Nosferatu (2024)

Ironically, Robert Eggers’s version of Nosferatu takes even more elements from Bram Stoker’s Dracula than did Murnau’s delightful original example of spirited copyright infringement. In quite the move, it appears to do so via Coppola’s version of Dracula, with which it shares the erotic intensity/fixation, the emphasis on artificiality, the love for loopy accents, and the willingness to stick to an aesthetic even if this will cost you half of your potential audience, because it’s simply the right one to use for the material, damn it.

Despite this, Nosferatu 24 stands in direct dialogue with Murnau’s film. It may use very different aesthetic methods yet it achieves the same atmosphere of dreams turned haunting/haunted, while dragging to the surface certain things Murnau couldn’t quite articulate (or intertitle) concerning Ellen’s sexuality, or really, sexuality as a whole. There are yawning abysses of subtext here, and I look forward to a the next few decades of film academics coming up with ever weirder interpretations, particularly now that David Lynch has decamped.

The concept of virginity and clear-cut sinlessness saving anything or anyone is right out in this century, obviously. Instead, Eggers goes for a much more complex reading of guilt, and lust, and self-sacrifice that feels more dramatic as well as more true to the inner life of actual people. Zulawski’s Possession is an obvious touchstone here, and not only because Lily-Rose Depp’s approach to the role of Ellen Hutter seems possessed (mere inspiration isn’t enough for this film) by the spirit and hair of Isabelle Adjani from that film.

Despite its more truthful psychology, this, as the Zulawski movie – and certainly all versions of Dracula important to this Nosferatu -really isn’t interested in “normal” human psychology expressed via the often empty gestures of psychological realism at all. Every expression and emotion here is gigantic, Gothic in a sense that would make Byron and Poe nod approvingly (just don’t look at what they’re doing with their hands), creating the/a truth of life through being larger than life. As much as this is the most Gothic of horror movies, it is also a very folkloric reading of vampire mythology, not in the “folk horror” sense, but in how it treats the supernatural and its rules not as some kind of weird science, but as something truly inexplicable in its nature and its ways of being.

Visually, this is a feast of the Gothic and the macabre, full of shots that feel as if they came from half-remembered dreams that will now be very hard to ever forget again. At the same time, parts of the movie look and feel as if they were taking place in the same physical spaces as did Murnau’s original, or as physical as the also always metaphysical and occult spaces of this film can be. This never feels like Eggers wasting energy on ironic nods, quotations or movie nerd self indulgences, however, more like an evocation of the actual physical presence of Murnau’s original, if that makes any sense. Clearly, to me, this is the kind of film that invites a drift into the fanciful and the mystical, but then, this a film that left me breathless watching it for its sheer power. There are shots, whole scenes, in here my typically very forgetful self will never lose now until dementia takes me – something this shares with the original, fittingly.

Which is appropriate for a film that’s so suffused with various characters’ obsessions, all too often with Ellen as their centre, the fulcrum who eventually ends most of these obsessions by an act of self-sacrifice that’s not so much tragic than it is an act of the kind of self-actualization that also ends the self.

On a less high-falutin’ note, I find it pretty damn difficult to watch Willem Dafoe’s version of not-Van Helsing here, and not imagine him sticking a good-natured middle-finger in the face of Sir Anthony Hopkins, CBE.

In short: Motherless Brooklyn (2019)

New York in the 1950s. Frank Minna (Bruce Willis), the mentor of Tourette’s Syndrome suffering detective Lionel Essrog (Edward Norton) is murdered while trying to blackmail someone with quite a bit of clout for money.

Lionel, as brilliant as he is strange, does his best to find the killer, and stumbles into a maze of complicated relations (between people and between communities), conspiracies, lies, dangerous truths and dark secrets of the past.

Edward Norton’s very free adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s novel has suffered quite the critical drubbing. On one hand, I do understand: visually and stylistically, Norton’s not much of a director, tending to the most conservative and often bland approach of framing any given scene with pacing to match; on the script level, he makes the decision to transfer a very highly regarded (and pretty damn brilliant) book into a historical past none of the original’s plot was actually about. Norton clearly prefers things slow and there’s a labyrinthine quality to his approach to the mystery genre that’ll get into quite a few people’s craw.

