David Vining's Blog, page 73

Amadeus: A Second Look

Ah, one of my absolute favorite movies. I’ve spoken of it before.

As I wrote in that piece, every time I watch it now, I’m reminded of my father’s insistence that I would lie it less as I got older, and it continues to not be true. Milos Forman’s adaptation of Peter Shaffer’s play is one of the most deliriously entertaining films I’ve ever seen, and I continue to love its entertainments with every passing year and every subsequent viewing.

The story of Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraha...

Terms of Endearment

James L. Brooks’ feature film directing debut won just all of the awards. I can see why. It’s well acted, largely well written, adapting the novel by Larry McMurtry and providing space for some legacy and up and coming actors to have their moments, but the weepy finale is just too out there for my tastes. Brooks’ consistent and light hand at character-based comedy is what pulls me through, even that final act.

Aurora Greenway (Shirley MacLaine) and her daughter Emma (Debra Winger) are lef...

Gandhi

The structural similarities between Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi and David Lean‘s Lawrence of Arabia are really quite striking. They both start with the death of their title characters, skip ahead to their funerals, and then goes back to the right before they go off on their first major entrance into the greater world. Throw in some other details (Lean had once tried to make a film about Gandhi, there are some Lean regulars in the supporting cast, Attenborough is obviously aping Lean’s tech...

Chariots of Fire

These British films that end up winning Best Picture always end up feeling so out of place. If I were transported back to before the ceremony, my guess on winner would probably have been Atlantic City or On Golden Pond, just based on the Academy’s recent proclivity to awarding films with big movie stars in films that focused mostly on performances by those stars. A film about characters overcoming obstacles to win a sports event, especially one with such a focus on one of its main character’...

Ordinary People

The combination of The Deer Hunter, Kramer vs. Kramer, and finally Ordinary People drove me to find what I could about the voting body of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in the late 70s and early 80s. All three films are very much actors’ films without only the first having any real cinematic ambitions (though I’m not exactly a fan), the other two being more purely performance driven films that won the Best Picture Oscar over competition like Raging Bull, Apocalypse Now, or T...

Crystal Embers – Free for a short time!

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The giveaway is over, the 100 winners have been chosen, and yet, I’m still giving away copies!

Through Thursday, November 2, Crystal Embers is completely free in the Kindle store! If you missed out on the giveaway, now’s your chance to get a copy anyway!

Go ahead and get it! It won’t cost you anything! And don’t forget to love it and leave a review!

Kramer vs. Kramer

What could have possibly beat Apocalypse Now at the Oscars for Best Picture? Some small drama about a divorce? Psh…wait…this is a great drama about a divorce. I mean, it’s still not much of a question in my mind about which film I would have voted for, but that’s not to diminish the wonderful nature of Kramer vs. Kramer, Robert Benton’s adaptation of Avery Corman’s novel.

Ted Kramer (Dustin Hoffmann) is an up and coming ad executive at the tail end of six hard months’ worth of work to sec...

John Huston: A Retrospective

I found John Huston’s filmography to be really frustrating. Don’t get me wrong, he made some classics, but he also made more than his fair share of duds. However, what frustrated me most was this collection of perfectly fine, okay movies that could have used just a bit more in a rewrite to elevate them into something special. I felt this acutely because I had recently finished watching the work of William Wyler, and Wyler never fell into that.

I bring up Wyler because Huston actually started ...

The Deer Hunter

Here’s another one of those movies that everyone seems to love, and yet, I just don’t connect to it. I mean, I don’t connect to it at all. I find it primarily boring. Michael Cimino was probably one of the most self-indulgent, and unrightfully so, filmmaker of the 70s and 80s, and his disaster that was Heaven’s Gate feels earned. The one film that I thought of consistently through this was Ryan’s Daughter, the late entry in David Lean‘s career that is so absurdly overlong that it could have ...

Annie Hall

I’m going to have to do a Woody Allen run at some point, and one of the things that I’ll be most interested in discovering is the influence of Ingmar Bergman on his work. I think this is one of the earliest works of his with those influences front and center (there are two posters for Bergman films, Face to Face and The Passion of Anna, while the two main characters arriving late for Face to Face is a small plot point for a scene), and there is a lot of talk from the main character about his...