David Vining's Blog, page 217

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...

A Night in Casablanca

I love Duck Soup, but I’ve never quite loved anything else the Marx Brother shave done until now. Everything else was pretty funny, but nothing came close to hitting the satirical and manic genius that is Duck Soup. A Night in Casablanca comes close, though. It does miss the more biting satirical elements, but the manic energy is pitch perfect.

Casablanca. Rick and Ilsa are no longer there, instead there is a hotel that simply cannot keep managers alive. Three have died in short time. We se...

The Rite

Made for television in the late 60s, The Rite is a very small film from Bergman. It’s not just small in visual scope, but also small in narrative focus, which seriously limits its appeal.

I actually didn’t really get the film at the end of the screening and did as I always do with these. I grabbed the book from the Criterion collection and read the essay on the film. I think the reason the movie’s point passed me by while watching it, assuming the essay was correct, was because the film is a...

Fury

Tough, wounded men arguing with each other in a metal beast upon a scarred patch of earth. Their tank needs some electrical work before it will move again, and everyone’s growing impatient with the increasing sense of danger around them. As we learn later, all four of these men have been fighting in that tank, named Fury, since the Allies first landed in Africa, but now it’s 1945. The German war machine is broken but not gone, and Nazis are still trying to protect their homeland as America r...

Sawdust and Tinsel

Ah, more Bergman. This is going to keep happening until morale improves, or until I get to the end of the set. Whichever comes first.

The common theme that Bergman explored through the late 50s and early 60s (God’s silence) is actually only a motif in this movie instead of the central theme. Sawdust and Tinsel exists in a world where God is silent, but the movie is a bit more tactile. It is about a traveling circus coming to the community where the owner’s wife lives with their three childre...

Bad Times at the El Royale

Drew Goddard went ambitious with his second feature film, but it’s the kind of ambitious that could be accomplished without that much money. The narrative is sprawling, but the physical scope of the action is actually quite contained in that eponymous hotel on the California and Nevada state line.

There’s a lot going on in the film, but after only a single viewing I’m a little unsure of how cohesive everything under the surface is. I’m not convinced one way or the next whether it’s a mess or...

Bad Times at the El Royal

Drew Goddard went ambitious with his second feature film, but it’s the kind of ambitious that could be accomplished without that much money. The narrative is sprawling, but the physical scope of the action is actually quite contained in that eponymous hotel on the California and Nevada state line.

There’s a lot going on in the film, but after only a single viewing I’m a little unsure of how cohesive everything under the surface is. I’m not convinced one way or the next whether it’s a mess or...