David Vining's Blog, page 90

Beyond Rangoon

There’s something off about this film. It’s like there are puzzle pieces that don’t fit and aren’t even from the same puzzle being shoved together without any effort to actually find some semblance of cohesion. It makes me wonder about the writing process of the film. The credited writers are Alex Lasker and Bill Rubenstein, but considering the behind the scenes stories where Boorman heavily rewrote scripts on set, like on Deliverance, it would surprise me not at all to learn that Boorman he...

Where the Heart Is

Part of that weird 80s and 90s subgenre of rich people having to interact with the homeless, John Boorman’s Where the Heart Is is actually one of the more successful efforts, in the lines of Mel Brooks‘ Life Stinks. It’s more clear-eyed and realistic in its portrayal of the issue while having something to say that is beyond bromides about how the mentally ill homeless are more in touch with the human experience than stodgy well-off people. That did seem like something Boorman could have fall...

Colonial Nightmare – Coming Soon! June 1!

I’ve gotten far enough in the rewrite process to say with confidence that Colonial Nightmare, my newest novel, will publish on June 1. I would like to thank Mark Andrew Edwards who, he probably doesn’t remember, suggested the title to this book about 4 years ago.

Below is the summary that will appear on Amazon:

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 F...

Hope and Glory

It’s kind of funny how you can read the description of a film, think it sounds completely out of step for a filmmaker’s work, and then actually watch it to discover that it ends up fitting perfectly. A slice of life tale of a small boy in the London suburbs during World War II felt like it was something of an aberration in Boorman’s work that had been filled with tales of myth and journeys into the heart of darkness while combatting the degrading nature of technology on the human soul, but t...

Goodbye, Sony eReader, Daily Edition

I bought this eReader about 12 years ago, and it has served me well. I went nuts downloading every epub file I could get my hands on, and it has about 1700 books on it. Sure, I might have only read a couple hundred of them, but I had a library in my backpack wherever I went, and it was awesome.

Sony stopped making these things right about the time I bought it, so I’ve been preciously guarding it ever since, watching that faux leather steadily flake away with every passing year. I’d never ...

The Emerald Forest

John Boorman goes full Luddite. Taking the harrowing real story of a man searching for his son for years after the boy was taken by a rainforest tribe in South America and applying is ever-increasing pessimism about humanity and its relationship to technology, Boorman takes his ideas towards their supposedly inevitable conclusion and embraces the noble savage fully and completely. This would be fine if the story were better built and less muddled in its delivery of the ideas, though. As it s...

Killers of the Flower Moon – Trailer

Martin Scorsese has earned every amount of trust over his decades of filmmaking. He’s one of a handful of directors who has gotten better with time, adding more tools to his toolkit, never bending from his strengths but also understanding his own need for talented collaborators, in particular writers. Working with Eric Roth as a cowriter, based on the non-fiction book by David Grann, I have every confidence that Killers of the Flower Moon will be up to par for his later work.

It’s a...

Excalibur: A Second Look

It’s been obvious that John Boorman had his own little cinematic world. It was less distinct visually than someone like Fellini, especially across the films, but he was operating in a distinctly unique thematic space. In Excalibur, Boorman found the most distinct visual presentation of his style, embracing Romanticism and operatic theatrics to bring the tale of King Arthur to life.

Watching this in context of his filmography instead of just as a one off, I’m stuck trying to fit it in, esp...

Exorcist II: The Heretic: A Second Look

There really is an advantage to watching all of the works of an individual filmmaker from beginning to end, and it’s because it gives the viewer greater context for the types of stories and how the stories are told from one film to the next. Specific decisions and directions become more purposeful and explainable. However, it very, very rarely makes the actual films better because after this second viewing of Exorcist II: The Heretic, I can safely say that it is very, very, very bad. It just...

Zardoz

The drugs have kicked in.

Zardoz seems to be something of a poster-child for the hedonistic, drug-fueled, portentous, and overstuffed version of pre-Star Wars 70s science fiction, and I don’t hate it. After the success of Deliverance, that went so far as to get a Best Picture nomination from the Oscars, Boorman took his cache to Fox where he all but forced the studio to pay for this trippy, difficult to watch film. Making it around his house in Ireland, he brought in the former James Bond...