David Vining's Blog, page 62

Argo

You know, Ben Affleck is a pretty good director. Remember the meme about how Matt Damon probably only wrote Good Will Hunting and Affleck just put his name on it? Over the years, it seems increasingly like it might be the reverse. That being said, while Argo is a tense, often exciting film, it also has hallmarks of Hollywoodization to up the tension in ways that betray its efforts to act like its playing things straight, taking what could have been a lower key and effective thriller into one...

The Artist

Now, this is a throwback. Filmed mostly silently while also telling a story around the conversion of silent to sound pictures in Hollywood (notice, they never make movies about the conversion to color or widescreen). It is a gimmick film, for sure, but beyond the gimmick is a surprisingly involving story of change and loss. It’s a modified form of the well-worn story from A Star is Born with an established star losing his place to an up and coming younger woman, but it’s charming and fun and...

The King’s Speech

Tom Hooper is some kind of madman. Yes, we can look back with the knowledge of the existence of Cats, but the evidence was here for all of us to see. This is a film that ends up working despite a director instead of because of him. The script by David Seidler is an intricately researched and constructed screenplay that focuses on two characters from vastly different social classes and even countries finding commonality in the face of great challenges. It’s a great little example of the trium...

The Hurt Locker

I think this is the turning point for the Academy. The lowest box office performer of the Best Picture winners in decades, The Hurt Locker was the Academy simply turning its back on box office performance as part of its calculation, perhaps even going in the exact opposite direction. It’s ironically also the winner of the year after The Dark Knight‘s failure to even gain a nomination ignited a change in Academy rules to increase the nominees to up to ten. Perhaps the vote was widely split am...

Slumdog Millionaire

Danny Boyle is a filmmaker who excites me as a filmgoer. He’s always got incredible energy to him, but he never loses sight of the humanity and basic narrative building blocks. So, it irks me somewhat that the Academy decided to award him and his film Best Director and Best Picture Oscars for what I consider to be a lower tiered work. I like this film. I enjoy Slumdog Millionaire‘s energetic run through the strata of Indian society as viewed as a series of flashbacks in between tapings of th...

No Country for Old Men

This is probably the purest genre exercise to win Best Picture since The Silence of the Lambs. It’s all tension, quietly assembled and ready to break out into violence at any moment. This is a masterful adaptation of Cormac McCarthy by Joel and Ethan Coen, finding the little slices of black, deadpan, and offbeat comedy here and there, but mostly this is a dead stare of a threat against the audience’s nerves. Told precisely both from a screenplay point of view as well as visually, No Country ...

The Departed: A Second Look

The contrast between the basic visual filmmaking of the previous Best Picture winner, Crash, and Martin Scorsese‘s The Departed is stark. Paul Haggis was obviously influenced by the conventions that had taken over cinema that emphasized closeups and crosscutting to build scenes ever since television changed the language of film. Scorsese, though, is far more adventurous and classically influenced, leading to a film of such energy and constant movement that it simply pales the previous winner...

Crash

I have a serious issue with how most ensemble films come together. Most of them take an ensemble approach to go in a variety of different directions that never really connect in anything more than the most basic of mechanical manners, making the films feel like they go off in random directions without any real central point (this is the James Gunn approach). That’s not what Paul Haggis does in Crash, his Best Picture winning film. Everything is interconnected with the same central ideas of r...

The Best Picture Winners at the Oscars: A Statement of Purpose Part IX

And we have the final batch. Yup, I’m going to finish it all the way here. I’ve done a handful of them previously, but nothing like the 90s to early 00s. So there won’t be too many second looks.

Looking ahead, this seems to be where the Academy has experienced the most turbulence in “what it means” regarding the Best Picture Winners. I’ve seen it change from the very beginning when it was very obviously about rewarding producers who bet big with large productions and won big with box offi...

Frank Capra: The Definitive Ranking

Frank Capra was surprisingly distinctive from the get-go. Working first for the largely forgotten silent comedian Harry Langdon and then for the skid row studio Columbia Pictures under Harry Cohn, Capra was able to tell stories of the little guy triumphing over the powerful big guy early and often. That was always the basic foundation of what became known as Capraesque, and he just refined it over time.

Given remarkable freedom (and little money) to tell his own stories on set (though bes...