an uninspired count, a ghost story, and a family scandal

Dario Argento's Dracula: (2012. dir: Dario Argento) You can see it's him, that it's Argentino-ish, anyway, see it from the colors and extreme lighting (in this case, though, oddly flat and bright), and from the naked girls, including naked Asia Argento. But where's the master? I always thought even bad Argento was interesting (see Phantom of the Opera for some truly twisted imaginings), but this is just bad. It looks like he was filming a fairy tale for television, along the lines of Once Upon a Time, for example, except that the script is not good enough. (You heard me. Let that notion settle and simmer in your mind for a spell.) This script reads like it was written by someone who barely speaks English, and so is telling the bare-bones story with no subtlety, no grace, no elision. And, alright, the story of the bloodsucking Count is one that we KNOW already. We don't NEED the scene in which Van Helsing sits down with Mina and says, "The Count doesn't just drink blood, he changes his prey into creatures like himself..." We KNOW that. Just SHOW us things, alright? Didn't Argento used to be kind of a king in the realm of just showing us things from angles we never dreamt? or am I misremembering that?

On top of it all, the sound is awful, with bad dubbing throughout. It looks like it was made for television, with slow fades at commercial breaks. Even Thomas Kretschmann as the Count doesn't quite work. All those mad skills and charisma and even he needed something more: a script, yes, but maybe just some gothic trappings, some nice, mysterious lighting, perhaps, without which he's paddleless up a pretty humdrum creek. The music is nice and just-this-side of kitsch, using theremin and gypsy violins, but even that is not well-integrated.

On the other hand, how about that praying mantis, huh? Atta boy, Dario.

the Gift: (2000. dir: Sam Raimi) An old-fashioned ghost story done with easy, old-fashioned unfolding by Sam Raimi, with atmosphere to spare and a cast so great that they'll leave you sputtering with admiration. There's Cate Blanchett, amazing as usual, but also Giovanni Ribisi and Greg Kinnear, both of whom give stunningly good performances. Then there's Hillary Swank in a smaller role, and downright perfection as a downtrodden victim with a malevolent streak. Look at the way she walks, the way she hunch-shouldered sidles up to the woman she wants something from, stands too close, talks too quietly and insistently, manages to erase the presence of anyone else in the room. Really outstanding. Kim Dickens (Deadwood and Treme) also manages to demonstrate both chops and personality even in her do-nothing, I'm-a-plot-device, expositionary role.

Raimi uses a quiet, ambling pace, allowing the tension to build itself, and quaint old fade-outs at scene ends, which, God knows why, work well here. The story is a good one; the characters are good; the script is just good enough, and therein lies the rub. In the end, alas, we are asked to swallow too much, and so come away dissatisfied. Until then, though, it's really a nice ride.

the Stories We Tell: (2013. dir: Sarah Polley) I try to avoid documentaries people make about their own families. Generally they're using the camera as a weapon to get revenge on old grampa, or the people are awkward in front of it, whatever. But, just as even someone like me who hates weddings enjoys going to actors' weddings (because they understand the importance of timing, humor, dynamics, bold choices, and moving the damn thing along), Sarah Polley's family are a different kettle of fish, a family of performers. Her parents (well, "parents", in quotation marks, I guess) were actors and the kids tend towards a great, perhaps inherited, sense of showmanship. In short, they're a good time to hang out with. The great family "scandal" is not shrugged off, but also has good humor tossed its way along with some painful honesty. Polley has shaped things well and unapologetically, and provides both major parties involved wtih a good platform upon which to speak their individual pieces. The result is both interesting and surprisingly enjoyable.

last night's double feature: jigoku and images

Jigoku: (1960. dir: Nobuo Nakagawa) An early (perhaps the original?) Japanese example of what I call the "Bardo" film, in which the main character dies and has to wend his way through strange hallucinations, possibly real and possibly projections of his own guilt, before he can find his peace in death. Visually bold and unsettlingly edited, with a suddenness of scene change that lends pace along with eeriness and a continuing sense of threat, it shows us hell in every sense and from every angle. By incorporating both contemporary jazz and creepy theremin into the soundtrack, and by giving us a devil who is a young hipster, it feels both evocative of its moment and timeless.

By the roll of the end credits, it has long risen to a level of kabuki hysteria which is difficult to take seriously, but it's still a groundbreaking work of horror.

Images: (1972. dir: Robert Altman) Another fascinating study of a woman's descent into madness. Children's author Cathryn (Susannah York) and her wealthy American husband (Rene Auberjonois) go for a much-needed holiday at the country manor, where she has to fend off ex-lovers, both dead and alive, as well as an encroaching doppelganger, while carefully keeping track of which experiences are part of the "real", physical world and which exist in her (just as real) hallucinations. Altman kicks off the dis-ease with a jolt of Japanese horror-film music right through the credits over a montage of household items which already look weirdly malevolent beneath the eye of his camera, particularly when juxtaposed against the story which runs at a mad tumble through Cathryn's head, a story about children hunting unicorns. The husband's ongoing jokey banter approaches malevolence, too, and his three most constant props, --a camera, a long cigarillo, and a rifle, --all make vague but contiguous gestures towards an ongoing threat.

Why didn't I know about this film before? This is one of those happy things you stumble across when you're looking for something else; I found it (anomalously) on somebody's list of Paranoia films from the '70s(*). It was a smaller venture, filmed in England, wedged between Altman's major Hollywood outings McCabe and Mrs. Miller and the Long Goodbye, and perhaps it didn't get the press, but it's a wonderfully absorbing psychological thriller, and York is sufficiently earthy and grounded to get our hopes up for her salvation (unlike many actresses, who might have played up the ethereal, with too much of the changeling-caught-between-worlds thing. Picture, for instance, Mia Farrow or Isabelle Adjani in the role).


(*) Although there is certainly paranoia involved, it's too personal to fit onto a list including the Parallax View and the Conversation. It fits in rather well, though, with the new women's horror films of the time (Rosemary's Baby, the Stepford Wives, Repulsion, Let's Scare Jessica to Death). It also would not be out of place on a list including Roeg's Don't Look Now or Polanski's the Tenant.