David Vining's Blog, page 76

Prizzi’s Honor

The film that John Huston directed his daughter to an Academy Award nearly forty years after he had directed his father to an Academy Award in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Prizzi’s Honor is another example of how Huston could manage his actors well, know how to place his camera, but felt a bit lost outside of dramas. This is essentially a Coen Brothers movie, a dance between dramatic construction, pitch-black humor, and a certain deadpan delivery, but Huston doesn’t manage that delicate...

Under the Volcano

Adapted from the novel by Malcolm Lowry, John Huston’s 8 1/2 and Leaving Las Vegas, Under the Volcano is a tale of inaction around a man who simply and actively refuses to make decisions anymore, choosing to lose himself in a hazy life of constant drunkenness. Set in the very earliest days of WWII in Mexico, it’s a portrait of a man who knows, on some deep level, the amount of death about to come into the world and his insignificance in the face of it, his inability to change it. It’s almost...

Annie

Adapted from a stage musical based on the long-running comic strip, John Huston’s Annie is a light, musical affair with a winning heart, a curious change to the source material, and a loose structure betraying its wide-ranging origins. At least the songs have some kick and the physical production is worthwhile, helped in no small part by a winning central performance and a major supporting performance from Albert Finney giving it his all. The film reminded me of the spectacle of Carol Reed’s...

Pet Sematary by Stephen King

I really do understand why King became the king of novelistic horror through the 70s and 80s.

I also completely understand the criticism that he was terrible with endings.

Pet Sematary is King’s best book since, probably, The Last Stand (I’d be willing to say The Gunslinger, but that feels more like an experiment without reading any more of the Dark Tower books than a stand alone book). It’s got a clear view of what he’s trying to do with his mystical elements (unlike Christine that fe...

Escape to Victory

Bill Conti makes every movie better. I swear, one of the reasons I love Daniel Stern’s Rookie of the Year so much is because of the Conti score. Working with John Huston, Conti delivers a typical Conti score that does everything it can to help elevate a rather rote combination of WWII POW escape movie and sports underdog story. It does nothing particularly novel with any particular element, but Huston manages things well, never losing sight of the basic human element, providing enough charac...

Phobia

This has the reputation of being John Huston’s worst film, and it’s not even that close. I, however, cannot stand The Kremlin Letter, and Phobia‘s dull, nonsensical, and overwrought paint-by-numbers approach to psychological thriller mechanics in the early days of the slasher genre may be ultimately stupid and not terribly thrilling, but it’s not the inanity that was The Kremlin Letter, at least. John Huston had a real problem with thrillers, pretty obviously not knowing at all how they actu...

Wise Blood

This film’s writers, Benedict and Michael Fitzgerald, had direct ties to the source material’s author, Flannery O’Connor. Their parents housed O’Connor for a few months in Connecticut when they were small boys, and their mother, Sally, became the literary executor of the O’Connor’s legacy. When the two Fitzgerald boys were trying to make it in Hollywood, they zeroed in on her first novel, Wise Blood, as a way to get attention and get their careers moving, connecting with John Huston, and get...

The Man Who Would be King

A project that John Huston was trying to get off the ground over the course of decades, The Man Who Would be King is one of those movies where you can just tell he tried. For most of his films over the previous fifteen years or so, John Huston didn’t seem to be terribly invested in the films, just showing up to manage the set effectively while just accepting whatever weaknesses the scripts may or may not have had as just part of the package. The Man Who Would be King, though, is something he...

The Mackintosh Man

Less remarkably inept than The Kremlin Letter but still largely inert and lifeless, especially for a thriller, The Mackintosh Man is what Roger Ebert called derogatively the “anti-spy” movie. There really did seem to be something about the thriller genre, a genre that Huston returned to repeatedly over his career, that he just did not grasp. Laying out the plot of the film, it’s a pretty clear-cut espionage story with hidden identities and motives, but the way it’s all presented is just so l...

The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean

John Milius, who wrote the script for this film, was reportedly very unhappy with the final result, his ire focusing on particular sillier elements that John Huston inserted, while the overall casting of Paul Newman as the titular Texas figure rubbed him the wrong way (he wanted either Lee Marvin or Warren Oates). His disappointment in the execution of the script led him to push his way into directing as a form of protection, and, you know what? I get it, in regards to this specific movie. I...