Noah (2014)

Starring: Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Emma Watson

Director: Darren Aronofsky

IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1959490/

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah_(2014_film)

Back in the 1950s and 60s, Hollywood came out with a series of epics based on stories from the Bible. I admit to seeing only a handful of these, but I did watch "The Ten Commandments" (the 1956 Charleston Heston version) a little over a year ago and was very impressed with its grand scope and strong themes in regard to human freedom and faith in oneself. So while I did not exactly go out of my way to see the newest adaptation of Noah's Ark and I have mixed feelings on director Darren Aronofsky's previous works, I was at least a little hopeful that they would try to recreate the majestic feeling of these larger-than-life films.

Well, I did eventually see it. And it was...interesting...I'll give it that...

Before I get to the movie, a few housekeeping notes. First, this will be a full-film review, so there will be spoilers. Secondly, while this will mostly be in chronological order, I am going to jump around a bit to explain certain parts of it better. Thirdly, my knowledge of the Bible is very limited, so if I get some things wrong on that score, I apologize ahead of time even though I will not be talking about it much. This also means I am not going to nitpick at certain controversies that people have had about it, like the fact that they use the term "Creator" instead of "God."

Lastly, and in that same vein, I am not going to use this review as a forum for a theological discussion. It is outside the scope of this blog and this post would never get completed. Hell, it took me two years just to complete the "House of Wax" review! So it would be best to get this one out of the way. Now.

After a brief prologue, we are introduced to Noah, played by Russell Crowe. He and his family are basically nomads who wander a vast wasteland populated by now-decrepit cities. But when a flower all the sudden grows instantly from the ground and Noah starts having bad dreams, it appears that something is amiss. They decide to go find his grandfather to try and get an explanation for things. They also come across an orphaned girl named Ila, who they eventually decide to adopt. As they travel, they are chased by Tubal-cain (Ray Winstone), a clan leader who had killed Noah's father decades earlier.

However, they are saved by holy hell what are these things...?

So, these things that lost out in meetings over the film's budget are the Watchers, who are fallen angels condemned by the Creator to life on Earth as weird stone creatures because they tried to help humans back in the day. Look, I get it, they are suppose to be ugly and unnatural. But seriously, these guys look like stop-motion monsters from a cheesy 1980s sci-fi movie. Are we really suppose to take them seriously?! Oh and two of them are played by Frank Langella and Nick Nolte. Whoopie-do.

Well, anyway Noah and his family get saved and they meet up with his grandfather, Methuselah, a powerful man who is shown in flashbacks to have defeated evil forces with mystical powers. So...if that is the case, why do they spend all their time wandering the desert hoping to avoid getting killed by savages? He seems like someone who would be handy to have around...and his place is a lot nicer too. Then again, once you get to know the character, you kind of question why they bothered going back to him...

In any case, because he is played by Anthony Hopkins, his first onscreen appearance consist of him standing awkwardly in the middle of a room just for the sake of being creepy.

"I am still waiting for my second Oscar, Clarice..."

His running gag - because, honestly, that is what it boils down to - is that he has not gotten out in a while and has a desire for the taste of blueberries (I guess human liver with fava beans and chianti are a little too exotic for someone his age). Anyway, he basically tells Noah that he should do what the visions tell him to do. So, why was his advice needed in the first place...?

Anyway, it turns out the Creator is going to wipe out humanity with a giant flood and an Ark needs to be built to house two of every animals plus a handful of human beings. I know, shocker, didn't that one coming! So Noah starts building the Ark over the course of several years and his kids grow up. Shem (Douglas Booth), the eldest, and Ila are now lovers, but it is a bittersweet romance since Ila cannot have children, a product of injures she sustained prior to being found by Noah's family. She is played by Emma Watson, who was Hermione in the Harry Potter series. So let's see how this adds up:

Gets attacked as a child. Becomes The Boy Who Lived. Later enables him to vanquish evil.

Gets attacked as a child. Becomes infertile. Feels she has nothing to offer for the future of humanity. 

Yep, seems fair. Hooray, feminism!

But whatever hurt she feels is nothing compared to that of Noah's second son, Ham (Logan Lerman, a.k.a. the "Percy Jackson" kid). Why? Because he doesn't have a girlfriend and has teenage angst! The horror! There is also a third son, Japheth (Leo McHugh Carroll), who is born during the construction of the Ark and...serves no practical purpose in this film. Well, he was in the Bible, so might as well just leave him in there...

