David Vining's Blog, page 61

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...

Nomadland

Nomadland is one of those prime examples of why Hollywood is being left behind by the larger culture. It’s a dull, ugly little film that has far less to say than it thinks and received all of the awards. There’s precious little craft even on display, Chloe Zhao choosing to simply film in natural light as much as possible which does not end up having the elegiac effect of a Malick/Lubezki film but instead just results in a drab, desaturated look that is often hard to even see. Throw in the fa...

Parasite: A Second Look

My introduction to Korean cinema was probably pretty typical for my generation: It was Park Chan Wook’s Oldboy, especially when Harry Knowles was pushing it at Ain’t It Cool News. I’ve never really dug much deeper, knowing most of Wook’s filmography really well (I still haven’t seen I’m a Cyborg and That’s Okay, though) and a handful of other things here and there like Train to Busan and Bong Joon-ho’s The Host (I would say that Snowpiercer isn’t Korean since it’s…you know…filmed in English,...

Green Book

This is probably the most generically competent race relations movie to gain serious Awards consideration. Peter Farrelly’s first serious movie after a couple of decades of making gross out comedies with his brother, Green Book is so thoroughly inoffensive and unchallenging, its characters stop going through any kind of arc by the forty-minute mark. It’s an overlong, easy to digest meeting in the middle that not only recalls Driving Miss Daisy but also The King’s Speech since the differences...

The Shape of Water

It kind of pains me that Guillermo del Toro would turn out a movie I ended up rejecting rather completely. His same sumptuous visuals are present along with that precise but weird approach to monster design, and yet, the script is something of a complete mess of coincidence while its villain is so cartoonishly evil that its obvious attempts at elevating Creature from the Black Lagoon end up falling apart.

Elisa (Sally Hawkins) is a mute janitor at a secret government facility in Baltimore...

Moonlight

Or is it La La Land?

I kid, I kid.

This coming of age story of a young, gay, black man in one of the poorest parts of Miami, Liberty City, is a handsomely told, earnestly felt, and somewhat thin exploration of living a lie on the outside while harboring the truth of oneself where no one can see. It’s the kind of film that obviously comes from an intensely personal place from director Barry Jenkins, who also wrote the screenplay, pulling from his own childhood, especially around his mot...

Spotlight

There’s a subgenre of films about working professionals doing their jobs professionally that I admire quite a bit. They tend to be quieter, less melodramatic, and with more restrained performances that allow for subtler and deeper emotions to seep into the audience, and Spotlight is just that sort of film (well, except for Mark Ruffalo). It tells a highly emotional story in restrained terms that don’t force emotions upon its viewing public, ending up with a deeply penetrating look at the abu...

Birdman or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance

I don’t think there’s another film that’s more about actors than this. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Birdman is a self-searching character piece about an actor caught between different demands of the craft (art vs. commerce) while all of his personal problems are about the existence of being an actor. No wonder Hollywood loved it. I mean, it’s a technical marvel with a lot of good performances, but, you know, it’s kind of obvious from beginning to end. There’s virtually no subtlety to the po...