David Vining's Blog, page 58

Kull the Conqueror

I did not think that the Laurentiis family would sink any lower in their adaptations of Robert E. Howard material than Red Sonja, but Raphaella proved me wrong! Taking a Conan script that had been sitting around forever because Arnold Schwarzenegger didn’t want anything to do with the Laurentiis producing family anymore, presenting it to Kevin Sorbo who insisted on changing it to Kull, minimizing the budget, hiring a television director to do it cheaply, and making it look like any generic f...

Red Sonja

So, this is sort of Robert E. Howard material. He did create a character named Red Sonya, but she was never set in the Hyborian Age in Howard’s writing. She was modified by Barry Windsor-Smith and Roy Thomas from the sixteenth century gun-totting female that Howard had created into the female barbarian warrior of the ancient world for Marvel Comics. That being said, the film directed by Richard Fleischer and written by Clive Exton and George MacDonald Fraser is just this boring retread of th...

Conan the Destroyer

Richard Fleischer’s Conan the Destroyer takes the weird, primal, and solidly written pulp by Robert E. Howard and turns it into something lesser, more of a generic fantasy pulp adventure. And you know what? I’m kind of okay with it. It doesn’t even attempt the operatic heights of John Milius’ precursor film, despite the reuse of Basil Poledouris’ score, instead choosing to be a fetch quest, there and back again tale with only perfunctory efforts at character, all while making it a bit (hones...

Conan the Barbarian

John Milius’ Conan the Barbarian takes the weird, primal, and solidly written pulp by Robert E. Howard and turns it into something operatic and beautiful, retaining so much of what made Howard’s original stories so compelling while completely messing up most of the specifics. Heck, Conan has the backstory here of Kull the Conqueror. Not that I’m some sort of Howard scholar or anything. The differences don’t matter to me. What I get swept up in is that operatic quality, my only real complaint...

Robert E. Howard: A Statement of Purpose

Wait a minute…Robert E. Howard wasn’t a film director.

That’s right, he wasn’t, boys and girls. He was a pulp writer in the early 20th century who created the characters of Conan the Barbarian and Kull 9f Atlantis before shooting himself in the head at the age of 30.

So, what’s he doing here? Am I going to switch over to reading?

Not on your life (well, I do read, but that’s another story). No, I’m going to watch the cinematic adaptations of Robert E. Howard’s creations (and Red So...

Pier Paolo Pasolini: The Definitive Ranking

The Italian Marxist who caused constant stirs within the Italian culture of his time, Pier Paolo Pasolini, was a talented writer and filmmaker who seems to have gone through a crisis in the mid-60s. The death of Togliatti, the leader of the Italian Communist Party, seems to have had some great effect on the filmmaker, causing his films to go from veiled leftist critiques of contemporary Italian society to increasingly shrill rants against the bourgeois, largely keeping hold of his filmmaking...

Salo or 120 Days of Sodom

Now we come to it, the movie I was most dreading. I’ve seen this once before, but it was many years ago, one of the early films I got using my Netflix DVD subscription. I’ve thought of it from time to time since, having surprisingly clear memories of it, and I’ve never had a desire to revisit it. It represents a unique problem in art: a work so repellant that it’s difficult to get through, but which is intentionally so. Is it a success because it achieves that goal of repellence? Or, is it a...

Oppenheimer: A Second Look

#6 in my ranking of Christopher Nolan’s filmography.

#36 in my ranking of the Best Picture winners at the Oscars.

Well, that was predictable. The Oscar win, that is. When a film wins top honors at the SAG, DGA, and PGA ceremonies, it’s going to win Best Picture.

Anyway, I was happy to revisit Oppenheimer, not only because I did enjoy it this first time (with my caveats), but also because I always wonder if my reaction to newer films is at all afflicted with some sort of recency bias...

Arabian Nights

The final entry in Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life is more akin to The Canterbury Tales than The Decameron. Erotic but less concerned with shocking the squares than the first entry, Arabian Nights is another anthology film of ancient tales set in an exotic land, filmed beautifully by Pasolini and his cinematographer Giuseppe Ruzzolini, that entertains lightly as it moves through its different stories with something of an overall framing device popping in every once in a while (it’s not the origin...

The Best Picture Winners at the Oscars: The Finale

Well, I did it. I watched ’em all. It took about a year, but I have seen every Best Picture winner at the Oscars from Sunrise and Wings to Everything Everywhere All At Once. This is the fourth of my posts about the winners, and it’s going to end up more of a review of the whole thing rather than a breakdown of what the last twenty years of winners means because the last twenty years of winners don’t seem to mean much.

I think the Best Picture winners had some kind of meaning to the Academy fo...