Some Thoughts About Godzilla (1954)

In truth, there isn’t all that much one can still add to everything that has been written about the movie that started it all, Ishiro Honda’s incredible original Gojira, a film that has been something of a given for me all of my life, at first in the curious German cut (that is based on the US cut, but mutilated further), then in the much superior Japanese original.

My umpteenth rewatch, however, did bring up a handful of observations: first, how much of a horror movie this initial Godzilla movie is at its beginning, with much of the monster action taking place in gloomily lit nights scenes, and a structure that slowly reveals the giant lizard that’s going to threaten Japan. Much of the film’s visual language must of course have resonated quite heavily with a populace that has lived through the war years and their particularly brutal end, and at first, these shots as well seem to be in the service of simply making the horror more horrific.

But the more emotional gravitas the film gains – and this film is all about gravitas, and sadness, and things and people destroyed in the end even when the world is saved – the less Honda uses his shots of destruction that way, and instead utilizes them to argue his emotional, humane and political points. In the end, Honda’s always the humanist, the pacifist who enjoys shots of destructive technology with the best of them but is also genuinely saddened at their use, and only the guy trying to creep us out on the way to get there.

Speaking of the political, it’s interesting to watch a couple of scenes here after Shin Godzilla and after Godzilla Minus One, how important Godzilla’s moments of the squabbling, ineffectual, officials will become to these films in the century after it was made.

In general, one of Honda’s particular strengths here isn’t just that he creates surprisingly complex characters particularly in Drs Serizawa (Akihiko Hirata) and Yamane (Takashi Shimura), but that he understands how to create side characters who feel memorable and alive enough to stand up to the giant lizard with the atomic breath – which most kaiju and giant monster movies simply don’t manage.

It is also fascinating to keep in mind how much this one is a movie all about the filmmakers figuring out how to do what they are trying to achieve while doing it, and how little this looks like a movie made by people who weren’t quite sure how to do it until they did it. In fact, Godzilla feels like a fully thought through and composed masterpiece from shot one to its finish, where one has to look very hard for the traces of the scrappiness of some of the production.

Some thoughts about The Northman (2022)

Robert Eggers’s insanely ambitious trip into the world of biggest budget cinema in form of a trippy, high production value Norse vengeance movie that actually convinces me that Alexander Skarsgård can do more than be the hot Scandinavian is really quite the film. It is also, alas, one of those perfectly splendid films I only have a couple of vaguely insightful things to say about, even under my customarily loose definition of “insight”.

Which may have rather a lot to do with how much Eggers does here by aesthetics alone: making a film that as once has the air of an authentic saga (at least the Icelandic ones I’ve read), criticises the very toxically masculine bent these things – as well as its none-Norse themed brethren vengeance movies – tend to have, yet also accepting and respecting how its lead finds religious-spiritual fulfilment in the act of vengeance. Eggers is so much on fire here, even the sort of ambiguity about the reality of the supernatural elements this includes, which would usually annoy me to no end in any movie, becomes fitting and simply works. Sure, the magic here is probably only a result of Amleth’s (and yes, there’s rather a lot of Shakespeare in here, if you care to look from the right angle) state of mind, his ecstatic-shamanistic-pagan religion, and drugs, but it is also absolutely real for him and everyone else in the movie, which makes the question of its objective reality inside the fictitious world of the movie pretty much irrelevant for the characters in it.

I found myself particularly excited by the strong mythic pull of the whole affair, Eggers’s ability to turn what would be cheesy, campy psychedelia in the wrong hands, into something that feels absolutely true to the inner world of the characters. And since one of the film’s main thrusts is its insistence on the inner world and the outer world of any given character bleeding into each other to actually create the world as a concept they inhabit, it’s simply true to the characters’ world as something more intense than history (or the idea of historical accuracy). To me, this feels rather a lot as if Eggers were applying Werner Herzog’s ideas about Poetic Truth the great director uses for his documentaries to narrative cinema; and doing it as well as anybody ever did.

Some Scattered Thoughts on Jean Rollin’s Le Frisson des Vampire (1973)

Because frankly, Rollin’s films do often lend themselves to scattered thoughts more than stringent analysis or a simple recounting of their plots. Though, to be fair, Frisson (known as Shiver of the Vampires in most English speaking markets), is actually one of the man’s more plot-heavy films, with an at least half-clear throughline and even some recognizable character motivations.

