David Vining's Blog, page 30

Tony Scott – A Retrospective

Tony Scott is synonymous with 1980s and 1990s big-budget action cinema. Mostly through his partnership with Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, he made a series of high-profile movies like Top Gun, Days of Thunder, and Crimson Tide, meeting success for the most part as his career flourished. He was well known for his work with some of the biggest stars in Hollywood like Tom Cruise, Denzel Washington, and Bruce Willis. He directed the biggest movies of the year in 1986 and 1987 at the box offi...

The Lost Boys

I don’t know why the Peter Pan referenced title maintained its way through the original script’s rewrites, production, and editing because the references are watered down to nothing. Still, it’s not a bad title, and The Lost Boys is the best movie of Joel Schumacher’s short career. I mean, I wouldn’t quite call it good, being generally too thin from a character perspective to quite work, but it’s stylish in that early Ridley/Tony Scott sort of way and functions well enough from a narrative p...

St. Elmo’s Fire

Joel Schumacher really wanted to be the Robert Altman for Gen-X, didn’t he? I mean, he wasn’t Gen-X himself, but this plus D.C. Cab feels like what he had tried to do in Amateur Night at the Dixie Bar and Grill, which was an obvious but almost successful attempt to replicate Nashville zeroed in on that new batch of young adults coming of age in the early 80s. Unfortunately, for all of his perfectly modest qualities as a director, his writing was simply getting worse with time. That this film...

D.C. Cab

Joel Schumacher was asked about D.C. Cab later in life, and he explained that at that point in his career, one did not question the quality of work offered. One simply took it in order to continue working. I mean, I get it. D.C. Cab is not a good movie, there’s precious there that should identify a filmmaker except being caught between Robert Altman and John Landis in terms of influence, but, on the other hand, Schumacher has a writing credit on the film. He apparently conceived of the story...

The Incredible Shrinking Woman

As Joel Schumacher’s freshman theatrical feature film was playing out, I was getting distinct Joe Dante vibes, but upon some minimal research after it was over, I discovered that it was actually John Landis vibes. Landis was set to direct this before he pulled out for whatever reasons to go off and make An American Werewolf in London, the project falling on the newer Schumacher to bring the script by Jane Wagner, based on the novel The Shrinking Man by Richard Matheson, to life. I think Land...

Amateur Night at the Dixie Bar and Grill

There’s no way on Earth this television film wasn’t directly inspired by Robert Altman’s Nashville. A story of a large group of people with the background being music in a country-like setting all dealing with little subplots? Yeah, this is the TV-movie version of Altman’s classic take on Americana. Unfortunately, while I do admire the effort from Joel Schumacher who also wrote the original script, the 100-minute runtime prevents the kind of deep dive into the host of characters that Altman ...

Orson Welles – A Retrospective

As a fan of the cinematic work of Orson Welles, I find myself in a certain precarious spot. There’s been a brewing backlash against Welles, mostly centered around his most famous film, Citizen Kane, for more than fifty years. In 1962, it was the first time that the BFI Sight & Sound poll had listed Welles’ freshman effort as the greatest film ever made. It held that distinction every decade through 2002 until the poll in 2012 when it was supplanted by Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. For fifty ye...

John Landis – A Retrospective

John Landis was one of those young, bearded guys who took Hollywood by storm starting in the 70s on, alongside other filmmakers like Scorsese, Spielberg, and de Palma. He was brash, bringing anarchy to comedy with a gritty visual aesthetic endemic to 70s filmmaking, and he went from success to success to success with Animal House to The Blues Brothers to Trading Places, being key in helping to create the movie star that was Eddie Murphy.

And then Landis took the golden opportunity of his ...

Virginia Hill

Joel Schumacher’s first film is a made for television biopic about the girlfriend of someone famous where the story actually told isn’t that of its main character while it feels like a bog-standard biopic of conventions. At least it looks decent sometimes and there are some pretty good performances. I mean, this is not a good film. It’s poorly written and not terribly engaging, but the performances do enough to maintain interest as it moves quickly over its short 75-minute runtime.

There ...

Joel Schumacher: A Statement of Purpose

Do you want the easy, stupid answer?

Because he’s recent, has movies that people recognize, and he died a few years ago, meaning he’s not going to surprise me with another late career resurgence ala Joe Dante or Clint Eastwood.

Still, he interests me since I’ve seen so few of his movies. Of course, there are his two Batman films, but I remember being obsessed with The Client when I was a kid during my John Grisham phase (okay, kid might be overdoing it, I was in high school and thought...