David Vining's Blog, page 216

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Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

There are times when Star Trek gets really literate, and it pleases me greatly. From “The Conscience of the King” to First Contact, Star Trek writers have been happy to mine some of the English language’s greatest classical fiction and drama for allusions. Perhaps Nicholas Meyer and Leonard Nimoy went a tad overboard with the Shakespeare here, but I still love it.

For the longest time, I ranked the sixth Star Trek movie as my favorite, but upon this most recent watch of the whole series, I’v...

The Right Stuff

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Here is one of the great shots in American cinema, and it comes in the first five minutes of The Right Stuff, one of the great American epics:

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That’s Chuck Yeager on his horse looking at and passing by the X-1, one of the most advanced pieces of transportation equipment man had created up to that point. The rugged individual, the cowboy, and the high-tech instrument of man, together.

That really does crystalize into an image what the Right Stuff actually is, according to the movie and its w...

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

This movie is objectively bad, but it’s not worthless. The story is so poorly assembled and the characters are mostly just placeholders and the movers of small plot points, but within this mishmash of styles, tones, and subplots, there are a handful of actually quite wonderful things and moments.

Really, The Final Frontier feels like a clip show of scenes from different movies, or maybe different episodes of a television series. Nothing seems to go with whatever is coming next. The opening s...

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

Here’s the crowd pleaser of the series. Here we have the easiest of the franchise to digest as a viewer, and it’s a surprisingly strong combination of goofy, earnest, serious, and joyful.

Many movies that try to balance that many tones end up with incoherent experiences, but Leonard Nimoy, Harve Bennett, and Nicholas Meyer managed to deftly navigate through the different tones to tell a story that does contain all of those emotional beats but also in a way that creates a cohesive and enterta...

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock

How does one follow a film with a fantastic villain, perfect structure, and really good special effects? Muddy the waters, apparently.

Don’t get me wrong. I feel like the third Star Trek film is good, but it’s also got problems.

So, let’s start with the good. The Enterprise is coming home from the Mutara system, wounded with one less officer. There’s no sense of victory as the ship tracks into spacedock where its wounds get pushed into a harsh light. Captain Kirk dismisses a cadet’s desire f...

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

My appreciation for Star Trek: The Motion Picture is documented well enough. In that commentary, I say: “Part of me wishes that the movie series had continued in this vein: throwing millions of dollars at the screen to be heady and weird. But then we got Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan which is one of those movies that I have a hard time calling anything other than perfect.”

And I stand by that. I really like the first Star Trek movie. I kind of wish the series had continued in that vein. Ho...

From Beyond

In the land of B-movie horror films from the late 80s and early 90s, this might be one of the more technically proficient and monster fests. Across the quick eight-five minutes, the movie shows the audience an array of phenomenal creature effects from slimy abominations of twisted human form to giant worms and floating eels. The visual design of the monsters and body horror elements are fantastic. I loved every second of them.

The rest of the movie, not so much.

The film, based on an H.P. Lo...

Vox Lux

When I write my Bergman reviews, they often end up feeling a bit like writing academic exercises because I engage with the ideas behind the action so fully. I’m not sure it actually comes across, but in front of those ideas are dramatic mechanisms that drive the ideas and give them appreciable form. What I saw from Vox Lux was a movie that had the ideas but not the dramatic mechanisms.

The movie is broken up into four sections, a prelude, two acts, and then a finale. The majority of the acti...

Score: A Film Music Documentary

I’ve always loved film scores. Orchestral works that utilize themes and a large collection of musicians that go along with the action on screen but also work independently has been the kind of music I’ve listened to almost exclusively my whole life. I wish it got a better documentary than this.

It’s not really bad, but it’s wildly unfocused. The documentary has four sections of interest: the history, the process, the techniques, and the personalities. The movie is more than the sum of its pa...