This is also the Rollin movie that show clearest that this strange low budget Romantic had a sense of humour. To wit, he provides us with two male vampires who are as goofy as they are weird, letting them give a couple long, word-play heavy double-monologues that connect vampirism to Isis as well as to the Black Madonna (it’s not as if “The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail” had invented this stuff) while Rollin uses the camera and the actors’ somewhat dubious performances in comically grotesque ways that not just lighten this heady (in the early 70s meaning of the word) business up considerably but also add to the Weird mood of the film instead of detracting from it.

This does of course fit nicely into one of Rollin’s greatest strengths, his ability to turn what should be his film’s greatest weaknesses into their greatest strengths. So, if not all of his actors and actresses can really act but absolutely have faces for the sort of things he’s doing he’s getting them to consciously increase their somewhat dazed and stiff demeanour until they act as if they were sleep-walking, which always seem to be an appropriate way to go through Rollin’s gothic dreamy and dream-like world of nude vampirism and (in this case) early 70s hipster vampires. Characters in Rollin’s films – certainly our male lead here – are so often not clear if they are dreaming or not, reacting in manners to the world Rollin creates that seem perfectly appropriate and downright realistic in context.


Which to me seems to be one of Rollin’s great achievements, making the borders between dream and reality inside of the particular dream world of his films so porous, diffuse and liminal, even a strict term like “realistic” can shift its meaning.

Past Misdeeds: Nosferatu

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

I find writing about silent movies - much more so than actually watching them - exceedingly difficult. While I usually don't even flinch anymore when confronted with differences in style or filmic language, silent movies always seem to come from more than just a different time or place and to deserve a more scholarly treatment than I am capable of.

The problem is amplified even further when a film has been as heavily analysed as Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's Nosferatu - Eine Symphonie des Grauens. There is probably not much to say about it that hasn't already been said. Fortunately, the nice thing about blogging is that one's personal lack of knowledge does not always need to keep one away from trying to wring out a few words about a film.

Even better - I'm not all that interested in talking facts about movies anyway, especially not about films like Nosferatu which invite one to be read as dreams rather than narratives.

This method of watching silent movies as if they were other people's dreams, forgoing the need for logic, plot and other unnecessary ballast is the best way to derive pleasure from them for me and makes it easier to watch European films of the silent era than the often slicker American ones which on paper keep much closer to our modern sensibilities.

The German filmmakers of the Weimar Republic were a very peculiar mix of the commercial filmmaker of today and the mad scientist of future movies, giving their better films a mood that I find quite close to that of other films better understood as dreams than as narratives - the European exploitation movies of much later periods. Yes, I propose to watch Murnau films as if they were made by Jess Franco.

The commercial interests of Nosferatu are obvious. Taking the basic plot of a novel like Stoker's Dracula (of course without paying the author's estate) as the base for your film is as commercially minded as anything Roger Corman ever did, although Corman would never have been so obvious about it that you could have sued him.

But I don't think that the interesting parts of Nosferatu are those close to the book. It is much more important which parts of the book Murnau and his scriptwriter Henrik Galeen chose to ignore.

I see the original Dracula as a modernization of Gothic tropes for the contemporary British audience of the 1890s and have a lot of sympathy for interpretations of Dracula as standing in for venereal disease and/or the fear of the Other. Murnau's film, though, isn't interested in syphilis or modernization of tropes at all (which doesn't mean that he has nothing to say about/to his contemporary world - that part comes automatically). On the contrary, Nosferatu is full of the medieval attacking a present that seems already too much in thrall of the past anyway. Isn't that very German of it?

For me, as someone who finds parts of it still downright terrifying, this is the point from which the film derives most of its strength: Max Schreck's Nosferatu is an ancient, ancient thing come to eat up the future and drag the present back into his past of rats and plague, not so much a corrupting influence as Dracula is, but a regressive one. Nosferatu's horror is the horror of a past that has never been laid to rest and so just keeps shambling on, smothering the young and preventing a future that's worth living.


Seen from this angle, the end of the film itself starts to look horrifying. Even though the past is laid to rest, Ellen Hutter's youth and innocence have to be sacrificed and she herself has to become something exceptionally medieval herself - a saint. And where I stand, there is nothing more horrifying than a saint when you are trying to cope with the present.

