Movie lovers, mark your calendars!

This will be an exhausting but amazing double bill -- the original and the remake! Both stunning, essential films. February 1st at the Cinematheque!!!!

Keeping a record: 2025 at the start

 Well, the world is going to hell, might as well get my own life in order?

Not sure what I will actually get accomplished this year but for the purposes of record keeping: 

I have $23,000 in credit card debt and an overdraft I'm perpetually at the bottom of until payday.

I weigh, at the moment, 300lbs (actually I took a poop and I'm down to 299, but we like nice even numbers).

I have enough records and movies and books, really I do. 

Not making promises or resolutions, but let's see where the New Year leads...

Winning at 2048

So this is a fun, simple, but challenging game that a student showed me: the aim is to slide numbers around on a grid, doubling them -- crashing 2s into 2s, which thus become 4s, which you then must crash together into 8s, etc. Every time you make a move, a random "2" (or on some versions, the occasional 4) will materialize elsewhere on the board, sometimes filling a space you meant to move back into. To move, you can only use the directional arrows (or whatever keys work on your phone; I haven't tried it there) -- which means moving the whole row to the left or right or up or down; there are only the four possibilities. The game ends when no further moves are possible. It's fun enough to try to figure it out without any tips -- there's a bit of an adventure to be had just trying to figure out how to get a decent score, and I remember that without assistance, I was able to get as high as 512 soon enough. But if you want a heads up on how to proceed -- which will rapidly take you to the next level, the key is that you want to keep all the high numbers in one full row at the margin, restricting the movement to the remaining rows, pairing up numbers until you can add them to the bigger ones up at the top; you'll be tempted, sometimes, to take risks and break up the row of high numbers, but more often than not, you'll find you won't be able to recover the pattern and soon thereafter you'll lose. Just don't let small numbers get trapped behind big numbers, restrict your movements to only a portion of the board, and soon enough your 512s will turn in 1024s -- I only broke the pattern tonight because I could see victory three moves away. Tonight was my first 2048! Apparently it is possible to go beyond that target, but not on this website; this is the first time I've actually won the game. 

Robert Eggers' Nosferatu, Impending Doom, and Misogyny: some almost-organized thoughts

Short version: Nosferatu is terrific, ignore the reviews, ignore me, just go see it. I'll see it again theatrically soon. It's a magnificent accomplishment; people worried after The Northman that Eggers had lost his way should be reassured --  he's found it again, successfully working on a large scale. You will doubtlessly like some things about it more than others -- I certainly did -- but overall, you will appreciate the experience. Why are you even reading this, if you haven't seen it? Go see it, then come back to this. Then go see it again. If you haven't seen it at least once, and your instinct is to have a fresh experience, you are excused from reading what follows -- it's not very spoilery (and it's not like you don't know the story), but there's nothing here you need to put between yourself and your entry into the film; hell, reading this might even interfere?  

Long version (brace yourselves):

Truth is, devoted horror fan that I am, I have never really cared much about Dracula, or, by extension, Nosferatu.  (I am not italicizing them here, treating them as characters, centerpoints to the many adaptations; I'll italicize the individual film titles, but "Dracula" is a cultural phenomenon as much as that word is a title of a film or three.)

It might come down to my not having read the novel. With each film adaptation I have taken in, I have always felt like I'm one of those blind men groping a disparate part of an elephant, trying to arrive at a sense of the original text. But maybe it wouldn't help? After all, I have read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and don't really feel like it aided or subtracted from my enjoyment of any of the many Frankenstein films I've seen; and while I did read and love Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau, the film adaptations of that really do stand alone, all of them departing substantially from the source material; the book is simply one more text to take in. Still, I can't really speak to the issue of faithfulness to Bram Stoker, can't really discuss the original text, to weigh in on whether my problems with the Dracula story start with Stoker himself, or if they are more problems with the films. No comment on Stoker's text is truly possible from me, except speculatively... 

