Frankenstein (2015)

Am I still doing these? Let’s see what happens. I'm posting this with very little editing. I don't know if anyone reads blogs anymore. But this is still here, still heaving onwards like a strange misshapen behemoth forgotten by time. Here we go.

Director: Bernard Rose

Starring: Xavier Samuel, Carrie-Ann Moss

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

Frankenstein is a new adaptation of the Mary Shelley novel from so long ago, because I guess somebody really wanted more stories like this after all this time? This version starts off with very little backstory, just a couple of scientists making a 20-something white dude in a lab. There’s no real info on why they did this, no real details on who they are. Just a fun science experiment. The creature can barely walk and shows no discernible skills, but they take a lot of shots and inject him with sedatives a lot! Then he gets some boils on his face randomly so they decide to kill him.

Sorry, so what was the point then? Doesn’t seem like a very good experiment to me. Luckily the creature, who calls himself ‘Monster’ in this, just breaks free and kills everyone. He gets out and sees sunlight for the first time, and the cops just appear from nowhere like vampires and start firing guns without even asking questions. I give the movie points for a realistic portrayal of cops.

He goes out into the world and makes friends with a dog like it’s a fucking Disney movie from the late 90s. Then he finds some little girl to race sticks in the water with – truly this will be one of cinema’s all-time greatest scenes. He throws the little girl in the water for no reason, which is actually kinda hilarious. She gets out, but there are more cops there almost immediately ready to shoot him without asking questions – these guys are real desperados, man! Living on the edge!

He traipses through some fairly nice looking scenes of the city, until he finds Tony Todd, the Candyman himself, hanging out as a bedraggled blind homeless man playing a guitar under a bridge. This is actually a portrayal of how he's been doing since Candyman!

Anyway, he’s also cool, accepting and can do a lot of shit despite being blind, but doesn’t really have a character aside from that. It’s about as cliché as a movie can get. This stuff is like they were playing Mad Libs in the studio. It’s like they were trying to angle for an Oscar but didn’t know how to make the whole movie, instead of just individual scenes. It’s actually charming in a doofy kind of way.

Tony Todd introduces him to your usual cool, down to Earth hooker who wants to have sex with him. They go to a hotel and the hooker continues to treat ‘Monster’ like he’s a regular dude who just doesn’t talk much, even though he’s actually a catatonic freak show. It’s one of those dumb movie things where it doesn’t make sense why anyone doesn’t just see he’s an abnormality and treat him as such – the movie’s writing isn’t clever enough to sustain it. The bridge is giving out. You can feel the free-falling air meeting you like an old friend…

Anyway, he comes out of the shower naked, completely fucking scarred and with no dick. She freaks out and says she doesn’t want to do anything anymore, and he accidentally kills her. Then Tony Todd’s character comes up and ‘Monster’ kills him, too. The issue with the movie is just that he’s so strong he can do fucking anything. How is this an interesting plot if nothing hurts him and he can just swat anyone around like a fucking King Kong impression? Not very, I think.

He ends the movie by going back to the scientists as they’re about to have sex. They interrupt their good times to go down to the basement and care for him yet again. The dude tries to kill him yet again, also showing him a newer model of the same thing – still no reason why they’re doing this by the way; it might as well be gibberish. The woman scientist then tries to stop the dude from killing ‘Monster,’ but the dude ends up slashing her gut and killing her. They were having sex before this – that’s just funny to me now. What a tumultuous volcanic relationship. What a weird dynamic.

Anyway, that’s the movie I guess. It’s at least not a straight re-telling. I liked a few of the scenes’ camerawork. But overall it was kind of a joke. Why would you make this and title it Frankenstein and then just do it so unpretentious? Why was there no backstory to anything? I don’t need a huge amount – but this literally had nothing explaining any aspect of why these things were happening. That would be fine if the movie was gripping, but really, because he can just beat the shit out of or kill anyone he wants, there’s no drama. It’s like half of a premise became a movie with no vetting.

But maybe the pointlessness is just reflective of how life is now. Of how looking for meaning is really just naive and not constructive at all, and we might as well just go along with whatever weird tides life throws at us. Yeah. Maybe that’s it.

NIC CAGE MONTH: Adaptation. (2002)

Director: Spike Jonze

Starring: Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, Chris Cooper

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0268126/

"Nothing happens in the world? Are you out of your fucking mind? People are murdered every day. There's genocide, war, corruption. Every fucking day, somewhere in the world, somebody sacrifices his life to save someone else. Every fucking day, someone, somewhere takes a conscious decision to destroy someone else. People find love, people lose it. For Christ's sake, a child watches her mother beaten to death on the steps of a church. Someone goes hungry. Somebody else betrays his best friend for a woman. If you can't find that stuff in life, then you, my friend, don't know crap about life! And why the FUCK are you wasting my two precious hours with your movie? I don't have any use for it! I don't have any bloody use for it!"

-Robert McKee, summing up one of the movie's cardinal themes. 

Two Nicolas Cages. Let me just reiterate that for those slower folks among you…TWO NIC CAGES. THAT’S DOUBLE THE NIC CAGE. Why isn’t this movie talked about more? I mean…it’s two Nic Cages, on screen at the same fucking time! I think the universe just imploded. Monkeys are flying, pigs learned to talk and George W. Bush has been given the Nobel Peace Prize. That’s quite an accomplishment.

