Monster March II: Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)

Seven months ago, we began Monster March on a Mummy Monday with Boris Karloff’s The Mummy, but the first Universal Classic Monster movie was Tod Browning’s Dracula. And so it seems appropriate to return and begin again for Monster March II (cue the spooky music) with Bram Stoker’s Dracula, nominally more faithful an adaptation, directed by Francis Ford Coppola and starring Gary Oldman as the Count in all his myriad forms. 

I say “nominally more faithful,” because from frame one, Coppola’s Dracula veers wildly from the source material by reimagining the legendary vampire as a Byronic antihero, cursed by his dark past and searching for the reincarnation of his lost love in the person of Mina Murray (Winona Ryder). Alas for the Count, Mina is already engaged to solicitor Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves), and so Dracula’s journey to England becomes less a real estate game and more an amorous quest that just so happens to involve a little bloodletting. 

 

Plainly put, Oldman acts rings around everyone else in the cast, even the delightfully hammy Anthony Hopkins as Abraham Van Helsing. Oldman plays Dracula in no fewer than four different iterations, and he aces all of them. Bela Lugosi was iconic, but he seems one-note in comparison to Oldman’s more sophisticated portrayal of a vampire who is alternately tortured and torturer, a lusty bedfellow and a carnivorous lover. The image of Oldman never quite supplants Lugosi, however, proof positive of just how primordial the 1931 original remains, yet Oldman’s “Old Dracula” is a close second as he defies the laws of physics, suckles at shaving razors, and commands your attention in a riveting first act.

 

That opening third of the film, in which Count Dracula holds Harker hostage in his castle, is the best the film ever gets, a note-perfect introduction to an adaptation that never quite lives up to its own beginning. The opening is so compelling, in fact, that you’ll almost forget that Keanu Reeves is madly out of his depth as a young British solicitor, encumbered by the worst British accent since Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins (and perhaps even worse, given that his greeting of “Count Dracula” sounds more like “Count Chocula”). So good is Oldman, and so spooky is his castle, that Coppola might well have stopped the film there and turned in the best short film about Dracula.

 

After Dracula leaves Transylvania, however, the film slows to a crawl in its depiction of Dracula as romantic foil. Oldman is often too psychotic for the work of courtship, and it’s frequently unclear whether Mina is truly falling for Dracula or whether she’s laboring under his hypnosis, his absinthe, or both. Meanwhile, the film spends a great deal of time with Lucy Westenra (Sadie Frost), her three suitors (Richard E. Grant, Cary Elwes, and Billy Campbell), and Van Helsing, such that it feels like Coppola wasn’t quite sure which film he wanted to make – the star-crossed lovers or the paranormal medical mystery. Of the two, the latter is more compelling, but it never bears Coppola’s full attention.

 

What’s very clear, however, is that Coppola wanted to make one of the most erotic Draculas ever, filling the film with copious nudity and literalized subtext. In doing so, however, much of the tension of the film becomes inert. To borrow an unfortunately apt line from Alfred Hitchcock, the terror is not in the bang but in the anticipation; the sensuousness of Lugosi’s Dracula was all subterranean, where Oldman’s Dracula is, in the biblical sense of the word, openly ravishing. It’s an interesting forerunner to the Twilight films, of all things, with a doomed immortal languishing as an unabashed romantic, but its erotic dimension is so overblown, so baroque, that it becomes fairly ridiculous. 

 

Coppola’s direction, too, is sumptuous and ornate. Often Coppola is attempting to ape the filmic style of Old Hollywood, with dramatic fades and creative camera angles that would make Orson Welles blush with envy. It’s for those reasons, Coppola’s fiendish attention to classical styling, that the film’s exaggerated sexuality and violence end up distracting rather than amplifying. When Dracula licks the shaving razor that nicks Harker’s throat, it’s icky but spontaneous, yet when the vampiric Lucy vomits blood onto Van Helsing’s face, it’s nauseating for all the wrong reasons. 