As the Ark nears completion and the animals start arriving - scenes which are admittedly pretty cool - Noah heads out to find potential mates for Ham and Japheth so the human race can later be repopulated. Or maybe just to get Ham to shut up, I don't know. However, when he arrives at a human settlement, he is shocked by all the violence and depravity he sees and walks away empty-handed.

Ugh, worst grape-stomping competition ever.

Ham runs off and tries to take matters into his own hands by rescuing a girl from the settlement named Na'el (Madison Davenport). She gets killed in a stampede after only five minutes of screen time and we learn nothing about her, but I am sure she would have been a great character...*faceplam*

Anyway, as the rest of the family looks for Ham, Ila comes across Methuselah, who is still looking for those damn blueberries. He tells her that he has come to realize that he has had almost no contact with her during the building of the Ark. He apologizes by using his powers to make her fertile.

Wait...stop...

So let me get this straight...he has been living next to his adoptive great-granddaughter for roughly TEN YEARS without any real interaction with her. Why? Because he just never got around to it?! Did that take a lot of valuable time away from his normal routine of giving away obvious advice and blueberry hunting?! And his way of saying sorry is to make her able to have children, something that he could have done AT ANY TIME over the decade and spared her from all those brewing feelings of bitterness...???!!!

Well, at Ila seems to be cool with it because right after this happens, she finds Shem and they have sex right then and there. Yep, Ham has gone missing, they are surrounded by hoards of dangerous people, and the whole world is about to flood, but they are just going to take the "Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus" approach: giving in to the slightest physical impulse for the sake of plot convenience! (Yes, I did just compare a Biblical film to "Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus." Deal with it).

Anyway, eventually they do get everyone back together and they have this big fight with Tubal-cain's people. The stupid rock things, I mean Watchers, end up sacrificing themselves to save Noah's family and they ascend into Heaven for redeeming themselves. or just so we do not have to look at them anymore. Meanwhile, the flood comes in at full force and carries away the Ark, along with all its animal and human passengers.

The Biblical version of "Get in the choppa!"

Cool, Russell Crowe on a boat! You know what that means...! No, not "Master and Commander," I mean this:

Oh, and Methuselah gets left behind and dies. Or rather, he finally finds his goddamn berries (in a place not very far from his place that should not have taken a decade to find) and, apparently feeling perfectly content with how he has conducted himself over the years, willfully gets washed away by the waves. Normally I would question why there was no explanation for him staying behind, but frankly, given the nonsensical nature surrounding his character, I am willing just to send him off on his merry way. Believe me, we haven't even gotten to the "good" part of the movie yet...

Now, up until this point, I'm still sort of content with the film. It's not great and its flaws only get bigger the more you think about them, but it has decent special effects (other than the Watchers) and the plot still keeps me intrigued. But then Noah starts to lay out his game plan and this is where it really starts to lose me:

After Noah gives a monologue about...umm, Creationism?...forget it, not going to ask...he tells his family that the Creator is telling him that man has become too evil. So instead of trying to repopulate the planet, he tells his family that once they get back on land, they will live out the rest of their days with no more procreation before they die, effectively killing off the human race.

So...Noah is a religiously-inspired ecoterrorist now! But wait, it gets better! It is discovered that Ila is pregnant (I know, did not see that one coming either), so Noah, being the kind, gentle soul that he is, makes a deal: if she gives birth to a boy, he can live; if it is a girl that can procreate, she must be killed.

Who. Is. This. Psychopath?!!! Is he really that messed up in the head that he thinks his own family is not good enough to redeem mankind?! And as a result he is just going to basically hold them hostage, not knowing whether or not he might at some point kill one of them?! Wait, Russell Crowe plays a guy who takes direction from visions that only he can see and as a result endangers his family, including his wife played by Jennifer Crowley...

Huh...

Well, before I get any further with this, I should say that Tubal-cain is actually still alive at this point: despite being badly wounded before the flood hit, he managed to sneak onto the Ark while no one was looking. When Ham discovers him, he makes a deal with the boy to keep his presence a secret until he has healed enough to kill Noah. He then gathers his strength by eating the animals nearby. Remember, there are only two of each, so just killing one effectively causes an extinction!

Tubal-cain: the reason why we no longer have Jackalopes.

