David Vining's Blog, page 214

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...

The Serpent’s Egg

Every Ingmar Bergman movie after a certain point (the mid 50s) carries a certain level of autobiography to it. From the agonizing existentialism of The Seventh Seal and the Silence Trilogy to the pinpoint look at marriage in The Seventh Seal and even the feeling of invasion in The Passion of Anna, Bergman’s work always concerns what he was going through at the time. The Serpent’s Egg is no different.

Bergman had been arrested on tax related charges in Sweden and put himself in exile (first i...

Under the Silver Lake

I have an affinity for movies that are really messy. Movies that spill over their sides with simply too much stuff, as long as the stuff is at least interesting and it can largely stick together. The one example that I can always call up of something like this is Gangs of New York. It does so much (not all of it that successfully), and ends up being really entertaining in the end.

Well, Under the Silver Lake is of that same ilk. There are red herrings everywhere. The whole experience is desi...

Airplane!

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Airplane! is a few years older than I am, so I never saw it in its initial run and most of the cultural references it makes go way over my head. Did I ever see the exact coffee commercial that they play off of? Did I ever watch Leave It to Beaver? Did I know what jive was? Did I know any of this when I first saw the movie off of a TV broadcast when I was about seven?

No, I didn’t, but I still found the movie hilarious. Can we say the same of the spoof movies that have come out over the last...

Safety Not Guaranteed

It’s sweet yet barely holds together, and I have no idea what Spielberg saw in this that led to him giving Colin Trevorrow control of the Jurassic Park franchise.

Darius is an intern at a Seattle magazine when she gets looped into a weekend trip to investigate an odd ad about time travel for a story. Along with Jeff, a reporter, and Arnau, another intern, she travels along the Washington coast to a small town where they investigate this lunatic who thinks he can time travel and is looking fo...

The Touch

This has to be the most generic title Bergman ever used. I kept forgetting what the movie was called as I got ready to put in the disc.

Anyway, here’s a fairly solid late entry into the Bergman oeuvre. It could have been better, especially in its final third, but it’s anchored by a fantastic performance from Bibi Andersson and the first two thirds are quite interesting.

Karin is a happy housewife to Andreas in a small Swedish town, and they have two children. The movie actually begins with K...

Robin Hood

So, let’s talk about a movie no one remembers because it was pretty derisively received by critics and largely ignored by audiences: Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood!

I can feel the excitement!

I bring it up because I think that when trying to talk about a director’s work, it’s a bit easier to focus on something that isn’t universally considered great. Being able to balance between things that a director did well in a particular picture with things that he did not do well in that same picture provid...

The Cotton Club

“The “re-visiting” a few years ago took the form of several small experimental films, and re-visiting what Coppola describes as “Zoetrope’s electronic archives” has encouraged him to re-assess the edits of his earlier films and, as he puts it, “to learn from past perspectives.” Last year, he completed a re-imagining of The Cotton Club, cutting extraneous scenes and adding several high-energy music and dance numbers.”

–Deadline, “Peter Bart: Turning 80, Francis Coppola Looks Ahead While Reach...

After the Rehearsal

Here’s an interesting little movie with a cast of three, set entirely on a stage, and that jumps backwards and forwards in time.

Henrik is a theater director spending some time alone on the stage after a rehearsal of A Dream Play by August Strindberg. He wants to collect himself before he returns to his domicile to take a nap prior to that night’s rehearsal. As he sits there, one of his actresses, Anna, arrives on stage with a thin story of looking for a bracelet. What follows is a long conv...

All Star Trek Movies Ranked: The Definitive Ranking

All Top Tens are crap, you know.

Top 13’s? Awesome.

So, now that I revisited all of the Star Trek movies, I must do what websites that talk about movies are expected to do: Make a list. So, fine. Here’s all thirteen Star Trek movies ranked from worst to best:

Star Trek: Insurrection

There are really three moves fighting for the bottom spot, but I have to put Insurrection here. Its clash of tones, ideas, and unconvincing special effects make this a slog to end all slogs.

Star Trek Into Dar...