David Vining's Blog, page 35

Red Ensign

If Michael Powell wasn’t inspired by Frank Capra and American Madness, I would be quite surprised. Coming out two years after Capra’s early masterpiece, Red Ensign shares similar beats, outlooks on the rich in depression times, and just a general approach to material about depression era conditions. It would be quite the coincidence if Powell had never seen Capra’s film. That being said, this is lesser than Capra’s work, but it’s still a worthwhile experience on its own. Still part of his qu...

The Fire Raisers

What, pray tell, is a fire raiser? It’s an arsonist, but…fire raiser is such a mealy-mouthed term. It feels too polite. Maybe it had greater purchase culturally in Britain in the 1930s, but 90 years later, it’s an odd choice. Hard to fault Michael Powell for not having that foresight, but, seriously, arsonist is such a better term. It just sounds meaner. Anyway, this is the closest I’d say that Powell has come to failure in the opening four surviving films of his quota quickie period. A thri...

His Lordship

Michael Powell changes production companies and makes his first surviving musical, a fun and amusing, almost delightful, comedy of manners that uses the ideas of class as jumping grounds for light comedy and no more. Satirical in intent but musical in execution, His Lordship feels like a Lubitsch homage, especially Love Parade, his first musical, and Powell pulls it off quite well.

Bert Gibbs (Jerry Verno) is a plumber by trade by holds possession of a peerage making him the Right Honorab...

Hotel Splendide

An advantage of a really short film is that if your final ten minutes are really fun then they end up representing a much larger percentage of the overall experience than in a normal feature length film. This allows those final ten minutes to elevate the viewing more fully, providing a capper with greater effect. Well, that’s what happens with Hotel Splendide, Michael Powell’s second surviving feature where the first 40 minutes are a slightly amusing look at a combination of comedy of errors...

Rynox

Michael Powell’s first surviving film is his third with sole credit, the first two, Two Crowded Hours and My Friend the King being considered lost. Rynox was part of series of films that Powell made that were called quota quickies, short 4-5 reel films with minimal budgets (reportedly for this it was only about five thousand pounds), and very abbreviated shooting schedules. These were the kinds of film that Capra thought he was making: akin to newspapers to be watched once and discarded. I’m...

Michael Powell: A Statement of Purpose

Michael Powell seems to have been mostly forgotten for some time until Martin Scorsese used his clout in the 1980s to begin a revival of appreciation. His connection with Powell grew so tight that his regular editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, married Powell for the final six years of his life.

That resurgence has brought Powell up to the level of consciousness along the lines of some of his contemporaries like Carol Reed, culminating in the release of Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pr...

Next…

[image error]

The Halloween Franchise: The Definitive Ranking

This franchise is…all over the place. And I’m going to say something seemingly controversial: the only person who understood it on the same level as John Carpenter, the ideas, the kind of horror Michael Myers represented, was David Gordon Green. His trilogy is the best thing to happen to that franchise since John Carpenter and Debra Hill birthed it in the late 70s. Everything up to that point had been…misguided at best.

The problem was the timing. Halloween essentially birthed the slasher...

Halloween Ends

Well, I really don’t get the consensus. Halloween Ends is easily the best sequel since the original film, the one that does the most to actually expand on the original ideas, the one with the best handle on the kind of horror that Carpenter originally strived for, and the one with the best overall approach to its character-based storytelling. Sure, Michael Myers doesn’t appear until something like halfway through the film, but we got much more interesting stuff instead. Do we really need ano...

Halloween Kills

I’ve seen this once before, a couple of years ago, right after its release. I was somewhat mixed on the film, but I just did not understand the vitriol some were throwing at it. Yeah, the repetitions of “Evil Dies Tonight” got old and there was some obviously, hit you over the head moralizing, but I didn’t hate it. It was obvious that David Gordon Green was trying to do something about trauma infecting a community, and I appreciated that. Upon this revisit, though, I’m even more on board wit...