David Vining's Blog, page 173

Back to the Future Part II

The two Bobs painted themselves into a narrative corner with their jokey ending to the first Back to the Future movie. They had no intention of ever making another one, so the tag at the end was just for giggles. But, the first movie was hugely successful and Universal threw money at the two Bobs until they relented and made another pair of movies. So, saddled with a throwaway line about Marty’s kids and taking his girlfriend along, the two Bobs realized that they were in a jam. Dealing with...

Who Framed Roger Rabbit

This movie is a joy. It’s a technical achievement, a wonderful callback to a lost era in Hollywood, and a great example of a genre that had fallen out of favor all while being thoroughly entertaining with enough broad appeal to be a big box office hit. This is Robert Zemeckis using his accumulated craft and knowledge of the medium and applying it to someone else’s work with energy and intelligence without ever losing a sense of fun. A movie about humans and cartoons feels like it should be f...

Back to the Future

Thinking back to my model of storytelling, I have stated my preference for theme as the most interesting element of storytelling and plot as the least. It’s a taste thing. Back to the Future, though, is almost all plot and I find it as completely infectious as anyone else. This movie is just plain fun, and it manages that because of how Zemeckis approaches a plot heavy film. It’s been obvious from the beginning of his career with I Wanna Hold Your Hand that the two Bobs (Zemeckis and Gale) l...

Romancing the Stone

This is the movie that saved Robert Zemeckis’ career. His first two films I Wanna Hold Your Hand and Used Cars are fun little movies, but they were not exactly the financial successes that the studios were hoping from the new whiz kid they wanted to be another Steven Spielberg. It almost looked like Zemeckis’ directing days were done until Michael Douglas picked him out to direct his next producing and starring film, an original screenplay of a romance novelist finding herself in the kind of...

Used Cars

Early Robert Zemeckis movies tell me that Robert Zemeckis should never have worked from a large budget. His small movies have all of his charms and none of his major issues. He builds clockwork like plots, fills them with fun characters, and tells the stories with an infectious energy. He’s like Nolan with less pretention and a greater sense of fun. Used Cars is a very fun early example of how Bob Zemeckis and Bob Gale could put their heads together to put on this kind of show.

The movie ...

I Wanna Hold Your Hand

Ensemble pieces are hard, and Robert Zemeckis lands one pretty well with his very first movie. The newest wunderkind and protégé of Steven Spielberg got his first movie with Universal on the promise that Spielberg would finish the film if Zemeckis didn’t work out. Well, work out Zemeckis did, going on to a long film career that includes several classics. Working with his friend and writing partner Bob Gale, Zemeckis started his career with this feature film that pointed to a lot of things he...

The Twilight Zone: The Movie

This is one of those movies that has conversations dominated by something outside of it, the deaths of Vic Morrow, Renee Shin Chen, and Myca Dinh Le. You have to talk about it in conjunction with this movie not just because it happened while filming but, less importantly, because it negatively affected two of the segments in the film. If you want to just talk about the film itself without bringing anything else into it, you end up without real explanations for why the first two segments feel...

Cats

I don’t like to use the word flawed when talking about movies, but sometimes it’s unavoidable. Cats is deeply, deeply flawed. It’s the sort of flawed that makes the movie’s mere existence a flabbergasting paradox, leaving one with questions about the layers and layers Tom Hooper had to work through to get the $95 million to produce and release such a broken, ill-conceived piece of cinema. He convinced studio executives, producers, production designers, and visual effects supervisors that his...

Brainstorm

I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to love a movie more and not been able to. The second of only two movies Douglas Trumbull ever directed (the first was Silent Running), Brainstorm has some marvelously wonderful moments. Moments of genuine emotional tenderness and awe that recall the visions and effect of the Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite section of 2001: A Space Odyssey (that Trumbull famously lead most of the special effects work on). And yet, the whole thing gets weighed down by a generic ...

The DCEU Ranked: The Definitive Ranking

Ah, the DC Extended Universe. It’s a bastard child of a franchise that, ever since Batman V Superman, has been running away from itself while being pushed around by a rotating team of executives in every different direction. It wanted to be the answer to Marvel, but there never seemed to be a terribly strong voice at the executive level, like a Kevin Feige, to operate as a guiding hand. I suppose Zack Snyder had too much early control, determining the first steps of the franchise entirely on...