David Vining's Blog, page 71

Joe Dante: A Statement of Purpose

Why Joe Dante?

Well, because doing this will surely get him the money together to make one more feature film, making my efforts at a definitive ranking a joke, like what happened with Clint Eastwood deciding to make Juror #2.

But more seriously, I was just running through lists of filmmakers who had risen to prominence in the 70s and 80s who weren’t working anymore, and his name just made sense. He’s got movies people recognize. I like what I’ve seen. I own a few of them (most notably...

So Ends the seventh section of Best Pictures…

Well, that was disappointing.

I only actually liked two of those five, one which felt completely out of step with the rest of the awarded (The Last Emperor), and the other was just pretty standard Hollywood fare done well enough (Rain Man). The rest were just…not movies that I enjoyed all that much, making me question how insane the Academy had become. For long stretches of this run, I could say, “Well that was really good, but I might have chosen this other one instead,” or, “Well, they ...

Dances with Wolves

Kevin Costner’s directorial debut, Dances with Wolves, is the exact kind of sweeping epic that Hollywood wasn’t really making all that much anymore. A throwback to another time when the Western was king, it’s a revisionist text that takes Michael Blake’s source novel (from a screenplay he wrote), and makes the West…immensely boring. I was reminded of a lot while watching this, from Terrence Malick‘s Badlands to John Ford‘s The Searchers to Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter, but it mostly remi...

Driving Miss Daisy

Well, that’s nice. Not exactly what I would call good, but it was nice. Deeply inoffensive, Driving Miss Daisy is based on a play by Alfred Uhry and brought to the screen by the Australian director Bruce Beresford. It’s a very gentle look at racism in the Deep South through the lens of the relationship between an older Jewish woman and the black chauffeur that her son forces upon her. It ends up with precious little to say, probably too gentle regarding the core relationship that never seems...

Rain Man

Well, this might be the safest Best Picture winner in a while. A perfectly fine, entertaining drama from Barry Levinson, directed from a script by Barry Morrow and Ronald Bass, Rain Man brings together one generation older with the newer generation of acting stars in an unlikely combination on a road trip across America where the flawed character learns the value of other people and becomes a better person. It’s almost rote in how it approaches the material, helped in no small part by the ac...

The Last Emperor: A Second Look

This does feel like a weird one for a Best Picture win, huh? A movie about the final Chinese emperor, filmed in English by an Italian, all while something like Broadcast News is over there just waiting to be awarded? Did the Academy fall out of love with James L. Brooks, or something?

I’m not complaining. If I really cared about which films won the Best Picture Oscar, I’d be happy that this beat Broadcast News (it’s a fine little film, but nothing too terribly special, a lot like Terms of...

Platoon

This is another one of those films that everyone seems to love that just leaves me cold. Instead of seeing some kind of penetrating look into the soldier experience in the Vietnam War, brought to the screen by an actual Vietnam War veteran in Oliver Stone, I see a cartoon of a vision of the war with simplistic characters and a need to exact cinematic vengeance upon a CO Stone once had (I assume). Instead of a heart-wrenching dramatization of the terrors of war, I see a self-importantly self-...

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

A really short detour this time.

Five movies over four days (I reviewed The Last Emperor randomly forever ago).

Out of the modern era of Best Picture Winners, this might be the section that I’m least familiar with. I think The Last Emperor is the only one that I’ve seen more than once, and the rest were watches I made twenty years ago or so when I was trying to watch everything really quickly. I barely remember any of them.

So, let’s go! Will I discover movies that I love and have b...

Paul Leni: The Definitive Ranking

Paul Leni only has a handful of surviving features, and that has more to do with the fact that he died in 1929 at the age of 44 from sepsis sourced from a tooth than the fact that some of his early German films (and one of his American films) are lost.

He was one of those early German imports to Hollywood who was brought to bring a certain German artistry to the Hollywood product. In Leni’s case, he was brought in by Carl Laemmle at Universal to help replicate and make more artful the gra...

The Last Warning

Paul Leni’s last film after which he died from sepsis brought on by an infected tooth (seriously, go to your dentist), this is probably the first film in his Universal contract where he had real freedom after the large series of successes that had preceded it. Smaller in scale than his previous The Man Who Laughs and more than somewhat reminiscent of his first Universal feature, The Cat and the Canary, The Last Warning is a whodunit with a real sense of fun about its mystery and the movement...