David Vining's Blog, page 210

The Incredible Hulk

So, this is the bastard child of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, huh? I cannot say that I’m terribly surprised.

This movie was a slog. It was a series of miscalculations, unsupported emotional moments, and poorly framed action, all while being arranged without anything really resembling dramatic structure. Let’s take an early scene that works as a wonderful microcosm of the film’s overall issues.

Bruce Banner has been hiding in Brazil for some time. Through a series of very quick shots in the...

Iron Man

I know what Tony Stark’s character arc is supposed to be in this movie. I do not know what it actually is, though.

Tony Stark is a weapons manufacturer who works on contracts from the United States government. He starts the movie finishing a large sale for a new missile called the Jericho. It produces its large explosions, the military is happy, and Tony makes his sale. His convoy is quickly beset by terrorist forces, Stark is captured, and the terrorists force him to produce a Jericho missi...

Planet Terror

Robert Rodriguez really leaned into the grindhouse aspect of this effort, but all of it was done using his own personal digital tools like all of his movies. Digital damage to the film stock, digital effects, and digital color timing were combined with an array of analogue tools to create a trashy zombie epic in about 80 minutes.

The first half hour of this movie is kind of a drag. The biggest single problem with the film is that there are way too many characters running around. There’s the...

The Furies

I don’t often make this complaint, but I wish The Furies was an hour longer. A full hour. I love the movie as it is, but there was room to make this a three-hour epic.

The Furies is a generation war between father and daughter about the future of their ranch called the Furies. Barbara Stanwyck plays Vance and Walter Huston plays T.C. Jeffords, her father. The movie begins with Vance’s brother getting married and moving off The Furies to pursue a life away from the ranch. The background of T....

Quentin Tarantino’s Movies Ranked: The Definitive Ranking

 

A top nine, not a top ten. Whew…that was a close one. That almost sucked.

Gosh, I didn’t realize how much of Tarantino’s filmography I loved before doing this. I’d never watched so much of his stuff in so short a time. Not everything’s great, but a whole lot of it is.

Death Proof

“It’s probably his least movie, but it’s an entertaining ride, if a bit shaky.”

Reservoir Dogs

“In a ‘normal’ movie, this scene would be much shorter and much more perfunctory. It’s the scene right before a h...

The Hateful Eight

A group of people are stuck in a small place in the middle of a blizzard that keeps them from escaping all while questions of who is actually who they say are abound, but enough about The Thing.

Out of all of Tarantino’s movies, this is the one that feels most like a novel. I know people equate it to a stage play, mostly because of the amount of dialogue and the limited location, but I feel like it has more in common with a literary creation than a theatrical one. Scenes play out at the kind...

War and Peace (1956)

I hate the argument that if an adaptation of a work is different from the work then the adaptation of the work is a failure as a piece of art. If someone wants to make a Winnie the Pooh adaptation that turns it into a debauched sex comedy, you should measure the work as it is not as you want an adaptation of Winnie the Pooh to be. When the artist of the adaptation is trying to be faithful, though, I think the argument can provide illustrative help in the argument. However it is still not an...

Django Unchained

Here’s the more focused and emotionally satisfying take on revenge. Where Inglourious Basterds ultimately falters in its final moments, Django Unchained thrives. The former sees a certain disconnect between its disparate acts of vengeance while the latter integrates them really well.

A group of slaves is being transported through the wilderness of the American South a few years before the outbreak of the American Civil War. A German dentist intercepts them and desires to purchase one of them...

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

I can easily see why Tolstoy would rankle at the idea that his book was a novel. It has novelistic aspects that largely dominate, but it’s also so much more. If I had to made a guesstimate, I’d say that it’s just under two-thirds novel, just under one-third history, and the remainder is philosophical.

There’s so much going on in this large novel that it can be hard to distill the story down to an easy summary, but I think the second epilogue is the key to it. That epilogue is all about Tolst...

Inglourious Basterds

This movie is chock full of greatness, but it ends up being a bit less than the sum of its parts. I can easily see how someone would take those different great moments and get wrapped up in the whole movie while glossing over the fact that the ending doesn’t tie up as well as it should, but that ending bugs me.

The film starts with what may be Tarantino’s single best scene, the chapter titled “Once upon a time … in Nazi Occupied France.” Hans Landa, an SS officer, arrives at a small dairy fa...