So what exactly is Tubal-cain's grand plan after he does away with Noah? In a nutshell, he is going to make the remaining females on the boat his brides, and he will repopulate the human race in his image. Okay, there are many things that can cause this idea to fall apart, but I am not going to bother listing them down. You know why? Because he cannot even get the first part right! His great idea on how to kill Noah: make him come down to where he is on the ark and then jump him. Yep, jump him. Oh, by the way, when he decides to launch this "attack," enough time has gone by that Ila goes into labor. So, in other words, he had NINE MONTHS to figure this out and he still screwed it up!!! Killing Noah in his sleep? NAH, let's given him the chance to fight back and see how that turns out. Well, as it does turn out, Ham changes his mind...for some reason...and ends up killing Tubal-cain himself. And so goes another useless character due to a complete failure to judge his basic surroundings...!!!

Honestly, was there really a need for a villain at all in this movie? Noah is pretty scary already! Which do you think is scarier? The guy who you know is bad and just need to find the right time and place to kill him? Or the guy who is suppose to be mankind's savior and yet he keeps his own family in a constant state of paranoia for nine months (hey, whatever happened to "40 days and 40 nights"... ah forget it...) and is willing to kill his own grandchild based on a hunch that only he knows about?!!!

*Deep breath* Moving on...

As I mentioned, Ila goes into labor and gives birth to...twin girls! Oh, the irony! The end result? Well, Noah looks into their eyes and sees good in them, so they and the rest of humanity get to live on after all. Umm...so he looks at them and sees goodness but not the other members of his family...you know what, we are almost done, so let's just get to it...

"So, that whole me going crazy and threatening your lives thing? We're cool, right?"

The family comes across land and start their new lives. Noah spends some time acting like a bum, feeling guilty that he did not fulfill the Creator's simple favor that he commit infanticide in order to wipe out his own species. But his family tells him to get over it, so he does. Ham goes off to be his own man or something. And...the movie ends.

Wait a minute. A guy who takes direction from visions that only he can see terrorizes his family in an isolated location, to the point where his son seeks the help of an outsider to help kill him, only for that said outsider to get killed really easily. Hey, this is not "A Beautiful Mind" at all, it's...

That's it! That is what it was all along! So that means...Stephen King wrote the Bible!!!

Or this movie is just weird, I don't know...

Wow, just...wow. You know one of the things about writing these reviews is that it gets you to think more about the movies you just saw, which can be both a good and a bad thing. With this movie, it is certainly the latter. The more I go into detail about it, the more I realize how bad it is. There are just so many plot holes, a number of supporting characters are useless, and the movie's namesake is such a despicable human being that you really cannot get behind him. Now I should say that making Noah a flawed character is not itself a problem; it should almost be encouraged because it makes him more relatable. But if you are going to make any story and you are going to purposely make a character with major flaws, you have to at least give a reason why your audience should still like him or her. Or at the very least give some rational reason why they are who they are, not take them so far into Walter White/Frank Underwood/Jack Torrance territory and then bring them back from the abyss, pretending they were a hero all along. It is disconcerting and ruins the whole point of what you are trying to get across. That is, if you had a point to begin with...

There is not much I can defend in this film, with a few exceptions. Some of the visuals are impressive, as I mentioned, and the acting is more or less decent. And I do not necessarily blame Aronofsky and the others for wanting to do something different with a story that has been told countless times and virtually everyone knows about. They could have easily have said "We have Russell Crowe and a multimillion dollar budget. Go see it." You can tell they were at least trying. But as I have said in the past, different is not always better, and this time it really did not work out. So let that be a warning to all those planning to see the upcoming "Exodus: Gods and Kings" movie coming out. It might be better than this film, but just be careful what you get yourself into.

As for this film...yeah, I do not recommend it.

Thanks, Yul Brynner. You know what, go see "The Ten Commandments" instead. It's 10,000 hours long, but it's all worth it. And it's not "Noah," so that's a bonus!

The pictures and videos in this post do not belong to me and are being used for entertainment purposes only. Please do not sue me; it says so in the Bible.

REVIEW: Hannibal (2001)

Okay, all bets are off, people. This is the big one. One of my most hated movies of all time. I did a short one paragraph thing for this movie the last time I saw it, but I really don’t think THAT did this heinous thing justice at all. So let’s dig into this virtual layered cake of everything wrong with cinema, Hannibal.

Director: Ridley Scott

Starring: Anthony Hopkins, Julianne Moore

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0212985/

Where the first Hannibal Lecter movie with Anthony Hopkins, the great Silence of the Lambs, had characters, even the most minor ones, with depth and texture to them, a compelling story and a fascinating psychological undertone, this movie has phoned in joke characters, subplots that go nowhere and take up the majority of the film’s run-time and psychology that is mostly relegated to ‘playing classical music while showing montages of Anthony Hopkins doing things.’ Formula for a train wreck? You bet!