Some Ideas About The House by the Cemetery (1981)

Original title: Quella villa accanto al cimitero

Because doing a plot synopsis of this particular film without describing it scene by scene would be even less coherent than the film itself, and instead of reading a description of every single scene of a film, one should simply watch the damn movie, I’ll present some scattered thoughts about one of my very favourite movies.

It is very much worth watching, anyhow, even though Cemetery is usually described as the least of director Lucio Fulci’s trilogy (at least in mood) of films consisting – of course – of this, City of the Living Dead and The Beyond. It’s probably even less digestible for anyone coming to a horror film expecting a sensible plot, conventional narrative or storytelling than the other two films, because its great strangenesses in plot and structure are rather going at the audience as its villain, the delightfully/absurdly/hilariously named Dr Freudstein is at his victims. Riddle me this, for example: does our “hero” (heh) Norman Boyle know he is moving his family into Freudstein’s house? If he doesn’t, how can he still not know this after his wife (the always delightful Catriona MacColl) has found a tomb with the Freudstein name in their parlour? If he does know, why the hell does he seem so genuinely surprised by it later on? Like half of the characters here, Norman acts as if he was going by one base of facts in one moment and by the exact opposite one in the next.

Or take that babysitter – what is her deal exactly? Why does she clean up the leftovers of one of Freudstein’s kills when her death scene makes clear she isn’t in league with him? Add to this particular set of confusions about her, when the film early on seems to suggest she might be a ghost or some sort of revived manikin. She definitely acts bizarrely throughout her lifespan in the film. I could go on and on with this, because there’s really no single character in the film whose acts suggest the coherent whole we expect of a movie character.


But I believe it is exactly Fulci’s purpose here to populate the film with characters that don’t make sense and by this rob his audience of all the security that comes with stable structures like character arcs and proper (or even fake) human psychology, setting us adrift in a world where everybody’s goals and personalities change in inexplicable ways. Thus, House by the Cemetery is less focussed on dragging the audience and the characters into the world of Fulci’s Beyond by dissolving their senses of time, place, and human anatomy as the other two films in the trilogy are (though there’s of course a bit of that, too), and more about finding the uncanny in the lack of a human core most narratives insist on.

Random Gushing about Die Hard (1988)

Because this is a childhood (well, teenhood) classic for me and has held up through repeated viewings nearly on the level of the original Star Wars trilogy, I’m making even less of a pretence to objectivity (which I don’t actually believe in when talking about any kind of human expression) than usual. So this is more a list of various bits and pieces I particularly enjoyed and found interesting  or just thought about while watching Die Hard this time around.

For those among my imaginary readers who haven’t seen this (even though I suspect these are even more imaginary then the rest of you): this is one of the three or four best US big budget action films of the last century, featuring Bruce Willis in his absolute prime, the true spirit of Christmas (which has a lot to do with explosions), Jan de Bont doing what he’s actually good at (hint: it is not directing, and certainly not Shirley Jackson adaptations) and brilliant action movie filmmaking by John McTiernan, also in his absolute prime.

This is certainly one of the godfathers of the non-brain-dead blockbuster style action movie. Now, I’m not pretending Die Hard is a film of infinite depths, but it’s certainly not treating its audience as zombies like the Michael Bay school of this sort of thing demands. To wit: watch how much of the film is actually conscious of the concept of class and how it plays out in practice, and how much of it is a paean to the working stiff which is kinda, well, socialist, really, given how all people in class-based authority are either evil or utterly incompetent, and how a deeply working class cop helped by the voice of another cop at the bottom rung of the ladder (in a lovely performance by Reginald VelJohnson) saves the day.

Feeding into this is that Willis is never portrayed as an unstoppable killing machine, not just because Willis’s kind of charisma at this point, following a long stint as mostly a comedic actor, is a very human one. He’s also the rare action hero who sweats and bleeds a lot, losing as much of his clothing as the film can get away with, and coming over as genuinely tired, in danger, and heartily sick of the whole affair, only coming through via the very working class virtue of tenacity. This also makes the film a good fit for the more American reading of being about the lone guy who puts things right with elbow grease and conviction, but then, the country as it is was founded by protestants, with whom this sort of thing particularly resonates.


