David Vining's Blog, page 202

The Spirit of St Louis

This movie sticks out of Billy Wilder’s filmography. It’s too nice, the main character too guileless, and there seems to be a complete absence of the common motif that appears in literally every other Wilder film up to this point. It’s a fine entertainment, but it almost feels like it belongs to another filmmaker.

Using a flashback structure, Wilder tells the story of Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight from New York to Paris, starting at the night before his run when he can’t go to sleep and his voiceove...

Movie News – Week of 11/18

News that Caught my Eye

‘Justice League’: Zack Snyder, Ben Affleck and Gal Gadot Call for Release of Fabled “Snyder Cut”

So, during post-production of Justice League, Zack Snyder’s daughter committed suicide. He walked away from the project and got replaced by Joss Whedon who shot a bunch of stuff and finished the film. By all accounts, the finished cut is quite different from the rough cut Snyder was working from when he left the project. Since 

Tideland

I really like Terry Gilliam, but he’s got some terrible narrative instincts and he lets them all fly free in Tideland. Gilliam is first and foremost a visual stylist, and his best works all feature that visual flair while also managing to wrangle a strong enough story around them. I think there are ideas in Tideland that could have been brought together into something cohesive, but it ultimately doesn’t work.

I know that this movie has its fans, so after this, my second watch of the film, I searched out some of t...

Beauty and the Beast (2017)

It’s fascinating when a remake of a very good movie comes along and utterly fails at almost everything that the original did so well. It doesn’t look as good, sound as good, and it doesn’t play as well. It’s a curious artistic failure.

The movie’s problems begin right at the opening with an introductory sequence that falls somewhere between a dramatic scene and a voice over summary of events. It’s filmed in exactly the same way as the rest of the film is. There are no filters applied to the visuals...

Gate of Hell

This movie starts a bit frustrating and ends in one of the most marvelous final half hours I’ve seen in film. Considered lost for a time, not because the negative disappeared but because the magnificent colors captured on early Eastman Kodak stock had faded, Gate of Hell by Teinosuke Kinugasa is a visually sumptuous story that starts too big and ends up with laser-like focus on its core drama.

It’s Japan during the Heiji Rebellion, and the emperor of Japan is under attack. In order to provide a distra...

Overlord

Sometimes, you just want to see zombie monster Nazis get blowed up real good. That’s a fun way to spend a couple of minutes, but if you want to sustain interest over a full two hours, a bit more work needs to go into it. Overlord does try, but it ends up spending too much time in a single location, beyond reason, and descending into a generic monster fight by the end. Still, points for effort.

It’s the night before D-Day and a group of paratroopers are riding out the night over France, ready to deploy to t...

The Walk

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There’s one reason Robert Zemeckis wanted to make this film, and it’s not the first ninety minutes. Those first ninety minutes are good, solid storytelling, but it wasn’t Philippe Petit’s quest to become a tight rope walker that attracted the director to the material, it was the eponymous trek from one World Trade Center building to the other by the rooves over a wire.

Petit is a dreamer in the purest sense. He speaks to us throughout the entire movie in voiceover, given from the torch of the Sta...

The Seven Year Itch

This is a fun and intelligently assembled bit of fluff from Billy Wilder. It’s solid entertainment filmed brightly and colorfully while stretching just beyond the original confines of its theatrical roots. It’s as light and frivolous as its opening set on Manhattan several hundred years in the past when we watch a Manhattan tribe send their wives and children north during the hot July before immediately chasing after an attractive young woman which is immediately mirrored in a time jump to t...

Sabrina

This is pure fairytale, and it’s rather delightful. It’s a marked contrast from Wilder’s previous few films that were dripping with cynicism. There are still cynical characters, but the tone of the movie overall is so much lighter with a much greater sense of fun that it almost feels like it was made by another director.

The titular Sabrina is the daughter of an English driver to a rich American industrialist family outside of New York. There are two adult, unmarried sons to the family, Linus and Dav...

Movie News – Week of 11/11

Here’s some news that caught my eye:

Denis Villeneuve’s ‘Dune’ Movie Sequel Takes Step Forward in Development — Report

Dune news! Real Dune news! Sort of.

Jon Spaihts has been hired to write the sequel. The movie we’re getting next year only covers the first half of the first book, so it’s nice to see that the studio has enough early confidence in the film’s success to actually start work on the sequel. There’s no design work or anything, just hiring a relatively expensive screenwriter to churn out a draf...