I mean, think about it. This movie could have easily been told with two different actors playing the roles of the Kaufman brothers. It’s played pretty straightforward. But they decided to go the extra mile and just have two Nicolas Cages playing both twin brothers. That’s…I don’t even know what that is. It’s both awesome and extremely eccentric.

DOES NOT COMPUTE!

Phew. OK, aside from the obvious cosmic anomaly present, this movie is actually a really good one. It’s called Adaptation, and it’s about a struggling writer (a fictionalized version of Charlie Kaufman), who is working on a script and has a pretty big case of writer’s block. His agency is pressuring him, his twin brother is becoming a more successful writer and he just can’t seem to get laid. At all. His life pretty much sucks. But that’s only because he hasn’t…adapted.

Lame joke, but at the same time, it also sums up what this movie is trying to get across. Adaptation is a movie of parallels and paradoxes. Nicolas Cage’s character…the first one…is writing about a woman who is writing about orchids. The woman, played admirably by Meryl Streep, is also given her own story arc in a series of cutaways to ‘3 years ago’ – this movie is heavily in love with playing around with time. She’s another paradox in herself, with her main thing being that she is passionate about nothing except finding passion, which she is convinced she hasn’t done yet. Nic Cage’s Charlie, again, could be described the same way. The whole thing is just really cleverly done. It does tend to feel self congratulating a bit, like it’s just SO proud of its own wit, but overall I don’t find it intrusive.

The whole movie is wrapped up in the big theme of finding one’s own way in life, adapting to change and blossoming, as if in the throes of a late stage of puberty. Nic Cage’s character Charlie constantly tries to start up his life but is too afraid to go all the way. He fails at asking out a pretty waitress at a diner, and then is too afraid to meet with Streep’s character when his agent tries to put them together in a last ditch effort to finish the script. He needs to adapt. His most crushing failure is perhaps when he can’t even get the nice girl-next-door who really likes him but is waiting for him to do something. She just finds another guy who does have the balls to say something to her. His brother is more adept than he is; at least he gets Maggie Gyllenhaal to be his girlfriend.

There’s another clever thing – duality, two Nic Cages, Charlie and Donald Kaufman, both with very different approaches to life. You have to feel sorry for him when his brother Donald gets his trashy serial killer horror script (based slightly on the movie Thr3e, which I will review here sometime, as it is horrible) picked up. That’s a slap in the face, man. But it also shows the dichotomy between Charlie’s artsy, holier-than-thou attitude towards writing (“I want to write a movie without any big Hollywood clichés”) versus Donald’s more straightforward approach. That is what sells, and overall it isn’t surprising when Donald’s more conventional, less artistic script is the one that gets somewhere. Cage must also adapt to the expectations of a movie-watching public.

Most of the movie is spent with Charlie whining about what he can’t do. He even wonders where he came from to the tune of…a 10 second montage that chronologically tells how mankind first came into existence.

Did I mention this movie was written and directed by the guy who did Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? Just thought that might put things into perspective for some people.

On the other side of things, there is brother Donald (the ‘other’ Nic Cage…you know) who is adapting quite well, even despite Charlie’s insistence that he’s a nuisance and an idiot – sometimes, apparently, idealism works better than hard-nosed cynicism. Putting oneself out there to be criticized and to be put down, so one can get back up again and improve…that’s life! That’s adapting. Charlie doesn’t know how to do that, and neither does Meryl Streep’s character, who can’t even muster up a pulse any more lively than a coma patient’s. On the other hand, there’s also Laroche (Chris Cooper), the friend of Streep’s who she’s writing the book about. He has pretty much fully adapted and knows his place in the world – hunting for rare plant life in swamps - like the back of his hand.

The acting is all pretty damn solid, with Nic Cage and Meryl Streep giving standout performances. Nic Cage especially, as he has to do two different parts on screen at the same time, both with vastly different personalities. That takes talent! Chris Cooper as John Laroche is good, too; gruff and raw, living life the way he wants. All of these characters are clearly defined and will make you believe they are who they say they are. Even though there’s some serious star power here, it doesn’t ever feel like a collage of big names and bigger faces, and that’s always good for a film like this.

The first two acts are pretty melodramatic and slow paced. They focus more on the acting of Nic Cage (times two) and his attempts to blossom. The third act, in another paradoxal twist, is the blossoming of the movie’s action (in the same way that one old goat of a screenwriter told Cage to make the third act action-packed), turning it into a high octane chase with a drug scandal, adultery and the swamps of Florida all mixed into this movie’s pot luck of random shit that somehow comes out to a good time. I don’t want to spoil too much, but when your movie starts off with soul searching melodrama in an urban setting and ends up with a chase scene through a Floridian swamp, you know it’s a trip you want to take.

This is a movie about change and about growing into life. Graduation into a higher plane. Learning to cope and live with all the crap society throws at you – there are good times, there are bad times and there are times you just won’t know what the hell is going on. Told heartwarmingly and convincingly by a duo of Nicolas Cage clones. Aren’t all good movies?

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