 

By dubbing the film “Bram Stoker’s” Dracula, there’s an immediate claim to authenticity, an appeal to authority that suggests this is the definitive adaptation of the novel. Hokey reincarnation notwithstanding, Coppola may have succeeded in spite of himself. The film replicates the novel’s obsession with emerging technology, particularly its intersection with the epistolary mode of storytelling, and the script has a keen interest in Stoker’s most likely inspiration, Vlad the Impaler. And Keanu Reeves aside, this Dracula stars as good a cast as any (including the woefully underrated Tom Waits as the sniveling Renfield). Yet Bram Stoker’s Dracula tries so hard to be grown up that it loses some of the power of suggestion. Lugosi could say more with a discreet bow than Oldman says by leaping into bed with his prey.

 

Put another way, Oldman is no Lugosi, but it’s worth it to watch him try. Gliding across the carpet and whirling a titanic sword, his Dracula is buckets of bloody fun.

 

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is rated R for “sexuality and horror violence.” Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Written by James V. Hart. Based on the novel by Bram Stoker. Starring Gary Oldman, Winona Ryder, Anthony Hopkins, Keanu Reeves, Richard E. Grant, Cary Elwes, Billy Campbell, Sadie Frost, and Tom Waits.

Noah (2014)

Abandon all hope, ye who anticipate a Biblically accurate adaptation of the flood narrative.  This here’s Aronofsky territory.  The same uber-metaphorical lens through which Black Swan regards Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake” gets applied here to Genesis, resulting in a film that is often uncannily strange but never less than engaging.

Russell Crowe stars as the Scriptural patriarch who gathers his family and two-of-every-kind in a colossal ark after a vision from The Creator informs him that the world is about to perish in a flood.  As he gathers his family (wife Jennifer Connelly, sons including Logan Lerman, and daughter-in-law Emma Watson), Noah incurs the wrath of local warlord Tubal-cain (Ray Winstone), who refuses to believe that God has not spoken to him too.  Postscript – check out Anthony Hopkins as a berry-gathering Methuselah, doing that wise old man act he’s perfected by now.

Let’s set aside the religious debate right off the bat.  The film doesn’t purport Biblical accuracy; in fact, director Darren Aronofsky disavows any such intention.  Consequently, I think Noah ought to be measured by the same standards as any other film adaptation of a major mythic narrative, in the vein of superhero or Hercules movies.  And there’s nothing in Noah that constitutes an unequivocal betrayal of the source material, nothing incompatible with the core of the original story.

As an interpretive adaptation, then, Noah is mostly successful, though it borders every so often on the bizarre.  The film is fortunately anchored by a very compelling and very human performance from Crowe, who imbues Noah with a deeper humanity than most interpretations. Rather than present Noah as a stoic “true believer,” Crowe gives him his moments of doubt, his misinterpretations of the message, and his post-flood uncertainty.  (Plus, after this and Man of Steel, Crowe has the market cornered on “dads who put their sons in arks.”)

Aronofsky does some visually clever stuff when he introduces Noah’s visions from The Creator as slideshow dream sequences, working in a nifty sample of the overlap between creationism and evolution.  But then the film gets really weird, and by weird I mean “rock people help build the ark.”  There’s a bit of murky theology in these rock people being fallen angels who help mankind, and their bids for forgiveness play up a side of Old Testament God that isn’t seen too often.  In a movie that otherwise immerses you in a specific time period in antiquity, though, living rocks strain credulity.

The other major subplot Aronofsky introduces is the presence of a tribal chief who goes to war for a spot on the ark.  It’s a plausible addition that Noah’s neighbors might have been a bit jealous, and Winstone is wholly engaging as Noah’s foil.  Aronofsky uses these villains, though, to posit an underlying vegans-versus-carnivores message that ultimately confounds more than it proselytizes.  (Some are reading it as anti-industrialist, though that may be a bridge too far.)  It’s fine for establishing a contrast between Noah and the sinners, but it raises major ethical questions:  Noah kills three hunters to avenge their killing of an animal for food, but he turns a blind eye to the rape and pillage of actual humans next door.  I see what Aronofsky is doing, adding an earthy and spiritual element to Noah’s communion with The Creator, but it’s more distracting than it should be precisely because the logic doesn’t hold up.

