THEY SHALL NOT GROW OLD (2018)

Back in the 1980s, a TV commercial promoting colorized movies quoted a random woman justifying the project on the ground that "we live in color." Peter Jackson's rationale for his colorization of documentary footage from World War I is basically the same; it could be summed up as "they lived in color." In a making-of short, Jackson makes the valid point that colorization, in this case, violates no one's artistic intentions; the original filmmakers certainly would have worked in color had it been available to them. Jackson has done more than colorize the footage. He used modern software to adjust the speed of the erratically hand-cranked films so that the soldiers filmed a century ago move with virtually the smoothness of people filmed today. His goal was to make the war footage look as if it was filmed yesterday, going so far as to fill in dialogue when lip reading -- or, in one case, some impressive scholarly research -- is possible. The results are inevitably mixed. That's partly due to the varying quality of source film, some of which can only be smoothed out so far. Colorization itself remains imperfect, or else it remains a painstaking process that sometimes requires more time or resources than Jackson could expend while meeting his implicit deadline of last year's Armistice centennial. His colorized footage is sometimes very close to the mark, and sometimes it reminds me of the limited palette of early Technicolor. While Jackson notes that grass was a particular challenge, he could have said the same about hair, with which his team had less success. Sometimes the footage still has the stencil-ish look of bad colorization from the early days of home video, but most of the time the results look better than that.

While Jackson colorizes out of a commitment to retrospective realism, the results can still be jarring on aesthetic grounds to people who identify World War I with the grim monotones of canonical fiction films like All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and Paths of Glory (1957). Films like those encourage a view of the Great War as a nuclear winter of blasted landscapes and exiled sunshine before the thing itself could be imagined. In a way, Jackson's commitment to restoring the World War I landscape to what it looked like to the soldiers is a kind of corrective to the implicit expressionism of Lewis Milestone, Stanley Kubrick, their cinematographers and others. It's additionally ironic to contrast Jackson's portrayal of the war with the explicit expressionism of the recent J.R.R. Tolkien biopic that portrays the Great War battlefield as an  inspiration for the doom-laden fantasy world so vividly visualized by Peter Jackson.

Given the heritage of World War I on film, the most surprising thing about They Shall Not Grow Old is that it is not an anti-war film. It isn't really a pro-war film, either -- it's almost impossible to imagine any World War I movie as such -- but it's not intended as Jackson's commentary on the war or its horrors. Pointedly, the script consists only of oral-history testimony from veterans collected by the Imperial War Museum. That decision leaves the politics of the war out almost entirely. It also leaves out the usual question of whether the war was worth fighting. Whatever Jackson may think, he doesn't treat this project as his opportunity to editorialize on the subject. That doesn't mean there's no auteurial presence at all, however. There's a degree of showmanship involved as he makes the audience wait for the colorized footage to fill the wide screen. His initial use of the old black and white footage in its original aspect ratio seems inspired by the prologue to This Is Cinerama, building up to an ideally similar ooh-ahh reveal.  In black and white and in color, Jackson tries to reconstruct as generic a soldiering experience as possible, from enlistment to baptism of fire, with strong emphasis on the discomforts and compensating camaraderie of trench warfare. Perhaps tellingly, the generic battle imagined from testimony and rare documentary footage is a victory for British forces, rather than the typical episode of existential futility from canonical fiction films -- among which, it might be observed, British films are relatively rare. Jackson's directorial decision makes some historic sense, since Britain did win the war, but the fact of victory never stopped filmmakers from the winning nations from emphasizing the negative. Perhaps because Jackson's is a commissioned film, it largely eschews the sort of introspection and regret we expect from World War I movies while implicitly claiming to represent an actual consensus of soldierly experience.

By no means, of course, is Jackson hiding the horrors of the Great War. Leave it to him to earn an R rating for a documentary compiled from century-old film precisely because he lingers on luridly colorized footage of corpses. The rating also has something to do with his unique emphasis on soldiers' bodily functions. Some of the still photos of bare-assed soldiers filling open-air privy benches may well have never been seen before by the moviegoing public.  The overall effect is closer to Rabelaisian than tragic, taking the bare bums and gore as a whole, but with no mockery or satire intended. Folkloric might be a better word, since it aspires to convey the experience of the common rather than the uncommonly sensitive soldier. Whatever your word for it, approving or critical, and leaving your aesthetic judgment of the colorization aside, Jackson has succeeded at least at his presumed minimal goal of making World War I look different than our movie-influenced collective memory of it.

WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS (2014)

It was a low bar to hurdle, but Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement deserve credit all the same for writing, directing and starring in the funniest vampire comedy ever made. There may not be much competition -- qualitatively speaking, that is -- but such competition as exists only proves how hard the task has been. How did these New Zealand comics pull it off? I compared notes with my longtime friend and longertime vampire-movie fan "Wendigo" and among the things we agreed on was that this film benefited from not focusing on one specific vampire film or personality to parody. Instead, it's a fairly comprehensive survey of vampire archetypes without stooping to impersonation. This is a film where no one does a "blah, blah" version of Bela Lugosi's voice, but there is an Euro-accented romantic-tragic vampire, Viago (Waititi) and a vampire inspired by the pop-mythological Vlad Tepes, Vladislav the Poker (Clement), who share a Wellington NZ house along with Deacon (Jonathan Brugh), whom Wendigo had to tag for me as an Ann Rice-type vampire gone to seed, and Petyr (Ben Fransham), a mute Nosferatu type who spends most of his time in the basement. The creators resist any remaining temptation to parody the Twilight cycle, but instead get laughs out of 21st century vampire Nick (Cori Gonzalez-Macuer) boasting implausibly that he inspired the books. The simple idea of What We Do in the Shadows is to throw these types together in one cramped setting, where none of them really fit, and let them bounce off one another. In short, it's reality TV or, more accurately, mockumentary, the gimme being that these vampires have allowed a documentary crew to film their activities, promising not to kill them and, indeed, keeping their word. The description doesn't sound very promising, really, and Wendigo in particular was skeptical about the rave reviews the film was getting, but the vampires' desire -- Viago's more than anyone else's -- to publicize themselves gets us quickly to the heart of the parody. Above all, the vampires (not counting the indifferent Petyr) are narcissists almost to the point of neurosis and don't really want to be in the shadows at all. In short, they're a lot like us.

It really was that simple. Give us vampires with the full panoply of powers -- mesmerism is especially important for them, particularly when police have to inspect the house shortly after one of the vampires has gone up in flames -- but make them almost mundane in their humanity, or almost human in their mundanity. That's the sort of comic gambit we might have expected in the 1950s, the golden age of parody, only now it comes out somewhat less Yiddish than it might have then. More to the point, whereas most vampire comedies aspire to an Addams Family mentality, What We Do in the Shadows is more like The Munsters, though the vampires in the picture are more like Herman than Grandpa, the actual vampire on the show. For all their irrepressible exoticism, there's something laughably bourgeois about their squabbling over household chores, their glee at getting admitted into trendy niteclubs with the help of Nick, their newest recruit, their still greater glee when Nick's still-human buddy Stu (Stu Rutherford) wires their home for the Internet and really introduces them to the 21st century. While most vampire comedies take the glamour of vampirism for granted, What We Do in the Shadows constantly punctures the glamour while exploring the paranormal underworld of Wellington. Our vampires trade insults with an equally bourgeois band of werewolves; their "Dark Masquerade" that climaxes the film takes place in a bowling alley banquet hall. Just as important, the film doesn't try to get laughs out of dumb humans getting seduced or waylaid by the vampires. It does quite well without an "audience point-of-view" character, the most prominent human character, Stu, being noteworthy for his utterly passive fearlessness in the vampires' presence. If anything, his technical knowhow makes him as fascinating and exotic a character to the vampires as they should seem to him.

All of the above would only add up to good intentions if the cast didn't deliver fully committed character turns. Each of the vampires (apart from Petyr) has a storyline running through the picture: Viago's pining for a still-living human lover he was separated from 70 years ago; Vladislav's much-hinted at feud with "the Beast," and his squabbles with his current human servant Jackie (Jackie van Beek), a local housewife impatient for eternal life; Deacon's growing jealousy of Nick, now the most modern and fashionable of the group, even as he seems to ape Deacon's fashions; Nick's own imperilment of the group's safety by his public boasting of his new status. What We Do in the Shadows keeps a lot of balls in the air while most vampire comedies can barely hold on to one. I won't go into further detail because it's a good enough comedy not to have its gags spoiled. It's no masterpiece by any means, and if I find it one of the funnier movies of the past few years I have to add that I seek out relatively few comedies. But it is the best of its kind and that justifies some hyperbole, as well as renewed astonishment that it too cinema so long to do this right.

Wendigo Meets PERFECT CREATURE (2006)

My friend Wendigo and I were planning to watch Tobe Hooper's Salem's Lot this past weekend, but when Wendigo saw that SyFy was running Glenn Standring's sci-fi vampire film he suggested we look at that instead. No screencaps, alas, but it's worth doing without to learn why Wendigo recommended an edited-for-TV version of a film he has only seen edited-for-TV to date. The main reason he recommends it is because you're not likely to find another vampire film like it.

Written and directed by Standring, who hasn't made a feature since, Perfect Creature is a steampunk vampire film set in "a world not unlike ours," yet one in which a 17th century Italian alchemist discovered the principles of genetics ahead of schedule. One result of his research is "the Brotherhood," an all-male cohort of mutants who have heightened strength and senses, fangs, and a dependence on human blood. The Brothers, who don't reproduce sexually or by biting, but by random mutation only, were quickly integrated into western civilization after a brief period of persecution, until they stood at the center of the Church, where humans make voluntary offerings of blood. In return, the Brothers serve man, though some might ask who the servants are, and who the masters. In any event, Brothers and humans enjoy a sort of symbiotic relationship that symbolically merges them, according to Brother theology, into the "perfect creature" of the title.

