David Vining's Blog, page 5

The Burning Season

I just have this bias against biopics, and I can’t deny it. Taking entire lives of complex men and squeezing that into two hours is just a hard thing to do. The process simplifies instead of illuminates complexities, and when complexities are revealed, they’re quickly forgotten because we have a movie about a martyr to make here. The story of the life of Chico Mendes, the Brazilian activist fighting to preserve the rubber farmers in the rainforest, is brought to earnest life by John Frankenh...

I’m back – A recount of my adventures, Days 1 and 2, Munich

So, I went to Europe for two weeks with the family.

I decided that, for my 40th birthday, I could be a bit greedy and demand a vacation to the country I love second best to America: Italy.

So, we went.

We actually flew in and out of Munich, though.

It was rainy. We were staying at a hotel near Old Towne. We made it to the Hofbrauhaus:

However, our experience was marred by a single decision: American Airlines deciding that our bags, which we handed to them in Charlotte, NC,...

Against the Wall

This feels like what the last act of Birdman of Alcatraz was supposed to be: an exploration of the seedy underbelly of the American prison system. It didn’t really work in the earlier film because Robert Shroud, in particular as shown in the film, was actually treated pretty decently. However, the portrait of Attica, the riot that gave the prisoners control, and the reaction after four days of negotiation is a much better venue for the idea. Working on a television budget for HBO, Frankenhei...

Year of the Gun

This is easily John Frankenheimer’s most interesting and successful film in years. It still doesn’t quite work, but it’s the kind of combination of character-based storytelling and political thriller that defined him early in his career. Based on a novel by Michael Mewshaw, it’s overcomplicated and the characters never quite feel real enough to have emotional impact, but it almost works as a complete package. Almost. Not quite, though.

David Raybourne (Andrew McCarthy) is an American jour...

The Fourth War

John Frankenheimer movies keep having their weird and very large structural issues. Because of his background in television, I assume that all of these are simply inherited from the script, something he never really revisited once he signed on to direct the project, and he just plunged ahead through production as quickly and efficiently as possible. Television teaches directors terrible habits (also some very good ones), and I think Frankenheimer had long since reached the point where he was...

Paddington Brown

Shot and reverse from Paddington. The first is Michael Bond, and the second is his creation, the bear from Darkest Peru.
In October of 1958, Michael Bond published the first of what would end up being 30 picture books and collections starring a small bear from Darkest Peru. Sent to London by his Aunt Lucy who has retired to the Home for Retired Bears in Lima, Paddington was adopted by the Brown family and had a series of small adventures over the next 60 years until 2017. It was then that Bon...

Godzilla, from the 80s On

About a year ago, I ran through the largest bulk of the Japanese Godzilla franchise: the Showa Era films. I promised myself I’d return to finish watching the rest, so I have now watched all of the Heisei, Millennium, and Reiwa Era Godzilla films.

And I have thoughts.

I mostly have thoughts about the nature of franchise filmmaking. Like most long-running franchises, the Godzilla franchise is a producer driven effort, individual films carrying marks of writers and directors but the overa...

Back to the Frankenheimer.

And my very quick sojourn into the Taken franchise is over, my obligations to my schedule completed, and I’m ready to return for the final ten movies of John Frankenheimer’s career.

Maybe he’ll get out of his studio doldrums.

We shall see!

On Monday.

Taken: The Definitive Ranking

I guess I might as well do this. I think three movies is kind of too short to make a ranking interesting (I sometimes still chuckle at my ranking of Charles Laughton‘s movies, though), but I’ve done it anyway.

So, the definitive ranking of the Taken franchise, three films that started with a surprise hit and just kept moving from hit to hit until…everyone decided to take things to television. Also, the movies got progressively worse. Maybe Luc Besson was largely just embarrassed to keep the f...

Taken 3

This is more of what I thought the first sequel to Pierre Morel’s Taken would be. What made Brian Mills interesting in the first film, and what we saw for a brief period in the second, was his ability to figure things out, to think on his feet and progress quickly through a criminal organization towards a clear goal. It was never about the action (which was always passable, at best) but about watching a professional do his job, that job being tracking in an urban environment. Coming back for...