David Vining's Blog, page 18

Ghostbusters

Ivan Reitman had been trying to find somewhat to combine the slob, mostly played by Bill Murray, winning out over the squares in the system. The solutions found have been uneasy, at best, in Meatballs and Stripes (Stripes needed to edge into pure fantasy territory just to get audiences to forget some inconveniences in the plot), but it’s in Dan Aykroyd’s insane musings that were the original script to Ghostbusters that Reitman found the most perfect vehicle for his vision of the slob winning...

Stripes

Bill Murray, Ivan Reitman, and Harold Ramis return once more to the screen with another celebration of the North American slob, this time set in the US Army. Post-Vietnam and obviously released in a culture still deeply skeptical of American military power, Stripes is irreverent, funny, and a testament for how the slobs could fix everything…by screwing everything up first. This is Reitman taking another step closer to the John Landis vision of anarchic comedy, but perhaps a bit more laid bac...

Meatballs

Ivan Reitman went from a small, independent, and amateur production to directing theater for a few years until he started producing movies again (most notably John Landis‘ Animal House). Gearing up production on a script by a group of writers (Len Blum, Dan Goldberg, Janis Allen, and Harold Ramis), Reitman couldn’t get Landis to return (he was prepping The Blues Brothers), so he decided to just direct it himself. What’s probably most interesting, though, is that Reitman completely changed th...

Cannibal Girls

Having just finished all of Roger Corman’s directed work, Ivan Reitman’s second film is an interesting comparison. It’s an exploitation film about, well, cannibal girls, but in contrast to Corman’s work which could be overstuffed and messy, but they were never slow. This is confused, messy, and slow. It makes it simply a harder kind of exploitation film to sit through. I mean, this isn’t complete dreck, just mostly dreck. Unfunny, ugly dreck. Mostly.

Clifford (Eugene Levy) and his girlfri...

Ivan Reitman: A Statement of Purpose

In my quest to discover cinema, bouncing from one director to another, I decided to follow up Roger Corman (and my brief interlude with Sergei Eisenstein) with someone I felt would be a marked departure. And I settled on Ivan Reitman.

Reitman is not one often equates with the word auteur (for the uninitiated, I actually hate the term and how its used in discussing movies which ends up more about gatekeeping than discussion), but like John Landis he has movies with indelible impacts on Ame...

Next…

Roger Corman: The Definitive Ranking

For those who just come across this ranking, this is not a ranking of Corman’s produced work. So, no Piranha or Boxcar Bertha or Dementia 13. This is just his directed works.

And you know what? I had a much better time with this than I thought I would. I’m not one of the Corman faithful who finds joy in some of the less polished early exploitation stuff, but I did find a rather consistent strain of filmmaking craft that lent itself well to making the most of scripts as they were, and no m...

Frankenstein Unbound

Roger Corman comes out of directorial retirement for a $1 million paycheck and an opportunity to adapt the novel Frankenstein Unbound by Brian Aldiss. The result is far more interesting than I expected but far less than what it could have been. A story so stuffed with unnecessary subplots that distract from the core of the film while the core remains interesting unto itself. It’s something of a precursor to the sumptuously produced classical horror adaptations of the 90s like Francis Ford Co...

Von Richthofen and Brown

I’m going to be honest: I was really surprised at how much I liked this. Roger Corman had felt tired of the whole directing gig since the end of the Poe cycle. His hippie period is something of a creative disaster (though he definitely met financial success with them), and he felt tired through it all. Making movies is hard work, and Corman was a hard-worker, but there was something distinctly like a feeling of just being lost in his work there. So, when Von Richthofen and Brown ended up bei...

Gas-s-s-s (or, It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It)

I’m interested in Roger Corman’s director’s cut of this. This is something of a disaster, continued evidence that Corman was simply lost amongst the hippie generation he was trying to take advantage of. It’s hard to judge him as the artist of this piece, though, apparently so cut up by AIP that Corman ended his professional relationship with them afterwards. All we have, though, is the final result, and it’s not good. It’s bad. Deeply unfunny (most of the time, I got a handful of decent chuc...