I don't enjoy poetry. Let me explain: I can understand the technical merits of poetry, and appreciate the artistry in a well-turned verse. I will gladly read poetry, and listen to it read by someone else, but I don't enjoy it. I realized, during my viewing of Nosferatu, that I feel the same way about most silent films. I can recognize that this film is important, and influential, and technically brilliant. I can enjoy a few scenes for what they are, but there's something missing from the equation for me personally to enjoy a 90-minute silent film.
With that said, this is one to watch if you care about horror. It was nearly lost forever, as the producers failed to get proper rights to Stoker's Dracula book, and the version of the film we have now is cobbled together from sources scrounged from hidden vaults and archives all over the world. You've seen a few images from this before, through cultural osmosis, and they're the most haunting parts of the movie. It's in the public domain in this country, so you can find it everywhere online for free, but there's a definitive version on Netflix that's closest to the original presentation, if those things matter to you.
October 28, 2014:
So naturally, after Nosferatu, I had to watch the movie about the making of Nosferatu. And boy, is it fun. It's funny, and gripping, and absolutely gorgeous. (Like Night Tide, this film was directed by an artsy-type guy who just dabbled in genre film, and both movies are wonderfully human and haunting.)
So besides Willem Dafoe as the vampire, the movie stars John Malkovich as a silent-film director, which gives him plenty of opportunities to go Malkovich Mad like no one else can. (Also, Eddie Izzard is hilarious in his minor role. I suppose I should also mention Mr. C. Elwes...) Oh, and this was the first movie ever made by Nicolas Cage's production company, but luckily he doesn't appear in the movie. According to the DVD's special features, he was personally responsible for the casting of Malkovich and Dafoe, so I guess he gets a lot of credit for that at least.
This won all kinds of awards, and rightly so. I kinda wish the director returned to making more mainstream films, so I could watch more movies like this one.
October 30, 2014:
So, I finally saw the Haunted Mansion movie. It came out the same year as the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, and this is the one that fulfilled all the doubts and inferior predictions people made about POTC.
Rather than tell you all the bad or mediocre things about it, here's a list of the things I liked:
- Wallace Shawn is always funny, in everything.
- A lot of the art direction and set design is gorgeous.
- The idea to show a suicide onscreen, and make the dead people really grisly and realistic, while misguided, was at least ambitious.
Also, I couldn't help but notice that, like The Corpse Bride, this movie features a wedding ceremony wherein a dead person marries a live person, and the live person is expected to drink poison wine so the marriage can work.
I can only hope that, one day, Guillermo del Toro will make good on his Mansion movie.
October 20, 2014:
I'll try to keep this short. I'd never read It before last week, or seen the TV adaptation. The book is good, of course, but it's also long. Turning an 1,100 page book into a three hour movie is nearly impossible (the audiobook version I listened to ran nearly two days!), but the adaptation is mostly efficient.
The problem is, Stephen King can be an efficient storyteller, but he's at his best when he's rambling. Some of my favorite parts of It are his long divergent interludes, wherein we find out about the historic evils of the town and Pennywise's past doings, which barely rate a mention in the TV film.
The cast is pretty good, and it's nice to see, for example, Harry Anderson and a young Seth Green play a grown-up and teenage version, respectively, of the same character. Of course, Tim Curry is indelible as Pennywise.
The adaptation's biggest crime, and to me it ranks fairly low on the list of book-to-film adaptation crimes, is that it makes the story much simpler. This focuses our attention on the more mythic, Campbellian parts of the battle between good and evil, while losing so many of the character details which make our seven heroes real to me. The two climactic battles, one in each time-frame, have lost the metaphysical parts of the battle, becoming almost entirely real-world and physical fights.
But, both book and film have enduring, horrifying scares I'll remember pretty much forever, and if I only have three hours to spend on this story, I'd watch the film version again.
In a few more days, we'll see the last batch of these reviews, with another Disney family horror comedy, one of the worst movies I've ever seen, one of the most grueling horror movies I've ever seen, and a fluffy witch comedy.
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