In case you missed it.

Shadow of the Vampire (2000) is not your average vampire film. The (IMO brilliant) conceit of the film is that German expressionist filmmaker F. W. Murnau found a real vampire to star in his classic Nosferatu — but as far as the cast and crew know, actor Max Schreck is some dude who takes his work really, really seriously. Call it method acting circa 1921.

John Malkovich stars as the obsessed F. W. Murnau and delivers a memorable performance. I blow hot and cold on Malkovich. I love him in this movie, and I thought he made a damn good Ripley. In Being John Malkovich, he convincingly played himself, which can’t be easy for an actor. But his turn as Kurtz in Nicolas Roeg’s Heart of Darkness sucked big time, rivaling the bloated lameness of Marlon Brando’s Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. Bottom line, I think Malkovich does best when he has free rein to chew the scenery, AND the movie’s subject and tone is compatible with said scenery-munching. Shadow of the Vampire fits the bill.

One of the reasons that Malkovich’s scene-sponging thrives in this film is that he is well and truly upstaged by Willem Dafoe, whom (unlike Malkovich) I almost always love (though I found him just meh in those Spider Man movies). This role must have been a blast for Dafoe. Just watch. Although I like Malkovich in this movie, Dafoe is the main reason to rent it.

Interestingly, the movie Nosferatu had a checkered history. Bram Stoker’s widow successfully sued Murnau for copyright infringement, and the movie was ordered to be destroyed. Were it not for some bootlegged copies, the movie might have been lost. It’s a hoot, by the way, and well worth seeing. (I don’t know about you, though, but I need to be in a particular mood to want to watch a silent film.)

Shadow of the Vampire is a good one for a dark night, thunderstorms, fire in the fireplace, giant bowl of popcorn, and mass quantities of (insert drug of choice here). Or enjoy it with a clear head. It’s one of those movies we watch whenever it’s on and never seem to tire of it.

D.

A tale of two crucibles

Just a quick comment about two movies which are structurally similar, but one of which I liked well enough to watch twice, while the other made me flee the room in about 10 minutes.

They both involve obvious crucibles. I can’t recall which book on writing this came from, but the author argued that a good drama requires a crucible. The author defined this as an inescapable problem: seven shipwreck survivors on a life raft, a fortress that must repel the barbarian invasion against all odds, a ring that must be destroyed else a giant eye will, um, keep staring at us. You get the idea.

The good movie: 1408, with John Cusack starring as a writer who debunks ghost stories, and who spends a very, very long night trapped in a haunted hotel room.

The crappy movie: Devil, a story about four or five people trapped in an elevator. (Honestly, I can’t remember. Let’s see. There was Old Lady and Annoying Man and Mystery Man and Young Lady and Black Man. Okay. Five.) And one of them is the Devil!

Honestly, WTF? I remember when I saw this previewed in a theater, I asked myself, how could you possibly create a feature length movie about people trapped in an elevator and keep it interesting for all 100 minutes? Answer: they didn’t. It took me three tries to even get through the Wikipedia summary, and after doing that, all I can say is, thank heavens I didn’t waste a couple hours of my life on that.

It’s easy to say that one movie works and the other doesn’t based on “good” versus “bad” writing, but that answer is too general to be of much interest. What’s good about the good writing, and what’s bad about the bad writing? I think it comes down to characterization. Cusack’s character is interesting (if not completely likable) from the start, and he does become more and more likable as the movie proceeds. In contrast, the five people trapped on the elevator in Devil are either irritating or invisible. Please, can’t we have at least one likable or interesting character?

I’m sure it’s not the story that’s to blame. Both are legitimate crucibles. Trapped in a hotel room that is itself murderous, or trapped in an elevator with a Devil willing to kill, machts nichts. It could have been the other way around — Devil might have been the spellbinder and 1408 the snore-fest. Which tells me authors probably obsess over plot far more than they should. Characterization, that’s where it’s at.

I’d blather on but I have this summer cold, dig? And I still have a bit of a headache.

D.

Some preliminary thoughts on the home movies

I converted all of our old 8 mm over to DVD. By “old,” I mean “late 1950s to mid 1970s.” Curiously, it seems that the older movies were better quality. I have no explanation for that.