All told, though, Noah ends up an engaging film, a successful spectacle – which is, at the end of the day, all I ask of a movie.  It’s far from patently offensive, and the parts in the film that work do work very well.  Aside from a few silly bits, Noah is big-budget pageantry at its most watchable, put forward by a powerful lead performance and directed by a man with an unmistakable (if punctuated by logical error) directorial vision.

Noah is rated PG-13 for “violence, disturbing images and brief suggestive content.”  Aside from the whole exterminating flood, there are a few scenes of bloody combat, other scenes of animals being killed in gory fashion, and a bit of bare-shouldered friskiness from the cast’s younger group.

Next week, something we haven’t done in a very long while – two reviews on the same day. Hint:  what’s the big release this Friday?  And when is the Double-Oh-Seventh of this month?  Put another way, when is an American icon like a British agent?  When they’re both reviewed here, that is!  See you next week!

Red 2 (2013)

Red 2, the closet comic book film of the summer, has been marketing itself as the antidote to the monster/superhero bombast of the summer season, and while that’s certainly true it might have been wiser to play up the film’s strengths – its exuberant sense of fun executed by professionals who aren’t afraid to take themselves a little less than seriously.

Enjoying retirement to the dismay of his girlfriend Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker), former special agent Frank Moses (Bruce Willis) is pulled back into the life by his old partner, the mentally dispossessed Marvin Boggs (John Malkovich).  While another old friend, Victoria Winters (Helen Mirren), takes a contract on their lives for MI6, these Retired/Extremely Dangerous agents scramble to find a nuclear device mislaid during the Cold War before engaging Edward Bailey (Anthony Hopkins), the criminally insane genius who built the bomb.

Let’s get the obligatory stuff out of the way.  Red 2 bears none of the gravitas of Skyfall and probably won’t be making any best-of lists come December (although it’s #1 on my list of “Top 10 Movies of 2013 Where Helen Mirren Blows Stuff Up”).  And while the concept demands aging actors, there are moments when an abler, more spry spy might have shaved about fifteen minutes off the plot; there are moments in Red 2 where Willis seems tired and not, I suspect, because his character needs a breather.  (I hesitate to say “phoning it in,” although it’s clear he’s not having as much fun as everyone else at all times.)

But even though the director’s seat has a new occupant this time (Dean Parisot replacing Robert Schwentke), screenwriters Jon & Erich Hoeber return to make sure that the Red franchise keeps its identity secure.  This is a film that knows itself well and in the end does right by itself.  The Hoebers don’t lose sight of what made the first film work – its melding of no-frills action and an infectious sense of fun.  But a movie premised just on being fun doesn’t quite cut it.  Fortunately, Red 2 is also deft at including the other elements – plot, character, acting – that a film needs to “work.”

The plot is, admittedly, a little thin – we’ve seen “ticking time bomb” plots before – but it succeeds at giving events a sense of significance rather than just a skeleton on which to graft special effects sequences.  That is, we care about the stakes, and the characters are compelling enough to bring it to life; we want to see them defuse the bomb not because they have to but because the narrative structure imbues importance on the issue.

Much of that work of significance comes from the acting cast, who are as resplendently entertaining as they were in the first outing.  Willis, Malkovich, and Mirren continue to do well in their roles (the latter practically demanding a spin-off with a near-cameo Brian Cox, whose infatuation with her never gets old), their taut chemistry losing none of its fizzle in the interim, but it’s Parker who’s the surprise hit, amping up her damsel-in-distress with a strong shot of thrill-seeking.  Parker’s everything you want in an unlikely action heroine – strong, sexy, hilarious, and just the right amount of clumsy-yet-capable.

