David Vining's Blog, page 47

Rules of Engagement

I think this is a couple of choices away from being something really special, and I get the sense that the choices made were followed through on at the behest of test screening audiences. I know one of my issues was, and now that I’ve learned that, I suspect that at least some of the others might be as well. Still, what is there is surprisingly special. William Friedkin makes another courtroom drama, this time based on a script by Stephen Gaghan (originally developed by future Senator James ...

12 Angry Men (1997)

It’s been a while since William Friedkin adapted a stage play to film, but every time it happens, I feel like it’s Friedkin coming home somehow. It’s unusual since Friedkin’s early history is dominated by his documentary work, but the first film he had real passion for was the adaptation of a Harold Pinter play. So, when he returns to the theater, effectively, it tends to focus in on actors, an obvious love for Friedkin. He obviously had great affinity for actors and their performances, and ...

Robert E. Howard: A Retrospective

Six films have the credit of some variation of “Based on the works of Robert E. Howard,” and I watched all of them a few weeks back. It all started when I got the 4K collector’s set of the first two Conan the Barbarian films starring Arnold Schwarzenegger from Arrow Video (they’re very nice). I expanded it to include the other four, and as I was going through them, I had the recurring thought that I would write a post about them. However, the only thing that kept attracting my attention was the ...

George Romero: A Retrospective

If there’s one thing George Romero is known for it’s zombies. He was the zombie guy. He made zombie movies. And, to be fair, six out of sixteen films were zombie films. That’s not a small percentage, but half of those three were made in the final five years of his career from 2005-2009. Much like many film directors who started in the horror genre, he spent most of his career trying to break out of that mold before ultimately just giving up and using what little clout he had in that tiny subgenr...

Jade

This really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Directing from a script by Joe Eszterhas, William Friedkin brings a professional air to a trashy erotic-thriller that’s not that trashy nor that erotic. It’s mostly just kind of dull. I don’t think Friedkin had ever directed anything sexy before, and there’s a surprisingly sterile quality to the erotic elements here. But, the real sin is that the plotting makes just this side of no sense, the characters barely exist, and the overall mystery neve...

Jailbreakers

This kind of reminds me of the Masters of Horror series, the series of short films made for Showtime in the early 2000s, hyping up the talents of filmmakers like John Carpenter and Joe Dante which ended up being largely just an uneven series of random horror-like stories without any real authorial stamps from the talents involved. I guess Showtime’s been doing this for a while because Jailbreakers is part of a series called Rebel Highway, and this kind of just feels like a generic 50s biker ...

Blue Chips

I haven’t seen this movie in over twenty years. I might have watched it twice (my dad really likes it), and I was surprised to discover that I remember a shocking amount of what goes on. As I’ve been progressing through Friedkin’s body of work, though, I’ve been wondering how this movie about basketball and recruiting could have anything to do with the films that preceded it. Was it just another director for hire job like the C.A.T. Squad films? Well, no. It perfectly fits. If there is a the...

The Guardian

You know, I was expecting a complete disaster from William Friedkin’s The Guardian. All of the ratings everywhere are low. It’s mostly forgotten. It sounds silly. And yet…it’s competent. I mean, it’s not good, denying any sense of mystery that kills any tension across the bulk of the film, its chief flaw, but Friedkin knew how to put together a movie even if the script (which he apparently did the final draft on himself) is simply not good enough to actually hold dramatic interest across its...

C.A.T. Squad: Python Wolf

Well, this is a surprise. The sequel to William Friedkin’s and Gerald Petievich’s network television film C.A.T. Squad, a largely dull affair masquerading as a thriller, is actually…pretty decent? I mean, I still wouldn’t go so far as to call it good, but it’s perfectly competent. Maybe it’s the inclusion of Robert Ward as a writer. I mean, maybe his history of novel writing and writing for Michael Mann on Miami Vice taught him the basics of thriller mechanics. Because that’s all this really...

Pier Paolo Pasolini: A Retrospective

Pier Paolo Pasolini was controversial in Italy before he ever started making movies. Writing poetry from his youth, his first novel, Ragazzi di vita, led to lawsuits for obscenity from the Italian government. He entered the Italian film industry doing things like rewriting dialogue on Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria, providing a more realistic and lower-class patois, leaning heavily into “lower” Italian dialects, to the characters of prostitutes who populate the film. His first film as dire...