It’s also pretty interesting that the script is interested enough in social reality to have little moments like the one where the insufferable Deputy Police Chief introduces himself to the African American FBI agent while calling him “man”, and is rebuked simply but effectively. These bits of reality standing beside broad caricature make all of the film’s awesome implausibilities (German Alan Rickman! Crazy FBI cowboys!) more believable and even more fun. Also, explosions are pretty.

A few thoughts about The Lost City of Z (2016)

Unlike a lot of critics, I find little to enjoy about James Gray’s adaptation of David Grann’s excellent book about Edwardian explorer Percy Fawcett. In part, my intense dislike of the film is certainly caused by the simplistic way Gray’s script turns the rather complicated Fawcett into a simplistic type we know and hate from a lot of bio pics: the guy who is right about stuff even though most of the world disagrees. The film’s approach to Fawcett’s actual ideas manages to turn a man trapped between progressive (for his time) ideas that came to him through practical experience, typical reactionary thought of his time of the dying British Empire, and romantic craziness into your typical anti-racist 2017 era liberal, which is certainly easier for a (stupid) audience to identify with but is also neither believable, nor does it get at the internal inconsistencies that make Fawcett so interesting and his story – apart from all fantastic adventurous thought and obsession and tragedy – so human.

The film’s Fawcett – as rather indifferently performed by Charlie Hunnam - is a cardboard character, and his ideas are cardboard character ideas without nuance, doubt, and the thing we all as humans share (yes, I mean myself, and you, and so on): being wrong.

All this, I still could accept, if the bad adaptation of a good book would at least work as a decent adventure movie. For that, unfortunately, the film’s pacing is way too leaden and there are too many scenes of Fawcett debating the theories that only vaguely resemble those he actually held, full of the sort of “intelligent people are talking” dialogue screenwriters get up to when they don’t trust their audience’s intelligence to actually understand or be interested in the ideas discussed. I’m not a friend of the phrase “dumbing it down”, but that’s exactly what Gray’s film does to Grann’s book; and it doesn’t even do it well or with charm.


In this context, it will come as no surprise that the dangers Fawcett faces in the rainforest are rather more appetizing than a lot of those the actual Fawcett’s expeditions suffered from. The real life body horror element isn’t completely absent in the movie, but the film’s still pretty squeamish when it comes to the icky details and really rather prefers dangers out of traditional adventure movies – it’s not terribly adequate at making these exciting either, though.

Some Thoughts About Der amerikanische Freund (1977) & Ripley’s Game (2002)

Even if you ignore the twenty-five years of change in the technical aspects of filmmaking and the world around it, it does come as a bit of a surprise how different these two adaptations of Patricia Highsmith’s novel - the older directed by Wim Wenders, the newer by Liliana Cavani – are. Even though both films hew very close to some of the main plot beats, there’s a world of difference in sensibility between them. As a dear friend of mine remarked when I tried to explain the difference between the films, it’s a lot like a piece of classical music realized by (very) different conductors.

The choice of very different lead actors and two very different approaches to the character of Tom Ripley seem to me symptomatic for the difference between the two films: where John Malkovich in the Cavani film hews closer to Highsmith’s text and is a cultured sociopath whose main relation to neurotypical humanity seems to me a curiosity about how people who are very much not like him function internally, Dennis Hopper’s Ripley is a guy in cowboy hat who understands high art probably as well as the Malkovich character does but seems to find actual enjoyment in those things Malkovich-Ripley will probably sniff at as low-brow, and who seems not as precisely drawn as is his 2002 counterpart. There’s a blurriness around Hopper-Ripley’s edges, a wavering between a kind of melancholy that would be alien to Malkovich’s Ripley and the ability for ruthless action they both share. As its Ripley, so are the films: Wenders’s movie feels much more leisurely, much more interested in exploring the inner life of Bruno Ganz’s Jonathan Zimmermann (his version of Dougray Scott’s character in the Cavani film) but also arguing that you can’t understand anyone’s inner life in a precise way. Meandering and circling and walking in a direction that might very well be the wrong one (but one won’t know until one has tried) is more Wenders’s style.


