David Vining's Blog, page 29

Batman & Robin: A Second Look

Yeah, this is a bad film, but it’s much more in alignment with its desired tone than Batman Forever. It’s sillier and knows it’s sillier. It has greater tonal issues overall than its predecessor, though, its efforts at being silly being more obvious while clashing with the efforts at meaningful character stuff. However, I prefer the tonal clash here to the even tonal morass that was Batman Forever. Batman & Robin is silly nonsense that doesn’t work, but it’s more watchable than what came imm...

A Time to Kill

Joel Schumacher’s outrageous visual stylings from Batman Forever retreat very far into the background while Schumacher calms down heavily to take on the adaptation of John Grisham’s first novel, A Time to Kill. Taking a moral quandary and playing it out in the legal sphere, the film ends up feeling like The Client in the end but in a different direction: overly melodramatic instead of keeping its feet firmly planted in the very well-constructed legal reality that Grisham, Akiva Goldsman, and...

Michael Powell (and Emeric Pressburger) – A Retrospective

The best form of this is going to be the recent documentary Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger narrated and executive produced by Martin Scorsese. He has been a fan of the work of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, often under the production company banner The Archers, since he was an asthmatic child unable to go out and play and spending all day in front of his television where he discovered movies like The Tales of Hoffmann on a local station in New York. He and his f...

Batman Forever: A Second Look

It wasn’t THAT long ago that I went through all the live action Batman films. Combine that with my long history of knowing them anyway, and this revisit has me thinking back to how I professed as preferring the much maligned third sequel, Batman & Robin over this. Lets not go crazy here and imagine that I think that next film is good or that the world is completely out of alignment with me and thinks that Batman Forever is some kind of high water mark in the franchise. Neither is good, and f...

The Client

One of the earliest of the glut of adaptations of John Grisham novels, The Client is Joel Schumacher applying his technical acumen to someone else’s story once more. Working from a script by Robert Getchell and Akiva Goldsman (the workman of 90s Hollywood screenwriting), Schumacher shows that his evolution as a filmmaker is more about him managing things well and not delving deeper. The end result is an entertaining thriller that actually manages the feel of a thriller slightly better than F...

Falling Down

I’ve been collecting my thoughts on Schumacher as a filmmaker as I get closer to the halfway mark of his feature film output, and a thought came to me after I finished what may be his best received film, Falling Down. Could it have been better…made by someone else? I’ve been getting this sense from him that his touch tended to make scripts worse, that his narrative instincts were so off that even when the product overall is solidly good and pretty easily his best film of his career, that it ...

Dying Young

I kind of hated this movie. Joel Schumacher would say later in life that he was the wrong filmmaker for the film, having taken on the work as a favor to its star, Julia Roberts, with whom he had become friendly on his previous film, Flatliners. Based on a popular novel of the same name by Marti Leimbach, Dying Young is a cliché-ridden tear-jerker that stumbles at basic narrative essentials from beginning to end. There are elements that feel like, given more time and better focus, they would ...

Flatliners

This is the perfect movie ripe for a remake (ignores presence of actual remake that is apparently not very good). The concept is interesting, but then the execution is just underwhelming. Joel Schumacher does nothing to improve on the script by Peter Filardi, a largely unimaginative affair that asks, “What is beyond death?” and responds with pseudo-psychology all told with caricatures. Well, at least Schumacher imbues the film visually with a host of style, filming in interesting locations a...

Cousins

Fresh off the pair of moderate financial successes that were St. Elmo’s Fire and The Lost Boys, Joel Schumacher got hired by William Allyn to direct a remake of the French film Cousin, Cousine, moving the action from France to Seattle. The end result is a charming and heartfelt little romantic comedy, the kind of film that Schumacher was not at all known for. However, when matched with a quality script by Stephen Metcalfe, Schumacher showed that he could manage a production well and end up w...

Halloween – A Retrospective

The Halloween franchise is a mess, a complete and total mess. It resets to one degree or another five separate times. It has a serious identity crisis from almost the beginning. It doesn’t know what to do with its main draw, its central monster. Out of the three major slasher franchises of the 80s, it’s the least cohesive and, arguably, the worst through that heyday. For all of the faults of Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street and their sequels, they at least understood what they w...