David Vining's Blog, page 49

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...

Mad Max: A Statement of Purpose

So, the Mad Max films are five of George Miller’s eleven films, representing almost half. Also, no one else has directed a Mad Max film. Should I just do all of George Miller’s filmography at once?

Well, I’m not gonna. It has more to do with the fact that I have an idea for an essay to write that involves the Mad Max films than a desire to peruse Miller’s body of work as a whole. Besides, he’s obviously still working and making movies. Furiosa might have bombed hard enough to deny us anot...

Cruising

William Friedkin’s connections to the real story that inspired this film are probably more interesting than the film itself. Friedkin hired Paul Bateson, an x-ray tech, to play a doctor in The Exorcist. Bateson went on to murder several gay men in New York through the 70s, even going so far as to imply that he had done more than he had been convicted for. The story of the film doesn’t touch on Bateson directly, instead being inspired by a novel written by Gerald Walker. It also seems to get ...

The Brink’s Job

This is described as a comedy. Peter Falk plays the main, central role. Heck, Roger Ebert talks about the warm human comedy. I barely cracked a smile through the whole thing (there are a handful of moments later, though). That’s not to say that the film is some sort of unmitigated disaster, just that there’s this apparently separation between tone and what seems to have been the intent where the comedy should be. The film feels sedate where it should feel more lively, like it took the templa...

Sorcerer

William Friedkin was bouncing from success to success at this point after The French Connection and The Exorcist, choosing to use his clout to remake a classic French thriller, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear. Considering his output up to this point, this spare, tense piece of cinema feels out of place where most of his work had been claustrophobic and very actor-focused, usually theater-centric. However, Friedkin’s skill is up to the task, and he delivers one masterful series of e...

The Exorcist

I remember the first time I watched William Friedkin’s and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist. My father had fed me the line that it was the scariest movie ever made, and I bought into it. However, I was determined to watch it. I put it on in the middle of a bright and sunny day, determined to minimize the scares. Well, the effort wasn’t really justified because I wasn’t terribly scared. I was, on the other hand, completely enthralled. This was a horror film that completely pulled me in, he...