It starts off in the way I think everyone wanted a Hannibal Lecter movie to start, with a side character from the last movie talking to a diseased Muppet crack baby played by Gary Oldman:

You see this less than a minute into the film's runtime...isn't that just wonderful? Isn't that the best way possible to start off a sequel to one of the defining serial killer movies of the 90s?

…what, you didn’t think that would be a good set-up for one of these movies? Well then, you simply have no taste!

I guess the story is that this guy, Mason Verger, was once tricked by Lecter into doing hard drugs and savagely removing his own face with broken mirror shards, and that somehow made him paralyzed from the neck down as well. Probably just because this series loves having people bound so that they can’t move any part of their body below the neck. Are we seriously supposed to be invested in this? Oh, boo hoo, you did some drugs and did stupid things while on them? Cry me a goddamn river you whiny little freak.

What is his plan, anyway? We see that he “collects” Lecter memorabilia for some strange reason, but his main goal seems to be to torture and kill Lecter for revenge. However, THAT falls flat almost in the same scene when he admits that he’s “glad” Lecter did what he did to him, because it allowed him to awaken spiritually, or some bullshit like that. So which one is it? Is he obsessed with Lecter or does he hate him? MAKE UP YOUR MIND.

A drug fueled binge of madness? Yeah that sounds about right with how THIS movie was made...

Oh well. Oldman’s performance is deplorable and irritating, and the writing is just garish – this character is not an intimidating villain, he is Miss Piggy’s wart removed from the bottom of her foot. He’s pretty much only here to serve as a foil to Lecter to get him back into America.

He calls Clarice to his house because he saw on the news that she shot some drug dealer lady who had her baby strapped to her chest (just go with it…), and is now taking heat for it. There, he questions her about God and whether or not she has accepted Christ as her savior. This subplot is…never brought up again? What? Why? What was the point of bringing it up then?! It’s incredibly forced and contrived! Did the filmmakers just go “hey, we need something DEEP in this next scene! How about we have Verger ask Clarice about her opinion of Jesus Christ! That means our movie is SUPER INTELLIGENT!!!” Ugh.

But enough of that; we still have Clarice Starling’s character to butcher! In the original she was played by Jodie Foster, who gave an exceptional performance and really breathed life into the character. Here, and I can’t imagine why, she has not returned, making way for Julianne Moore, whose performance is about as bland as can be, but hey, at least she’s trying – it’s mostly the fault of the writing that she isn’t believable at all as Clarice. In a sensible sequel, the viewer would feel the weight of her years on the force and sympathize with her when she gets kicked off the force despite trying her best to follow orders. However, THIS movie just makes it all kinda ‘eh’ and presents it in a relatively bland way. How am I supposed to be invested in this Clarice? I know almost nothing about her. The atmosphere of the film and her personality are almost entirely different from that of Silence of the Lambs. With more insight into her inner character this could have been an arresting performance, but I guess that would have actually made the movie good, so the filmmakers couldn’t do that! Oh no.

We do however have stupid scenes set in Florence, Italy, where Hannibal himself is now residing, played by an Anthony Hopkins who I am betting got through this movie by smoking copious amounts of weed before each day of acting. He looks pretty zoned out:

"I'm sorry, I took more than my usual dose of Ritalin today..."

He’s…mostly OK, I guess, but the abysmal writing screws that up, too. He desperately wants to come out of retirement and start killing again, and yet he’s spending all his time, energy and resources applying for the position of curator of a museum? What the hell is stopping him? We clearly see later that he has no qualms with killing when provoked. Why doesn’t he just kill whenever he feels like it? Would that make too much sense? Does he just suffer from the fatal Plot Convenience Disease?

But never fear, for as soon as Clarice appears on the news for a relatively minor screw up, he writes her a letter all the way from Florence – because that makes sense how he would watch the American news all the way from there, right? Was he just doing that for 10 years straight just in case Clarice showed up in distress on the screen? Again, Plot Convenience Disease! It’s a killer!

There’s also Ray Liotta, who pretty much plays some horrible wretched douchebag put on Earth solely to torment poor Clarice. He’s a homophobe – he calls Hannibal gay because he enjoys classical music and tea time food – and he’s a sexist, as evidenced when he openly objectifies and harasses Clarice right to her face, with no shame whatsoever. Real great character guys! Maybe you should have him kick puppy dogs and tie girls to train tracks next!

