David Vining's Blog, page 209

Avengers: Age of Ultron

Ensemble pieces are hard. You have several main characters revolving around one goal, but all of these characters should be unique and driven by their own wants and needs, but all of those wants and needs need to be connected to the core of the story. When you take half a dozen heroes who are (largely) off on their own adventures most of the time, it can take some doing, and I don’t think that doing was done quite well enough here.

The Avengers have been wiping out Hydra one base at a time f...

Guardians of the Galaxy

This is the most purely fun movie Marvel has released. It’s also the most visually resplendent.

The story is pretty typical MacGuffin type stuff. There’s an orb that drives the plot. Everyone wants it for different reasons. It has power that comes into play late in the film. It’s an Infinity Stone and part of the larger mythology. That’s not the joy of the movie. It’s on that clothesline of a plot that James Gunn hung an array of entertaining characters who make the journey interesting, and...

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

The first twenty minutes or so of this movie establish so much so well, it feels like the Marvel franchise has finally grown up.

The opening scene takes place around the Mall in Washington D.C. as Captain Rogers takes in his morning run, lapping a young ex-soldier several times. When the two finally speak, there’s a grounded sense of community between the two stemming from their dual tours of duty in wars separated by decades. It’s the physical detail that Sam brings up about the over-softne...

Thor: The Dark World

They took all that was good of Thor, sapped all of the color out of it, clothed it in darkness, and grounded it in a more recognizable reality. That process made it so much more boring.

Gone are the operatic tones and performances. Gone are scenes of father and son yelling at each other over big things in large sets with bright colors. Instead we get father and son arguing under their breaths about things in dark rooms with “realistic” performances. It’s such a drab drag of a film.

First we...

Iron Man 3

This movie has large sections of it that work quite well in isolation, but the movie as a whole doesn’t really come together like it should.

I realized something was wrong pretty early. Tony has been tinkering ever since his close encounter with a nuclear weapon in New York, losing himself in his work and developing dozens of Iron Man suits. When confronted by the events of that day, he has anxiety attacks. Meanwhile, a terrorist called The Mandarin has been setting off explosions around the...

The Avengers

This is the most cohesive film version of a manchild playing with his action figures I’ve ever seen. It reminds me of Van Helsing, but better.

The tesseract, the blue box MacGuffin from Captain America has awoken and called out to the cosmos. SHIELD, the organization tasked with protecting Earth and is experimenting with the tesseract, begins an evacuation as the little box becomes more active. Arrives Loki, slightly grungier and less interesting than we last saw him in Thor, is there to con...

Captain America: The First Avenger

This is the most Joe Johnston movie that Joe Johnston has ever made. I’m not entirely sure what that means, but it seems to make sense. I mean, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and The Rocketeer have a distinct feel about them and Captain America: The First Avenger takes those aesthetic and narrative generalities and just ups them.

Steve Rogers is just a skinny kid with a big head in Brooklyn who really wants to join the army and punch Hitler in the face after the outbreak of World War II, but he’s...

Ingmar Bergman – A Retrospective

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Ingmar Bergman was one of the greatest of filmmakers. He stands next to the likes of Orson Welles, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Charlie Chaplin, Stanley Kubrick, Akira Kurosawa, and Jean Renoir as the titans of the art form. He made some of the most iconic images in cinema of the 20th century, and now I’m going to force you people to talk about him.
As a Man

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Born to a Lutheran minister, Bergman was raised in a strictly religious household. He chaffed under the rules of the house (which were...

Thor

Finally, a good movie from Marvel, and most people don’t seem to like it very much.

I love about 50 minutes of this movie, the first thirty minutes and the last twenty. Everything in between those bookmarks of operatic emotion and design is somewhere between functional and pretty good.

The film opens with three people in a van in the middle of the desert looking to the sky at night. Some strange formation of clouds and light forms in the sky, they race towards it, and they find a man who sho...

Iron Man 2

What, exactly, is the story here?

Tony dealing with death? Vanko exacting revenge for his father’s death? Tony figuring out how to operate alongside the United States military? This film is just so jam packed full of stuff that nothing ever develops, everything fights with everything else for screen time, and all we really get is a jumbled experience.

In the wake of Tony Stark revealing himself to the world to be Iron Man, Ivan Vanko is by his father’s deathbed in Russia. Papa Vanko had once...