David Vining's Blog, page 39

Beverly Hills Cop II: A Second Look

The latter entries in the Beverly Hills Cop franchise as well as Tony Scott’s previous films have made me appreciate the second installment a bit more. Not a whole lot more, but a bit. It’s so much better made than the next two films, but it’s also probably Scott’s most cohesive film to date. I mean, it’s still not what I’d quite call good. The character stuff still makes no sense and the connective tissues of the plot is totally threadbare, but it’s breezily entertaining in ways that the la...

Top Gun

Gosh, I wish I liked this more than I do. I mean, it’s technically accomplished, there are some nice performances, it looks good, but the story is just so wane, the stakes so completely absent for so much of the running time, and the romance so generically dull that it seriously limits my enjoyment of what the film does well. It’s just one of those films where the technical side of things is so high that it really does just come down to a balance between that and everything else that is just...

The Hunger

Tony Scott emerges from his commercial period with his first feature film in over a decade, a vampire tale in two parts that’s all style and almost no substance. I say almost no substance because there are a couple of small and interesting little twists on vampire lore going on here that do actually feed the overall film, but they’re never explored in great detail and ultimately fall to the side in favor of blue-steel visuals of people inside with glasses while doves fly around. It’s far fro...

Loving Memory

Is it even done to talk about Tony Scott’s first film? He made Loving Memory 13 years before The Hunger with BFI money (reportedly some Albert Finney money as well), it was shown at Cannes, and then the younger Scott didn’t direct a film for more than a decade when he came out with fairly different material. At only 50 minutes in length, it’s a curious mood piece and not much else, and I was mostly just kind of bored.

A young man (David Pugh) is riding his bicycle around the rural part of...

Tony Scott: A Statement of Purpose

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I have never really liked the work of Tony Scott.

Never been much of a fan. When people tell me that they prefer his work to his elder brother Ridley’s, the man who made things like Kingdom of Heaven, Blade Runner, and Alien, I am just plain confused.

I don’t think I’ve been much of a detractor based on my history of watching the younger Scott’s work, but I’ve never been much of a fan. The one film of his I’m coming into this survey with the most familiarity would be Top Gun, and that’...

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Orson Welles: The Definitive Ranking

The director’s director, Orson Welles, had a short filmography, and even out of those films, precious few could be considered his. He didn’t work great in the studio system, though movies like The Stranger proved that he could function well enough. His independent streak was simply too wide and too well-defined to walk into a production of someone else’s imagination and just do the job of managing the set. Every film he worked on, he would take over the script and completely rewrite it, espe...

The Other Side of the Wind

A Hollywood myth for decades, Orson Welles’ final film was in legal limbo because of its funding mechanism (the brother-in-law to the deposed Shah of Iran), typical Welles family in-fighting (his daughter Beatrice and mistress Oja Kodar were regularly at odds regarding what to do with the different pieces of different projects that they had claim to, though Oja got most of it), and the fact that no one really knew what to do with the footage (even people like George Lucas couldn’t make heads...

Don Quixote

I don’t think it’s really possible to talk about this film without talking about its long production history. Completely funded by Welles himself, he managed the actual production period from 1967-1969 shortly after the death of his star Francisco Reiguera. With no timelines or deadlines enforced upon him, Welles was able to take all the time in the world to come to some kind of conclusion. By the time of his death in 1985, he had come to no conclusion, sending the concept of the film, which...

F for Fake

First of all, I’m not going to review Filming Othello. It’s essentially just Welles talking to the camera, a video essay where he recollects some tidbits from the production of his film mixed in with a discussion from two of his actors and a Q&A with film students in Boston. It’s interesting, but it’s more about his interpretation of Othello the play than anything else. On the other hand, I’m definitely reviewing F for Fake. It’s also a video essay, but it’s far more involved than just Welle...