David Vining's Blog, page 44

Animal House

John Landis has been saved by teaming up with Ivan Reitman and Harold Ramis (as well as Doug Kenney and Chris Miller) for this first effort at filmmaking by the magazine National Lampoon. Actually teaming with funny people with deeply satirical bents meshed well with Landis’ anarchic energy and sense of humor, creating a tale that’s a celebration of slobs, slovenliness, and general cynicism about everything, the exact kind of anti-establishment feeling that appeals to many people across many...

The Kentucky Fried Movie

From effectively a series of skits dressed up as a movie to definitely a series of skits dressed up as a movie, John Landis teams with the Kentucky Fried Theater trio, David and Jerry Zucker as well as Jim Abrahams, to take the same kind of random comedy, package it slightly more effectively, and deliver a more entertaining package. I mean, I still don’t think this is good comedy, but there are many more bits here that work than there had been in Schlock. However, there’s one segment, the lo...

Schlock

This is the work of a big time film fan who has…not a lot of cinematic talent. He’s the goofy guy people said was funny, pushing his low-brow sense of humor as hard as possible across a quick 77-minute long thing that resembles a movie. It’s interesting to see this kind of desperate attempt for a laugh after finishing the work of Preston Sturges which always felt so effortless (well, until the end), but that kind of screwball mentality is what gives John Landis the little appeal the film has...

John Landis: A Statement of Purpose

John Landis is still alive right? So, much like Joe Dante, this list is going to somehow end up making Landis find funding for another film. The cinematic butterfly effect.

However, I have serious, serious doubts that he’s going to make a movie again. In fact, I’m surprised his career lasted as long as it did after 1983 and the on-set accident of The Twilight Zone Movie. His high point after that seems to have been Beverly Hill Cop 3, which is widely considered the worst of the franchise ...

Preston Sturges: The Definitive Ranking

Preston Sturges best films are surprisingly well remembered seventy years after their release, and they represent a large percentage of his filmography…because he didn’t make many. He burned very brightly for a very short amount of time, dominating Paramount Pictures as the first prominent writer/director for several years before his trouble with his main producer, Buddy DeSylva, sent him off in new directions. That new direction was towards Howard Hughes which…just…don’t go into business wi...

The French, They are a Funny Race

Preston Sturges’ relationship with 20th Century Fox came to an end after both of his films underperformed, and Sturges was left trying to find work where he could, going from one script to another theatrical production with no success until he found French financiers for another film. Based on a novel by Pierre Daninos, The French, They are a Funny Race is a curious series of comic vignettes without anything close to a story to connect it all together. It’s more of a survey of one prim Engli...

The Beautiful Blonde of Bashful Bend

Has…has Sturges just lost the touch he once had? I wouldn’t go nearly as far to call The Beautiful Blonde of Bashful Bend, his second (and last) film at Twentieth Century Fox, as bad, but there’s a certain deadness to much of what happens, this lack of dramatic throughline that helps provide the underpinnings of his best work. It seems as though this film was almost forced upon Sturges by Fox, looking to get him to make a comedy star out of Betty Grable, but its lack of success ended Sturges...

Unfaithfully Yours

Preston Sturges’ business partnership with Howard Hughes came to an abrupt close during the filming of Vendetta from which Hughes fired Sturges, and Sturges ended up going to 20th Century Fox for his next film, Unfaithfully Yours, something of a bit more typical project from him than his previous effort at combining his comedy with a silent comedy legend. That’s not a bad thing at all, mind you. He’s experimenting a bit with structure while continuing his lean into witty playfulness as he mo...

The Sin of Harold Diddlebock

Legacy sequels aren’t anything new, it seems. Hoping to work with Harold Lloyd years after his retirement, Preston Sturges wrote a sequel to The Freshman, one of Lloyd’s most beloved silent comedies from the early 1920s, taking Lloyd’s central character and imagining what would happen to him after twenty years of being placed in a small box before breaking out into Lloyd-esque antics one more time. Reportedly, the perfectionist Sturges shut Lloyd out of the creation process, especially aroun...

The Great Moment

Now this…This is a weird film. Preston Sturges, known very well and paid very well for his ability to write and direct comedies, takes on a biopic of Dr. W.T. Morton, the dentist who reportedly was the first to use ether as an anesthetic. Morton seems like a curious case study because of the rancor around whether he, Dr. Charles Jackson, or Dr. Horace Wells came up with it first combined with the fact that he didn’t actually invent anything while also including all of the contradictory ideas...