"Hey, what, do you expect me to actually act like a human being that wouldn't have been beat up or killed in the real world yet? TOO BAD!"

But this is all really just window dressing for the movie’s real passion. You thought this was going to be a sequel continuing on the original’s premise of Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter in a mental battle of wits with a third plotline mostly in the background? No! THIS MOVIE’S main focus is one Detective Pazzi, a rude, fat, frumpy, pissed-off looking guy who smokes a lot and yet somehow has a hot, charming wife who begs him in a seductive voice to take her out to the opera…nope, sorry movie, I’m not buying that for a second. There’s NO WAY a guy this annoying, bad tempered and fat would get a woman like that. NO WAY.




Anyway, he catches onto Lecter’s real identity and starts to try and capture him to get the FBI bounty on his head. This would be OK if, oh, I don’t know, HALF THE GODDAMN MOVIE WASN’T SPENT WATCHING HIM DO THIS. I don’t know if you know this, movie, but this character is grating as hell. He’s really not a good character at all. And we literally sit here for like upwards of 45 minutes watching him blunder around Florence, acting like a jackass, getting innocent people killed and shrugging it off like it’s nothing and just generally being a despicable excuse for a human being…? Do you people know anything about how to entertain an audience? Do you have any concept of what it means to tell a story that people want to pay attention to? GOD.

Oh, except when we have Lecter giving pretentious speeches about sin and Dante Aligieri and Judas Iscariot…Christ, I don’t think I can make it through this. How is it even possible to make something this unenjoyable? The answer to everything isn’t just putting ominous classical music on in the background, you know. That doesn’t exactly make your movie deep or anything; just more annoying and pompous.

So, yeah, after god knows how long, Lecter finally kills Pazzi by hanging him from a tall window tower and slitting his belly open. It’s actually a good scene and beautifully shot, but how much do you want to bet they just cease to care about the Pazzi character, his friends and family and Florence altogether after this? If you put money on that, well, you’d be sitting pretty right now.

It is just incredible how asinine this is. “Hey, let’s take an hour of the movie’s runtime to establish the character of Pazzi and make him the focus of the film. But after he dies, there’s no real point in resolving the story or anything; no no! Just act like it never happened at all! Great filmmaking!” What is this, the third or fourth time I’ve used that joke of imitating the movie’s creators? I’m sorry, but there just isn’t much else to do with this one. There’s nothing else here!

But maybe the movie will redeem itself with its last act or so. Maybe I’m being too quick to condemn it. After all, there’s still the plot with Verger, who despite looking like something a cat puked up, actually does have sort of a main goal, even if it is incredibly confusing. Maybe he’ll surprise us and pull out a truly cunning and sinister plan…

Yeah, this is stupid. Look at those dumb sunglasses he's wearing. Look at the boars just running around out there waiting to eat people alive. He really thought this was the best plan he could do?

…OR he’ll just do the dumbest thing possible! I mean my God! You can’t seriously tell me THIS was his only option! “Hmm, I want revenge on this guy! I think I’ll feed him to a bunch of savage boars!” It doesn’t add up! There are a billion more dignified and cool ways to kill someone! How on Earth did Hannibal attract the one person in the entire world whose chosen method of killing and torture was BOARS? It’s so stupid it’s radioactive! You could see the asininity coming off this plot from outer space. Outer! Space!

On the bright side, though, it’s finally clear to me exactly much of a joke this movie was to its creators. I mean, there’s simply nothing else here but crappy one-shot jokes turned into elongated pseudo-serious plotlines. I feel sorry for a lot of these actors, actually – especially Gary Oldman; man that makeup must have taken a long time! And it wasn’t at all worth it.

So they kidnap Lecter and strap him to another board so he can’t move his body at all; told you this series had a fetish for that. Verger says “Bet you wish you had fed the rest of me to the dogs too, huh?” Because, you know, it’s not like Verger said earlier that he was glad that Lecter tricked him! Oh wait, he did. Is it really that hard to have a character even a little bit consistent in his motive and mental processes?

Clarice comes to save Lecter at the last minute and gets shot, so Lecter saves her and walks out. But not before convincing Verger’s butler to throw Verger into the boar pit and kill him! This could have been a compelling plot point – a sort of ‘servant turns on the master’ gig. But the way the movie plays it, the whole story just didn’t matter, as nothing is ever resolved of it and we learn nothing about Verger, his butler or any of the other villains that make this movie any more compelling. But at least we got to see a guy eaten by boars! Hur hur…

Ha ha ha...finally, I get to see this terrible character pushed off a ledge and eaten by boars! My oddly specific wants are satisfied!

