David Vining's Blog, page 77

Fat City

Often seen as John Huston’s return to form after more than a decade of largely less successful films, Fat City is a solidly good look at two men moving in opposite directions in the same grimy corner of the lowest levels of professional boxing. The eponymous Fat City is the goal men yearn for without ever being able to achieve (echoes of a bunch of Huston work from The Maltese Falcon to Key Largo to Moby Dick to The Misfits to A Walk with Love and Death), and both men react to the impossibil...

The Kremlin Letter

Out of all the genres in film, I think it’s the thriller that’s hardest to walk into and do well. There’s a different need for structure and pacing than in most other genres, and if you walk in approaching it like you would a drama, you end up creating something flaccid rather than taut. That being said, The Kremlin Letter is probably John Huston’s worst movie (we’ll see once I get to Phobia, I guess). It’s everything wrong with James Bond wannabe films, and it recalled the languid pace of C...

Corstae – Coming March 1

So, this is the book that I had to recreate from the second draft, and I really like it.

Originally born by my need to create a fantasy world with hundreds of years of stories, this is the third of five books that I had planned set in my fictional world of Corstae. The first is hidden in a vault, never to be seen again. The second was Crystal Embers, of which I am still very proud.

This third is set hundreds of years before the events of Crystal Embers, though, telling the story of ho...

A Walk with Love and Death

Staying in the distant past, John Huston adapts a novel by Hans Kroningsberger with a script by Dale Wasserman, takes us into fourteenth century France and a romantic Romance, a story of love in the middle of conflict and war with changing sides and hatred. Feeling like a less compelling version of the same ideas at the heart of The Night of the Iguana, A Walk with Love and Death is another film of Huston’s through the sixties that could have been more but simply settled.

Heron de Foix (A...

Sinful Davey

This is one of those movies so forgotten and demeaned by the few people that have seen it that kind of confuses me. One of the lowest rated films on the IMDB in John Huston’s filmography, Sinful Davey seems to have this reputation as a complete mess, helped not at all by the fact that this is at least the third film that Huston simply abandoned during post-production, letting his producers do what they wanted to it (The Red Badge of Courage and The Barbarian and the Geisha are the other two)...

Reflections in a Golden Eye

On paper, this feels like the kind of movie that is my jam, but there’s something off about the execution that keeps me from investing in it. There are thematic layers to the action, feeding through all of its characters, but the characters end up feeling too thin to support the ideas with an emotional throughline. I think it’s because the film ends up relying too much on performance and not enough on the writing to get its point across. I just felt disconnected to the action at hand, and I ...

Peter Weir: A Retrospective

The story of the Australian film industry was a very sad one for a while. Having established itself well during the silent era, the sound era saw the start of a steady decline of the national industry until, by the mid-60s, there were three years in a row where not a single Australian-financed film was made. The Australian government decided to set up a series of funds to encourage filmmaking in the remote and very large country with a minimal population. Most of what got made simply lost mo...

Casino Royale (1967)

Just a quick note: I’m reviewing this in the context of John Huston’s filmography. Since he is listed as one of the five credited directors, I am reviewing it, though I will not include it in the rankings of his work. He directed no more than a quarter of the finished product, and I generally don’t include contributions to anthology films or even short films in these rankings. At best, you could say that his contributions amount to a short film. As you can tell, I have included it in the ran...

The Bible: In the Beginning…

More of an anthology film than one feature length narrative, The Bible: In the Beginning… is one of those occasional outlets from John Huston where he really does try to stretch himself cinematically. Derided at the time for a certain esoteric air about it, the telling of the major events of the first twenty-two chapters of Genesis is something of a mix between an art film, a religious film, and John Huston film, soaring high for stretches before kind of bumbling through its largest segment ...

The Night of the Iguana

I think I respect Tennessee Williams more than I actually like watching anything based on his work. Maybe the adaptations miss something of the original stage plays. Still, I can appreciate the specific nature of his work with characters even if I find the ultimate points to be somewhat mundane and not that interesting. Adapting the WWII era play to the early 60s, John Huston leads his star-studded cast through the motions of the story of a disgraced Anglican priest as he tries to save himse...