David Vining's Blog, page 60

The Hawks and the Sparrows

Pier Paolo Pasolini was going through some stuff when he made The Hawks and the Sparrows. This comedy, complete with a delightful score by Ennio Morricone, is obviously some form of self-therapy on Pasolini’s part as he deals with the death of Palmiro Togliatti, the leader of the Italian Communist Party (an organization that kicked Pasolini out because of his homosexuality), and the seeming failure of Marxism to bring about a change in humanity required for the promised utopia on Earth. It’s...

The Gospel According to Matthew

Pier Paolo Pasolini, noted communist, atheist, and homosexual, went out and made one of the best religious films in history because he was stuck in his hotel room in Assisi while the pope tied up traffic of the city, he got bored, and he read the gospels, zeroing in on Matthew as an ideal source for adaptation. His stripped down approach to retelling the life of Christ, complete with his return to using an exclusively non-professional cast after he rankled while directing Anna Magnani in Mom...

Mamma Roma

Pasolini’s follow-up to his breakthrough feature film debut, Mamma Roma, is his first attempt to work with an actual movie star, and it’s something he’d roll back on immediately afterwards. Anna Magnani was an Italian star who’d even done work in Hollywood as well as alongside Jean Renoir, and Pasolini wrote a script around her personality while also feeding his own thematic concerns at the same time. She plays everything very big, a marked contrast to the restrained performances he had gott...

Momma Roma

Pasolini’s follow-up to his breakthrough feature film debut, Momma Roma, is his first attempt to work with an actual movie star, and it’s something he’d roll back on immediately afterwards. Anna Magnani was an Italian star who’d even done work in Hollywood as well as alongside Jean Renoir, and Pasolini wrote a script around her personality while also feeding his own thematic concerns at the same time. She plays everything very big, a marked contrast to the restrained performances he had gott...

Accattone

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s first feature film is, on the surface, another example of Italian neo-realism, a form that dominated in postwar Italy for decades because of the relative poverty of the industry necessitating minimalized physical productions, but it also appears to be one of those that was heavily political, taking on a main character who never works, living off the labor of another, and is so morally corrupt that he’s a joke on the lower end of the criminal world of Rome. Yeah, he feel...

Pier Paolo Pasolini: A Statement of Purpose

This has got to be out of the blue, no? Some mostly forgotten Italian filmmaker from the 60s and 70s who was wildly controversial in his day but almost seems quaint when thinking about the era now. I mean, there’s Fellini and no one else, right?

Well, the folks at Criterion put out a box, Pasolini 101, and my mother reached out to me asking if I was interested in it as a present last year. I mean, I wasn’t going to say no. I’ve seen five or six of his films (I think I’ve seen Oedipus Rex,...

Heretics of Dune by Frank Herbert

This is weird, and I don’t mean the sex scene late in the book. This feels like Frank Herbert being pushed to write more in the Dune universe after he ended his coda of God Emperor of Dune (which barely had narrative reason to exist itself) and having no idea where to take it next. It’s too familiar to what had come before in terms of worldbuilding while he searches desperately for some way to make the rules of the universe different at the same time. On top of all of that, it was intended a...

The Best Picture Winners at the Oscars: The Definitive Ranking

This is the whole list, all ninety-six films that won Best Picture at the Oscars (including Sunrise which won Best Unique or Artistic Picture in 1927/28).

There’s precious little connecting one film to the next regarding authorship, though there are moments here and there where films connect from one year to the next. Still, this is really just a survey of (mostly) American cinema from the late silent era to today. That’s really all it should be viewed as. It’s not some authoritative list...

Everything Everywhere All At Once: A Second Look

Lol, so random. Wut?

So, I’ve seen Everything Everywhere All at Once a few times now. I find it entertaining but not nearly as engaging as some of its biggest fans. I actually showed it to my mother because she had expressed interest in the trailer (she didn’t like the movie).

And you know what? It hasn’t grown on me any extra. I still view it as a lightly amusing, very aggressively made and edited look at nihilism in a materialist view. It’s manic and weird while coming to a rather ba...

CODA

I have nothing in particular against CODA, a fine little film that tugs at the heartstrings, but it probably represents everything wrong with the Academy at this point. Some small production that a major corporation just bought for too much money and then campaign aggressively to the point where almost the only people who had seen it were the ones who voted for it in the Academy. This is the Academy allowing itself to become completely insular against the interests of the larger culture to t...