart Cooper’s Overlord tells the story of the months leading up to the famed D-Day invasion from the very tight perspective of a single soldier, Tom. Intercut with extensive footage from the Imperial War Museum’s archives, Cooper created a dreamlike eulogy to the many nameless soldiers who died so young in service to a fight they seemed to grasp only tenuously. Made in the middle of the uproar ...

Ivan’s Childhood

Fear and Desire. Based in World War II with small casts of characters and an elegiac and dreamlike feel, both are the sorts of small first step...

Samurai Rebellion

Masaki Kobayashi was a great Japanese filmmaker who’s been overshadowed by Akira Kurosawa over time. He worked in the samurai genre several times, much as Kurosawa did, but he was far more political. His work functioned as scathing critiques of contemporary Japanese life, in particular the propensity for people to set aside their own desires and rights for the efficacy of the larger system around them. What Kobayashi does so well is to generalize that point thematically and wrap it in the pa...

The Witches (2020)

#15 in my ranking of Robert Zemeckis films.

This feels like a return to an older style of storytelling for Robert Zemeckis. This is more in line with the manic early films of his career rather than the more maturely told movies he’d been making since the 90s. In another way, this also feels like the safest move he could have made after the financial flop that was Allied and the incredibly ill-conceived mess (as well as financial flop) that was Welcome to Marwen. A retelling of a well-rega...

Fellini Joins the Shelf

Let the circus begin!

Robert Zemeckis: The Definitive Ranking

Robert Zemeckis is a wonderful talent who had his heyday back in the 80s and 90s. That could be called his Imperial Period where he dominated the box office and critical acclaim with such films as Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Forrest Gump, Contact, and Cast Away. He’s had stumbles here and there along the way, but he’s still an effective filmmaker.

He’s also changed remarkably as the decades have gone on. Watching his earliest films like I Wanna Hold Your Hand or Used Cars...