But adaptations of it, I have seen many, and while I've enjoyed bits of all, there are none I really love. I won't count, here, things like the Paul Morrissey (Andy Warhol) Blood for Dracula or, say, my favourite Hammer takes on the character (like Taste the Blood of Dracula), since they use the conceit of Dracula to do things NOT, I presume, in Stoker -- to poke vulgar, softcore Marxist fun at the decadence of the aristocracy, in the former case, and to skewer Victorian sexual hypocrisy and sexism in the second (insofar as I remember it; it's been awhile). There are non-Dracula vampire tales that I do enjoy (Let the Right One In, Near Dark, 30 Days of Night, Martin, Habit, Ganja and Hess, and many others), but they all reinvent the vampire for their own purposes, taking us so far from the source that they're basically their own thing -- vampire movies, not Dracula movies. 

But versions of the actual Dracula story I've seen have seldom resonated strongly, and when they do connect, it's usually not because of the actual "Dracula" elements in them, if that makes sense. I was fascinated by how the original Nosferatu, for instance, served as an unsubtle, anti-Semitic shudder of horror at immigration: it really plays up fears of hooked-nose foreigners bringing their weird diseases and customs with them -- a cautionary tale about doing business with people from elsewhere. I don't approve of that messaging, of course, but it makes the film very interesting to watch and think about! (Enjoyment of a film for me often has more to do with the thoughts it provokes than my agreement with its content; I also think King Kong is a fundamentally racist narrative, say, but that's not meant as a condemnation; regarding it in that light makes it much more interesting). 

Or let's consider the Werner Herzog remake. I love, also, how Klaus Kinski -- a monster of a man, in real life, to be sure -- brings such pathos and humanity to the character of Nosferatu, or Orlok, or what-have-you. Herzog does a few things in that film to somewhat sabotage it, to make it ridiculous, as I recall -- weird little smirks and giggles he interrupts his text with -- but Kinski really makes you feel just how lonely and isolated the character is; there's something really remarkable in his performance. You feel sorry for the monster, as he portrays him, though again, this seems to move us away from the original purpose of the source story -- I guess. I wouldn't really know: do you feel sorry for Dracula in Stoker? You feel sorry for him (Orlok, Nosferatu, whatever) in the Herzog film. It's maybe the tenderest treatment of the story, the gentlest.

By contrast, I have never cared for Bela Lugosi and find the Tod Browning film overblown and impossible to enter, the last few times I've tried; I barely remember the Hammer Horror of Dracula, the one that actually does adapt Stoker, which is probably my least favourite Hammer vampire movie, of the ones I've seen. And the Francis Ford Coppola one is so risibly over-the-top that I couldn't get through a half hour of it the last time I attempted it. It's just a piece of crap, a bad joke of a film (note: I also was so put off by the first half hour or so of the Badham/ Langella Dracula that I just turned that one off. There may be other versions of the story that I've seen that I'm forgetting!). 

So Dracula has never entirely been a monster I've dug. And I do think part of the problem might come from the Stoker text. See -- there's a part of the elephant that feels very much like, oh, what shall we call it, Victorian misogyny? The idea that the female is the key to the evil -- that her connection to the vampire is drawing him -- a connection that at least sometimes is framed in terms of her own sexuality, as with the Eggers film, which I'll get to presently -- and that she must sacrifice herself to atone for that sexual sin, which lets, even invites, evil into the film's world... it's the same rationale that had church fathers proclaiming that Eve was the Devil's Gateway, a horror at female sexuality and female hysteria that ultimately necessitates the death of the female (even if this is framed heroically, it's still misogynist, because it is a necessary aspect of the film: if, to assert virtue, a character must destroy themselves, well, what is that saying about that character? "I'm so much a part of this problem that I must die to right it?" Cf. Carol Clover on Pumpkinhead, here). Maybe Stoker's source material is richer and deeper than all that, and maybe there are female, or even feminist, viewers of these films that find these elements rewarding or enriching, whether or no they agree that they are problematic (as I do about the original Nosferatu's anti-Semitism). But framing femininity as the ultimate source of evil, innate and biological, which must ultimately, to retain virtue, sacrifice itself -- which must be destroyed to defeat the monster -- is, uh, just a bit problematic, and runs throughout all versions of the film, to some extent (maybe not the Herzog? I'd have to see it again).  

