David Vining's Blog, page 68

Shakespeare in Love

This is one of those Best Picture winners that gets all the crap because it beat an obviously superior film, namely Saving Private Ryan. And yet, I feel like the backlash against John Madden’s film is overwrought. Shakespeare in Love is a fun, witty comedy of a film, the kind of movie that people often say they want the Academy to award, a fun crowd-pleaser. It just happened to go up against one of Steven Spielberg’s best accomplishments that hit a cultural vein upon its release. Oh, and The...

Titanic

I swore I wasn’t trying to be trendy with my reaction to The English Patient, and I hope my reaction to Titanic proves it because, yes, I do approach these things only from my own experience and opinion, for I do love Titanic. Yes, most of the criticisms against it are still at least somewhat valid, but I do get swept up in the grand romance and technical spectacle, especially in its final half.

The story of the eponymous ship’s sole voyage that is the stuff of common cultural knowledge i...

The English Patient

I promise I’m not trying to be trendy with this. I just find this film immensely boring. Elaine Benes trying to catch popcorn in her mouth while everyone else cries in the theater? Yeah, that’s me. I’ve seen it once before, in a college class nearly twenty years ago. It was a film and literature class, actually my very first class at Virginia Tech, taught by the one professor I ended up having the most throughout my college experience, a very amenable British man, and he loved this thing. He...

Braveheart

Mel Gibson’s second directed feature is a big, brash effort at mythologization of a historical figure that is a sweeping entertainment that gets all of the narrative details right while leaving the actual history a complete mess. I don’t care, this is such a wonderful entertainment that it’s large detours from actual history simply don’t bother me. Did Randall Wallace, the screenwriter, and Gibson know that the Battle of Stirling Bridge involved a bridge? You betcha. Did it matter to this my...

Forrest Gump: A Second Look

Boomer: The Movie remains what I saw it as a few years ago when I went through Robert Zemeckis’ filmography: a heavily sanitized and incredibly safe travelogue through the 60s and early 70s. It’s unchallenging with a likeable but uninteresting lead character while it sands the edges down of everything that happened in the decade from Vietnam to Watergate to the drug culture to even AIDS, all while more interesting characters are shoved off to the side and ignored for long stretches. That it ...

Oppenheimer

#6 in my ranking of Christopher Nolan’s films.

There’s something about how Christopher Nolan approaches making films that makes them seem incredibly ambitious. A biopic (honestly, my least favorite genre) that jumps back and forth in time between as many as four different timelines that includes the Trinity test and is mostly just people talking in a couple of rooms ends up feeling thoroughly cinematic. His approach to making films is heavily reliant on editing to feed his time-jumping se...

Schindler’s List: A Second Look

You know what always surprises me about Schindler’s List? How funny it is. There are a lot of little bits of humor through much of the first half in particular, when the subject is the least heavy, like when Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) berates two low-level Nazis because they won’t let him have his accountant and plant manager Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley) who has been mistakenly loaded into a train to be transported to a concentration camp. He calmly tells them that he has contacts who will...

Unforgiven: A Second Look

This was a good little stretch for the Academy, wasn’t it? After largely being unmoved by the Academy’s choices through the 80s (Amadeus excepted, of course), the 90s keeps truckin’ after the exceptional genre exercise The Silence of the Lambs with Clint Eastwood‘s Unforgiven. I would be surprised if this wasn’t also part of the obvious move by the Academy’s actors body to wrest control of the Best Picture prize from anyone else (it was originally a producer’s prize, largely because an overa...

The Silence of the Lambs

It’s amazing how this film just fires on all cylinders for its entire runtime, from its quiet opening to its grand finale. It’s kind of structured a bit weird, it’s all kinds of trashy, but it’s so impeccably made that it completely and easily overcomes all of that to become a real thrill ride of an experience. That it won Best Picture is some kind of miracle because the Academy had been awarding largely safe films for more than a decade, and The Silence of the Lambs represents something far...

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

We’re getting close to the end now. This is going much faster than I had predicted. I had thought it would take me about two years, but it looks like I’ll be finished a few days before the next Oscar ceremony, making my inevitable list completely irrelevant within days.

Winning!

Anyway, this takes me from the early 90s into the mid-2000s. This is also the period where I’ve done the most previously from other directors (like Eastwood and Zemeckis), randomly (like with Schindler’s List a...