David Vining's Blog, page 95

The Sympathizer Trailer

I am, kind of low-key, a massive Park Chan-wook fan, and I had no idea this thing existed until today when I noticed his name attached to the above trailer in my YouTube feed.

I’m not much one for television, but I’ve been just beginning to catch his rendition of John le Carre’s The Little Drummer Girl (only on the first episode), and this pops up. Must be fate. And, being on HBO Max (or just Max now, I guess), it actually has a shot at a physical release at some point down the line (Th...

One Hour with You

A remake of Lubitsch’s earlier The Marriage Circle, this is essentially the same movie with two major differences: songs and the guy caught in the middle of the two women, his wife and her best friend, actually goes through with the infidelity. It’s a change that introduces a real moral imbalance in the film’s final moments that it just tries to glide past without much consideration, and it makes the ending work far less well than the earlier version did. There’s real charm from the leads, i...

Broken Lullaby

It’s interesting when a filmmaker with a very distinct milieu breaks from it completely and still succeeds. Broken Lullaby by Ernst Lubitsch reminds me of how I reacted to Martin Scorsese‘s The Age of Innocence. Lubitsch obviously had done his share of drama especially in Germany, but they were larger in scale and more melodramatic in tone. This is a much more accomplished work than anything like Anna Boleyn or Sumurun, and it’s because the film has both much better focus on the core charact...

The Smiling Lieutenant

After the stumble that was Monte Carlo, Ernst Lubitsch comes roaring back with The Smiling Lieutenant, a delightful look at a Viennese love triangle that crosses class boundaries, ending with a surprisingly moral take on the pair of relationships at the film’s core. It’s about two people forced into a situation through coincidence and some light farce, learning to bridge the gap between them to find mutual attraction and, perhaps, even love. Like the rest of Lubitsch’s best work, and even so...

Monte Carlo

After the dizzying highs of The Love Parade, Monte Carlo is something of a letdown. Leaning more heavily into the elements of farce and masquerade, this musical comedy is less engaging and less delightful than Ernst Lubitsch’s previous film while also feeling like something of a step back from a technical perspective. If, a few days ago, you had told me that this was Lubitsch’s first sound film and The Love Parade his second, I would have easily believed it. This is technically less accompli...

The Love Parade

That’s it. I get it. I am 100% on board with this Ernst Lubitsch guy. I’d enjoyed a fair number of his films up to now, especially after he made the transition to Hollywood, and I’d even loved a couple of them. However this, his first full sound film, shows me everything about his popularity both with audiences at the time but also, in particular, with the artists and executives that were his contemporaries and the following generation. Absolutely delightful from beginning to end while demon...

Eternal Love

Ernst Lubitsch’s second to last mostly silent film (there’s a dedicated soundtrack, but it’s just music and some sound effects), Eternal Love doesn’t hit the same peaks as his previous film, The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg, and it’s more in line tonally with his historical melodramas. However, it’s more successful than any of those historical melodramas, though. Stripped of the need for the explanation of larger settings and situations in the medium of silent film, the story is much sma...

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins

I’m pretty sure that I read the original Hunger Games books around the time the movies were coming out, but I’ve remained familiar with the movies for a while. Overall, it’s a pretty good series of dystopian movies around a single story. It was obvious that Collins had organized the action of the story so that Katniss Everdeen had minimal moral implications around the murder sports she was forced into, but it mostly worked. The world building was always threadbare and never really made a who...

Ooo, was I also wrong about Terry Gilliam?

Gilliam being done with filmmaking that is.

Terry Gilliam has a new film on the way, and it now reportedly has a name – The Carnival At The End Of Days. 

The Monty Python And The Holy Grail filmmaker came up with the idea for a new feature during the pandemic, when he was self isolating in his home in Italy. He’s spoken about the premise in a February 2022 interview, where he said that “the idea was basically that God has decided to wipe out humanity because of the mess he has made of...

The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg

This is the film that Ernst Lubitsch had been building up towards his entire career. His efforts to find and execute his voice had been growing increasingly successful over the previous few years, especially since he made it to Hollywood, and in The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg, based on a German play by Wilhelm Meyer-Forster, Lubitsch had found the most perfect balance of Old World charm and aesthetics, light, comic sensibilities, and emotional pathos. This is a triumph of film, of the ...