Cavani’s film, on the other hand, seems to me to be all about precision and hard edges, to always know where it is going and why in the clearest manner. Malkovich’s portrayal of Ripley is of a fastidious and neat man who always gives at least the illusion of control, so Cavani’s treatment of the plot needs to and does feel much tighter and leaner than Wenders’s approach. One would be tempted to call her film more conventional, but that does sound rather patronizing to a film that is as strong as this one, and that is as much about finding beauty in the strangest of places, moments and people as it is about its thriller plot. Perhaps the difference is that one of these films was made by a woman who is nearly seventy and has seen and experienced a lot more and the other one by a comparatively young man who still had a lot to catch up on when he made it.

A Handful of Toughts On Family Plot (1976)

Alfred Hitchcock’s final film is generally, though certainly not universally, rather unloved. It’s not much of a surprise either, for this peculiar comedy thriller (thriller comedy?) most of the time doesn’t feel at all like the sort of films you think about when it comes to defining an Alfred Hitchcock movie, even though it is certainly working in a genre space Hitchcock very much helped define.

Which is why I rather like the film, I think. At the very least, I find it very difficult not to respect a filmmaker who has been making movies since silent film times, and in the late 70s still goes out to make a film that’s not typical of him. Family Plot is not a stone cold Great Film mind you - it lacks that slightly abstract crystallized and unmoving quality films marked with this word not seldom suffer under; it doesn’t feel like a part of a canon but like part of a life’s work that could have gone on from there.

The film’s great strength and its great weakness lies in its playfulness, the director’s willingness to let his very wonderful, very 70s cast – particularly Karen Black, William Devane, Bruce Dern and Barbara Harris – interact in often funny ways that suggest personal histories between characters instead of explaining them, and to let them show off-beat flaws, how the film suggests all sorts of interesting stuff you couldn’t get into a film that’s interested in tight plotting. For Family Plot really is a rather meandering kind of movie, with quite a few scenes you’d just cut if its aim were are tight unified experience but which are left in here to create more of a space for the characters to inhabit. The plot for its part is weird, rather intricate, but also not at all the point of the film.


There are two nice Hitchcock suspense set pieces to enjoy too, but what really lets this film stay in my mind is how little this is “An Alfred Hitchcock movie”, and how much the work of a veteran director of huge talents trying on elements of what the new kids have been up to in the last years.

Some Thoughts About Poltergeist (1982)

Well, I think I can spare us any words about the plot here. After all, if you’re reading this, you’ve most certainly seen the film.

For quite some time, I’ve never really given Poltergeist much of a chance. Sure I’ve enjoyed it when I was a kid, but afterwards, a degree of dislike for its approach to horror as a carnivalesque special effects spectacular and a whole dollop of grumpy prejudice left me with a very cynical view of it, or of what it turned into in my mind. As is rather too often the case with me for comfort, I was wrong and unfair about Poltergeist. Fortunately, a recent rewatch of the painfully bland remake did make me curious about trying the original again, and watching it rather changed my mind.

Sure, I was right about Poltergeist in so far that it is indeed a film very much rooted in spooking its audience with its special effects – some of which still look brilliant to my eyes, some of which have dated as badly as CGI from the year 2001 – but it goes about it the honest way, certainly throwing something cool to look at on the screen every five minutes but also realizing special effects – even great ones – are not the only thing you need to catch an audience, and if you want to spook it for more than a few minutes, you’ll need to build an emotional connection.

The Hooper/Spielberg (how much of this is actually directed by Hooper and how much by the nominal producer Spielberg depends on whom you ask – at least some of the lighting and the sense of humour feel very much like a product of Hooper to me) film goes about creating this connection rather more subtly and rather less saccharine than Spielberg of this era is generally given credit for. The Freeling family is of course meant as an ideal identification foil for the film’s presumed white upper middle-class 80s audience, but the filmmakers are intelligent enough to realize that audiences might ask for representation but when it comes down to it, they’ll actually empathize with specific characters that are more than pure stand-ins for abstract notions quite a bit more. Consequently, the film puts a heavy emphasis on the way particularly the parents interact with one another, an - often quite funny – natural closeness that, together with fine and highly sympathetic performances by Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams, presents the couple as the proverbial Good Parents, but also as people with flaws and difficulties who bicker sometimes, roll up a joint (or read up on Ronald Reagan) or make bad jokes in front of a mirror. In other words, characters whose troubles an audience can be interested in not because they are exactly like them (whatever that’d look), but because they feel like actual people. Compare that to the remake that doesn’t even manage to get any kind of personality out of Sam Rockwell.

