David Vining's Blog, page 211

Death Proof

Instead of making a grindhouse movie, Tarantino made a Tarantino slasher movie. It mostly works.

The structure of the film is defined by its two halves. The first half, follows a group of four young women as they have an evening out in Austin, Texas. Because they are in a Tarantino movie, they talk about this and that, building up strong and defined characters for the audience to latch onto. There’s Jungle Julia, the DJ with dreams of owning her own record label, and Butterfly, her friend fr...

Really, you should be reading Crystal Embers

Don’t just take it from me. Take it from a Top 500 reviewer on Amazon:

“Yep, as I said this isn’t some navel-gazing vanity work. There’s action, George already struggling with his new life and trying to reconcile it with the world of war, now having to act in a very unfamiliar capacity when a dragon is…well, read the book. Point being, watching George’s arc throughout this book, especially near the end when he shows impatience with gratuitous celebration of battles, demonstrates that Vining h...

Kill Bill

Much like The Lord of the Rings and Manon des Sources, Kill Bill was a large movie shot at one time and released in separate parts.

It is amazing that over the course of a single movie, Tarantino turned himself into one of the premier action directors of his generation. The most action-oriented scene he had ever shot before this was probably Mr. White hitting Mr. Pink to the floor in Reservoir Dogs. Then, he brings us Showdown at House of Blue Leaves which is one of the most inventive action...

Jackie Brown

My first viewing of Jackie Brown, years ago, confused me. I was expecting time jumps, and I kept asking myself when things were happening. I was trying to rearrange a movie that needed to rearranging.

I mention that uninteresting anecdote because it speaks to the interesting, slightly out of step, place Jackie Brown holds in Quentin Tarantino’s whole filmography. People threw the word “mature” a lot at Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood as though Tarantino had never calmed down before, but Jack...

Dumbo (2019)

I think it’s really funny that Tim Burton made a movie about how much he hates Disney, and he got Disney to produce and distribute it. I don’t know how else to read the subtext of this film.

Following in the drunken footsteps of Beauty and the Beast, The Jungle Book, Cinderella, and others, Disney decided that it was going to make a live-action remake of another of their classics: Dumbo, the movie from the 40s that’s a grand 60 minutes long. Tim Burton previously made a live action sequel to...

Pulp Fiction

Much like Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction works so well because of its structure. In Tarantino’s freshman effort, he used the out of time elements to break up the one set monotony and provide lighter tonal moments here and there. In Pulp Fiction, it’s used at the behest of thematic material, and I think it works on a whole different level.

It’s sort of an anthology film, but the three sections a little too interconnected to just lay it like that. They’re connected through a similar set of chara...

Reservoir Dogs

The thing that makes this movie work at all is its structure. I can imagine this same movie arranged chronologically and it would be a slog. It doesn’t help that it was obviously written with this structure in mind, but even taking that into account, the second half would be just too much.

It really starts with the opening scene. In a “normal” movie, this scene would be much shorter and much more perfunctory. It’s the scene right before a heist begins, the final moments before the gang gets...

The Ballad of Narayama (1983)

In a village suffused with poverty and strife, one family tries to survive a year while the matriarch in her sixty-ninth year begins to contemplate making the expected climb up Narayama where the old go to die. Life in the village is brutish and cruel in the faceless ways of nature that turn men savage.

Near the beginning of the film, Granny Orin makes mention of the fact that she’s considering the climb. The audience, as well as her family, seem confused on the matter. She’s strong, healthy...

The Future of Home Video

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The future of home video is bleak. Well, mostly bleak. There’s one very bright spot, but it’s pretty much all bleak beyond that.
Movie theaters will always exist, but they’ve already become carnival attractions for the newest large corporate product. It’s rare for something that’s not tied to some previously established property to get a wide release.
Most people watch movies at home now. Hell, I’ve been to the theaters four times this year, but I’ve watched at least 200 movies since the beg...

Ingmar Bergman’s Best Movies Ranked: The Definitive Ranking

Again, not a Top Ten. It’s a Top Seventeen. So, I’m good.

As I came to the end of the Criterion Collection’s box set, I realized that I had written a lot of 4-star reviews. I went back and counted, and there are seventeen of them. Seventeen of thirty-nine films received 4-star reviews. That’s incredible. So, I’ve ranked them below. As a warning, though, there’s not a whole lot of difference in quality, in my opinion, from one to the next. We’re talking about seventeen movies that I love. It’...