David Vining's Blog, page 91

Deliverance

If you’ve ever wanted to make a movie where a handful of guys wander around the woods for most of the runtime, I’m not sure you could find a better model than John Boorman’s Deliverance, based on the book and script by James Dickey. Apparently Sam Peckinpah was interested in adapting the book at the time (going to England to film Straw Dogs when he didn’t get the rights), and it would have fit perfectly in with Peckinpah’s body of work, a filmography concerned with the nature and transformat...

Leo the Last

Yeah…no. Leo the Last is part of this subgenre of films that heavily uses metaphor and symbolism to try and explain, well, everything. Darren Aronofsky’s mother! is a more modern example, and Lindsay Anderson’s Britannia Hotel is another. Considering the presence of Marcello Mastroianni, regular star of Federico Fellini’s films, I’d say that this is Boorman’s effort at making a Felliniesque farce, and I don’t think it really works. It’s not a complete drag with moments of genuine comedy and ...

Hell in the Pacific

I love these sorts of tiny little films from accomplished filmmakers. This is two actors (literally no more than two at any point in the film) in a battle of wills and wits on a beach. It’s the sort of thing that, just at the sound of it without any mention of names, sounds like some sort of low-budget independent affair that’ll probably be incredibly boring for the lack of any real events. Instead, when you include John Boorman, the talented young Irish filmmaker, with Lee Marvin, one of th...

Point Blank

John Boorman, supposedly based on a positive review from Pauline Kael for his first film Catch Us if You Can, started receiving offers to work in Hollywood, and he attracted the attention of Lee Marvin who, at the height of his fame, was offered complete creative control over the adaptation of The Hunter by Richard Stark, which he immediately deferred to the young, Irish filmmaker. That freedom is obvious from the start as Boorman takes what would have been a more standard revenge movie from...

Catch Us if You Can

I’ve got to admit that I resisted John Boorman’s first film, an effort to replicate the success of The Beatles’ A Hard Days Night by fellow British Invasion band the Dave Clark Five. It was hard to figure out what was even going on with five, young British men that all kind of looked alike and, separated by almost sixty years from their celebrity, difficult to differentiate. However, the movie does gain a focus as it goes, and it’s a surprisingly intelligent and sad one at that. I wonder if ...

John Boorman: A Statement of Purpose

So, I thought I had a handle on John Boorman when I decided that he was going to end up on my schedule of movie watching. I had, of course, seen Exorcist II and Excalibur (which none of my readers remember I’ve previously reviewed), but I also have histories with both Hell in the Pacific and Zardoz. Take those four films, and you would think you have a decent idea of what a John Boorman filmography has to hold.

However, I looked over the seventeen films with John Boorman’s name listed as ...

So Ends the third section of Best Pictures…

That’s most of the 1950s done (could I really not have just gone one more and done Ben-Hur? No, screw you, expectations! I don’t follow anyone’s rules, not even my own!).

I’ve, overall, really, really enjoyed this decade of Best Picture winners (and, just for the record, I have seen Ben-Hur more than once, and it is awesome). I’ve long held that the 50s were my favorite decade in film, and the Best Picture run in this decade has helped give me another little bit of evidence in favor of my...

Gigi

I feel like I’m seeing Lubitsch everywhere now, but it’s hard to deny the connections between Lubitsch and Gigi. It’s set in Europe, pre-WWI (specifically France’s Belle Epoque), with wealthy people and a certain visual materialism, a class divide, the battle of the sexes, and Maurice Chevalier. It’s the Chevalier presence that makes it unmistakable at this point (also making me question the stories of Arthur Freed refusing to work with him on An American in Paris because of Chevalier’s coll...

The Bridge on the River Kwai: A Second Look

I’m still in amazement at how well The Bridge on the River Kwai comes together in the end. David Lean had been working up his way through the British film industry through a series of smaller films, and he entered the epic game with a serious bang. Taking Pierre Boulle’s novel and pushing it into his own direction thematically as much as possible, Lean made one of the great epics all centered around the idea of madness.

One thing I’ve noticed through this run of Best Picture winners, espe...

Around the World in 80 Days

I’ve read a few Jules Verne novels, but I’ve never gotten around to Around the World in 80 Days. I wonder if the book has the same lethargic travelogue feel as the film. It’s not a complete bore of an experience, but there’s no real energy to the narrative as a whole. There’s some energy to individual sequences as well as a near constant and mildly entertaining British wit running through a lot of it, but the whole package is simply too loosely told to really support the three-hour runtime. ...