David Vining's Blog, page 186

The Mask of Zorro

Buckles get swashed good and hard and sexy in The Mask of Zorro, and I find its energy, sense of fun and adventure, and its action to be invigoratingly intoxicating. This is one of the most purely enjoyable action movies of the 90s, and it makes the reboot of a long dead franchise feel like a completely natural and rational choice instead of a desperate cash grab.

The old Zorro, Don Diego de la Vega, finishes one last ride in the service of the people of California before the Spanish backed gov...

The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T

I remember reading that Dr. Seuss had written a movie, I jumped at the chance to view it. Of course, that means that I put it to my Netflix DVD queue and wait patiently for it to reach number 1. But, we have finally come to the day that it arrived and I have to say that it’s pretty much exactly what I would have expected from the writer of visually inventive and weird children’s books, but with less rhyming.

It’s a story set in a dream world that follows dream logic. A young boy is sitting at t...

The Skin Game

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I found it hard to not think about Juno and the Paycock as I finished The Skin Game and read the little there is to read about it. Much like the former picture, The Skin Game is based on a play, but unlike Juno, it actually feels like a movie. Hitchcock wasn’t able to do much in terms of scripting and the choice of the project wasn’t his being a studio assignment and limited by contract to keep pretty much all of the original play intact, but it doesn’t feel like someone set up a camera in fron...

Sarah’s Key

I found this tedious and maudlin until the final act got going. It got better from there, but not enough to save the movie overall. I can see how many people would get hit by it emotionally, but I just didn’t feel it, finding the character work too thin, the structure undermining to the overall effect, and the result more predictable than the movie seems to think it was. It’s handsome and well-acted, for sure, but I can’t help but see the manipulative gears of the film in full view.

It’s a dual...

The Killer Inside Me

Movies that try to delve into the psychology of sociopathic killers have an inherent issue that distances the work from the audience. It’s not, actually, that the audience can’t connect with a killer, it’s that the movie usually has little to actually say about the state of being a killer. Even Ingmar Bergman hit this with From The Life of Marionettes, a film that purported to delve into the psychology of a killer but ended up feeling like someone who didn’t understand killing trying to figure ...

Mary

I’m not actually going to review this. The only copies I could find did not have English subtitles, but I did watch the whole thing in German. Since I know precisely two and a half words of German, I wasn’t really able to follow the action of the movie in any great detail. However, the fact that Mary is almost the exact same movie as Murder! except in German, I can at least talk about it a bit.

I’m not sure how common it was in the early sound era for studios to make English and foreign version...

Quentin Tarantino

I love Tarantino. I don’t think he’s made a bad film. His worst film, Death Proof is still entertaining if not quite where it could be. He’s a massive film nerd and has an encyclopedic knowledge of cinema and its history that makes my own personal knowledge seem infantile by comparison. That massive knowledge bank manifests in several different ways.

Tarantino actually got very early direct encouragement from Terry Gilliam. Gilliam, as an established filmmaker, took part as a mentor in a semina...

Murder!

This feels like is should have been an early Hitchcock film that fit in easily with the parts of his filmography that he’s famous for like The Wrong Man or North by Northwest, but Murder!‘s story of one man alone without being able to call the police is really weirdly built. It also contains some more misconceptions about the use of sound that were fairly common in the early talkie era.

My problem with the film is that an alternate theory to the murder doesn’t come up for about an hour. In that...

The Die Hard Franchise Ranked: The Definite Ranking

Another small list, lower than 10, which is good. Those are terrible.

I’m a bit weird about the Die Hard franchise. I don’t like the first as much as most people, and my favorite is not what many think it is. Most seem to be a lot more forgiving of the second than I am.

But one thing we can all agree on: The last one is bad. Let us celebrate our similarities.

A Good Day to Die Hard

“I didn’t hate this movie. I mostly found it boring and unengaging. It was simply too inept to get all worked up...

A Good Day to Die Hard

I’m not one to demand that films in a franchise adhere to the conventions and formula of those that preceded it, so the fifth entry in the Die Hard franchise doing stuff like going to Russia and essentially becoming a spy action thriller don’t bother me. What bothers me is that the trip to Russia is thinly drawn and ends up making little to no sense and the spy action thriller stuff isn’t exactly good.

There’s an exchange in Live Free or Die Hard where John McClane and Matthew Farrell are drivi...