Lecter stitches up her wound and dresses her up in the skimpiest dress he could find, which shows off as much of her tits as possible:

Yeah, at this rate, why don't you just go full stop and dress her in her underwear or something? I didn't know Lecter was this much of a lech.

She goes downstairs and finds they’re at Ray Liotta’s house, which Lecter…found somehow, I guess. He’s scalped Liotta and is, well…it’s too dumb to even write down, so I’ll post a picture:

"Goodfellas? Meh, that was alright. THIS is my true passion in acting!"

Yeah, our finale for this movie involves Julianne Moore’s tits and Anthony Hopkins eating Ray Liotta’s brain! You know, the biggest flaw with THIS scene is that Hopkins is indeed eating Ray Liotta's brain. Ray Liotta has a brain? I think this scene is factually inaccurate.

So long story short, Lecter escapes and feeds some brains to a little boy on a plane. The end! Was it worth it? I don’t think so.

I mean man, this is a heinous piece of work, a sorry excuse for a film, a sad attempt at a sequel to something good. It’s practically unwatchable in how dragging and directionless it is. Plots are brought up and dragged out for ungodly amounts of time, as if they’re actually important, but then they’re just dropped for no reason and never resolved at all. There are opportunities for character development and psychological intrigue, but they are shelved in favor of terrible one-off jokes and attempts at being gory.

The characters are mostly indefensible, especially the awful Ray Liotta and the confusing mess that was Gary Oldman’s Mason Verger. The only good parts involve just Hannibal and Clarice together, only even they don’t seem terribly invested – hell, just look at the half-assed script they had to work with and you can completely sympathize. There’s just nothing good about this movie. There is simply no way they could have possibly screwed up a sequel to something good more…

Okay, well there’s that. But this is still terrible!

I guess some people like this movie for reasons I will never even begin to comprehend, but…yeah, keep this thing as far away from me as possible. Eugh. You know, why did I even bother elaborating on this? Looking back, my original review was fine and summed up everything I've said here except in about 1/10th the length! What was the point; what was the purpose?! Excuse me...I need to go meditate on my life.

All images copyright of their original owners. I do not own any of them.

Review: Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Starring: Keanu Reeves, Gary Oldman, Winona Ryder, Anthony Hopkins

IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103874/

In 1992, Francis Ford Coppola directed a movie called Bram Stoker’s Dracula. That seems like a winning formula, doesn’t it? The director of classic movies like the Godfather and the Godfather II making a new movie based off a legendary horror classic. What could go wrong?

…Well, I’ll tell you.

The movie begins with a hokey narration spoken in just about the silliest English accent you could possibly imagine. I mean it; it’s like they hired a narrator from the Monty Python team to do it. It’s just so unfitting of the serious material that it’s unbelievable. And speaking of Monty Python, the montage of battle scenes that follows isn’t much more believable. It just looks so fake. It’s just silly, and that’s not how I want to start off a film adaptation of an all time literary classic.

Then we get a sob story that details why Dracula is a sympathetic villain. Apparently some guy shot a fake notification of Dracula’s death in battle into the castle by arrow. His fiancée apparently just straight up believes that Dracula really did die, and then she kills herself instantly, after writing a suicide note. Uh...so she didn't ask QUESTIONS or anything? She didn't even ask anyone else and confirm that he was really dead? She just believed a piece of paper shot through a window and decided that she had to KILL HERSELF because of it? Well, I guess Darwinian natural selection wins again. Dracula of course is not really dead, and flies into a rage after a priest tells him that his fiancée's soul is damned for eternity because she killed herself. He drinks blood, saying that he will become immortal and avenge her death!

…Dracula is a pretty extreme guy. His highs are high and his lows are low.

No, seriously, where was any of this in the original book? If you’re going to title a movie ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula,’ at least try to keep it close to the source material. You could at least attempt to build up the same kind of suspicion and fright that the original novel did. But nope, this movie just throws it all out the window and spoils the villain for us right at the start. That’s wonderful. Just wonderful, movie.