For me, this labyrinthine quality is rather one of the film’s strengths, an approach perfectly fitting to the traditional noir private detective in the Chandler tradition (and Essrog as a character fits that tradition wonderfully, too), the film’s way of portraying truth as it plays out in real life between actual people as something that’s much more complex than truth as a philosophical abstraction. I’m also very happy with the movie as a left-wing critique of elements of US culture. Because the reason for Norton’s shifting of the film’s setting back into the 50s is so he can do something like Chinatown for New York, though a Chinatown that’s not nihilist and pessimistic to its core but hopeful to a fault. But, as I’m growing older, I’ve found myself being pretty okay with films that do at least dare to dream that injustices might be made just and the people doing that deserve a happily ever after (or at least until the credits run).

Norton’s script may have its eccentricities, but I found myself drawn into the world it creates and the character that populate this world, going through those moments that don’t quite seem to make sense as anything but noir pastiche the same way you go through a Chandler plot, accepting the messiness because whodunnit really never was the point of the endeavour at all. The pacing, it turns out, isn’t actually as slow as it seems once you get into that spirit, either, rather the proper way to talk about a world and the relations of people in that world.

On the acting side, this is simple great stuff, Norton overacting with great intelligence (and a bit of vanity, to be sure), Gugu Mbatha-Raw adding another impressive outing to a career that seems to become rather full of impressive work in interesting films, Alec Baldwin doing a note perfect horrible “Great Man”, and the rest of the gang acting in style.

In short: Off Limits (1988)

Vietnam, 1968, during the Tet Offensive. CID Sergeant’s McGriff (Willem Dafoe) and Perkins (Gregory Hines) are the kind of racist, violent shitheels you’d expect in that role during this time. However, when the murder of a local prostitute leads them on the trail of a whole series of murders of prostitutes during the last year, all showing a lot of disturbing parallels, and their investigation begins to suggest the serial killer to be an American officer, they don’t back down but go out of their ways to catch him, risking life and career. Of course, they are still treating the Vietnamese as well as enlisted US soldiers like crap while they are doing it, and can’t spend five minutes without going on about how terrible a country they deem Vietnam to be, so it’s probably just another day at the office for these two.

At times, Christopher Crowe’s attempt to transfer 80s cop movie clichés to the more interesting background of the Vietnam War, actually does manage to make these clichés somewhat more interesting and lively; at other times, I couldn’t shake the feeling the director uses the background as an excuse to be more racist and have more unpleasant main characters than he could have gotten away with in a film set in the 80s. Crowe certainly knows how to stage a chase scene and other action movie core elements, giving them a grimy and dirty edge that fits the rest of a film whose Vietnam feels a lot like New York in action movies made at this time by people like James Glickenhaus.

The plot’s not terribly good at leading us from action scene to action scene, though. Crowe’s script never really manages to make the actual investigation terribly interesting – and honestly, if you don’t guess the whodunit very early on, I’d be very surprised. The thin characterisation of everyone involved here doesn’t make the plot any more interesting either. There’s a desperate attempt to humanise at least Dafoe’s character a little with a romance plot between him and a French novitiate sister played by the not terribly French (but lovely) Amanda Pays, but it’s so perfunctorily written, it doesn’t do much beyond adding scenes to the movie.


The characters are so bare-bones, even actors with as much heft as Dafoe, Hines or Fred Ward don’t manage to suggest much depth to these men; only house favourite Scott Glenn has an opportunity to actually do something of interest acting-wise, but he’s not in too many scenes.

Three Films Make A Post: They Say No One Can Save The World. Meet No One.

6 Underground (2019): Obviously, not being named Rex Reed, I usually talk about movies here I have stayed awake watching throughout, and seen all the way through to the bitter end. However, given the clear disrespect – if not even outright hatred - Michael Bay shows for us poor idiots watching this particular thing, and having inflicted half of it on myself, I think I do deserve at least a little compensation (like a couple of months of free Netflix, the other party responsible for this roaring garbage fire). So, even having only seen half of the film, I can most certainly say that Bay is still completely unable to stage and film action sequences, he’s even worse than he was when he shot the unparsable car chase in The Rock. Today, his action isn’t just over-edited and makes no structural sense, it has also learned to shake and strobe like a Tony Scott movie, adding the epilepsy to the headache. The “script” was written by the guys who brought us Deadpool, Zombieland and Life, so you know it was going to be some smug meta-masturbation at best, but is just probably cocaine-addled and deeply mean-spirited nonsense by writers who are so much less clever than they obviously think they are. Screw, Michael Bay, seriously.

