David Vining's Blog, page 220

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...

Beowulf

In the original epic poem, why does Beowulf come back from defeating Grendel’s mother carrying Grendel’s head? It’s an interesting question that has fired literary critics imaginations for a while, and when Robert Zemeckis set out to make his big screen adaptation of the poem, he went beyond merely adapting the text itself. Instead, he took those questions that critics had considered and ran with them dramatically.

So, what we end up having isn’t so much an adaptation of Beowulf, but an adap...

A.I. Artificial Intelligence

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A few months back I went through the entirety of Stanley Kubrick’s filmography in about two weeks. It was a wonderful experience since I love the man’s movie’s so much. But that experience birthed an idea in my mind that germinated for months until I finally followed through on it last week. I rewatched A.I. Artificial Intelligence, one of several films Kubrick had toyed with for years while leaving it unfinished.

In 1979, while Kubrick was filming The Shining in England, Steven Spielberg wa...

Winter Light

This Silence trilogy isn’t easy movie watching, but it’s very rewarding.

Tomas, a minister in the Church of Sweden, is finishing a service at a small country church with only a handful of congregants. He speaks the words of the communion rite seriously, but dryly. We can tell by the solemn by detached manner in which he speaks that Tomas is somewhat removed from this thing that takes up his life.

With the service ended, we begin to see Tomas’s relationships with some of his congregants. Ther...

Everything’s Fine Now, Bye….

There’s a trope in storytelling that’s largely a mainstay of fantasy narratives. In order to clear the world/town/school/whatever of a certain threat, our protagonists need to hit just one bad guy, and then everything’s good. Yes, I’m thinking of last night’s Game of Thrones episode.

From the second that we saw a white walker die and then his small scouting party collapse into bones at his death in Season 6, it’s been obvious that this was what was going to happen. Someone was going to get e...

The Green Inferno

I liked this a lot more than I thought I would, which is to say that I didn’t think it was terrible.

The story of a bunch of well-meaning college activists who travel to the Peruvian Amazon to stop loggers from bulldozing a native tribal village and then get eaten by those villagers is that makings of pure schlock, and that’s exactly what Eli Roth delivered.

There are some consistent issues that plague the movie a bit, though. The biggest problem is its structure and general disinterest in e...

Through a Glass Darkly

What do you do with a movie that is intentionally banal for its first half hour or so? Do you turn it off because you have better things to do with your time than to watch a family bicker about who’s going to get the fish nets and who’s going to set the table for dinner? It’s all done lightly and in a friendly manner, but, still, it seems to be about nothing. If watching casually, it can feel like the setup to nothing, but watching closely and it becomes evident that there are very dangerous...