David Vining's Blog, page 59

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...

The Third Quarter Century of Oscar Best Picture Winners

Getting close now, it seems. I should be done right before the next Oscar ceremony, which isn’t too far away, but I was looking ahead to what came after my stopping point of 2004 and realized that the whole game seemed to have changed character from that point on. Considering the vast changes in how the Academy seemed to be operating when it came to Best Picture winners that had occurred from the early 70s to the early 00s, it felt like simply too much for one post. So, here I am breaking it up ...

The Second Quarter Century of Best Picture Winners

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A few months ago I wrote about the first quarter century (roughly) of Best Picture winners at the Oscars. Well, in the ensuing months, as I’ve discovered the works of William Wyler and Peter Weir, I’ve also kept on with my viewing of Best Picture winners to the point where I can now talk about the next quarter century (roughly) of Best Picture winners at the Oscars.

And this is the period where I really think the Academy found some kind of sweet spot between awarding films with critical accla...

The Canterbury Tales

If this didn’t inspire Terry Gilliam and his approach to his first sole feature film, Jabberwocky five years later, I would be surprised. There’s something about the loose production, handheld cameras, and exaggerated lenses and costumes that feels like a precursor to Gilliam’s first solo foray into live action filmmaking. After my muted reaction to The Decameron, I was expecting to find the rest of Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life to miss the mark as well (especially since the first feature is ge...

The Decameron

You know, I was not expecting to be so disengaged from the first of Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life. It seems to be the most well-received of the three films, erotic anthologies adapted from very old literary sources, and yet I felt like it was largely a one-note affair, mostly an effort to “scare the squares” with raunchiness mixed with borderline blasphemy, all while never really being the kind of funny that I think Pasolini intended. There were chuckles along the way, and Pasolini’s strong vis...

Medea

There’s something about this adaptation of Euripides’ Medea that feels just so much slower than the rest of Pasolini’s filmography. Things had been slowing down for the last few entries in his filmography, but those slowed paces, especially in Teorema, had been in service to quirkier, weirder stories that still managed to get in and out in less than one hundred minutes. Going nearly a full two hours for this telling of Medea feels overindulgent to the point where it simply feels like the fil...

Pigsty

I don’t think this quite works. I think something has broken in Pasolini’s narrative brain at this point where his hatred of modernity, Italy, culture (past, present, and what he saw as the future), the lack of Marxist revolution, and even the New Left was simply the point of his cinematic undertakings at this point. We’re left with symbols, implied meanings, and archetypes. I’m just glad he’s really good at making movies, or this would have been a complete disaster instead of something of a...