David Vining's Blog, page 88

A Man for All Seasons

This feels like something of a throwback, not for today but for the contemporary period in which it was released. A Man for All Seasons feels like the kind of prestige pictures that Hollywood was making mainly in the 1930s, costume dramas centered around great performances that used minimal musical cues. Chop off the edges of the frame to make it Academy ratio and drain the color from the image, and it would look like it too. Based on the play by Robert Bolt, Fred Zinneman won his second Bes...

The Sound of Music

I love the perhaps apocryphal story that the BBC had The Sound of Music ready to go in case of nuclear holocaust. The film is filled with such warmth and joy that it would be a wonderful distraction from the world ending. Based on the stage musical by Rogers and Hammerstein and the real life tale detailed in Maria von Trapp’s autobiography The Story of the Trapp Family Singers, Robert Wise’s The Sounds of Music is an absolute delight for about 2/3 of it. And then the actual plot and romance ...

My Fair Lady

I swear, this 4K disc might be the best in my entire collection. It’s gorgeous and makes the film look brand new.

After the success of Gigi, Hollywood worked to bring the popular Lerner-Loewe musical that preceded Gigi the film on the stage, My Fair Lady, based on the George Bernard Shaw play Pygmalion. Bringing in old, practiced hand George Cukor to direct from a script by Alan Jay Lerner (with the songs written by Frederick Loewe), Warner Brothers successfully brought one of the most de...

Writing Update

So, having published Colonial Nightmare (buy it now! or I’ll shoot National Lampoon’s dog!), I’ve been looking ahead to what I’ll do next, and I chose to read a first draft of a book I wrote through 2020.

It doesn’t have a title yet (I just refer to it as The Adventure Novel), and I’ve dreaded revisiting it because I have very clear memories of hating it as I wrote it. I already have one novel I’ll never let see the sight of day again (there’s a Goodreads page for it here, and nope, not e...

Tom Jones

I get the sense that Tony Richardson’s adaptation of Henry Fielding’s novel was botched during production. The editing is simply too chaotic, and I don’t think it was intentional. There’s way too much ADR and stitching together of scenes through what feels like random bits of B-roll footage to create montage for this to have been intentional. It’s easily the most chaotic Best Picture winner from a purely cinematic craft point of view, a marked departure from the precisions of assembly that w...

Ernst Lubitsch: A Retrospective

There are directors who were huge in their day but just end up falling out of the collective consciousness over time. I have a theory that those that tend to last the longest in the minds of film fans over decades after their death are the ones most influenced by German Expressionism (Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, and John Ford, just to name three). Ernst Lubitsch, born in Berlin in 1892, started in theater as a teenager and soon found himself in the nascent German film industry in the early...

Lawrence of Arabia: A Second Look

The second of two movies that David Lean directed to the Best Picture Oscar, Lawrence of Arabia is often held up not only as Lean’s best work but one of the greatest films of all time. I, er, put it #3 in my list of Lean’s films. Still, it’s just so great.

Lean was a craftsman in the best of terms. He did a lot of writing throughout the smaller, earlier part of his career, but he was also doing it a lot while adapting Noel Coward plays and Dickens adaptations. He didn’t write Lawrence, bu...

West Side Story (1961)

So, I have something of a history with this film. Previous to this screening, I’d only seen it once, about twenty years ago, and I hated the film. I loathed it. In fact, despite having only seen the film a single time two decades ago, I retained surprisingly clear memories of the film itself as well as my own reaction to it. I would tell people for weeks at the time about how much I hated it, which created a lasting impression (I must have been insufferable). So, as the years have gone on an...

The Apartment: A Second Look

I’m going to pay Billy Wilder the highest compliment I think he would accept: The Apartment could fit in with Ernst Lubitsch’s mature period. Watching this alongside The Shop Around the Corner would be a fascinating look at how essentially the same sense of comedy, drama, and romance developed over about twenty years. It’s still earnest, gentle, and sweet, but it just embraces sex more explicitly, edging onto Lubitsch’s pre-Code embrace of the subject. I imagine that if Lubitsch had lived an...

Colonial Nightmare – Now on Sale!

Here’s the link!

Available in Kindle, paperback, and hardback editions! Buy all three! Buy them and then alternate between editions for different chapters! It’s the only authentic way to do it!

Well, that being said, here’s the plot summary:

When George Washington was 21 years old, he went on a dangerous mission into the wilds of the Ohio River Valley to deliver a message from the Virginia colonial governor to a French military base, Fort Le Boeuf, a message to prevent war between ...