New face Catherine Zeta-Jones is somewhat less inspiring as a Russian femme fatale, though her scenes with Willis allow the latter to play a stellar moonstruck.  The other big additions, however, are much more pleasant.  Byung Hun Lee is a treat as an assassin with a revenge plot for Frank Moses, and his fight scenes get the blood pumping where the older stars can’t.  But by far and to no one’s surprise, the best addition to the cast is Sir Anthony Hopkins as the insanity-addled scientist, who’s gone mental after years of solitary confinement.  If Red 2 is understood as a space where scenery chewing isn’t just permissible, it’s encouraged (cf. Malkovich), Hopkins goes to the head of the buffet line for an all-you-can-eat performance, greeting invisible cows while distractedly fidgeting with nerve gas.  It’s the kind of role that exudes entertainment, with Hopkins’s gleeful mania suggesting not just the depths of his character’s insanity but also the sheer enjoyment factor that must come from playing such a part.

At the end of the day, Red 2 doesn’t break much new ground, nor does it distinguish itself as mind-numbingly brilliant.  But what it does, it does quite well – entertain, distract, and divert for two hours with a serviceable plot, a solid ensemble cast, and a breathless sense of fun.  Count me in for Red 3 (especially if you get someone like Michael Caine in there)!

Red 2 is rated PG-13 for “pervasive action and violence including frenetic gunplay, and for some language and drug material.”  Yeah, that’s a weirdly specific rating... certainly lots of guns get fired and plenty of stuff blows up.  The profanity is pretty tame, and Marvin’s history with LSD is cited a few times.

Check back with us on Wednesday for another action film, Pacific Rim!

Monday at the Movies - June 3, 2013

In honor of last month's stellar first season finale of Bates Motel, the A&E show I ended up loving more than I ever thought I would, we take a look at the myth behind the filming of Psycho before turning to the film itself.

Hitchcock (2012) – One of our finest actors portrays one of the greatest directors of all time, yet somehow the results leave something to be desired.  Sacha Gervasi’s directorial debut follows the corpulent Alfred Hitchcock (Anthony Hopkins) during the making of his ostensible masterpiece, Psycho.  It sounds like a recipe for success, but something’s missing; my vote is that, engaging though they all are, there are far too many subplots going on in the film.  We’ve got Helen Mirren doing fab work as Alma Reville, but it’s a performance dulled by a lifeless tease of adulteries (Danny Huston, usually equally compelling, is uninteresting here).  The bits where Hitch hallucinates encounters with Ed Gein are wacky in a Tim Burton kind of way, but these scenes are mere sidebars to other narratives.  And the making of Psycho itself, which was the major draw for me, gets short shrift – a shame, since it’s Hitch/Hopkins at his liveliest, and we have solid turns from Scarlett Johansson and James D’Arcy (as Janet Leigh and an uncanny doppelganger of Anthony Perkins, respectively).  On top of all that, though Hopkins is divine as always, his own star power sometimes overshadows the role, so it’s difficult to see him just at surface level; his Hitch voice is killer and his mannerisms accurate, but Hopkins still bleeds through.  All told, there’s nothing wrong with the movie, but it teases so many fascinating movies within itself that nothing feels fully fleshed out.  If nothing else, you’ll be itching to rewatch Psycho when all’s said and done.

Psycho (1960) – What do you say about a movie which the universe has already agreed is a landmark classic?  Alfred Hitchcock, the undisputed master of suspense, directs the hell out of Robert Bloch’s pulpy novel about the shady Bates Motel and its troubled proprietor Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), burdened with his own unique brand of mother issues when Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) arrives with a bundle of stolen cash.  Though it’s part of the air we breathe, the rest is criminal to spoil just in case, and I can only say that what Hitch does with the material is nothing short of golden.  He’s helped by a more than able score by the legendary Bernard Herrmann, who crafts no less than three unforgettable themes for the film (including those unmistakable violin screeches); indeed, Herrmann’s compositions are almost characters in themselves, governing the mood almost as much as Hitch’s own deliberate direction.  But oh, those directorial decisions:  the black and white, the montage (Eisenstein’s idea of montage as violence never felt so appropriate), the angles, the shadows, even the color of Janet Leigh’s underwear – all are the marks of an obsessive genius lending all his skill to a real project of passion.  Each visual is a treat unto itself, the shots of Norman’s taxidermy lending a beautiful horror to his calm conversation.  And from an industry standpoint, much about the film is delightfully innovative, making twist endings and arriving on time part of the moviegoing lexicon.  In short, it’s not crazy to love Psycho.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here on Friday for the Double-Oh-Seventh of the month!

