David Vining's Blog, page 174

Birds of Prey and The Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn

This movie has a single objective: to hate men. There’s literally no other reason this movie exists. No male character is remotely good in the end, they’re all backstabbing rapists and psychopaths while even the criminal women are all sympathetic to the extreme. So, fine. That’s its ultimate theme, but what about how the movie tells its story? Well, let’s judge it purely on that, never mind its rampant misandry. It’s, um, it’s terrible.

So, the movie is sort of told from Harley Quinn’s pe...

Shazam!

I actually watched the DCEU movies a bit out of order. Immediately preceding my viewing of David F. Sandberg’s Shazam! I watched Suicide Squad and Birds of Prey. Starting up this I was relieved to see the simply building blocks of story presented in an order that made narrative sense, and I almost cheered. Sandberg’s adventure into newfound superhero abilities has some issues along the way that drag it down a bit, but it’s nice to see that Warner Brothers can still hire a director who unders...

Justice League

The biggest mistake Warner Brothers seems to have made about their big team up picture isn’t that they forced it too early, it’s that they forced it to be two hours long. I have to imagine that part of the reason Zack Snyder left the project in the middle of post-production was that Warner Brothers was demanding a two-hour film and he knew he couldn’t tell the story he had made well in less than three hours. After the loss of his daughter to suicide, he probably wasn’t up for that kind of fi...

Wonder Woman

I know that the general consensus is that Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman righted the DCEU ship, but for the faults of the previous film, I don’t think that was really a way to make it better. It’s brighter, more colorful, with a more upbeat central character, for sure, several things I have no problem with whatsoever, but there are sections of this film that I find poorly done and even thematically confused. It’s really a mixed bag of a solo adventure for the Amazon.

My problems with the fil...

Suicide Squad

Failure has a thousand fathers, but I don’t think you could ever excuse David Ayer from the dumpster fire that is Suicide Squad. Yes, the stories of Warner Brothers getting different editing houses to compete over the edit and a commercial editing firm won to help make the movie a near completely incomprehensible mess, but I don’t think that the editing mess can really hide the fact that this is a movie that tried too much in too short a time. Would a longer, cleaner cut improve things? Prob...

Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice

The sequel to Man of Steel feels both of the previous film and decidedly apart. Where the first one had  a rough visual aesthetic with a lot of hand held camera work, the sequel largely sidesteps that. Where the first explored character in a solid block before giving way to a relatively straightforward plot in the second half, the sequel is mired in an overcomplicated plot from the first scene. The ambition is still there, though, to tell a story of epic scope, and while I definitely don’t t...

Man of Steel

There’s something big and ambitious and earnest about Zach Snyder’s take on Superman that I find really admirable. Not everything in this movie works, but the mythic scope and embrace of the idea of gods coming to fight it out on Earth is handled with such weight and energy that I get swept up in the spectacle every time.

Snyder took the well-worn story of Superman’s origins and recast it rather dramatically in a couple of different directions. The first is aesthetics. Krypton looks brown...

Gemini Man

It’s really unfortunate when you see quality directors go down holes they really shouldn’t have gone down in the first place. Ang Lee decided that 120 frames per second was the wave of the future a while back, and he’s not letting go. So, while he made it happen in Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, to a muted response, he decided to repackage the technique using the newest in digital cloning, one of the biggest movie stars in the world, and one of the lamest scripts that had been languishing ...

Terrence Malick: The Definitive Ranking

A top seven, of nine movies, because I don’t follow anyone’s rules, not even my own. At least it’s not a top ten, you know?

I wish more people shared my love of Terrence Malick’s work. He is a mad genius that angers beyond rage half of the people he works with like Christopher Plummer and James Horner, and becomes a center of creativity for others like John Savage and John Fisk. Looking at his end results on their own, I have nothing but praise for the man and his work. His worst film, by...

A Hidden Life

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Terrence Malick is a genius. This is the first time since The Tree of Life that Malick approached a project with a completed script that everyone got, and this is the first time since The New World that he tells a story linearly. His experimental phase is over, though it does inform his technique here. In the end, Malick came back from his experimental phase with one of his most affecting and devastating films that is deceptively small but betrays ...