No: what I do connect with, however, is a sort of latent criticism of capitalism and the, uh, real estate business, which also does surface in some versions of the film. The whole journey of -- I think of him as Harker -- into Transylvania; his ambition -- which he justifies in terms of trying to provide for his wife, but which, ironically enough, will put her at jeopardy; his traumatizing encounter with deep evil; and his journey back, to try to set right the wrongs he puts in motion, as a sense of overpowering menace grows... that's the stuff that I always gravitate towards, in any adaptation I see, which has moral and political meaning that I can get inside (further enhanced by the evil insanity of "Harker's" boss, usually called Renfield, but not in the Eggers film, where he's Knock, pronounced Kuhnock). The folk horror/ folk-tale-ish elements grab me, too -- surely Dracula is the birth of the trope in horror where the main character is warned to turn back by locals? But by the time that Mina (in the original -- in Eggers, she's Ellen or something) becomes the central focus, it doesn't matter what version I'm watching, I start to tune out, to lose my way; only the Kinski adaptation really holds my interest after the midpoint, because Herzog brings us inside the character in ways no other adaptation does... 

My reaction to Eggers' new Nosferatu is perhaps somewhat predictable, then. I loved and deeply felt the first half of the film, up to the point when the Demeter, or whatever it's being called, spills its rats onto the shores. (There are more rats than in Herzog, like that might have been Eggers' ambition; let's hope they were treated better than Herzog's rats -- there's an essay out there about that, in a Granta, or maybe  a Projections). But the subplot involving Frederick and Lucy (is she still Lucy? I'm lost) and their daughters, and the central action of the second half of the film, which revolves around "Mina"/ Ellen's decision to give herself to the monster, that she can betray and destroy him... it just doesn't do much for me, just like it never does much for me: Eggers has taken a text that I usually only really enjoy the first half of, and made of it a movie that I only really enjoyed the first half of.

But what a first half it is! It's brilliantly conceived -- the performances, the production design, the period detail, the costumes, the photography... actually, I'm always a bit weirded out by Eggers' taste for filming people square-on, center-frame, which there's a lot of at the start, but that one eccentricity aside, every element of Nicholas Hoult's character's journey -- I forget what they're calling him, in lieu of Harker -- is perfectly realized, a real pleasure to behold. The half-full theatre seemed as gripped as I was; I can't recall a quieter, better-behaved audience outside of an arthouse screening, actually -- I couldn't even hear the rustle of popcorn. I don't recall having enjoyed a sense of impending doom as much as this. Once Lily Rose-Depp becomes the center of the story, though, it all becomes much less interesting. Maybe this is my failing? I don't understand where the character is coming from, can't connect with her as a representation of femininity, don't feel compelled by the drama. Isabelle Adjani, in the Herzog, at least has this powerfully tragic aspect, in a doomed, Gothy way. I wanted to care more about Mina/ Ellen, wanted to feel more connection with her hysteria, her dread, her sense of responsibility, but I just didn't. 

I didn't much care for Willem Dafoe, either, to be honest, who is just a bit too Willem Dafoe for this role (the van Helsing one); he does things we've all seen him do before, that are nowhere near as fun to watch as in, say, his performance in Poor Things, where the goofy Willem-Dafoeishness of him is perfectly suited. I like Dafoe, but he was just distracting in this role.  

