David Vining's Blog, page 69

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...

Writing Update – 12/9/2023

So, I did it.

I set out to write a complete first draft in less than (checks most of my previous first drafts) 15 months, and I did it.

2 months and 2 days, with moving from SC to NC and a 3 day cruise in the middle of it. I think I can be pretty proud of that output, and I don’t hate the book!

The last time I wrote a first draft that quickly was The Sharp Kid (now with a Goodreads giveaway! sign up!) which I wrote in just about 2 months (I have the handwritten first draft where I d...

Paul Leni: A Retrospective

In the late silent and early sound era, one of the chief imports to Hollywood was German directors. The most important import was probably Ernst Lubitsch, but there were definitely others such as F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang (you could throw in Billy Wilder, but he was imported as a writer, and he struggled to get into the country and system). One of those that could have been in that top tier was Paul Leni, attracting the attention of Hollywood with his anthology film Waxworks, but he died in 192...

Joe Dante: The Definitive Ranking

I enjoyed Dante’s body of work more than I expected. I very much didn’t love everything. His early period is undisciplined and only intermittently successful, and his later period is mired in compromises that undermined the overall efforts (though, again, I really did find a good bit to enjoy in Burying the Ex).

And yet, the 80s and early 90s were very good for him creatively. He latched onto Steven Spielberg after Spielberg got him the job on Gremlins, and he used that connection to grea...

Burying the Ex

You know, I was surprisingly entertained by this. Burying the Ex, Joe Dante’s final film it seems, is a little bit of indie filmmaking that blends a few genres, is competently handled by Dante, and winningly performed by its four main actors. I think it’s maligned by what ended up being its target audience because it’s not much of an actual horror movie, it’s more of a romantic comedic drama than anything else. It’s of the same vein as Shaun of the Dead, but not exactly as good. Still, I thi...

The Hole

It seems pretty obvious that Joe Dante got the money for The Hole for two reasons. The first is that it was a horror film, and horror films tend to be pretty cheap (this one doesn’t look very expensive). The second is that he promised to use 3D! Remember 3D? The thing that studios desperately wanted to attribute to the success of Avatar that they attached it to everything for a few years afterwards? I don’t hate 3D, or anything. It’s neat sometimes, but there’s no denying that it was a quick...

Masters of Horror: The Screwfly Solution

This is like “Pro-Life“, something so fully built on irony without anything else to offer in terms of entertainment that I was surprised that it wasn’t written by the same people. Instead, we have the return of Sam Hamm as writer to Joe Dante’s second foray into the Masters of Horror television show, and it further cements the idea that Joe Dante was just there for the paycheck, not as a creative force. Not because it’s bad, mind you (yes, it’s bad), but because it doesn’t feel like a Dante ...

Masters of Horror: Homecoming

After watching this and John Carpenter‘s entries in the Masters of Horror television series, it seems increasingly obvious that this was very much a producer driven series, even though one of the largest selling points to the whole thing was bringing in people like Dante and Carpenter, who at this point hadn’t worked regularly for a while, and give them an outlet. “Cigarette Burns”, “Pro-Life”, and now “Homecoming” feel like director for hire jobs, the overall creative energies coming from t...

Looney Tunes: Back in Action

On paper, it seems like a perfect combination: Joe Dante and a Looney Tunes movie. Well, the production was apparently some kind of nightmare with studio execs trying to ensure a new era of cartoons, stepping all over Dante’s feet, and generally preventing him from making the movie he wanted. At least the animated segments are pretty solid, but the manic busyness of the film from beginning to end just wears down, all while it takes nothing seriously, including its own story.

Daffy Duck (J...

Small Soldiers

Joe Dante’s previous film, Matinee, bombed horribly at the box office, and he struggled to get his next assignment off the ground, having the submit to studio demands more fully than before, leading to this compromised production that has some of the Joe Dante flair. However, the script ends up reminding me of those limp, aimless things that John Sayles wrote near the beginning of Dante’s career, Piranha and The Howling, filled with people kind of waiting around until the third act starts. I...