David Vining's Blog, page 81

Fearless

Well, I was not expecting this. Seemingly forgotten in Peter Weir’s filmography right before what might be his most beloved film, The Truman Show, Fearless is a character study with certain operatic notes to it. It’s a performance based film, centering on the acting chops of its two main stars, supported by an intelligently written script by Rafael Yglesias (based on his own novel) and Weir’s strong direction.

The film is a character study of a man who completely changes after a plane cra...

Green Card

Following up Peter Weir’s most overrated film with his most underrated one, Green Card is a nice, gentle, sweet, and ultimately touching little romantic comedy. It’s not top tier Weir, but it is a sweet little film about love which ends up contrasting interestingly with Weir’s earlier films filled with passion like The Year of Living Dangerously. I never got the sense that Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver’s characters would last long in a relationship at the end of that film, but I feel quite...

Dead Poets Society

This is one of those films that just passes me by. I don’t get it. I look at the effusive praise in a host of reviews, its high ratings everywhere, and the host of Oscar nominations, and I just don’t understand the praise. The script is a confused mess without any real focus while taking this mushy-headed view of nonconformism that doesn’t hold up to much scrutiny. Watching this in the context of Peter Weir’s body of work, it’s weird how the unorthodox and inspiring teacher shares so many qu...

The Mosquito Coast

Peter Weir continues his venture into the American film industry by filming far from Los Angeles, taking his movie star into the jungles of Belize to adapt Paul Theroux’s novel from a script by Paul Schrader. The combination of Weir’s interests in the smallness of man in the face of larger forces, Schrader’s religiosity, and the source material combined to create Weir’s Werner Herzog film. Perhaps Herzog might have had the right combination of madness to push this into greatness, but Weir’s ...

Writing Update – 8/7/23

It’s currently called Stock and Swank: The Scepter of Dagobert, and I don’t hate it anymore!

It needs another draft at least, but I took a deeply flawed first draft and turned it into a second draft that I feel some pride over.

Now, it goes into the back of my mind, and I try to forget I ever wrote it. Next, I take an older third draft and see if I can be happy enough with it to give it another pass and even, potentially, publishing it for the March to April timeframe. I’m hit by compl...

William Friedkin has died

The man who made The Exorcist and Sorcerer has died. He hadn’t made much of note in decades (though Killer Joe is something, but it’s still sad to see someone like him go.

He had finished (or got real close) one more film, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, which is set to premiere at Venice, assuming it shows up at all with this actors’ strike going on.

Still, it’s sad to see someone like him go. He’s all but guaranteed to go on the list soon…ish. I’ve got plans. I think the only person ...

Witness

Peter Weir comes to Hollywood, moving from helping to create one movie star in Mel Gibson to helping to change the image of another, Harrison Ford. Taking a long languishing script by Earl W. Wallace and William Kelley (that apparently originated as an unproduced Gunsmoke script) and applying Weir’s intelligent and understated approach to drama and emotion was a solid welcome for Weir to the American film industry, leading to eight Oscar nominations including Weir’s first for Best Director (...

The Year of Living Dangerously

Peter Weir and the new Australian cinema were getting bigger and bigger with every passing year, and Weir directed all of that increasing energy, value, and creative endeavor into the adaptation of C.J. Koch’s novel about an Australian journalist covering the political upheaval in Indonesia in the early years of President Sukarno’s reign. Also, there’s a romance. Reminding me heavily of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, but perhaps less anti-American and more Romantic in effect, The Year o...

Gallipoli

The Australians really do hold the Battle of the Nek against the English, don’t they? I mean, in a war filled with giant wastes of life, the massacre of Australian soldiers during the Gallipoli Campaign was small in scale in comparison but an important symbolic loss, especially for the new nation that had only existed for fifteen years after Parliament had granted the commonwealth independence to govern itself. They were supposedly independent, not subject but equal to the nation of Britain,...

The Plumber

This is more of a riff, a ditty in between major projects. Supposedly born from a friend’s own experience with a problematic plumber, Peter Weir’s The Plumber is a television movie of awkward and dark humor, the sort of thing that Weir was obviously amenable to considering the humor of Homesdale and The Cars that Ate Paris, though this is a bit more successful than his two earlier attempts. I wonder if Weir, who also wrote the film, would have taken more time to craft the script, bringing to...