After a prologue showing the birth of a Brother and his prompt adoption into the Brotherhood, we're introduced into the late 20th century, where technology, after having ran ahead of history heretofore, seems to have stagnated. Cars and TV exist but are relatively primitive, though I admit that I don't know exactly what year the story's set in. We do know that by that time there hasn't been a new Brother in the last 70 years, while the still-immortal Brothers are dedicating their knowledge to fighting nasty strains of influenza that are plaguing humanity. It's not a good time for a Brother to start running amok and biting necks in (for all we know) unprecedented fashion for these eminently civilized creatures.

As the Jamestown police investigate, they're assigned a liaison, Brother Silas (Dougray Scott), who learns that the killer is the baby we saw at the start of the film, his own brother by the same mother, Brother Edgar (Leo Gregory). The Brotherhood seems to believe that Edgar, one of their leading flu researchers, may have been infected while working on vaccines, but Silas and Detective Lily (Saffron Burrows) eventually learn that Edgar was up to something secret, a side project designed to breed fresh Brothers, with unpleasant consequences for himself and possibly worse consequences for humanity....

Perfect Creature interested me because the steampunk context allowed Standring to state baldly what I take to be an underlying assumption of much modern vampire lore; instead of carriers of a curse, they're simply a separate race of superior beings. The Brothers aren't inherently evil, from the evidence shown here, and for all we know the deranged Edgar is the first one ever to hunt humans. The film interested Wendigo first and foremost because it's so different from anything else and committed to its own rules. "Vampires" (a term never used in the movie) don't represent much of what they normally do. Its pseudo-naturalistic concept of vampires isn't exactly unprecedented, but Standring takes it to an extreme, excluding any supernatural abilities apart from the usual heightened strength and senses, and all supernatural vulnerabilities. Standring has invented a world in which vampires are revered (by most), not feared or hated.

Why have vampires at all? Wendigo says that they illustrate the pitfalls of genetic manipulation, for starters, and also an untrustworthy religion in which people have placed an eventually unjustified blind faith. They've stunted any scientific development that they haven't monopolized as their own province. Vampirism has certain blasphemous resemblances to Christianity, so a vampire church is a naturally provocative idea. Whether we can make the reverse inference that churches are vampiric is another matter.

Wendigo also likes the sense of a thought-out fantasy world that doesn't need to be explained to us in full. We can draw inferences about the relationship of the Brotherhood to the Catholic Church or to the British Empire, but Standring doesn't feel a need to fill in the blanks and bloat the film with exposition. Perfect Creature is a mix of many different genres: steampunk and vampires, most obviously, but also film noir, outbreak film (complete with doomsday "destroy the community to save it" scenario) and a little bit of infected-human fun as well. It coheres better than that description might make you think, though you can still see the seams easily enough to call out the genres as they surface.

While the unfortunate Dougray Scott (offered Wolverine, he chose Mission Impossible 2 instead) stars as Brother Silas, Wendigo was most impressed by Saffron Burrows as Detective Lily. The film takes for granted female career advancement, however inconsistent that may be with the overall cultural stagnation, and Burrows plays a straight cop role while retaining a femininity that Wendigo thinks is too often lost by actresses playing tough. She isn't eroticized, though; Wendigo noted with some smugness my surprise that she never got turned into a Sister or even fell that hard for Silas. Scott himself has the bigger challenge of portraying the slow emotional awakening of a repressed person. He has the detached coldness, at first, that characterizes some classical vampires, but Silas is neither a seducer nor a hunter. While Edgar wants Silas to join him as a mad hunter of humans, you never feel that he's tempted in the least, or that he even has an instinct to hunt. He's as chaste as Edward Cullen, but there's no sense that he's holding back or struggling with evil impulses. He's very much like a priest renouncing his faith instead. That may make him a poor vampire for some viewers, but for Wendigo it makes Silas a uniquely interesting fantasy character. As Edgar, Leo Gregory is an unconflicted slobbering villain, and Wendigo found him uninteresting precisely because he was the nearest thing to a generic vampire in this picture. There's no tragedy to his plight because we don't see him between babyhood and insanity. Because the background villainy of the Brotherhood itself is rather abstract and vague, there's no real evil here to make horror part of the film's elaborate equation.

Standring left Perfect Creature open-ended, promising Silas's resistance to the Brotherhood's repressive power and the eventual rise of a Sisterhood with fresh implications for humanity as a whole. The film bombed, apparently, going straight to DVD in most markets, so the story ends here. Wendigo regrets its failure, since he enjoyed Standring's imaginative vision and the neo-Dickensian art direction, but he understands it. It's far from perfect dramatically; it could have ended an hour early with the menace contained but for some inexplicably stupid decisions, for instance. More importantly for many potential viewers, while it has some of the trappings of a vampire film, it simply isn't a horror movie and isn't anything Wendigo would recommend for Halloween viewing. But fans of steampunk and science fantasy, if they look past those same vampire trappings, should find the film a worthwhile experience.

The trailer was uploaded to YouTube by nzfilm01