David Vining's Blog, page 37

Halloween II

I…do not understand why fans of the franchise like this one so much. Everything I read says, “Sure, it’s not as good as the original, but it’s still so much fun!” And yet, I find it immensely boring. Just straight up dull from beginning to end. It’s weird because John Carpenter and Debra Hill wrote it while the director, Rick Rosenthal, was trying to go for the same kind of restrained tension that Carpenter maintained in the first one. However, the script is a complete mess (something Carpen...

Halloween: A Second Look

John Carpenter‘s little slasher that was almost forgotten before, as legend says it, Roger Ebert saved it with a highly positive review, is so different from the exploitative nonsense that defines the derivative Friday the 13th franchise and so much more grounded than the strange sights that dominate the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. This is a simple story of a girl in a suburb that gets visited by evil.

There’s practically no story here. It’s almost all character and tension. It’s s...

The Halloween Franchise: A Statement of Purpose

Well, it’s getting to be that time of year again. If your house is anything like mine (or, more accurately, your wife anything like mine), there have been Halloween decorations up for weeks now, maybe months (it’s bordering on months at this moment).

For the past two years, I’ve spent the weeks leading up to Halloween digging through the major slasher franchises of the 80s. First was A Nightmare on Elm Street (the latest of the three to premiere its first film), then it was Friday the 13t...

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Tony Scott: The Definitive Ranking

So, I came into the work of Tony Scott ready for disappointment. I wasn’t a fan before, but I had something like mixed to warm feelings about several of his films while having never felt a need to discover some of his lesser known work.

Well, I enjoyed the run more than I thought I would. He felt defined more by his producers than himself, his brother than his own creative impulses, and he seemed to have no real feel for narrative. That being said, he put together some entertaining times ...

Unstoppable

My wife and I have a running joke about this movie. We saw it when we were dating, and she came out of the theater playfully angry because the film’s title was a misnomer. “Ah,” I retorted after she had explained herself, “It’s not the train that the title refers to, but to the friendship between the two leads. That was what was unstoppable.” We replay the joke about once a year. It tickles me.

Anyway, pointless personal anecdote aside, revisiting Tony Scott’s final film more than a decad...

The Taking of Pelham 123

There’s something off about this readaptation of the novel by John Godey. On the surface, it’s a perfectly acceptable Tony Scott thriller with overactive camera work and good performances, but there’s something missing in the writing by Brian Helgeland. Characters feel too thin, the thematic tissue connection them too underdeveloped, the push to make the main character too sympathetic. The thriller elements work decently enough, but all of the character stuff just feels thin and off.

The ...

Déjà Vu

For the first two-thirds of this film from Tony Scott, I thought it was going to be his best film, and it wasn’t even going to be very close. And then the final third just kind of became a typical action film, Tony Scott on auto-pilot. The writers, Bill Marsilii and Terry Rossio, insist that their script was tighter than what Scott actually filmed (undermining my idea that Scott never, ever wrote a thing on his movies), so I suspect that Scott just pushed the final act towards his own milieu...

Domino

This is Tony Scott’s entry into the BMW web series, Beat the Devil, across an entire 2 hours of film. I found it a headache in 8-minute form. I find it just as much a headache at feature length. Bearing the obvious marks of a screenplay straining for any reason to exist, Domino is an overlong drag through stylistic excess with nothing at its core. If there is an attempt at something being the film’s center, it’s undone by the film’s flippant attitude towards audience involvement as well. Thi...

Man on Fire

This is the most sedate, focused, and emotionally resonant film that Tony Scott probably ever made. It’s also got those same hallmarks that have held back most of Scott’s other better efforts: namely some issues in the backend of the script that he shot without, seeming, much question. It kind of descends into revenge porn while leaving its emotional resonance behind until it tries to grasp at it in the final moments once more. It’s a disconnect that takes what should have been Scott elevati...