David Vining's Blog

Wes Anderson gets complete and total control. Stop-motion animation combined with the adaptation of Roald Dahl alongside Anderson’s exacting visual sensibilities ends up creating what might be his most crowd pleasing and easiest to take feature film. This is obviously something geared more towards children (death is more of an adventurous peril rather than a trauma to overcome personally), and it’s edited shockingly quickly, helping Anderson get under 90 minutes for the first time. It’s a li...

So…Wes Anderson’s parents divorced, he has two brothers, and his father died, right? After The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steven Zissou, and now this, it’s hard to separate the repeated motifs from the man most responsible for the films themselves. So, this time we have another journey, much like The Life Aquatic, but about 25 minutes less of a running time. There’s far less time for diversions. We have a fairly focused set of characters who are all dealing with the same emotion...

This was the first film that Wes Anderson didn’t cowrite with Owen Wilson, Noah Baumbach taking on cowriting duties for the film, and I remember people’s initial reactions to it being the discovery that, maybe, Owen Wilson was the secret sauce to why Anderson’s films worked so well because this one didn’t. Well, I think time has been kind to The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, that initial reaction having diminished over the years. Not that the film is considered Anderson’s best, but that it...

I believe this was the first Wes Anderson movie I ever saw. I think I bought it blind from Criterion about 20 years ago back when I owned so few Criterion movies that blind buys felt safe (renting Robinson Crusoe on Mars ended that impulse on my part). Anyway, it’s most important to me as the start of my love affair with Wes Anderson’s cinema. His precisely constructed bits of family drama and comedy just find the right kind of emotional wavelength in me where his endings, his discoveries of...

For telling another story about growing up in a twee style, it does feel like Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson really matured in their script writing after the financial failure that was Bottle Rocket. There’s a much clearer narrative line flowing from beginning to end, with the same feel for character and an enhanced sense of hand-crafted visuals that would increasingly dominate Anderson’s cinema over the years. This feels more like Anderson’s first film than Bottle Rocket because of that incre...

This is the older Wes Anderson film that I’m least familiar with, having only seen it once. I do have more affection for the rest of his filmography, the affectations of his hand-crafted little worlds that this doesn’t really have, but this is a confident, amusing little tale of coming of age, finding the important things in life, and inept heisting that has a warm, human heart and a light feel that makes it feel almost effortless. The lack of a strong actual story to carry the characters is...

When I was coming to the end of my 8 month long Hammer Film run, I felt like I had two choices in one. I needed a palate cleanser, no matter what, but I could go in one of two directions with it.

The first was my traditional method: a recognizable name with a distinct approach to filmmaking…who is dead…and preferably has a short filmography. Bob Fosse fit right in.

The other was…find someone who makes me happy. About a year ago, when I decided to take on Park Chan-wook, I decided that ...

Bob Fosse wasn’t really what I, or I assume anyone outside of his most intimate of circles, expected from him as a filmmaker. The dancer and choreographer who made his name on Broadway only made one film that really fit the mold of his reputation before he first stepped behind a camera, his first. The rest felt like reactions to his stage work, efforts to plump the depths of his own situation and psyche with as little dancing and singing as possible.

Cabaret functions as a musical for people ...

Less frequent, but not gone, bruh.

I watched 169 movies, and you’re gonna hear about it, bruh.

Like, subscribe, cult, bruh.