David Vining's Blog, page 48

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

#2 in my ranking of the Mad Max franchise.

Born of the wide-ranging world-building George Miller and Nico Lathouris created in preparation for Mad Max Fury Road, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is, I believe, a much more purely George Miller experience than any of the other films he’s made in The Wasteland. I’m not exactly a student of Miller’s work, but I’ve seen enough, in particular his previous film, Three Thousand Years of Longing, to understand that one of Miller’s primary concerns with the...

Rampage

William Friedkin chose to adapt the novel by William P. Wood, and much like Cruising, Friedkin’s last sole writing credit, there’s a serious attempt to tackle something that just doesn’t quite come together. I have admiration for Friedkin’s attempts at serious efforts to make a topical film that actually has both feet in reality, except that it makes these rather wide-ranging assumptions about the audience’s perception of the central issue that needed more explanation in the film itself whil...

Mad Max: Fury Road, A Second Look

I reviewed this…forever ago. Just one of those random things I picked up and wrote 400 words about when I was first starting, looking for some kind of path through the world of cinema to write about. Well, revisiting it again (really, again, I watch this movie pretty regularly), especially within the context of the overall Mad Max franchise, I think I appreciate the film even more. I love this film completely. It feels like the complete culmination of everything George Miller had been trying...

C.A.T. Squad

I strongly suspect that the only reason that this TV film got made for NBC was because William Friedkin had a good time while working with Gerald Petievich on To Live and Die in L.A., Petievich said he had more stories that he could turn into movies, and Friedkin fronted for him to studios and networks until they got a deal. This dull, plodding thriller feels like all of the worst impulses from Friedkin’s previous theatrical film without any effort to imbue it with an actual character journe...

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome

Yeah, this is weird, but I get into it. Presaging the total weirdness that Miller would unleash in the world building of Fury Road, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome is this combination of weird world-building and efforts at being more amenable to wider audiences. A lot of people hold certain aspects of that against the film, but I don’t. I enjoy it all. I mean, this isn’t great art. Miller doesn’t seem to be totally into the affair, going safe after the tragic death of his producing partner Byron ...

Paddington in Peru – Trailer

I don’t often get excited about newer films, and it’s very rare when it comes to children’s films. However, the Paddington movies are different.

Some of the most lovingly crafted and purely joyous bits of family entertainment made since PIXAR lost its mojo, the first two are absolute delights that my children love to death. I bought them, though, because I loved the movies first, and they discovered them later. My eldest has recently been asking me pretty regularly the release dates...

To Live and Die in L.A.

For the first hour or so, I was a bit uneasy with William Friedkin’s adaptation of Gerald Petievich’s source novel of the same name. It was too seemingly in love with extrajudicial federal agents playing by their own rules, the sort of manifestation of the criticisms leveled at Dirty Harry, and then the film makes some choices that make it obvious that this is less of a celebration than a cautionary tale, a tragedy. Throw on top Friedkin’s expert use of editing and his camera, and you’ve got...

Mad Max 2 (or, The Road Warrior)

I don’t know if it’s the new writers or what, but George Miller’s sequel to Mad Max feels much more in line with the intent of the first film than what the first film actually achieved. I have some very small issues with how things play out here, but it’s obvious that Miller got himself much closer to his ideal in terms of these stories of the Wasteland. There’s a minimalism to the storytelling that mostly works in the film’s favor that I really, really appreciate while keeping a clear-eye t...

Deal of the Century

Where The Brink’s Job felt like a dramatic film with missing comedic elements, Deal of the Century feels like a comedy with missing comedic elements. The earlier film still worked to some limited degree by preserving its screenplay through the edit, but Deal of the Century feels like there was almost no comedy in the screenplay to begin with. I think, at his core, Friedkin simply did not understand how comedy worked. He hired a pair of comic actors in Chevy Chase and Gregory Hines and expect...

Mad Max

Peter Weir‘s The Cars that Ate Paris helped to ignite the whole crazy cars craze in Australian exploitation cinema, and one of the beneficiaries of that was a young doctor turned filmmaker George Miller. Aiming to make a silent film with sound, telling the story kinetically, it’s obvious from the very beginning that Miller was a consummate director, but the script he had developed with James McCausland, demonstrates a complete lack of knowledge of how movies work dramatically, prioritizing a...