David Vining's Blog, page 19

Bloody Momma

Another ensemble film that is so diffuse in its focus that it ends up feeling like it does nothing at all. The eponymous central character gets lost amidst her sons for long stretches, key scenes of action are handled far too quickly, and there’s a use of stock footage to demonstrate the passage of time that never seems to add anything to the events. On top of it all, characters hardly ever feel like more than caricatures because the film is so short, there are so many of them, and there’s s...

Target: Harry

Supposedly an effort by ABC to both get into feature filmmaking and create what could have been a backdoor pilot to a television series, Target: Harry is a limp spy romp through a couple of European locales. There are obvious influences floating all around the film that seem to be replacements for entertainment, but ultimately it’s just something of an uninspiring genre exercise.

Harry Black (Vic Morrow) is an ex-con who flies tourists around on private flights and based in Monte Carlo. H...

The Trip

I think it’s safe to say that blaming Roger Corman for Easy Rider has a solid basis in fact. Not only did he direct The Wild Angels (starring Peter Fonda), but he also made this, The Trip, a psychedelic journey into the mind of Fonda (with Dennis Hopper in a small role) with heavy use of trippy imagery that obviously has some connective tissue to the similar sights from movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey (which came out the following year) and El Topo (three years later). It’s also extremely ...

The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre

I don’t know where the decision came from the jam pack this film full of voice over work, but I think it must have been a post-production decision. Lines of dialogue get cut off and scenes just continue to play out as the voice over man details who is who in the scene. I suspect that the script by Howard Browne was a subtler affair, an ensemble piece that tried to rely on implication for character building rather than outright talking. However, during post, someone, probably Corman, decided ...

The Wild Angels

There’s something special at the tail end of this pseudo-portrait of the Hell’s Angels, something deeply emotional and subtle, filtered through this drawing of a completely alien culture on choppers. However, the move leading up to it is not quite as compelling as it should be, mostly kind of dull as it moves through its limited plot, actors mostly ambling around from one point of action to the next. And yet, that ending almost saved the whole thing for me. Almost.

Heavenly Blues (Peter F...

The Tomb of Ligeia

The last of the Poe cycle, The Tomb of Ligeia was something I was onboard with for a while. Effectively Corman’s version of Rebecca or Jane Eyre, the script by Robert Towne takes the sliver of the short story Ligeia by Poe and wrangles a gothic mystery that goes so far off the deep end by the final act that I should be fully onboard with it. However, there are so many plot twists and turns jam-packed into those final minutes that they really just took me out of the film’s gonzo finale. I fee...

The Secret Invasion

I want to like this more than I do. There’s solidly admirable stuff at play in the script by R. Wright Campbell, but there’s also opaqueness to the action, an overextended cast of characters that don’t make enough of an impression, and a need for action beats whether necessary or not that keep the film from really gelling. It’s another one of those films where, had Corman directed the scriptwriting process a bit differently, he might have had a special example of a new genre under his belt (...

The Masque of the Red Death

Taking advantage of leftover sets from Becket, Roger Corman got over his fears of being called out for imitation of Ingmar Bergman‘s The Seventh Seal and finally got around to making his adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death. It’s something of a return to surrealistic excess that he had shown a certain flair for in House of Usher, the first of the Poe cycle, having taken more strictly gothic approaches to most of what followed. It’s a tale of excess that allows Corman t...

X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes

This is one of those scripts that feels like random ideas thrown against each other. There’s the sci-fi tale, the scientist gone mad tale, the carnival barker, the thriller, and finally the tale of redemption. It’s almost like there was no real idea of how to build the story of a scientist who gives himself x-ray vision into a story over the course of about 85-minutes. What it really amounts to is a series of loosely connected scenes that portray the degradation of a character, but the degra...

Anora

#37 in my ranking of Best Picture Winners at the Oscars.

Caught up again with my annual addition to my Best Picture ranking…and I kind of loved the film so I have to rearrange just so much.

Le sigh…Anyway…

Sean Baker takes his focus on sex workers and applies it to something like an inversion of the Russian bride trope. What he created is an explicit, very funny, and surprisingly touching look at a girl who comes this close to breaking out of the scummy world she lives in. I would s...