Thusly prepared, the horrors of losing a child, encountering the supernatural and losing quite a few of the outer determinants of the Freeling’s as members of the upper middle-class during the course of the film, take on a much more affecting face, what could be an empty special effects extravaganza turning into a film that can actually touch you emotionally. Poltergeist’s considerable impact is further strengthened by some fine supporting performances. The child actors are merely okay (but they’re not horrible, with is the only thing I really demand of acting children, because they are children), but Beatrice Straight as parapsychologist Dr. Lesh sells some of the more problematic exposition with a great impression of human warmth and dignity, and Zelda Rubinstein is just perfect as Tangina, a character that’s a genuine weirdo the film still – or even because of that - portrays with great warmth and without any irony, leaving sceptical me very okay with a character I should hate with all the energy of a hundred burning suns (compare with the insufferable holier than thou Warrens in the similar in approach but to me completely ineffective The Conjuring films).

That the film looks fantastic (the lighting often is just outright beautiful), and that Hooper/Spielberg (Hooperberg? Spieler?) know how to pace a movie perfectly hardly needs a mention.

Some Scattered Thoughts About Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens (2015)

It is somewhat ironic that you have to drag the Star Wars universe out of the hands of its original creator to actually get a watchable film taking place in it again, but then, creating something doesn’t necessarily mean understanding what’s best about it.

Sure, you could argue that a lot of the impact of J.J. Abrams’s film lies in the way it harnesses its audience’s nostalgia and general love for Star Wars and I couldn’t exactly call you wrong. However, you could just as well argue that doing this is actually what this particular film should do, respecting what the audience loved about the original trilogy and using it as the stepping off point for its variation of the original tale, instead of pretending to make everything new. And, while the film does perhaps repeat one plot beat of the originals too many, it gives most of its repeats little twists that to me feel very important. I don’t really need to explain why there’s more than just one difference between the scene between Kylo Ren and Han Solo and the parallel scene in the original trilogy nor why that’s important, do I? And while we’re talking about changes, to my eyes, it’s rather important and special too (in a good way) that Abrams also gives us a new entry in a beloved nerd mega-franchise whose heroes are a young woman and a young guy of colour, building on what came before and reaching towards inclusivity not as something to be prescribed in a dogmatic manner but as something that’s just normal (in all the good meanings of that word).

I also found myself decidedly happy with the film’s look which brings the Star Wars aesthetic back to its 70s SF paperback cover roots (that’s a compliment), its expectedly exciting action sequences (seriously, if you’re operating in the blockbuster world, good action sequences really should be a given by now, though it doesn’t seem to hurt Michael Bay his films only have crap ones), and the general air of the film very much caring about the tradition it stands in.

On Dario Argento's Dracula 3D (2012)

I'm pretty sure Argento's version of Dracula will automatically get the critical drubbing all his late period films get, be they great like Mother of Tears, abominations like Giallo and The Card Player, or fine workman-like efforts like his Masters of Horror episodes. Argento shares the fate of his co-sufferers in directing horror films like George Romero and John Carpenter of having turned their once rabid fanbases against themselves by continuing to change their styles. And we all know by now that "fans" only stay "fans" as long as you give them exactly what they expect, lest they turn into a highly enthusiastic lynch mob that wouldn't even realize if you made the best movie of your career. Thusly, the Internet has turned my private definition of "fan" into "person who hates something so much (s)he won't stop shouting about how horrible it is", but I digress.

Not that Dracula (3D) is the best movie of Argento's career. It is, in fact, a rather curious artefact that attempts - and perhaps half of the time succeeds - to build a luridly dream-like mood out of a mixture of operatic theatricality, cheapness, misguided uses of modern technology, an improbably bad soundtrack, and plain weirdness. When this works, Dracula becomes rather magical, like a pulpy version of that weird vampire sex dream (vampirism is all about sex and domination for Argento here) you once had after reading Bram Stoker and drinking too much red wine. When it fails, Dracula turns into a horrible mess half bad soap opera, half gore flick made by a teenager.