And while it's really interesting to see Orlok interpreted by Bill Skarsgard as a powerful, masculine, Slavic warrior with a Nietzsche moustache, glaring eyes, a powerful bellow and really bad skin -- a very different kind of Dracula than we've seen elsewise -- I have to say, good as he is in the role, Skarsgard is no Kinski, and Eggers is no Herzog. Sure, Orlok makes a commanding presence, but the film seems to remain on the outside of him. Is he in love? Is he just horny? Or is "Mina" mostly food and a future slave? You suspect the first of those reasons, but unlike the Kinski or even the Oldman interpretations of the character, you never really feel or care about his character's desires or backstory. He's just a monster with a big moustache and a thick Slavic accent (when he's not speaking in what I presume is Romanian). He's powerful enough in his bearing to be sexually intimidating, not a revolting little ratlike creature (like Kinski) -- so you can understand why women are compelled by him, despite what he is -- but interesting as he is, do you feel for him? I, myself, did not.

It's definitely a fresh take on the monster, though, I'll give it that. And whether the whole drive of the film is misogynist or not, there's no denying that Eggers foregrounds the issue of sexuality, makes it central to the film, not as subtext but text. It begins with Depp waking from a nightmare to which she will inexorably return. What's this about Mina/ Ellen/ whatever having been sexually seduced by the evil as a young woman? Maybe the alleged director's cut will shed more light on this aspect of the film: it's seemingly central, but a bit mysterious! 

So that's where we're at, ultimately: I adored the first half of Eggers' Nosferatu -- thought it gorgeous and gripping, the most cinematically vivid, gorgeous-to-watch, fully-realized spectacle of a film I've seen in a commercial movie theatre since Poor Things. But the things I liked in the second half were just incidental bits, shots of scurrying rats, or, say, the "Renfield/ Knock" character doing mean things in his cell to small animals, or... The film remained gorgeous to look at throughout, but in its final acts, won me no more than any other Dracula adaptation I've seen; Eggers' set up is much, much better than his resolution, which might just ultimately be down to a problem with the source text. (I've read people say that Eggers is too faithful to the original; maybe that is so). 

I still recommend it, though. Beats the hell out of The Northman! Go see the film. And then go see it again. And then come explain to me what it ultimately is, what it's saying about the female, about sexuality, about sex, because, I guess the truth is, I don't entirely get it. Is it profound and moving? Or is it a faithful adaptation of a fundamentally problematic, Victorian, prudishly misogynist tale? (It seems like there are plenty of viewers of it out there describing it as "feminist," but... that was not my takeaway). 

What the hell is this story, anyhow? I really do need to see it again...

Note: though I have made no mention of the film above, Jonny Bones will be hosting a rare theatrical screening of Shadow of the Vampire, with an unrecognizable Willem Defoe as the actor who played the title vampire in the original silent film, Max Schreck, with the conceit being, he really is a vampire! A curious film for Nosferatu enthusiasts; see here for more. 

This Sunday! NO FUN after Christmas! Again!

Did you miss NO FUN at Christmas this year? A ridiculously entertaining, entertainingly ridiculous festival of inspired seasonal idiocy, now with extra Wenceslas! Have you never heard "Elf Toymaker" performed live? (David Bowie's "Moonage Daydream" as re-interpreted by overworked, union-minded elves?). Are you hipped to the alternate uses of an uncooked turkey? Fear not, friends, if you've missed out to date, because THIS SUNDAY AT LANALOU's, David M. and the NO FUN gang take to the stage again, including possibly yours truly, to deliver NO FUN After Christmas, a seasonal event like none other (except for the pre-Christmas one that took place a couple of weeks ago, also at LanaLou's, from which my video evidence derives). More background here, if you want it, but really, no homework is required: there will be stuff that goes over your head no matter what you do ("Mommy, why is that man dangling a bat?"). Also see here, about the recent spate of NO FUN reissues happening in the US-of-M, or here, for audio evidence of a classic NO FUN at Christmas set from 1987, or, like, here, for my first disparaging review of this NO FUN at Christmas phenomenon, written in 2004, forgotten about, then discovered by David sometime around 2016, long after we had become friends. To be read live onstage while I am flogged with strands of Gorgo! 

I mean, what the hell ELSE are you gonna do this Sunday? Come to LanaLou's! (And come for dinner! The poutine is real good -- or have a quesadilla!).