David Vining's Blog, page 8

The Iceman Cometh

This feels like John Frankenheimer going back to his origins of making live drama for television. Based on the play by Eugene O’Neill, it’s an actors’ showcase where everyone gets their moments to shine in a depressing story of lost dreams, alcoholism, and self-delusion that gives time to every little side character to demonstrate O’Neill’s point. It’s not fun at all, but it’s not intended to be. Never really removing itself from its play origins, though Frankenheimer consistently gets attra...

The Horsemen

Reportedly, John Frankenheimer bugged out of the post-production process of I Walk the Line as fast as possible to get to Afghanistan to film this. Also, Columbia went through a regime change and the budget on the film got slashed in the middle of things, necessitating the change from filming in 65mm to 35mm. And…it’s kind of dull. Again. Just like The Fixer. Another prestige literary adaptation that has no real energy to it, The Horsemen isn’t a complete failure of a film. It’s just not as ...

Henri-Georges Clouzot: A Retrospective

Alfred Hitchcock had one real competitor for the title of Master of Suspense: the French filmmaker Henri-Georges Clouzot. Hitchcock himself invited the comparison, and Clouzot remarked publicly about how he was flattered by the comparison. This reputation comes from about half of Clouzot’s films starting with his first, L’assassin habite au 21, through his best known films, a quartet that includes Le Corbeau, Quai des Orfevres, Les Diaboliques, and Wages of Fear.

However, Clouzot remains ...

Joel Schumacher: A Retrospective

I walked into the filmography of Joel Schumacher without much of the way in expectations. What did I actually know about him beforehand? Mostly, it was his Batman movies, but I somehow expected that the rest of his filmography wasn’t like it much. It raised questions about who this man was as an artist. There are three major throughlines in his work: fantasy/unreality, ensemble-based storytelling, and the guardrails of studio filmmaking.

However, while that’s the kind of thinking that I u...

I Walk the Line

This is like a Johnny Cash song made film. John Frankenheimer’s I Walk the Line was a sneaky, surprising success from my point of view. The story of a man self-destructing steadily in the face of youth and corruption, the film is Frankenheimer’s best looking film in years, centered around a man who finds himself increasingly corrupted and blinkered at the reality that he’s creating for himself. I’m actually kind of surprised that it’s been completely forgotten and ignored and even dismissed,...

Yasujiro Ozu: What Mark has learned so far

Who was Yasujiro Ozu?

To start out with, I knew nothing of Ozu.  I hadn’t even seen his legend of world cinema, Tokyo Story.  I haven’t read any biographies of him, haven’t read his published diaries and hadn’t looked him up online until recently. So just about everything I have to say is coming from his films and a cursory examination of his background from IMDB and Wikipedia.  However, I will be studying and learning more about him, as I already have done with Kobayashi, Kitano Takashi ...

Superman: Mark review, 4/5 stars

/(poster by Dannyaer)

I don’t get to go out to the movies very often, and I don’t really like most of the superhero movies since Infinity War, but…I made an effort on this one.

I went into Superman with trepidation. On the one hand, James Gunn made one of my favorite movies, top three material even, The Guardians of the Galaxy.  On the other hand, I’m a meat-eating, gun-carrying, small-government conservative. Not James Gunn’s favorite kind of person.  I’m also a comic book fan and mo...

Welcome to a new Contributor: Mark Andrew Edwards

For a long time, Mark has been an active part of my little conversation on movies, and his decision to go along with me on Yasujiro Ozu’s filmography (combined with problems at his own blog) led to him writing a wonderful essay on Ozu which…was always going to be hidden in the comments of my Definitive Ranking.

I thought that was unfair to him. The essay is…really good. Like, my planned essay for Ozu which will be coming here in a couple of weeks feels meager in comparison.

So, I invited h...

The Gypsy Moths

With Burt Lancaster in the cast, I figured that this was another production that he had nursed through pre-production and then suddenly brought John Frankenheimer on, but it’s actually the opposite. Frankenheimer was brought in early by Kirk Douglas to make the film, Douglas and his producing partner, Edward Lewis, split, and Lewis took the project to MGM who funded it. Frankenheimer was along for the ride and hired Lancaster. Not terribly interesting backstory aside, this adaptation of Jame...

The Extraordinary Seaman

John Frankenheimer is on record as dismissing The Extraordinary Seaman as the worst movie of his career, something he couldn’t justify in any way. And I see this. This is an unfunny farce and something that seems to be satirical in intent. However, the target is…unclear at best, and the comedy falls so flat so consistently that it’s hard to imagine that anyone involved in the making of the film had any idea what they were supposed to be doing.

In the middle of the Pacific War, after Gener...