The most curious thing about it is how easily the film slips from one extreme to the next, with nearly awe-inspiring moments of Gothic horror turning into poor cheese and back again at the drop of a hat. Really everything in Dracula is changing from one moment to the next in this way - the acting (with generally lovely actors like Asia Argento, Thomas "Dracula" Kretschmann and Rutger Hauer as the least interesting Van Helsing imaginable) is convincing in one sentence, stiff in the next, and melodramatically overdone in the next, the special effects permanently meander between decent practical effects, utterly horrid CG most SyFy channel movies were ashamed of, and beautiful and imaginative CG, while the script wanders between homages to every other Dracula adaptation in existence, clever changes to the original (for example, not taking the plot to England doesn't just put away the xenophobic subtext, and is good for the budget but also makes the film dramatically tighter, or rather would make it tighter if this were a film interested in it; and I love what the film in the end does with the old, terrible "Mina is the reincarnation of Dracula's wife" bit), random weird shit I can't help but approve of (I'll just say "mantis"), and stuff that is of little use however you look at it.

Locations and sets are at times beautiful and atmospheric, and at other times so ill lit they have the fake, plastic-y look of a doll house. In this Dracula, the sublime and the ridiculous don't just go hand in hand, they change from one into the other like a hyperactive werewolf. I'm actually pretty sure Argento does this all on purpose (for he can hardly not see it), but what his purpose is - apart from making it much easier for people to hate on the film without having to think about it - I surely don't know.

What I do know is that, even though Argento's Dracula surely isn't his best film, or even a good one, it is a film containing as much personality, strangeness and idiosyncrasy as I could have wished for. It's certainly not the film I would have wanted Argento to make, but then I'm convinced that if you're expecting any artist, in whatever part of his or her career, to do the exact sort of thing you want from her or him, you're doing art appreciation wrong.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,thoughts,dario argento,horror,asia argento,rutger hauer,thomas kretschmann

Some Thoughts On Ace In The Hole (1951)

This is clearly another movie that's so much of a classic and that has been written about so extensively that there's no room for me to say anything new about it. Just as clearly, I can't let that stop me completely, for when have I ever been able to shut up about movies?

Anyhow, I'm not going to waste your time going into details about the obvious. The quality of the script (especially the fantastically sharp, darkly funny dialogue perfect for this, the least obvious of all film noirs), Billy Wilder's inventive and tight direction that makes a film that's nearly two hours long feel like seventy minutes, and Kirk Douglas' burningly intense performance, are as much a given as the whiteness of snow. Instead of the appropriate gushing, I just have two observations to make about the movie.

Firstly, there's something poignant (and a bit depressing) about the fact that Ace in the Hole has become less of a black comedy (and believe me, this is just as much a comedy as it is a drama; the difference between a black comedy and a drama lies only in the ability of a walking dead man to have a bitter laugh at his own cost in the former) as the years have passed. In 1951, having an actual carnival raised at the location of a catastrophe must have looked like a slightly surreal exaggeration. Today, that sort of thing has turned from a metaphor into business as usual; black humour has become documentation.

Secondly - and this is what I love most about the film - I'm again and again impressed by how right Wilder and Douglas do by a basic plot that could (and by all rights should) have become either a mawkish melodrama, or a film so moralizing nobody'd ever be interested in actually listening to its morals. Instead, the film is subtle even when its surface seems to play by the Hollywood rules, and knows the difference between having a moral outlook (and the bitterness that can - really does more often than not in Wilder's films - come with it) and hitting an audience over the head with what it is supposed to think and feel. Things and people are complicated, even when you want to sneer at the fact.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,billy wilder,thoughts,drama,comedy,film noir,kirk douglas

Some Thoughts on The Spiral Staircase (1945)

I hardly need to tell anyone that Robert Siodmak's thriller comes close to early perfection of the form (and is stylistically closer to my heart than Hitchcock's comparable films, but let's not go there), nor that the biggest hurdles it has overcome for a modern viewer are its alcoholism-based comic relief, its jerky romantic lead (who fortunately isn't important to the narrative at all and disappears from it early on - it's a film most interested in its female characters), and what can be read as its ableist tendencies. Siodmak overcomes most of these problems through the sheer beauty of his filmmaking, an eye for mood-building detail and a sense for filmic rhythm that just stops this viewer from thinking about possible flaws in the narrative. It's the sort of film that establishes its position as a period piece and the character of its lead by having her visit a silent movie.

