David Vining's Blog, page 225

Great Expectations

I’m convinced that it’s impossible to make a great movie out of a Charles Dickens novel. People have their favorites, especially David Lean’s Great Expectations, but I always feel that something’s missing from the story. And the simple fact of the matter is that the book is great not just because of its plot and characters, but because of the actual writing present throughout. Translating the story to screen cuts nearly all of that and you’re left with something like the shell of the story w...

The Homesman

I love Tommy Lee Jones’ first directorial effort, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, and yet I still waited several years to turn on The Homesman, his follow up.

I hate to say it, but my hopes of having another great actor turned director (like Clint Eastwood) may be a bit dashed. It’s not so much that Jones’ second film is bad, but that it feels surprisingly inconsistent.

The opening is a bit confusing. He juggles images of four women, three of whom are going through different stages...

1776

Decades removed from any sort of hype around a piece of art is interesting. Having never been exposed to its original source adds a new flavor as well. I am somewhat familiar with the iconography and could probably guess to the film’s story and characters, but there’s little else that I can do before I turn on the film that I’ve never seen before. It becomes just another movie, when, at the time, it might have been highly anticipated.

I don’t have a reason for having never seen 1776 other th...

Summer Interlude

[image error]

Now we see Ingmar Bergman feeling like he’s hitting his stride.

Summer Interlude, Bergman’s ninth film, is where everything seems to be coming together. Looking back at some contemporary comments, Bergman was actually more concerned with improving the technical aspects of his films than narrative. The issues that he talks about tend to matter less to me (sound synch problems and such), but I can entirely understand a craftsman being upset at the sight of potentially unforced little errors th...

Murder Party

I find early films of established filmmakers interesting. Stanley Kubrick’s Fear and Desire is a nearly unwatchable mess, but it still demonstrates some of the master’s talents, in particular around his photography. Since he was a photographer by trade, he brought that clean and clear sensibility to his first, unsuccessful, film. Ingmar Bergman’s Crisis is a bad film, but there are still moments that show his ability to frame a shot, get good performances from his actors, and write dialogue...

Duck Soup

[image error]

I’ve seen this movie a few times, and I laugh consistently through the entire thing every time. And yet, I’ve never loved another Marx Brothers movie nearly as much as this one. I really do enjoy Monkey Business and the others, but none of them get nearly as much of a reaction from me as Duck Soup. I’ve often wondered why, and taken this post as an excuse to figure it out.

Juxtaposition

One thing that makes comedy tic is juxtaposition when we expect one thing and get something else. This is...

Expertise

Expertise

[image error]

Let’s imagine that it’s 1959 and you are an expert in Roman naval combat. You’ve had a long day of experting, and you decide to knock off early to catch the new Charlton Heston flick, Ben-Hur. You’ve never read the book nor seen the original silent version. In fact, you know almost nothing about the film and just go because it happens to be playing at your local one-screen theater. You’re enjoying yourself until Judah Ben Hur gets on the galley ship, then everything goes off the ra...

Khartoum

[image error]

I don’t know if I would call Khartoum hot garbage, but I want to call it hot garbage.

Released about five years after Lawrence of Arabia, the movie is an obvious attempt to replicate the aesthetics and feel of David Lean’s grand masterpiece. The problems, though, pop up early and often.

It’s really hard to view Khartoum without thinking of Lawrence of Arabia because the parallels are so numerous. Desert based conflict (the Sudan vs. Arabia) where an Englishman, largely detached from the lowe...

To Joy

Early Bergman is interesting. With the great silent film director Victor Sjosstrom as his mentor, Bergman gained a strong visual sense early. With his love of and background in theater, he was able to get strong performances out of his actors pretty much out of the gate. However, while most of what I’ve seen of his early work contains scenes with sharp as a knife writing and biting performances, there’s often something missing in the larger sense.

To Joy was made in 1950 and was Bergman’s ei...

The Passion of Joan of Arc

[image error]

When a medium is only twenty years old, what does it mean to be called the best of that medium? When The Passion of Joan of Arc was released, narrative film was really only about 20 years old. It’s seems like a paltry selection of films from which to pull the best ever. I suppose the closest corollary in my lifetime would be video games. Mass consumer video games seem to have a birth in the late 70s and early 80s. When a game came out in the late 90s and early 00s that was considered one of...