David Vining's Blog, page 198
December 24, 2019
The Lodger
The opening few minutes of this film are such a marked contrast to Hitchcock’s first film and bear incredibly obvious German influences. The Pleasure Garden showed some skill from a young director, but The Lodger announced a real talent of strong skill. The rest of the movie doesn’t bear this influence as strongly, but it’s still a handsomely filmed and intelligently built thriller.
There are a string of killings going on in London. They all target young blond women, and the blonds of the...
December 23, 2019
The Pleasure Garden
Without the Alfred Hitchcock connection, this 1925 silent film is an unfocused and rather stilted melodrama that plays with little success. With the Alfred Hitchcock connection it is still all of those things, but it is also the very first film by one of cinema’s great masters of suspense. It just doesn’t feel like he made it.
A young girl, Jill, moves to London to be a dancer. Without any formal training, she tries out for a theater and immediately gets the job, negotiating a rate of pay...
December 20, 2019
The Star Wars Franchise Ranked: The Definitive Ranking
And here we are again, my good friend. The only ranking of the Star Wars franchise you’ll ever need, because it’s definitive.
And it’s a top 11! Not like those crappy top 10s. They suck. Glad I waited for the new movie.
“It’s amazing to think that Lucas could have addressed some of the largest issues with the first prequel head on, but still managed to somehow make a worse movie overall.”
“Overall,...
Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker
#5 in my Ranking of the Star Wars franchise.
“I think those are really valid ideas that Rian put forth, but any series of films, especially if you have three, is a conversation — which is, as I said early on when I was talking to J.J., thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. If Force Awakens asks the question of who is Rey and where did she come from, and then The Last Jedi answered it with a negative in a certain way, hopefully The Rise of Skywalker will take those two ideas and create a third...
Solo: A Star Wars Story
This feels more like several episodes of television stitched together rather than a single movie, and I think it suffers greatly for it. There’s also a conflict of directorial styles that pops up from time to time that makes the experience just a little bit more jarring on top of the rest.
The first episode of the film is Han’s life on Corellia. He’s a street thug who steals a car as the very first thing he does in the film. He runs back to his home in a subterranean tunnel and finds Qi’ra,...
December 19, 2019
Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi
This is a direct rebuke to the rank nostalgia of The Force Awakens. There’s even a moment when R2-D2 shows Luke the original Leia message, and Luke calls it a cheap trick. This is a movie about learning from the past and using it to help forge the future. The three main characters all explore this question in really interesting ways. And then there are the two worst characters in Star Wars and a side adventure that ultimately doesn’t matter that much. The parts that work do so at such a...
December 18, 2019
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
It’s a man on a mission story that focuses way too much time on one of the members of the gang to too little emotional impact, even though that’s the obvious desire, to create an emotional impact. The movie ends up working despite the repeated emotional faceplants involving its main character because they’re a relatively small part of the overall film, the rest being a pretty straight forward telling of a The Dirty Dozen type story…in SPACE!!!!
The emotional problems with the film stem from...
December 17, 2019
Writing Update – 12/17
Finished the pre-writing on the new book.
That’s 4 outlines (the first is 3.5 pages, the second centers on the history of the MacGuffin, the third is a quick path for the characters to follow in the final act, and the fourth deep dive which is 23 pages) and more than a dozen character profiles.
I really like what I’ve come up with. There were some late additions to the MacGuffin that I came up with and was able to figure out well before I started talking about it in literary form, giving me...
Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens
This shares a lot of the same structural problems as Episode I, but it’s better made, more energetically assembled, and with stronger dialogue which helps make up for it. There are a lot of stories floating around in this thing which obfuscates the emotional core of the film, which does float to the surface by the end, though it’s not quite as well built as it could be.
The movie pretty much doesn’t have a main character. It’s seemingly Rey, but she doesn’t really get an outsized amount of...
December 16, 2019
Movie News – Week of 12/16
News that caught my eye:
Oscar Isaac Says Denis Villeneuve’s Vision for ‘Dune’ Is ‘Nightmarish’ and ‘Brutalist’Dune news! We haveDune news!
Well, not really. As pointless as Rebecca Ferguson’s comments of strong women characters, this tells us little. Though, I like the idea of a massive scifi event film feeling brutalist and nightmarish. What that means specifically we may get an inkling of with a trailer. Hey, maybe we should get a trailer at some point.
That Quentin Tarantino ‘Star Trek’...
