David Vining's Blog, page 89

Ben-Hur (1959)

Another MOVIE, like Gone with the Wind. Another big, earnest, incredibly well made, really well acted, and often beautiful to look at film that the Academy decided to award with Best Picture. Ben-Hur is just one of those movies that makes sense for that. It’s not just great, but it’s a huge entertainment that uses huge sets to tell a compelling story, an adaptation of the novel by General Lew Wallace. It’s also the second adaptation of the book, the first being a very good film on its own, a...

The Best Picture Winners at the Oscars: A Statement of Purpose Part IV

And once more unto the breach, dear friends. Once more.

This should take me through most of the sixties. I’ll be ending with Oliver! from 1968. I’ve already done reviews for Lawrence of Arabia and The Apartment, so I’ll be doing ten movies across eight days with two second looks.

Now, I have seen all of these films before. The ones I know best are probably the ones I’ve already reviewed, but I’m interesting in some of the ones I’ve only seen once previously. Tom Jones I saw a couple of...

John Boorman: The Definitive Ranking

John Boorman was fascinating to go through. Starting in the mid-60s by making his transition from British television to British film by using the Dave Clark Five as his vehicle in Catch Us If You Can, he got full creative control on Point Blank through Lee Marvin, his star, and he never let go. He made his mark early, providing the world interesting films, at the very least, for nearly fifty years.

Not everything worked, and he really did need solid writing partners to make the most of hi...

Queen and Country

John Boorman’s final film is the sequel to his earlier film, Hope and Glory, the last of his films that received serious critical and awards consideration, and the only other film of his that’s explicitly autobiographical. I’d say that all of his films are somewhat autobiographical at a certain level, he’s just that kind of artist, but this is supposed to be a recreation of a certain aspect of his life. I thought on both of these films that they would be marked departures from the thematic f...

The Tiger’s Tail

I swear…John Boorman is always interesting. Here’s another film of his from his later career that doesn’t really work, but gosh darn it, I want to like it. I don’t quite think it’s good, but there’s so much that just so darn interesting about it that it fascinates me quite a bit. Boorman is obviously a very intelligent man with a lot on his mind. I just wish that he more frequently used better writing partners because he alone often has trouble organizing things dramatically because this was...

In My Country

John Boorman continues his exploration of remote political situations by moving from an invented situation in Panama to a fictional account around the real stories told during the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the end of Apartheid under the presidency of Nelson Mandela. He also continues his propensity for pushing too much into a single film, attacking about three different ideas without getting them to connect particularly well. Throw in a fairly inappropriate roma...

Some thoughts on some random books

So, I’ve read a few books in recent weeks, and I have some thoughts to put down.

First, was New Grub Street written by George Gissing. #36 in Flavor Wire’s list of 50 greatest British novels of the 19th century, I was much more pleased with this reading than I had been with the previous entry, Benjamin Disraeli’s Coningsby. In fact, I kind of loved the first 4/5 of the book.

It’s a story about two young men in 1880s London who are trying to get into the British publishing industry. The...

The Tailor of Panama

I think this film almost works. Almost. Not quite, though. There’s a saggy middle section that just drags the whole affair down without building up the tension like it probably should that the rest of the film can’t get past. However, the first third and final third are actually quite adept at pulling together this sort of anti-James Bond through the corrupt underbelly of the outer edges of the intelligence ecosystem, obviously made in no small part to take advantage of Pierce Brosnan’s imag...

The General (1998)

John Boorman had been getting more explicitly political for about a decade, but he moves his focus from far-away jungles to close to home, namely his adoptive home of Dublin. Based on a book by Paul Williams, Boorman wrote his script about the brazen and notorious criminal Martin Cahill with a particular emphasis on a melancholic attitude towards Ireland, using Cahill as a vehicle for this telling of the collapse and, perhaps, reconstruction of Irish society into something new. It’s easy to ...

Pre-Order Up for Colonial Nightmare!

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Coming June 1, the pre-order for the Kindle version of Colonial Nightmare is now up!

I will also be doing paperback and hardcover versions of the book, but Amazon does not allow for pre-orders on those. They will be live on June 1, so if you wish to wait for a physical copy to order, you just need to wait until June 1. Below is the summary again:

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 f...