David Vining's Blog, page 9

The Fixer

Based on the novel by Bernard Malamud, John Frankenheimer’s The Fixer is obviously something that never really figured out how to adapt the material for a different medium. I’ve never read Malamud’s novel (and I probably never will), but I suspect the movie is a fairly faithful adaptation, down to the structure. And the structure of a novel and the structure of a film are often not that compatible. Throw in the fact that it seems pretty obvious that both Frankenheimer and Dalton Trumbo, the ...

Grand Prix

This is John Frankenheimer’s epic. His three-hour look at Formula One racing, his first color film, and his first film made outside of the United States. And…it’s pretty good, didn’t need to be an epic, and is more mildly interesting than rip-roaringly compelling. It’s obvious where Frankenheimer’s heart was: the racing, and where it was not: everywhere else. And the movie suffers for it, taking what could have been a grand, sweeping statement on the nature of men living on the edge and turn...

IT

A couple of years ago, I decided that I was going to read Stephen King’s novels in publishing order until they bored me. I’ve made it into his 80s output, and I picked up IT, his magnum opus. Reading it in about a month, the 1200 page novel is…a complete and total mess. The first 20% had me hooked, though. It was great. There was this promise and sense of ill-defined danger that worked marvelously well as King jumped us between 1958 and 1985 with this sense of impending doom infecting everyt...

Wreck-It-Ralph: Folie a Deux

A while back, I looked at a case study in modern Hollywood accidentally coming up with a new success and then instantly undermining it in a sequel with The LEGO Movie. Well, companion to that, happening right about the same time at a rival studio, is another case study in such a movement, this time from Disney with its pair of Wreck-It Ralph films.

A brief synopsis: Essentially Toy Story but with video games, the first film tells about the titular Ralph, the bad guy in a classic video gam...

Seconds

A cri de coeur against materialism and the capitalist system, John Frankenheimer’s Seconds reminded me first and foremost of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s attempts to branch out from the more structured efforts of his earlier films with his unfinished Inferno. Frankenheimer’s first few films had a similar tight visual feel to them, even when he was putting the camera in weird places like Orson Welles, but Seconds is full of handheld cameras, loose filmmaking, and opens with experimental images aro...

The Train

Taking an interesting historical event and blowing it up to Hollywood standards while zeroing in thematically on the cost of war, John Frankenheimer’s The Train is his masterpiece. A thrilling men-on-a-mission film that expertly integrates its plot, its genre, and its theme with character to create an exciting but thoughtful WWII extravaganza. Eschewing any contemporary politics for the first time since his feature film directing debut, John Frankenheimer delivers the complete package of an ...

Seven Days in May

This is one of those films I greatly enjoy but have some basic logical problems with. I mean, if the brass of the US military was miffed at a disarmament treaty with the USSR that hadn’t even passed the Senate yet, would they initiate a coup or work with their friends in the CIA to blackmail senators into having the treaty die in the Senate? Ah, nevermind. That’s a different movie. The movie I do get is a tense, topical thriller about the dangers of a Deep State that refuses to bend to the w...

The Manchurian Candidate: A Second Look

This always fascinates me beyond its expert thriller elements. It’s a leftist critique of Americans who throw the name communist around (while the hero Senator gets to call the McCarthy stand-in a fascist without any note of irony) that…says those Americans are right. The implication being that blowhard anti-communists are actually communist agents. It’s kind of having their cake and eating it, too. Because the entire locus of the film relies on the secret communist agent in the government, ...

Birdman of Alcatraz

Even without the knowledge that Robert Stroud was a psychopath until he died, not at all fixed by caring for birds, Birdman of Alcatraz is a nice little fantasy of the strength of the human spirit. I have to very consciously break from the reality of the man behind the story to get there, but the actual film at play is a nice, simple fable of learning one’s humanity through caring for something smaller than oneself. I do wish it was completely fictional instead of based loosely on a true sto...

All Fall Down

I resist actors’ showcase films, and I think All Fall Down is a good example of why. A film without much in the way of structure or point other than a generalized anti-James Dean intent and some random “what’s so bad about being called a communist” dialogue here and there, All Fall Down is mostly about showcasing Warren Beatty and Angela Lansbury while the rest of the actors around them put in committed, professional performances. I just never engaged in this story of a broken family trying ...