David Vining's Blog, page 41

The Magnificent Ambersons

Orson Welles’ second and final film for RKO is one of those famous cautionary tales in cinema history. Welles was nearing completion of editing on the film when he was sent to Brazil to help film some propaganda-adjacent stuff for the US government at the start of the American involvement in the Second World War. Sending notes to his editors about what to do, the studio took the film away from him, massively cut the last hour and a half down to the bone, reshot some stuff, and released an 88...

Citizen Kane

If Orson Welles’ feature film debut were just another old movie, I imagine there wouldn’t be this brewing and simmering backlash against it wrought because the BFI’s Sight & Sound poll listed it as the best film ever for six decades (with an assist from the AFI). You tell people that Citizen Kane is the choice of critics as the best movie ever, they expect something transcendental from the experience, a film so great and amazing that it will literally change their lives forever. When all the...

Orson Welles: A Statement of Pur…Principles

I’ve almost gone through Welles’ body of work a couple of times before, but I was always held back by a couple of issues with his filmography.

The first question is one of authorship. Many of his completed films have multiple cuts. The most famous of them will be Touch of Evil, mostly because Walter Murch, operating off of Welles’ notes to the studio, was able to recreate a very close approximation for what Welles described as what he had intended for the film before the studio had taken ...

Orson Welles: A Statement of Purpose

I’ve almost gone through Welles’ body of work a couple of times before, but I was always held back by a couple of issues with his filmography.

The first question is one of authorship. Many of his completed films have multiple cuts. The most famous of them will be Touch of Evil, mostly because Walter Murch, operating off of Welles’ notes to the studio, was able to recreate a very close approximation for what Welles described as what he had intended for the film before the studio had taken ...

Next…

Reading Update

Maybe a few of you would be more interesting in a writing update…?

I can dream.

I’ll have more to come on that front later, but for now, let’s talk about the few books I’m managed to get through over the past few months. One of them was pretty long, so forgive me for only having 3 to talk about.

In no order, they were The House on the Borderland, True Grit, and The Lord of the Rings.

So, first, The House on the Borderland was a recommendation because I was looking for writing by ...

John Landis: The Definitive Ranking

Twilight Zone: The Movie really is the dividing line in John Landis’ career. Before the anthology film, his star was rising and seemed unstoppable. Even his weird throwback to Universal horror films made 10 times its budget despite getting rather ragged by contemporary critics. After the anthology film, he seemed to have just stalled and remained there until his last feature film nearly thirty years later. He puttered through smaller scale films without nearly the same kind of ambition or at...

Burke and Hare

John Landis’ final feature film is a director for hire job and another attempt to replicate the kinds of films from the past, this time Ealing Street comedies. He doesn’t balance things as well as Alexander Mackendrick in stuff like The Man in the White Suit, the script by Piers Ashworth and Nick Moorcroft not really providing him the best grounding on which to build a black comedy, though it was obviously the intention from the start. The choice to make one of the eponymous pair a tragic he...

Masters of Horror: Family

This is probably the best episode of Masters of Horror I’ve seen (grand total of six of them over both seasons). It’s got a straightforward story with focus, the appropriate scale for the shortened runtime, solid acting, and a satisfying ending. It’s solidly good stuff. It doesn’t feel like a Landis work at all, more like he’s just an effective manager of a set, servicing the script by Brent Hanley well, but sometimes that’s what a director needs to kind of reset. Maybe this is what he shoul...

Masters of Horror: Deer Woman

Le sigh…I did these for John Carpenter and Joe Dante, so I guess I have to do them for John Landis too, huh? Well, at least this is okay in terms of how these little anthology entries go. It’s not quite as solid as Cigarette Burns, but it’s not miserable like Pro-Life or The Screwfly Solution. It’s also notable as Max Landis’ first writing credit, working with his father to create this attempt at a horror/comedy mashup that John had pulled off so well with An American Werewolf in London. It’...