With the high quality of filmmaking (Nicholas Musuraca's photography being another special point of beauty) a given, what I found most remarkable rewatching The Spiral Staircase was, how much of the film visually pre-shadows the giallo. There are shots and scenes that will later be quoted (by Bava and Argento, for example) and re-quoted (by directors unconsciously quoting Bava's quotes) in just about every Italian film of the genre you'd care to mention. No genre is, of course, without its predecessors, but I've seldom seen a whole genre (except for the sleaze and the colour) so close to coming into existence twenty years before the fact.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,thoughts,robert siodmak,dorothy mcguire,thriller

Some Random Thoughts On Akira (1988)

Because who needs another full write-up of a classic everyone has already written about? Still, I have a handful of jumbled thoughts and ideas to share.

First of all, I'm impressed by how well the film still holds up as an aesthetic whole. A big part of the film's effect on me is the earnestness and relentlessness with which director Katsuhiro Otomo intensifies most of the more exhausting (one could say hysterical) tropes of anime and manga to the brink of the apocalyptic, creating a whole new set of tropes and concepts for later creators of anime to follow.

But what still gets me most isn't actually the apocalyptic, the boyish manliness, the shouting and the explosions, it is Otomo's treatment of silence. Some of Akira's most impressive moments are happening without a sound, at times accompanied by a few notes of the still pretty weird soundtrack, reminding me of the quiet/loud dynamic that was starting to become important in music at about the same time.

Perhaps related to that, perhaps its total opposite, I think, is the director's decision to stuff his film full of telling details, none of them emphasised, all of them just there, until Akira becomes so full of these details that it's more than just a little jarring whenever Otomo actually does emphasise something. A part of this is probably an attempt of Otomo to adapt his much more sprawling manga the whole affair is based on without having to leave out too much of the incidental detail (though large swathes of plot are left out, and the movie's better off that way), but its effect of me as a viewer is still just as confusing, exciting, and exhausting as it was when Akira was shiny and new.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese movies,anime,sf,katsuhiro otomo,thoughts

Re-watching Escape From New York

John Carpenter's Escape From New York (1981) has been one of my favorite movies seen I first saw it on German cable TV about twenty years ago.

There wouldn't be much sense in reviewing it - me using six hundred words to squee "I love it, I love it" looks like a waste of perfectly good blog space to me.

So I'm just going to list some of the details that made me especially happy this time:

• Parts of the music sound like further reduced E.S.G.!
• The relative disinterest the film takes in Snake's little gladiatorial match, which fits its anti-hero's poise perfectly. (And is exactly the thing some of Carpenter's later macho-fests like Vampires are missing)!
• The pure joy of having just about every single role cast with a b-movie hero(ine)!
• An ending that still says "Fuck you!" as beautifully as a perfect punk single!

Darling of the Day: "Snake Plissken!? I heard you were dead!"

Technorati-Tags: american movies,gushing,thoughts,action,post-apocalypse,kurt russell,lee van cleef,donald pleasance,adrienne barbeau,ernest borgnine,harry dean stanton,isaac hayes,tom atkins,john carpenter

A few thoughts about the Silent Hill movie

When Silent Hill came out in 2006, many critics (even some of those who actually understand genre films) were exceedingly underwhelmed by it. I never understood exactly why, but re-watching it gave me some ideas:

• It's a videogame movie, and because videogames are unworthy and juvenile, a movie derived from a videogame cannot be good.
• Many people are still unprepared to embrace artificiality in films. A film like this, which is dominated by a very conscious artificiality in set design, camera work and acting (although I admit some of the actors could just not be all that great) is something not everyone can appreciate.
• Silent Hill's plot is so loose it is basically not a plot at all. But in the context of a movie about a woman entering a place that is an extended metaphor for her subconscious, plot shouldn't be (and can't be) handled in a traditional way.
• The film has no interest in its few male characters. The male-lead sub-plot is its greatest weakness. That is of course perfectly all right with me.
• Characterization is handled in a weird way, less by the actors emoting (which they do anyway), or their reactions to the things they see, but by the way these things relate to them, a little like in Argento's Inferno.
• Not everyone is a Silent Hill fanboy like me.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,horror,thoughts,silent hill,christophe gans,roger avary,videogames