David Vining's Blog, page 212

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’...

Writing Update – 8/14/19

Stories are submitted. They’re kind of weird and I’m afraid that they may not be in line with the intent of the collection. If they get rejected, whatever. I’ll write two more and release them myself.

Now I start the third draft of George Washington.

I had a good conversation with my mother about it in Spain, and she convinced me of a couple of relatively large changes to the beginning of the book (namely scrapping the first chapter and beginning the book with a separate event that falls more...

Fanny and Alexander

This is the sum total of all of Ingmar Bergman’s film knowledge he had accumulated over decades, starting in the 1940s. It’s his longest and most sophisticated work both visually and narratively. It gets the adjective Dickensian used to describe it quite a bit, and it fits very well. To me, Fanny and Alexander feels like a combination of Oliver Twist, The Magnificent Ambersons, and ___.

According to Netflix, I’ve seen and rated the theatrical version of this, but I watched the television ver...

Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood

With my movie watching habits, I’m more than used to long scenes that don’t push the plot forward instead focusing on a character, and Tarantino’s new film is full of them. There’s one in particular that comes roughly halfway through the film as Leonardo Dicaprio’s Rick Dalton has come out of his trailer on the western television show he’s guest starring on. He sits down to a young actress reading a biography of Walt Disney. Dalton pulls out a pulp western novel and explains the plot to the...

Autumn Sonata

Autumn Sonata fits so well into Bergman’s filmography in a couple of different ways, and it’s amazing in the way that much of Bergman’s late career was amazing. There’s nothing showy about the film (though it is certainly visually sophisticated and adept). There’s nothing grand about it (the film’s scope is focused almost solely on the face of two women). And yet, through the power of Bergman’s pen, his two actresses, and his cinematographer Sven Nyqisk, Bergman creates an intimate and expan...