Monday at the Movies - February 20, 2012

Welcome to Week Eight of “Monday at the Movies.” Between rewatching the first season of Alias (say what you want about subsequent years, but that was a hell of a freshman season) and reading Samuel Richardson’s 1,500 epistolary novel Clarissa (which, according to Ian Watt, birthed the English-language novel), I haven’t had a chance to watch a single movie this week. Instead, I’ll start something I’ve always been meaning to do – a few reviews to get you ready for the second-most anticipated movie of Summer 2012... The Avengers. Since I’ve already reviewed The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man and Iron Man 2 on this site, we’ll look at the two most recent additions to the series.

Thor (2011) – Kenneth Branagh isn’t the first choice for a comic book movie director, but there’s a reason the Internet was disheartened when he announced he wasn’t returning for the sequel. Branagh brings his background in Shakespeare to bear in Thor, which blends perfectly the high theology and overwhelming pride of Asgard and the Norse deities with the restrained and comic scenes on planet Earth. When Thor falls from the heavens, we feel his pain, but angst is not the order of the day; instead, we’re treated to a never-too-ludic “fish out of water” narrative in which Thor finds himself unable to blend into human society. What’s unique here is that almost everyone is a scene-stealer: Tom Hiddleston as the trickster Loki, Anthony Hopkins as paterfamilias Odin, Kat Dennings as Natalie Portman’s sassy assistant Darcy, and Stellan Skarsgård as Swedish (and occasionally intoxicated) scientist Erik Selvig. Even Natalie Portman, who’s sometimes insufferable off-camera, is charming sweet, and intelligent as Jane Foster, Thor’s love interest. It’s a fantastic cast with a powerful story behind it, and it’s all grounded by Chris Hemsworth, whose turn as Thor is undeniably the centerpiece of a story which hangs together on his not-unimpressive shoulders. I’ve never read a Thor comic book, and what’s nice is that the film doesn’t assume you have; instead, there’s plenty of exposition and Norse mythology dabbled in without ever feeling too cumbersome. Even better, the film cues itself for a sequel without feeling unfinished, and the nods toward The Avengers likewise don’t necessitate another film to complete the narrative arc of this delightful movie.

Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) – The second Avengers film of 2011 takes us all the way back to World War II and Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), a scrawny shrimp turned super soldier by way of Stanley Tucci’s magic elixir. Rebranded as Captain America, Steve ventures overseas to fight the Nazis and their secret weapon, The Red Skull (Hugo Weaving, who chews a bit of scenery but never fails to remind us why he’s perfectly cast as a villain). This is another Marvel flick with a wonderful cast, including Tommy Lee Jones, Toby Jones, the aforementioned Tucci, and the obligatory but still delightful cameo by Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury. I was always a fan of Joe Johnston’s other superhero flick, The Rocketeer, and Johnston channels his WWII nostalgia here, creating a perfectly retro atmosphere without feeling less than modern. Marvel fans may balk at the presence of Chris Evans after his lackluster Johnny Storm in Fantastic Four (the subject, perhaps, for another Monday at the Movies), but his Captain America is respectful and dignified, and I can’t wait to see how he handles the time disjunction that happens when Cap joins The Avengers sixty years after the events of this film. (Don’t worry, the logistics of how that works is covered in this film, although it’s governed by what’s known colloquially as “comic book logic.”) There’s more action in this than in Thor, making it a perfect popcorn pick with an emotional punch at the end.

Come May you’ll see a full review of The Avengers when it’s released, as well as that “most anticipated” movie of 2012 from the Distinguished Competition.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!