David Vining's Blog, page 219

Seriously, How Did You Not See this Coming?

“I will lay waste to armies and burn cities to the ground,” said Daenerys Targaryen early in season 2, and late in season 8, she finally did just that. And people are surprised.

As a writer, I have a certain set of goals. One of them is twofold and involves the use of characters and their interaction with the plot.

The two major elements are 1) to write stories where characters drive the plot and not the other way around, and 2) to surprise the audience when characters take actions that are...

Soy Cuba

What an absolutely fascinating film. Pure propaganda for the then newly victorious revolutionary government of Cuba, funded by the Soviet Union and created with both Cuban and Soviet creatives (directed by the Cannes Palme d’Or director Mikhail Kalatozov), and absolutely engrossing from a technical standpoint, the film doesn’t quite reach as high from a narrative point of view.

Four separate vignettes that tie together thematically about the need to rise against the American proletariat, som...

Pathfinder

What an ugly movie.

I don’t know what drove the director to take the lush colors of the forest and drain everything out of it, but he did. Instead of deep greens, bright whites, and vibrant blues, we get muddles of grey. From beginning to end, Pathfinder is just a pain to even look at. It doesn’t help that the rest of the movie is a joke.

A Viking child gets adopted by some Native Americans and grows up to be a strong member of the tribe, though not quite of it at the same time. Vikings come...

The Seventh Seal

Here we have Bergman’s best known movie. The one movie that broke through the cultural consciousness to leave an imprint most people take for granted. The vision of death playing chess, as said in the movie itself, was a common enough medieval subject for paintings, but our modern culture’s image and the source comes straight from Antonious Block challenging Death to a game to extend his life.

Another thing about the movie that has suffused the culture is the idea that the movie is dour. It...

The Virgin Spring

This has long been my favorite Bergman, and now that I’m in the middle of the thirty-nine films of the Criterion boxset, I think I can begin to understand why.

Bergman is an intellectual direction, exploring ideas, themes, and people in convincing and compelling ways, but he’s rarely a visceral director of experience. We do get moments of compelling truth in Scenes from a Marriage as two people spit vitriol at each other. We do get moments of involving contemplation around the existence of G...

Writing by Hand – Some writing thoughts

A few years ago I decided that I would write all of my first drafts by hand. I don’t write shorthand, so my last four books and all five published collections of short stories I wrote longhand on college ruled lined paper. I’ve been asked a few times why I would do this, and I’ve thought about the question over the years, mostly because getting that hand written first draft into a typed up manuscript is the one part of my entire writing process that I hate the most, and it’s not even close.

I...

Broken Promises

When watching a movie, sometimes you must make a distinction between the movie that’s actually delivered and the movie you wanted.
Let me start with a television example. Star Trek Voyager is the most mishandled series of the franchise. It begins with a Federation ship finding itself on the far side of the galaxy from home as well as from any Federation support also needing to supplement its diminished crew with members of the Maquis, a group of Federation citizens who have broken off from th...

The Silence

I’ve seen most of Bergman’s work, and I think it’s safe to say that this is his most esoteric and impenetrable film. It’s intentionally so, though, so there’s a need to engage with the oddness on display to have the appropriate conversation with the film and figure out what on earth is going on.

There are long stretches of the movie where it plays like a silent film. There’s no important dialogue, and we only watch the characters move around, observe things, and perform small actions in rela...

Manon des Sources

I think one of the things that makes tragedy particularly effective on the audience is its predictability. We can see things that the characters cannot because we are standing outside the situation looking in instead of standing within the situation and looking out. We see each character’s flaws clearly in contrast with the events of the story so that we can predict the story’s ending in ways that the characters cannot.

Manon des Sources ends up working particularly well because we saw the b...

First Reformed

Tell me if you’ve heard this one before:

A reverend to a small country church preaches to a sparse population. He intones seriously, but there seems to be a distance there. After the service, a young pregnant woman comes to him and asks him to talk to her husband, who is beset by apocalyptic visions. After the reverend talks to the young man, he goes off into the woods and shoots himself in the head with a rifle.

That is the first half or so of both Winter Light by Ingmar Bergman and First R...