Dog Eat Dog (2016): This Paul Schrader film with Nicolas Cage, Willem Dafoe and Christopher Matthew Cook as luckless and pretty stupid small time crooks getting themselves killed over their inability to kidnap a baby sort of fits 6 Underground. Not because it’s also one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen but because it is pretty damn mean-spirited and excessive, too, Schrader apparently trying to very belatedly make the kind of black comedy which feels heavily influenced by all those would-be Tarantinos that cropped up after Pulp Fiction. The characters are your typical Schrader troubled males with violent tendencies (or in the case of Dafoe’s aptly named “Mad Dog” more than just tendencies) but drawn with a meanness that turns them into nasty caricatures, something the film, as well as the actors clearly revels in. It’s what you call an “interesting effort” while stroking your chin thoughtfully. Also features Nicolas Cage doing a Bogart imitation, it you’re into that.


Scrooged (1988): I know, Christmas is over, but Richard Donner’s version of the old Dickens number with added media critique that still seems rather fitting today, with Bill Murray despite being in a very bad mood during production actually giving a fantastic performance, fits these other two films rather well in its often very mean-spirited vibe. Unlike the other movies in this post, it is an actual artistic success, though, and does its very best to use said mean-spiritedness to say something to, as well as do something with the audience. Even if it is only to upset us pretty terribly about humanity (our Scrooge stand-in isn’t even the worst person in the movie) and then make up for it by having Murray give a “be kind to one another” speech where he seems to be teetering at the edge of an actual breakdown. Which, I’d argue, is exactly the right way to go here, for what the more polite versions of the material tend to gloss over is that we witness a man whose every belief (nasty as those may be) has just been curb-stomped and who is trying to recreate himself as a human being live on camera.

The Great Wall (2016)

China, in what I assume to be about the 11th Century C.E. Mercenary William (Matt Damon, apparently doing some kind of accent that may or may not supposed to be Irish but most certainly isn’t) and a small group of colleagues of whom only his closest buddy, the cynical Tovar (Pedro Pascal), will live long enough to be worth mentioning, have come to China to steal black powder. Not the secret of making it, mind you, these guys really seem to be aiming to cart a bunch of the stuff out of the country.

As if playing hide and seek with angry desert tribes weren’t enough to whittle a group down to next to nothing, these merry idiots encounter a lizard monster thingie, too, which they manage to kill, while leaving only William and Tovar alive. When they can’t escape the latest group of said angry riders anymore afterwards, they save themselves by surrendering to the garrison of the conveniently placed Great Wall. The Wall, it will turn out, isn’t just there to defend against human enemies, but to protect the more pleasant parts of China, especially the capital, against a horde of evil lizard thingies who pop out of a mountain every six decades or so after a meteor crashed down there.

Once they’ve decided not to kill the weird foreigners, who managed to conquer one of the lizard thingies and the two have proven themselves in an attack of the lizards, the Chinese defenders kinda-sorta bring out the best in William. Their strategist Wang (Andy Lau Tak-wa) is after all a very reasonable man, and Crane Corps commander Lin Mae (Jing Tian), after a short phase of wanting to kill William, learns to like and respect him and teaches him the meaning of fighting for things bigger than one’s own survival. Also, she’s as cute as she’s competent. At the same time, Tovar and an long-time prisoner/guest of the Chinese named Ballard (Willem Dafoe) are still very much into stealing themselves some black powder, because clearly, evil lizard thingies take the back seat for that. What will William choose, and more importantly, how dramatic will the fight against the lizard thingies get?

Historical fantasy adventure The Great Wall is a peculiar first partial English language film for the great Zhang Yimou to direct. Sure, his later Chinese films show a good idea of the marketable, and an ability to have deeply propagandistic elements stand next to others that very much subvert the propaganda again without getting himself into too hot waters with the censors. However this is clearly a film aiming to stand with one foot in the realm of blockbuster films from the USA and the other in that from and for China, and I’m not at all sure his aesthetics fit the US blockbuster market too well beyond certain critic and fan circles that won’t fill a cinema full.

It’s a bit ironic, too, for The Great Wall’s greatest strength is indeed visual spectacle, it just doesn’t feel like the kind of spectacle you get from Marvel, DC, or (Cthulhu help us) Michael Bay at all, and a mass market audience supposedly hates new things and different perspectives (even though some of the past years’ hits suggest otherwise). Personally, I am pretty happy with these parts of the film, and whenever Zhang goes for high visual excitement, the film soars, particularly because the director is free from any silly ideas of making a historically authentic epic. Instead, there are soaring scenes of masses of pretty people in colour-coded armour fighting off the genuinely excellent and inventive monsters, the absurd and utterly awesome crane diving fighting technique of the all-female crane corpse (who probably only not simply fly like in other Chinese movies not to confuse a Western audience that should be used to this sort of thing by now), the pre-climactic balloon chase(!) and more than just a couple of other wonderful flights of fancy. It’s basically a Western/Asian pulp adventure with a sense of wonder.