But if you think that was a treat, just wait until the movie introduces us to Jonathon Harker, the main character, played by the only guy to ever be out-acted by an actual brick, Keanu Reeves. Who is probably the very last person I would ever have picked to be in a Dracula movie. Seriously, he's basically just doing Bill and Ted in this movie again - the lost sequel, Bill and Ted's Blood Sucking Fun Time; he's just about as silly in this role. Luckily they barely give him any lines anyway. His girlfriend Mina (Winona Ryder) is sad because he’s leaving. But it's OK, honey, just get the Keanu Reeves life-size cardboard cutout. You won't even notice the difference!

So the next ten minutes play out like the novel: he travels up a dark, strange mountain pathway to meet the mysterious Count Dracula and sell him real estate in the city, going through many odd things in the process. But it’s all out the window when you see…

I think that thing is eating his head.

Oh, god dammit, movie. God dammit. Really? This is what you’re making Dracula look like now? I think the real question is how Gary Oldman’s career survived this streak of lame 90s movies. I think there must have been some kind of personal vendetta against the guy in the agent industry. It’s practically reaching levels that look like a conspiracy theory. He does a good job, sure, but how convincing can you possibly be when you look like that?! It’s ridiculous! How could anyone have thought that was a good costume? He looks like he has a nest of spiders in his hair.

So he engages in all manner of scenery-chewing with Keanu Reeves, who mostly just sits there with a blank look on his face the entire time. Get used to that look, people. It’s going to be on his face for the whole goddamn movie. I especially love this one scene where we get this fade-out as he’s looking around him after Dracula invites him to stay for a while longer. He just looks so clueless that it’s absolutely hilarious. Every look he has in this entire movie makes me wonder if he even knew he was in a movie. Like they just filmed him while he was eating Cheerios or watching Lost and then edited everything else in around him. "Hey guys, can you move the camera so I can see the end of this episode?"

Come to think of it, that would explain a lot of the editing in this movie, too.

We then establish the characters of Mina, who is the quiet girl who just wants one guy alone, and her best friend Lucy, who is the total opposite and loves flirting with lots of men at the same time. She has three guys trying to court her all at the same time – kind of like a roulette of guys to pick and drain of their souls. But we all know her true passion:

...well, we all need to get off somehow, I guess.

Meanwhile, Keanu Reeves is getting his own wild sex fantasy fulfilled as we see him drawn mysteriously to a bed where three vampiric succubi rise up out of the cloth and start seducing him, biting at him and trying to suck his blood. They’re stopped by Dracula, who pulls them away only to…let them have him later on when he needs to keep him bound. As for Dracula, he’s off to seduce Mina, who apparently looks exactly like his old wife who killed herself all those years ago. This is where the movie really starts to lose me and become too stylized for its own good. I mean it is seriously like a drunk, half-asleep David Lynch took over the director’s chair and started doing acid, or something. There are so many constantly overlapping images fading in and out and so many zoom shots where the camera runs up to whatever it wants to focus on that it’s like a roller coaster. Yes, this movie is just a big roller coaster ride, one big old advertisement for the Universal Studios tie-in. Can’t you idiots tell a story correctly?!

It just keeps going on like this. For like 20 minutes all we get are montages and overlapping images and pretentiously goofy camera shots, winding themselves up so tight that they’ll make you lose your lunch. At first, like with the succubi scene, it’s entertaining, and adds to the dark and mystical atmosphere. But after a few minutes of nothing but these kinds of scenes, it just becomes tiresome, and lame. Really lame.

So eventually, after much deliberation, they FINALLY get their heads out of their anuses and start trying to tell the story right. Alright, yeah. This is good. You’re back on track, movie. Now just get back to telling the story of how Dracula crept his way into the unsuspecting lives of…

The prince of darkness, people!

Fuck you, movie. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on. This sympathetic Dracula crap has got to stop. Right now! It’s one thing to have it done subtly in a way, to make it sort of an undercurrent…but when you actually shove it in our faces that this cold-blooded killer is actually just a poor little hopeless romantic who got his love taken away from him, you’re crossing a line that you can’t step back over. This isn’t just ‘Dracula,’ it’s BRAM STOKER’S Dracula, people! That should indicate that it’s at least mostly true to the source material! This is like the complete opposite of that! Dracula is a cold-blooded, heartless monster. He may have had a shred or two of humanity a long time ago, and he may have certain traits to him that inspire some degree of sympathy, but for the most part, he’s just the embodiment of evil. To treat him like this forlorn romantic dark hero makes the good guys look irrational and even downright crazy when Van Helsing starts raving about how he’s the devil. That could possibly make for an interesting psychological twist in a better movie, but in this movie, they mostly spend too much time on the special effects for any effort to be put into anything else.