Some key observations:

1. The home movies with me in them are almost all overexposed. It’s as if my brilliance was too intense for normal film.

2. People have no concept of what will be interesting forty, fifty, sixty years later. Hint: photos of people and pets are interesting. Even photos of the neighborhood and our home — interesting. (My banana bike? Interesting.) Long, luxurious panning shots of trees and mountains? Not interesting.

3. I was struck by a really old film wherein my dad had hair. My dad! With hair! Who is that guy?

4. I miss my grandfather.

5. Hmm. Who is more warped: the six-year-old who exposes himself on camera, or the thirteen-year-old who shoots the film?

6. I was struck by a really old film wherein I had hair. All of them, in fact! All of my hairs. In all of the movies. Me, with hair! Who is that guy?

7. Among the three of us, I am by far the most interested in watching these things. Jake lasted ten or fifteen minutes, and I suspect Karen tuned out sooner than that. And even I began fast-forwarding at about half-way through, and I still have about 20% left to watch. I doubt “future generations” of Hoffmans will have much interest in this thing.

So. Was it worth the nearly $200 it took to convert all this film to digital? You bet, and for one shot if nothing else: my grandfather picking a fig off a tree in his backyard, eating it, then thumping his chest, saying (I imagine), “Good for you!”

(Sis, in case you’re wondering, I’ve made copies for everyone.)

D.

Some thoughts on eXistenZ, twelve years later

Sometimes I find myself in the mood for David Cronenberg’s style of weird, which means diving into his older filmography. Cronenberg of late has been turning out gritty action movies with Viggo Mortensen (A History of Violence, Eastern Promises), films which are satisfyingly psychological but lack the visceral punch of, say, Videodrome or Naked Lunch. And I do mean visceral: Cronenberg loves his viscera.

So last night I was pleased to discover that I could stream both eXistenZ and Naked Lunch on Netflix. I’ve seen Naked Lunch a few times and would have streamed it had Jake been in the movie-watching mode. (This, by the way, followed a fifteen or twenty minute low-level argument wherein I was trying to convince him to go see a movie, Thor perhaps or Bridesmaids, but nothing apparently could lure him away from the charms of Civilization V.) Naked Lunch, Cronenberg’s homage to author William S. Burroughs, is the better movie; anyone who has ever seen film or listened to spoken word recordings of Burroughs would see that Peter Weller became Burroughs for that role. Really a remarkable performance.

It isn’t easy to summarize Naked Lunch, other than to compare it to another author-homage-film, Kafka, wherein Jeremy Irons played both the author and a number of his characters. So too does Weller become both Burroughs and several of Burroughs’s characters, dramatizing the author’s life but also living through some of his wilder stories. IMDB’s precis is thus misleadingly bizarre:

After developing an addiction to the substance he uses to kill bugs, an exterminator accidentally murders his wife and becomes involved in a secret government plot being orchestrated by giant bugs in an Islamic port town in Africa.

. . . which is like summarizing Lawrence of Arabia, “British officer visits the deserts of Arabia, goes native, and leads a rebellion against the Turks.” Technically accurate but misses the spirit of the film, you know?

Back to eXistenZ, which was, if you get right down to it, a modernization of Cronenberg’s earlier masterpiece, Videodrome. More below the fold, unapologetically laden with spoilers.

(more…)

Qaddafi Strikes Back

According to Colonel Jack Jacobs, Libyan strong man Moammar Qaddafi’s “forces have been systematically routing the rebels.” The Empire has won this round; will the plucky rebels find the necessary allies to turn the tables?

Follow me on this. In the third* Star Wars movie, the rebels found a band of small, furry, feisty Ewoks who allied with them to defeat the numerically and technologically superior forces of the Empire. Who might the Libyan rebels find to assist them in this, their time of dire need? Well, think about it: who nearby are small, furry, and feisty?

The Israelis, that’s who! The Israelis should invade Libya on behalf of the rebels, saving the day, putting the Emperor in his place once and for all.

Which makes about as much sense as the US doing essentially just that**.

D.

*Talking the original trilogy here. Don’t even get me started about that other abomination.

**And we’re not as cute as Ewoks Israelis.

Obviously Israeli. The magazine is called Sabra, isn't it?

With American Gods in mind . . .

Mindless escapist fun. Looks good. But how can you lose with Natalie Portman on board, eh?

D.