David Vining's Blog, page 223
March 25, 2019
Mad Max: Fury Road
The success of an action movie really depends on the execution of the action itself. This is generally why it’s a bad idea to make a no-budget action movie unless you know how to produce good action without any money. A lot of money makes a lot of moviemaking easier, but, in particular, it helps with action scenes.
Mad Max Fury Road was an expensive movie, and it shows gloriously. The story is super simple, and reminds me of Dredd. There’s no complex plot to tangle with, just the personaliti...
March 22, 2019
Repo Men
What an interesting time the nadir of the financial crisis was in movies. Rage at a nebulous financial system was hot in many parts of the country, and Hollywood wanted to try to take advantage of that with movies that reflected the mood. Repo Men is an unsuccessful movie, in large part, but it’s more interesting as a time capsule and for its twist (which, while unoriginal, actually makes some of the stuff preceding it a bit more interesting and amusing).
The first twenty minutes or so are t...
March 21, 2019
Scenes from a Marriage
In a godless world, all we have is each other.
Jonah and Marianne seem to have a very good marriage. They have two daughters, careers (him as an academic and her as a family lawyer), and a nice apartment, but as we watch the two interview for a women’s magazine we can see the cracks hidden underneath that will doom the arrangement. They seem happy, and generally are, but there’s something for each of them that they dare not talk about directly that’s eating away at their vision of the other....
Amadeus
Re-Introductions and Introductions
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When I first discovered Amadeus, I loved it, and I showed it to my father. We watched it together (one very nice thing about him was that he’s willing to watch almost whatever I try to put in front of him), and his reaction was much more tempered than mine. He said, “You’ll like it less as you get older.” Not that he didn’t like the film, but he just didn’t love it like I did.
I didn’t watch this movie for at least seven years until this week when I finally...
March 20, 2019
Sisters
Early Brian de Palma is trashy Brian de Palma, but also talented Brian de Palma.
So much of what he’s made through his career is suffused with his love of Alfred Hitchcock to the point that while he not only uses Bernard Hermann, it sounds like de Palma told him to write musical scores that would fit snuggly into a Hitchcock movie.
The movie hinges on two major things. The first is its plot and the ultimate twist, which I guessed way too early, and the second is the pair of performances from...
March 19, 2019
Rome Open City
Ah, post war Italian cinema in its infancy. Filmed immediately after the end of the war and using German POWs as extras, the movie shows the scars Italy bore at the time. Filmed on the streets around Rome and with a partially amateur cast, the movie has a strong sense of reality that defined Italian movies for several years. It’s so easy to see the poverty that was present in Italy before the rise of fascism, the broken promises of fascism’s rise, and the destruction of the war that fascism...
March 18, 2019
Draft 4 – Done
About 10 years ago, I started a fantasy novel that I eventually titled Crystal Embers.
I shopped it around for a while, but ultimately gave up on finding representation. I set it aside and just decided that I would write until the day I died because I enjoy it. I then wrote The Battle of Lake Erie, another fantasy novel set in the same world as Crystal Embers called Corstae, and a book set in 1874 Missouri called The Sharp Kid.
After having released The Battle of Lake Erie, I was eager to fin...
Under the Skin
The further I got away from this movie, the less I like it, the more I realized that its style was hiding its surfeit of substance, and what little substance it does have isn’t as effective as it should be. And still, I do admire it for certain elements.
The movie’s stylistic aspects are actually rather enticing for a while. The movie begins with interesting cosmic-like images and settles on a nameless woman (most of the characters remain nameless) who takes the clothes from a dead girl in E...
March 15, 2019
The Boys from Brazil
This movie has too good a pedigree to have failed, but fail it did.
The goofy story of Josef Mengele, hiding in South America, sending out clones of Hitler to adoptive parents across the world in an effort to try to recreate the genetics and environment that produced his Fuhrer is silly, but the movie can’t decide whether it’s going to take the idea seriously or not. It seems to lean on the side of seriously, but it doesn’t go far enough.
The central problem of the movie’s approach, I think,...
March 14, 2019
The Last Movie
This might be the worst movie I’ve ever seen.
Dennis Hopper became famous with his directorial effort Easy Rider, which has, honestly, not aged particularly well. It’s more of a cultural artifact than an example of great cinema. The financial success of the film was undeniable, though, and Hollywood decided to keep investing in the new golden boy. They didn’t throw tons of money at him, but enough for him to take a crew to Peru where he built sets and filmed…something.
I think this may be th...
