David Vining's Blog, page 50

Good Times

The first narrative feature film by documentarian William Friedkin is a Sonny and Cher variety hour (and a half)? That’s such a weird place to start his career, but okay. I have no real problem with loose narratives and variety-like presentation, but Good Times tries to strike this balance between having a story with expected payoffs in the pathos department while dedicating far too much of its runtime to three sketches that don’t end up actually contribute to anything while not being nearly...

William Friedkin: A Statement of Purpose

Why William Friedkin? Because he died.

Wait…he died last August…and I’m just now getting around to it? Yeah…I plan too far ahead, I think.

Anyway, why not go through his body of work? He’s got several films that seem to have become cultural touchstones, but, more importantly, he’s got a whole lot more than that. The Brink’s Job? The Guardian? C.A.T. Squad: Python Wolf? I’ve never heard of these at all. Sure, I’ve seen The Exorcist, Sorcerer, and Killer Joe (also, you know, The French C...

Godzilla, The Showa Era: The Definitive Ranking

So, the first question is: will I do the rest? Yes, eventually. This was a lot, and it represents almost half of the entire Japanese Godzilla franchise. I need a break. In a few months, we’ll see.

That being said, I was really not looking forward to this. When I decided to do the career of Ishiro Honda it was despite his connection to the famous kaiju rather than because of it. I wanted to explore everything else. Well, having invested my time and energies into watching the whole Showa Er...

Ishiro Honda: The Definitive Ranking

So, I was unable to find about a dozen of Ishiro Honda’s films. By all accounts, every one of them exists extant, but you pretty much have to go to film festivals in Japan to see them because they don’t have home video releases in either America or Japan that I can track down. I think I got lucky finding what I could.

That being said, I found Honda’s career both interesting and frustrating. Interesting because he started out as any other studio director at Toho, making melodramas and foll...

Terror of Mechagodzilla

Ishiro Honda got pulled out of sort-of retirement doing nothing but television work to make his final feature film as a director and the final Godzilla film of the Showa Era before economic pressures became the main brake on any more for almost a decade. Honestly, I was just happy to see the film work towards a bit of pathos and actually reach it in its own modest way. Sure, it’s nowhere close to Honda’s best film (Farewell Rabaul had little competition at the top), but it’s fighting for the...

Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla

Jun Fukuda returns to the Godzilla franchise for the final time, and he puts forward his best effort and one of the best of the franchise. He doesn’t elevate the material, but he does bring together the basic elements into an entertaining and complete package that goes in some small new directions while still basically sticking to formula. We have our pint-sized human characters running around trying to solve problems that affect the outcome of the giant monster smashes going on around it. T...

Godzilla vs. Megalon

The success of any of these Showa-Era Godzilla films (really the whole kaiju genre) seems to hinge on three major things: the dedication to the human story, some kind of connection between the human story and the monster action, and then the quality of the monster action. It’s a very simple mix without much demand for grand themes or involving characters. Most of these things are simply procedurals where professional people try to figure out solutions to the central problem of giant monsters...

Mirroman: Season 1 Episode 1

So, I’m not going to watch much of Ishiro Honda’s television work, but considering how it dominated his output through the 70s before he returned to Godzilla for one final time in Terror of Mechagodzilla and became Akira Kurosawa’s assistant director in his final working years, I felt like it was appropriate to take a look at some example. So, why not start (and end) with his work bringing the first episode of the series Mirrorman to Japanese television screens? In addition, this first episo...

Godzilla vs. Gigan

Tomoyuki Tanaka brought back Jun Fukuda to the Godzilla franchise after the…interesting results from Yoshimitsu Banno on Godzilla vs. Hedorah, choosing to go a more traditional monster-mash route from the man who had made Ebirah and Son of Godzilla. There’s also a move away from more direct proselytizing about an issue-du-jour and inelegantly inserting messages about how everyone needs to be nice to each other. It’s more generically monster-movie stuff with the humans having some small effec...

Godzilla vs. Hedorah

This is probably the most interesting of the Godzilla films. It’s the first film by Yoshimitsu Banno, who also wrote the script, and he swung for the fences stylistically and thematically. He wanted a return to the more serious-minded approach to the monster film like in Ishiro Honda’s first film while using it as a vehicle to talk about pollution rather than atomic energy. He also brings this weird 60s energy to so much of what happens on screen as to be simply…fascinating. I don’t think th...