David Vining's Blog, page 213

Waiting Women

1952. Bergman was past his studio phase, but he hadn’t quite hit the point in his career where he was “Bergman”, art house darling. He was writing almost everything he directed at this point, but no one outside of Sweden knew he existed, and even in Sweden he wasn’t that famous or even financially successful. It was in this period that he made Waiting Women, an interesting and mostly successful little movie about four women who are, well, waiting.

It’s a summer day in Sweden and the wives of...

Cries and Whispers

This movie is more red than Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Red. It’s more visually precise than perhaps anything Bergman ever made, and the color scheme is just part of it.

Cries and Whispers is the story of three sisters and a maid who have gathered in their childhood home as one of the sisters, Agnes, reaches the end of a 12-year long illness. She’s due to die, and everyone knows it. The home itself is a stately manor in Sweden, and every wall is red. With the movie’s preoccupation with death and...

Grant by Ron Chernow

That’s better.

I previously reviewed a biography of Grant by William McFeely, and I found it wanting. Descriptions of events were well done, but McFeely frequently went into Freudian psychoanalysis that was completely unsupported by primary documentation. Maybe there was reason to believe what he kept going on about, but he never presented it, which created a vacuum between what he wanted to convince me of and what he actually convinced me of.

Well, Chernow doesn’t follow that path at all. E...

Chappaquiddick

There are two tragedies in this film. The first is the death of Mary Jo Koepechne, the young woman left to die in an upturned car in shallow water. The second is Ted Kennedy’s ultimate refusal to accept responsibility for his negligence. The fact that the second tragedy works so well in the shadow of the first is a testament to how well the movie is written and performed.

The movie begins with a montage of Kennedy family photos and audio describing the achievements and deaths of Ted’s three...

Port of Call

A young man gets off a boat in a harbor. Moments later, he witnesses a young woman jump off the harbor into the water in obvious despair. They don’t meet, but he just watches as someone closer jumps into the water and fishes her out, leaving the young woman crying on the pavement.

Thus starts Port of Call, a movie that touches on a few familiar themes that Bergman would visit in his later movies and, for a time, gets very closer to be a special gem in his early filmography. Missteps in the f...

The Maze Runner

Oh, the early to mid 2010s, when men were men, women were women, and teenagers were constantly being pitted against an all-oppressive state with absurd contraptions and concepts that fostered some kind of twisted growth. They were more innocent times, really.

So, the king of these films (really, the queen) was The Hunger Games a good series of 4 (should have been 3) films based on a young adult dystopian novel series. Soon, everyone in Hollywood was doing what they always do, mimicking the r...

Thirst

The early Bergman films are interesting in how they portray an artist evolving with increased experience. They’re not always successful artistic endeavors overall, but they show how a studio system can foster and hone talent through experience.

Thirst tells the story of a young married couple on their way back from a vacation in Italy. We see them in France as they are about to board a train through 1946 Germany back towards Sweden. The woman is haunted by a previous affair and a subsequent...

Persona

Four-fifths of the way into my second viewing of Persona within a week, I placed my hands on my head and exclaimed, “I got it!”

Out of all the Ingmar Bergman films I’ve seen, Persona is easily the most difficult. Others have difficult subject matters or portray difficult situations with clarity, but Persona is the first where I thought I understood what was happening both literally and thematically but I simply could not connect with it. What convinced me to give it a second try so soon afte...

Big Trouble in Little China

Jack Burton has all the makings of a side character. He’s showy, loud, inept, and funny. He’s the kind of character that relieves tension from moments while the real hero stays steely eyed and focused on the task at hand. But John Carpenter made him the main character of Big Trouble in Little China, and it turns an adventure film into a comedy adventure film. That combination doesn’t always work well (think of the decreasing returns of using Jack Sparrow as the main character in the Pirates...

The Lion King (2019)

I’ve never quite understood the appeal of Disney’s mid-90s animated movie The Lion King. But, here comes Disney again with its latest money-making scheme to feast on nostalgia, their “live action” remake.

So, when we ended up going to the theater, I took this as an opportunity to re-evaluate the film that everyone else around me loves but I always find myself standing just off from.

In a nutshell, The Lion King is the story of an entitled brat who nearly gets himself and his best friend kill...