David Vining's Blog

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Park Chan-Wook was certainly being unserious when he said that he wanted to bury his first two films, that he wanted everyone to think of Joint Security Area as his first, right? No, he was being very serious, and I can see why. The Moon is…The Sun’s Dream is a bad film. It’s the work of a very ambitious but undirected young filmmaker who doesn’t understand why he’s making the choices he’s making. Sometimes, there are interesting little things happening, but ultimately none of these choices ...

Park Chan-wook died?!

No, he has not. He is thankfully alive and, by all accounts, well. He may be having some trouble finding American funding for his next English language project because of his ejection from the WGA, but I imagine he’ll be making another Korean language film soon enough.

No, I’ve decided to stop my resistance to living directors.

A few months ago, Mark and I were talking about Korean cinema, and I wanted a place of entry into Korea. Of course, that was probably g...

Wolfgang Petersen is worthy of praise. He wasn’t a completely rounded filmmaker. He had blindspots especially around large narrative concerns, but he could direct a sequence like the best of ’em.

I struggle to find who the “real” Petersen is. Was he his best movies? His best known movies? Or did he slum it on his best movies, hoping to make other things that ended up…less successful? I don’t think I’ll ever get the answer to those questions, and all I’m left with are his movies.

And h...

Don’t care.

Just don’t make me watch Sinners again. That was terrible. I’ll watch Hamnet instead, and we all know how much I loved Nomadland.

Wolfgang Petersen missed financially with Poseidon (though, you know, I kind of get a kick out of it), and he ended up only being able to find money in his life for one more film: another adaptation of The Nixon Recession Caper by Ralph Maloney, something he’d made in the 70s for German television under the title Vier gegen die Bank. That adaptation was…fine. Nothing terribly special, but it had its moments. This adaptation is much broader and more obviously comic, but I actually think it wo...

Different directors have different strengths. Some are great with actors. Some are great with story. Some are great with visuals. Some, like Wolfgang Petersen, shine best within individual sequences. They can design, film, and edit an action sequence like nobody’s business. Sure, they may have weird ideas about how to actually assemble the story around it, but those sequences are going to be with the time to watch them. What if Wolfgang Petersen decided to just make an entire movie into one ...

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This is a weird movie. Any adaptation of Homer is probably gonna be kind of weird from the start considering the large theatricality of the personalities, but this is effectively an attempt to adapt the entire Epic Cycle, stopping at The Odyssey instead of just The Iliad. So, where the epic poem that tells of the wrath of Achilles is actually fairly focused on that central idea, it just happening to take place in the middle of the Trojan War, the film has this need to add in the setup and fi...