David Vining's Blog, page 224
March 7, 2019
Sansho the Bailiff
What a beautiful and sad film. So pessimistic and optimistic about human nature in equal measure. A wonderfully complex portrait of a family torn apart by only partially pieced back together.
The story is about the wife to a disgraced governor in Japan and their two children. The governor was too lenient to his subjects, trying to shield them from oppressive taxation from the emperor. For this leniency and the lack of tax revenue from it, the emperor stripped the governor of his powers and e...
March 6, 2019
2001: A Space Odyssey
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This is a terrible way to start this retrospective, but this is the first movie on the list where I would consider replacing with another. My top ten list is political in nature in that it’s designed to drive those who are exposed to it to places in film that I consider important. Stanley Kubrick is a giant in the world of cinema, but I have two movies that he made that I love equally, the other being Barry Lyndon. That being said, let’s talk about the movie at hand.
I’ve never read a review...
March 5, 2019
Dreams
What was interesting to me as soon as I started up this movie was the fact that the title didn’t seem to match the translation. Kvinno Drom, the opening title said. The Swedish surely don’t have a two word phrase for the word dream, do they? So, as the titles kept running, I pulled out my phone and used Google to translate the original Swedish, and Google says it comes to Female’s Dreams. The literal translation of the title does seem to fit the movie better, but it’s an interesting change t...
March 4, 2019
The Killing of a Sacred Deer
Yes, this movie is weird, and it’s entirely intentional.
Yorgos Lanthimos is an interesting Greek director who’s been making English language films for a few years. The Lobster is so dry and oddball that I ended up kind of loving it. The Favourite I ended up loving because it was able to most effectively balance its weirdness with its characters (perhaps because he didn’t actually write this script as opposed to everything else he’s directed).
The Killing of A Sacred Deer is the movie he mad...
March 1, 2019
The Babe
I knew I hated this movie within its first five minutes. Young George Ruth gets cartoonishly dragged to St. Mary’s, fat and loudmouthed, and is quickly added to batting practice for the boys. His first swing is wild with his grip wildly inappropriate. The very next swing, we get dramatic music, dramatic closeups as his hands come together on the bat, and dramatic shots of his feet planting properly. And…homerun out of the home’s yard. How cheap can you get? How uninteresting? How blithely pr...
February 28, 2019
Panic in the Year Zero!
It’s amazing what a solid script can do for a movie with no production design to speak of and that was filmed in two weeks.
Panic in the Year Zero! was one of the first post-apocalyptic movies of the post-war scifi craze. It looks like it was meant to be just the bottom of a double bill. Cheap to make, easy to pre-sell, and quick to turn a modest profit. What the producers ended up getting wasn’t a great film, but one that holds together shockingly well despite the decades of films in the sa...
February 27, 2019
Casablanca
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Out of all the movies in my top ten, this is probably the one that pops up most in others. It’s been a staple of American cinema pretty much since its release and when it won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1942. It’s well loved by nearly everyone who sees it, and I think it’s easy to see why.
In my mind there are two major reasons why both I love this film and why it’s so beloved 76 years after its release: dialogue and the expert mixture of cynicism with romanticism.
First Things First
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The...
Summer with Monika
Now we’re hitting greatness.
Summer with Monika feels like an extension of the ideas Bergman presented in Summer Interlude. Not only does the seasonal motif and structure remain, but Bergman offers a different ending to the season itself and continues beyond it more linearly.
Harry meets Monika in a café, and like two innocents are immediately attracted to each other. They have a very chaste affair of dining and going to the movies until Monika, pressed by harassment at the grocery where she...
February 26, 2019
Oh, yeah. I’m going.
I’ve grown to love Fathom Events.
In the Heart of the Sea
They should not have included the connection to Moby Dick. I thought it was just a marketing gimmick, but Herman Melville is a character and the impetus for the overall framing device. I imagine that it’s true that Melville used the story of the “Essex” as partial inspiration for his grand opus (perhaps the greatest novel written in the English language, in my humble opinion), but is that necessary information to tell the story that enticed him in the first place? The story of the “Essex” is...