Of course, the pulp bit also explains the film’s weakness: the mostly bland and clichéd characterization, and a plot that seems out to exclusively hit the most expected beats at the most expected moments. But hey, at least the script contains a group of female warriors it treats matter of factly as just as competent and heroic as their peers without anybody going “you’re a woman!?” or trying to make a cut of the film in which women don’t exist.


So, seen as pure spectacle and monster-fighting, culture-uniting bit of fun, I really enjoyed The Great Wall. It certainly beats most of the other recent attempts at very consciously constructing films for the US and Chinese markets at once.

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The Hunter (2011): Daniel Nettheim’s Tasmania set eco thriller is not at all what I’d have expected from a director whose work otherwise is centred on dependable TV jobs (which I’m not going to knock, for there’s nothing at all wrong with craftsmanship under tight restrictions). It’s a slow, thoughtful film whose direction lacks all vanity and pretention in the best way, focusing instead on the landscape and quite wonderful acting by Willem Dafoe and Frances O’Connor, and specifically their interaction (with a bit of Sam Neill and two good child actors thrown in the mix, too). The film turns out to be a rather complicated redemption film that in the end sees our protagonist do something that is at once very, very right and very, very wrong – and unlike quite a lot of films about violent men finding redemption, The Hunter is quite conscious of this ambivalence.

The Sandman (1995): The thing with me and the films of (US indie horror pioneer) J.R. Bookwalter is that I like the man’s films and respect what he’s going for with them, but that I generally wouldn’t recommend them to many people. It’s not just the roughness that comes with making films with little money and not exactly a horde of experienced crew members involved that makes his films difficult to recommend - the ambition that makes Bookwalter’s films so interesting to me is what will kill them for a lot of viewers. If one is willing and able to look past the cheap costumes, the often amateurish acting, and so on and so forth and see the ideas they are supposed to stand in for rather than their inevitably imperfect reality, then one can be charmed and delighted by Bookwalters films; if one can’t, then one will only see something cheap and amateurish - though usually somewhat better shot and edited than one would expect. I’m not saying one of these ways to look at Bookwalter’s work – or that of filmmakers like him - is wrong, or right; I just happen to enjoy them, and this variation on the “dream demon” concept in particular.


Two Lovers and a Bear (2016): Not at all like a J.R. Bookwalter film is Kim Nguyen’s magical realist tale about, well, two lovers and a bear, or rather the imperfect and doomed (or not doomed, depending on one’s perspective) attempt of two lovers to overcome the pasts that defined and broke them. I found the film captivating, interesting, and infuriating to about the same degree. There’s gorgeous (and meaningful) photography of the Great White North (which is the sort of thing that’ll half sell me on any movie), fine performances by Dane DeHaan and Tatiana Maslany, and quite a lot of passion in the way Nguyen treats his characters; but I also found the way the ending seems to treat the characters’ brokenness as something that can’t be mended (or relieved) by anything but death unconvincing – quite literally in the sense that the film didn’t convince me of it, leading to an ending that to me felt as hollow and conventional as a classic Hollywood happy end.

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Witchouse 3: Demon Fire (2001): Ironically, J.R. Bookwalter’s likeable little horror movie - produced for Charles Band’s Full Moon when the money was obviously starting to run really low (though at least there aren’t any puppets around) - looks cheaper than most of the director’s self-financed films. It’s not terribly exciting business about the dangers of doing magic rituals while drunk (until the underdeveloped PLOT TWIST CHANGES EVERYTHING, of course), but Bookwalter makes the best out of no money and presents some minor chills, mostly spending his time on Debbie Rochon, Tanya Dempsey and Tina Krause (as well as Brinke Stevens as the evil witch Lilith) having fun, flipping out (particularly Rochon has two and a half highly entertaining scenes of losing her shit), and saying things like “You look like you fell down a flight of abusive boyfriends” while mostly keeping their clothes on. It’s entertaining enough for what it is, and tries hard not to bore its audience.

Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997): Where the first Speed was a dumb but inventive and fun action movie, this sequel is more than just a bit of a slog. Despite the promise of the title, the film is at least thirty minutes too long, full of boring subplots blandly presented, non-characters nobody gives a crap about and a general air of a script not so much written as spat out by some sort of script robot. Returning director Jan de Bont seems to have lost all his mojo for presenting exciting action. Never a man for prodding actors along, he can’t even get an entertaining performance out of Willem Dafoe (or any of the other actors, for that matter), so that the whole thing doesn’t just have the air of a bad sequel but of a film nobody involved actually wanted to have much to do with apart from cashing their pay checks.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008): On paper Nicholas Stoller’s comedy (written by lead Jason Segel) should be a mess of a movie, seeing as it mixes genuinely sweet romantic comedy, awkwardness humour (a comedy style that still leaves me puzzled), “raunchy” comedy, Hollywood self-irony, and full frontal nudity by Segel. In practice, all these things for once feel as if they belong together here. That’s thanks to a script by Segel that is generally much cleverer than it needs to be, and often more insightful into the way actual human beings work than it pretends to be. A cast (Segel, Kristen Bell, Mila Kunis and Russell Brand in the main) that can switch comedy and acting styles at a moment’s notice does help there, too.
Plus, there’s a puppet comedy Dracula musical involved.

In short: Shadow of the Vampire (2000)

Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (John Malkovich) is filming Nosferatu, his great, unofficial adaptation of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula”. Unbeknownst to anyone but Murnau, the man playing the vampire Orloff, Max Schreck (Willem Dafoe), is in fact an actual vampire playing an actor playing a vampire. Murnau has bought his cooperation by promising him his lead actress Greta Schröder (Catherine McCormack) once the shoot is over, perhaps with the thought to betray him.

Though once the vampire starts to become impatient and sets teeth to some of the crew, it becomes quickly clear that the director is willing to – quite literally - sacrifice anyone on the altar of his art, apart from himself, of course.

That latter bit is one of the things E. Elias Merhige’s strange (in all the good ways) horror film, drama, dark comedy Shadow of the Vampire understands much better than most films concerned with questions of art and sacrifice: how it’s very often others who pay his price, while the artist takes on the pose of suffering. Consequently, Merhige’s view on artistic production seems cynical bordering on the outright bitter, Dafoe’s Schreck embodying all kinds of emotional horrors, among them the worst sides of certain artist types that, like the film’s Murnau, would commit every atrocity as long as they can excuse it with their art, in classic horror film style externalizing internal horrors.

At the same time as Shadow of the Vampire is an appropriately horrific look at the dark aspects of the artistic impulse with a vampire as a metaphor, it is also a horror movie whose vampire is quite real, an often visually darkly poetic film, and also a comedy with a wickedly dark sense of humour.

All three of these aspects are embodied in Dafoe’s fantastic portrayal of a thing so ancient it has forgotten what it means to be human, a monster grotesque, pathetic, and dangerous all at the same time.

How Merhige manages to keep all these different aspects of his film in check without them tearing apart Shadow of the Vampire while dragging it in all directions, I’m honestly not sure. A pact with the devil, perhaps? In any case, he does, and leaves us with a film so rich I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed trying to make sense about it.

In short: John Carter (of Mars) (2012)

Adding insult to the many injuries Disney caused over the length of its existence - please don't get me started on their influence on the continuing prolonging of copyright into all eternity and keeping large parts of our cultural heritage locked up so they can make more money on that idiot mouse - is the inability of the company to hype this piece of actually awesome and fun blockbuster cinema into the at least minor hit it deserved to become.

It's got wonderful world-building, silly quips, romance, awesome (yes, I'll use this word again and again when talking of John Carter of Mars) action scenes, actually does a little more with its female characters than these films usual do (I'd watch a film that runs rough-shot over Burroughs and features the adventures of Lynn Collins's Dejah Thoris and Samantha Morton's Sola any time; oh, for a parallel universe), shows respect for its minor characters and makes awesome use of CGI effects. It even has a cute CGI dog monster thing that manages to be not annoying at all, for Cthulhu's sake! John Carter is certainly not a film to overburden the minds of the mainstream cinema public, but it, unlike the comparably budgeted films of the Bays and Bruckheimers of this world, is neither dumb, nor cynical, nor driven by an actual hatred of the human race; the film also just happens to be extremely fun once it gets going, taking what's good of its pulp roots and mostly leaving what isn't.

Of course, the film's not perfect. There are far too many superfluous introductory scenes, and the film gets a bit flabby around the waist once it enters its final ten minutes. Personally, I could also have lived without the flashbacks into Carter's (played by the unfortunately named Taylor Kitsch) traumatic past that seem to want to hammer home a point an audience should get on its own. However, the core of John Carter's running time is taken up by moments of awesome (see, I told you) fun that often even suggests the responsible filmmaker Andrew Stanton is pretty much in love with Burroughs's Barsoom - but obviously not with Burroughs's racism and sexism - and truly wants his audience to fall in love with it too. Worked well enough for me, as you can see.

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