Oh, yeah, Lucy died! That…was hardly even noticeable with all the special effects masturbation going on! I’m so glad we got to get to know her character in this movie…oh, wait, she comes back as this:

"I'm ready for my close up!"

By this point, it's clear to the characters that they need to do something drastic. Van Helsing tells them about the history of vampires, informing them of all the usual cliches: they live forever, they can turn into bats and wolves and other creatures of the night and they need blood to survive. Pfft, don't listen to this amateur. You need Edgar Frog to come to the rescue! TRULY COMIC BOOKS ARE THE ONLY WAY TO KNOW ABOUT VAMPIRES!

Yeah, I think it pretty much shot its load with that succubi scene, no pun intended. The rest of the movie just can’t hold up. There are some good scenes here and there and the final climax does have a few alright moments, but for the most part, it’s just really overdramatic tripe fronted by a really overt missing of the point of the whole thing (you know, the sympathetic Dracula angle). And it just kind of…ends, no real resolution whatsoever besides Mina getting released from Dracula’s spell.

Oh, whatever, I’ll accept any crap you throw at me as long as I never have to watch this again. My guess is the only reason this was popular was because of all the big stars in it; nothing else. Nobody would have ever noticed this movie had it not been basically a vehicle for these big names. This movie is just a mess all around. The directing is all over the place and the whole thing has about as much flow as one of those pasted-together ransom notes from twelve different magazines; it’s just so un-entertaining that it’s unbelievable. I mean it’s Dracula for Pete’s sake; the job of writing the damn story is already done for you. Added to the silly costume designs, unconvincing acting and all around weak transitions between scenes and you have a bona fide crap festival of a film. Just buy your ticket, swallow your dignity and strap your seatbelts, because this is two hours of showboating how cool Francis Ford Coppola thinks he is. I spit on this movie.

The Wolfman (2010)

Benicio Del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, Emily Blunt

 

 

Inspired by the classic Universal film that launched a legacy of horror, The Wolfman brings the myth of a cursed man back to its iconic origins. Oscar-winner Benicio Del Toro stars as Lawrence Talbot, a haunted nobleman lured back to his family estate after his brother vanishes. Reunited with his estranged father (Oscar-winner Anthony Hopkins), Talbot sets out to find his brother...and discovers a horrifying destiny for himself. [Note: this synopsis was shamelessly stolen from Flixster on Facebook].

 

This is a very good movie. While it is not spectacular in anyway, it is an intriguing film that supplies decent action sequences while exploring the hidden demons of man and the beast within.

 

De Toro does a good job as Talbot, who must simultaneously stop his own murderous rampage while also confront his unfortunate past. His transformation into the Wolfman is pretty cool, and the final result is fitting as well. He also runs really fast; I mean he is like Taz the Tasmanian devil from the Looney Tunes at times. Hopkins drifts through the first part and barely seems to be acting at all, but as his character develops more, he appears to become more involved in the role. And, not surprisingly, he is really crazy. Emily Blunt, as the semi-love interest of the story, plays a relatively minor role (except at the end), but she does well with what she has. Hugo Weaving also did a good job as a snobby but determined detective.

 

More of an action than a horror film, it nonetheless has fun showing off the gruesome deaths of the wolfman’s victims, which can be both bloody and pretty funny at the same time (and for those who are concerned, do not worry, it is not done in a campy fashion). I personally like the parts that take place in the woods, but the London scenes are pretty good as well, especially when all of the prim and proper English guys freak out when Talbot transforms.

 

The movie does have its flaws. Some of the scenes at the beginning are a bit choppy: the characters will be talking and then all the sudden it skips to the next part for no reason. I guess the filmmakers were trying to speed things up a bit so it did not drag out too long, which they should be given credit for, but they should have been a little more careful when it came to the editing. I also did not care much for the dream sequences; they were just too random, though it was kind of amusing to see Talbot have a double nightmare that each last but a few seconds.

 

None of this really matters in the last thirty minutes or so, which I think is the best part of the movie. It shows the violent struggle between a father and son, which perfectly illustrates the internal battle that man must fight in order to “defeat” his evil nature, though as the climax reveals, it never really goes away entirely.

 

Overall, it is an enjoyable time. For those who are wondering how this compares to the original 1940s film, I am afraid I cannot say since I have yet to see it, though I am now encouraged to do so after seen this new version. Anyway, I recommend this movie.