David Vining's Blog, page 38

Spy Game

I wanted to like this more than I did. I really did want to. However, the combination of its odd structure, overabundance of unnecessary exposition, and stretching beyond thin of its conceit to justify its flashbacks just held be back. There were good ideas here. There’s quality production design, its stars are quite good in their roles, and it looks quite good (when Tony Scott can calm himself down, of course), but ultimately it’s just hobbled by a deeply troubled script that really needed ...

Enemy of the State

This might be the most perfect alignment of a script and Tony Scott’s filming style yet in his career. The script itself isn’t perfect, but the action-thriller elements present mesh very well with Tony Scott’s hyperactive visual stylings (where Tony Scott ends and Michael Bay begins at this point in the 90s feels like an academic question to a certain degree) work quite well together. A story of surveillance, corruption, and the proper role of governmental powers balanced between different n...

The Fan

I’m not entirely sure if this would be a good film from the same script directed by someone else, but I think I can say for sure that Tony Scott was exactly the wrong director to bring this script to screen. The script has its own problems, for sure, but Scott was never a guy for building tension over extended periods of screentime, and that’s exactly what this script needed. It’s essentially The King of Comedy in the sports world, made all the more obvious by the casting of Robert de Niro i...

Crimson Tide

Going into this run of Tony Scott films, I wanted Crimson Tide to be my favorite. I don’t really know why beyond a certain affection for submarine movies in general. I’d seen it once before, remembered little about it, but felt like it could be the Tony Scott film that I got the most out of. Well, I did enjoy the film. It’s slick and fun and tense, but it’s also kind of inherently silly in a way that undermines it at key points all while it’s pretty obvious that Don Simpson was looking at th...

True Romance

This feels like a very unpolished Quentin Tarantino script, which I’m pretty sure it is. Part of an epic writing effort by Tarantino and Roger Avery while they were still working in that video store, the first half became Natural Born Killers while the second became True Romance. It has these hallmarks of a rambling script, a series of ideas sort of connected to each other but without the kind of attention to story cohesiveness that Tarantino would bring to his own directed projects. Bought ...

The Last Boy Scout

I don’t want to say that Tony Scott directing a script by Shane Black is a match made in heaven, but it did lead to Tony Scott’s best film since the start of his career directing feature films. The younger Scott is obviously someone who didn’t have much in the way of an eye for the building blocks of a good screenplay, and he was sometimes just a pawn for the erratic cinematic ambitions of Don Simpson. However, combining with Black’s solid approach to narrative, sarcastic wit in his dialogue...

Days of Thunder

I’ve seen this once before, but it’s been a while. I couldn’t say why I had this middling feeling about it, but the first half of the film had be questioning that middling feeling from before. This was fun stuff from Scott, Simpson, and Bruckheimer. It really did seem like this rather ideal distillation of their obsession with male-dominated relationships and things that go vroom. And then…the second half started where it was supposed to get serious, and it just never recovered. They didn’t ...

Preston Sturges: A Retrospective

Preston Sturges, his father’s last name was Biden but he took the name of his step-father, was born to a theatrical mother who carted him around with her as she explored the theaters of Europe as a performer. Educated in different boarding schools across the continent, he was as fluent in French as he was in English, calling France a second home. He never found a professional home as an adult until 1928 when he suddenly became Broadway’s biggest playwright, joining the army’s air service and wor...

William Friedkin: A Retrospective

Who is William Friedkin as an artist?

It was the question I started out with when I turned on his first narrative feature film, Good Times, the first film featuring Sonny and Cher, and I was hit with comedy and fakery and artifice. This was the introduction of William Friedkin, director of The French Connection, The Exorcist, and To Live and Die in L.A. to the movie going public. I was already having trouble predicting who he was, and his first film threw me such a curveball that it took me a...

Revenge

This film seems to have some mild positivity amongst Tony Scott fans, the idea that it may not be one of his best films but that it is one of his underappreciated ones. I simply cannot agree. It’s kind of terrible, a mixture of narrative, styles, and concerns that clash horribly all while having no real grasp of how to tell a character-based story of vengeance. I was alternatively bored and frustrated from beginning to end, finding nothing to cling to as a viewer beyond some mild application...