David Vining's Blog, page 172

Welcome to Marwen

Let’s just put this right out there: Robert Zemeckis was the wrong director for this job. Inside this bombastic and frankly odd combination of CGI laden fantasy and sad reality is a touching story of a broken man recovering from trauma through his unique little pocket of art. After Flight, it seemed like Zemeckis could deliver that little movie, but he cast aside everything small about this story in favor of over-produced spectacle that makes the central story trite at best. Terry Gilliam wo...

Allied

There are some Robert Zemeckis movies that really shouldn’t be spoiled before watching them. Cast Away and What Lies Beneath were a couple, and it’s safe to add Allied to that list. Yet the trailers for all of them simply gave everything away. That’s a conscious decision on the part of Zemeckis and the marketing teams in order to try and sell the movie to a broad audience and attract them, I get it, but there are surprises and turns to these movies that would be better enjoyed cold. A lot of...

Flight

Robert Zemeckis emerges from several years in the world of performance capture animation with a tale about addiction, admitting faults, and finding ways to move on. This couldn’t possible be about the animation, could it? No matter Zemeckis’ meaning at making this film, he comes out with his best movie since Cast Away, an intimate and penetrative look at alcoholism told at the personal level. It recalls Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend but is far less consciously “important”. It’s much more f...

A Christmas Carol (2009)

This could have the best of the three motion capture animated films Robert Zemeckis made in the 2000s. It embraces a slightly more cartoonish visual aesthetic that fits best with the animation style, using exaggerated character design really well, as well as a few very good performances, especially from Jim Carrey, but it also contains some of the worst impulses of these movies in that it falls down a rabbit hole of spectacle at the wrong moments. Overall, it’s a good, heartfelt film, a very...

The Polar Express

Ah, the nightmare people. Robert Zemeckis was always a technically minded director with stories from actors like Kathleen Turner on Romancing the Stone about how he was more interested in interesting camera angles than her acting, but he never let the technology drown out the stories of his movies until now. He had his toys, and he loved them. Maybe he would use them more than other directors would (like on What Lies Beneath), but they were never the point until he discovered motion capture ...

Cast Away

This is the ultimate Robert Zemeckis film. A man, alone with a problem that he needs to solve, a handful of tools at his disposal, all of which he uses, and long takes. This is the movie that he was born to make, and it’s the movie he had been building up to with decades of experience. Young Zemeckis could not have pulled off the quiet of Tom Hanks’ life on a deserted island like this.

Chuck is a FedEx employee who helps set up and fix foreign branches of the company. He starts in Moscow,...

What Lies Beneath

Famously made in the year long production break on Cast Away designed to give Tom Hanks enough time to slim down for the second half of that film, What Lies Beneath is a trifle in Robert Zemeckis’ filmography. It’s an homage to Hitchcock that ends up feeling surprisingly generic as it continues, but the whole thing is buoyed by Zemeckis’ sheer talent as he imbues every big scene with enough style and suspense that it’s almost enough to make up for the movie’s generic nature. Almost.

Clair...

Contact

This is one of those movies where I know from the opening shot that I’m watching something incredibly special. The opening is so unique, confident, clear, and effective that I know I’m in the exact right hands to tell this story. Robert Zemeckis took over the pre-production efforts after the studio fired George Miller, was granted full artistic control including final cut, and built off of what Miller had established to tell the filmed version of Carl Sagan’s novel about alien contact. I’d l...

Forrest Gump

Gosh, some people really love this movie, and there’s no way to convince me that a lot of that isn’t due to nostalgia on the part of the audience. The main character’s journey functions as a survey of the 60s, prime material for Baby Boomers to relive their early days in heartwarming package. I…did not live through the 60s. I do not share this love for the period, so I think that explains some of my more muted reaction. It’s a fine little movie with a strong central character and very good t...

Back to the Future Part III

After the pained opening and inventing re-imagining that was the second movie in the franchise, Marty and Doc return for their final outing with a more straightforward time travel adventure in line with the first one. From beginning to end, this is much more confident and assured storytelling on the part of Robert Zemeckis, standing on its own far better than the previous film while also giving Doc a surprisingly effective little love story.

Writing the second and third movie together, an...