David Vining's Blog, page 226

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...

How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World

What a wonderful series of movies.

I missed the first movie in theaters and took forever to get around to seeing it. By that point, the movie had largely fallen off the cultural roadmap and I could watch it without any sense of hype. I absolutely loved it. I watched the second one as soon as I could, and loved it even more. What made those two films stand out more than most other films aimed at children was their sense of loss in their endings. At the end of the first, the main character los...

Windsor Castle by William Ainsworth

Apparently, William Ainsworth was quite the popular author back in his day, and after having read Windsor Castle, I can see both why he was popular and also why he has completely fallen out of favor.

The book is filled with hallmarks of a bygone style. There are luscious (and nearly endless) descriptions of clothes, the castle itself, and the woods surrounding it. The dialogue is completely unnatural but poetic. There’s even an entire book (Book 3) that deviates from the narrative to tell th...

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

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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

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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

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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...