David Vining's Blog, page 67

Charles Laughton: The Definitive Ranking

Well, that wasn’t nearly as much as I thought! Surely, the man who made The Night of the Hunter would be showered with offers to direct more feature films, and he’d take those offers, right?

Right?!

Well, he didn’t, and so here I have watched and reviewed the complete and collected works directed by Charles Laughton, and the listicle gods must be appeased with my bad joke!

So, here are the complete works of Charles Laughton as a director, ranked. And do check out the rest of my rank...

The Night of the Hunter

Charles Laughton’s sole work as director is an accomplished, beautifully made, impeccably acted, and perhaps a bit too thin thriller, the announcement of a new talent behind the camera. And the reaction was muted contemporaneously. It was either the negative critical reaction or Laughton’s simple preference for directing theater over film, but The Night of the Hunter marked the sole, enticing work behind the camera of Laughton who could have gone on to make several more films, giving us a le...

Charles Laughton: A Statement of Purpose

Mostly known as an actor for performances in films like Spartacus, Charles Laughton decided to try his hand at directing a feature film in 1955. In terms of directing, he was mostly a theatrical director, but he wanted to bring some of that theatricality to the screen. He chose the novel by Davis Grubb, and he was off to labor in a long, fruitful career as a filmmaker.

Well, I am here to discover the outer bounds of that career with a definitive list.

These sorts of actor/directors, ...

So Ends the eighth section of Best Pictures…

Starting with a genre film followed by a Clint Eastwood film, and then ending in a very similar way, this second to last section of the Best Picture Winners was largely a series of, well, winners. Sure, The English Patient and A Beautiful Mind are in there, but most of the rest? At least pretty good.

I see nothing, though, that dissuades me from the idea that the actors have largely taken over and treat the Academy Awards as their playground. I do enjoy quite a few of these films, but out...

Million Dollar Baby: A Second Look

The Academy gets whiplash going from awarding an epic fantasy adventure and going back to the kinds of smaller, intimate character pieces that they on and off have loved since, probably the earliest, The Lost Weekend. It also gets to award one of the most successful actor/director combinations in one man in Clint Eastwood one more time before they decided to gain some distance from him because he would later say some mean things about a politician they liked.

Not to imply at all that I di...

The Lord of the Rings: A Second Look

Or, you know, a fiftieth.

It really is one of my favorite films. And yes, I watched the whole thing. I did it over three days, but I just don’t do it enough. I really should make it a yearly thing.

Anyway, The Lord of the Rings came out at the perfect time for me. I was in high school. I had discovered Dune, and the blurb on the back of my copy mentioned The Lord of the Rings. I mentioned it to some friends who said I should read it right about the time the very first trailer, that inc...

Chicago

It’s nice to see Bob Fosse win his second Best Director Oscar. Oh, wait, I’m being informed that Fosse died nearly thirty years before the production of the film version of Chicago. Well, props to Rob Marshall for aping Fosse’s approach to filming dancing numbers like in Cabaret by, pretty much, just taking Fosse’s choreography from the original stage musical and filming it? Whatever, it’s fine. I doubt Fosse would have cut the dancing up quite this much, though. Anyway, the film is a fun en...

A Beautiful Mind: A Second Look

You know, this movie really isn’t built for rewatches at all. If you go in knowing that Nash is a schizophrenic, seeing people who aren’t there, and you recall which of the characters you see are those manifestations of his mental issues, the film is robbed of so much of its tension and mystery. The more I revisit it, the less I like Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind, a competently made biopic that hits just all of the little cliched structural bits as the film, written by Akiva Goldsmith, plays...

Gladiator

Let me preface this by mentioning that I am something of a Ridley Scott fanboy. I hold him up probably higher than I should in the pantheon of modern filmmakers, and I don’t mind admitting it. However, the one film that I seem out of step on in the other direction than most audiences, feeling more negatively towards it than positive, is probably the one film that he’s most praised for: Gladiator. I’ve had several viewings over the past couple of decades to begin to sort through why I’m disen...

American Beauty

Wow, suburbia must just be the worst, huh? Well, that’s not really the point, but it is the implication of Sam Mendes’ feature film debut as director, working from a script by Alan Ball. The actual point is about living lies to the point of feeling numb and finding a way out of it. It’s just that Ball and Mendes used the cultural perception, essentially working off of the foundation set by things like the novel Revolutionary Road (that Mendes would later adapt to film) or The Man in the Gray...