David Vining's Blog, page 189

Champagne

This is an odd little movie that wants to be a comedy but takes its main character to a very, very dark place and doesnt seem to realize it. The comedic bits are broad, but theyre surprisingly far apart. Its a weird little movie.

So, The Girl (these characters dont actually have names) flies her airplane out into the middle of the Atlantic where she intentionally crashes the plane near a steam ship to Europe where her beau is. Shes in open defiance of her father whos very against the...

The Death of Stalin

I was expecting a much more straight comedy based on the movies marketing that what I got, but while the movie is often uproariously funny, its still the story of a handful of awful people fighting to the death for control of the living corpse that was Soviet Russia. The comedy is there, not for no reason, but because it helps highlight the absolute absurdity of the overall situation but it also brings to the fore the strong personalities involved.

Like most Russian literature, I have...

Parasite

Who is the antagonist? This question popped into my head after I finished Bong Joon Hos Parasite and as I read some snippets from Bong himself. He consistently refers to the film as a tragedy, and, as I wondered who the antagonist was, I remembered that in Greek tragedy, the fall of the hero always stems from a flaw within themselves. Then the answer clicked. The antagonists are the Kims.

So, the Kims are a poor family of four, struggling to make a living in Seoul and conning their way into...

The Black Stallion

I love how quiet this movie is, and I also love how loud it gets. The sound design of this film is absolutely amazing and really helps with the fact that theres so little dialogue in general, especially in the first half, and the center of the story is the relationship between a boy and a horse where they cant communicate verbally. With that in mind, sound design isnt just important, but it needs to be visually engaging, and The Black Stallion is really beautiful.

Alec is a small boy on a...

BloodRayne

Of the four Uwe Boll films Ive seen, I think that this might be the worst. Its stiff competition, for sure, but theres something extra inept, amateurish, misguided, and unappealing about BloodRayne. All of Bolls staples are here from inexplicably unnatural dialogue to incredibly dull performances to incomprehensible action scenes to flat cinematography, its all here, but the story of BloodRayne, an attempt at epic fantasy, is so overstuffed and undercooked by design that its kind of...

Easy Virtue

This feels like a thematic sequel to Hitchcocks Downfall or When Boys Leave Home. Both have young characters see their reputations besmirched unfairly and have their lives fall apart because of that. They also happen to take the idea from the ideas of the different sexes. Downfall was obvious about the destruction of a young man through the destruction of his reputation, and Easy Virtue is the destruction of a young woman through the destruction of her reputation. I think Downfall worked a...

Dune News! Worm Sign!

Sure, Im a day late I just kinda stopped doing the news bits, but Im too excited by this to let it go.

Dune spread in Vanity Fair!

 

Marty

This movie is so small. Its about two people and the handful who surround them in the 36 hours that mark the beginnings of their relationship. Its also the first American independent film that convinced American distributors that there was a similar market in the US for independent films as there was in Europe for European independent films. Its part of the same school of film that had previously produced On the Waterfront (which had actual studio backing) that focused on regular people...

The In-Laws

In some ways, this reminded me of Billy Wilders One, Two, Three in that both have collected characters at their core who watch their control over their world fall away and descend into anarchy. They are ultimately both quite different, but the overall movement of the plot into madness recalled each other to me.

My only real problem with the film is how it begins. Knowing nothing of the movie when I started it other than the cover art, I was surprised to see a thriller-like heist take place....

Patriot Games

I dont really like comparing movies directly, since theres an implication that if one did X than the other should also do X in order to be good simply because the first movie did X. However, I do think that comparisons can be helpful in highlighting how one movie fails to engage as well as it could. Patriot Games is the sequel to The Hunt for Red October, and they both purport to be thrillers, but the second movie in the franchise doesnt work nearly as well as the first. Its not bad, but it...