David Vining's Blog, page 7

The Challenge

Another derivative genre entry from John Frankenheimer, The Challenge is one of those American shows up to a foreign country, gets involved in a fight that isn’t his, and ends up at the center of it all for some reason movies. The Japanese settings and fight between old world and new world viewpoints recalls the (much) later The Last Samurai, but otherwise, this is just a generic fish out of water movie without nearly enough action in it.

Rick Murphy (Scott Glenn) is a penniless man who s...

The Rainmaker (1982)

John Frankenheimer takes a few weeks off to return to what he obviously loves most: adaptations of stage plays. Like The Iceman Cometh, this is really just Frankenheimer finding interesting places to put his camera while professional, accomplished actors perform well in a respected play. We do get shots of a crowd supposedly watching the performance, but, of course, they were filmed separately (the crowd wasn’t watching the back of the cameraman for two hours). I can kind of see why the IMDB...

Prophecy

This, more than French Connection II, marks a signal that John Frankenheimer was absolutely desperate for box office success. Neither the sequel to William Friedkin’s film and the follow up, the competent Black Sunday, lit the box office on fire, and now comes Frankenheimer making a creature feature with a lot of the same bones as Jaws. Especially in the 70s, the horror genre was seen as the gutter (soon to be made worse by the rise of the slasher), and Frankenheimer deigning to work in it w...

Black Sunday

John Frankenheimer’s back, baby! Returning to the thriller genre that had made his name in the 60s, Frankenheimer helms an adaptation of Thomas Harris’ eponymous novel and makes a taut, fun exercise that recalls his earlier triumphs. It’s not quite at their level, but it’s certainly better than 99 and 44/100% Dead.

The Black September Organization is planning something big to punish America. Member of the group, Dahlia (Marthe Keller) is orchestrating the job, and she has recruited Americ...

Sergei Eisenstein: A Retrospective

I’ve gone through the work of one other Russian filmmaker, Andrei Tarkovsky, who was more of a religious dissident than a loyal propagandist for the Soviet regime. However, there’s one Soviet filmmaker that stands above them all: Sergei Eisenstein.

Born in Tsarist Russia in 1898 (technically, the Governorate of Livonia), Eisenstein entered film through the theater. Working experimentally on stage, he had the perfect mindset for a nascent Soviet film industry looking for ways to break from...

Argylle by Matthew Vaughn

I don’t often talk about singular movies, especially modern singular movies, but I recently caught the Matthew Vaughn directed, Bryce Dallas Howard bomb, Argylle, when I got a 3 month free trial for AppleTV+ (purely for Severance, by the way). I’ve liked Matthew Vaughn as a filmmaker since his first film, Layer Cake through all three of his Kingsman films and even stuff like Stardust. So, I was actually somewhat excited about Argylle. It looked like what had become pretty standard Vaughn out...

French Connection II

You don’t make a sequel to someone else’s Best Picture winner in the 70s if your career is on a high-note, especially when you’ve already made your epic a decade earlier. The idea of continuing the adventures of Popeye Doyle after how his investigation ended in such a non-resolution with the first film, The French Connection, makes perfect sense in terms of potential sequels. But Friedkin‘s documentarian energy was absent, John Frankenheimer seemed lost as to what actually interested him in ...

Park Chan-Wook has another movie coming out

I don’t often talk about my Park Chan-Wook fandom, but I have it. I have it bad. I just buy his movies blind when they hit physical media because I know I’m going to love it. It’s what I did with Decision to Leave, and I never regretted it (it’s…really good). And Neon has just released the first trailer for his newest film, No Other Choice.

Trailers are not the movie, but I’m hooked already. No idea what the hell is going on, but it’s sexy as hell.

99 and 44/100% Dead!

What on earth is this? Some kind of James Bond/Get Carter ripoff set in America, John Frankenheimer’s 99 and 44/100% Dead! is a tiresome, unfunny, and not terribly exciting comedic thriller that inelegantly bounces between tones, poorly tells its story, and mostly seems to be an excuse for Richard Harris to pretend he’s Michael Caine or James Bond for a couple of hours. Frankenheimer even ended up making a comparison between this and The Manchurian Candidate, hoping that people would eventua...

Impossible Object (or, Story of a Love Story)

John Frankenheimer, for some reason, decided to make a French art film. It’s…not good. Filming from a screenplay written by Nicholas Mosley based on his own novel, Impossible Object is supposed to be this dizzying morass of reality with fantasy with obvious inspiration from Italian filmmakers like Fellini and Pasolini, but ultimately the whole thing just isn’t that interesting. The characters are too dull, their conflicts too mundane, and the distractions of fantasy too disconnected from wha...