strange_complex: (Vampira)
This is the American / British Hammer Productions remake of the Swedish film Let The Right One In (2008), which I watched last night on the Horror Channel. I've seen the Swedish version twice: once while travelling in Australia in 2017 (LJ / DW) and once at the Hyde Park Picture House in 2019 (LJ / DW). My previous experience of such remakes had led me to assume it would be crass and unsubtle, but for once that isn't a fair accusation at all. According to the film's Wikipedia entry, the producers aimed to stay true to the original novel and film, while making it accessible to a wider audience. I'd say they very much succeeded - though it's a pity for many reasons that the additional people this version will have reached won't normally contemplate stepping beyond their cultural bubble and watching a 'foreign' film.

The setting is transposed to New Mexico, which I did not know gets such a lot of snowy weather, but apparently it does, allowing the snowy setting of the Swedish original to be retained. The names are of course changed, so that Eli (the vampire) becomes Abby, her 12-year-old friend Oskar becomes Owen, and her previous servant Håkan becomes Thomas. Some of the special effects are slightly shonkier, like Abby's eyes when she is in full vampire mode, which definitely lack the subtlety of the original. But the general emotive power of the original is well matched, and so is the quality of cinematography and editing. Largely speaking, the story, the scenes used to convey it and the dialogue are unchanged except for being culturally Americanised: e.g. through more emphasis on religious belief in good and evil, more use of cars including a high-speed accident, and a more jockish feel to the high school bullies.

That said, there are various minor differences of detail - or at least I think these are differences, though I may be mistaken due to an imperfect memory of the original. We start with the capture, hospitalisation and suicide of Abby's previous servant, Thomas, from the point of view of the police and hospital staff, and then go back in time a couple of weeks to the two of them arriving at the apartment complex, before working our way back later on to the same events from his and Abby's perspectives. There's also more emphasis than I remember on the police officer as a character, I supposed again fitting American cultural expectations arising from the ubiquity of cop shows and movies. By contrast, Owen's father is largely removed from the narrative - Owen doesn't go and stay with him, and he appears only as an inadequately-supportive voice on the end of a phone-line. The cat-lady who gets bitten by Eli in the Swedish version and survives but begins turning into a vampire here has one dog instead of many cats, isn't as fully developed as a character, and bursts into flames because a nurse innocently opens the hospital blinds in her room, rather than because she has realised what's happening and asks for the blinds to be opened as a way of stopping it.

The questions which the Swedish version raised around gender were also pushed a little further here. Eli's statement about not being a girl is repeated verbatim by Abby, though Abby follows it up a bit further when Owen pushes her (them?) on it by saying she is 'no-one'. Meanwhile, on Owen's side, one of the main ways in which his bullies torment him is by calling him 'little girl' and referring to him using female pronouns. I'm 90% sure this isn't matched for the Oskar character in the Swedish version, so it becomes another thing they have in common in the remake: that both occupy a space outside of gender norms, whether willingly or unwillingly.

This version also seemed to make it more explicit to the viewer that Owen will become Abby's next servant, ending up like Thomas. This isn't to say that wasn't a suggested by the Swedish version - I noted exactly that in my first review of it (LJ / DW). I may also have been more alert to the pointers in this version, having already seen the other twice. But I felt there were two specific cues pointing fairly explicitly towards the parallel, and although the first may have been in the Swedish version too, I'm close to certain the second wasn't. One was a scene of Abby knocking on Thomas' hospital window and asking to be let in so she can kill him, followed immediately by another of her knocking on Owen's window and asking to be let in so she can snuggle up with him - i.e. the editing established a strong parallel between the two characters. The second was Owen finding passport photo booth pictures of Abby with Thomas when he was much younger in their apartment, looking just as nerdy as Owen and confirming for us the path that Thomas has been on. For me, this greater clarity made the developing relationship between Abby and Owen look rather less charming and a lot more like her grooming him, although again that may also be because I'm pretty familiar with the overall story by now.

Overall, definitely worth watching if you enjoyed the Swedish version, although the clearer delineation of Owen's future fate made the ending a little less bittersweet and more simply icky.

Hope

Saturday, 7 November 2020 20:38
strange_complex: (C J Cregg)
Well, I am really, really happy for you tonight, America! It's just great to see people dancing in the streets for something which is actually good for once.

I must say I've never found Biden a hugely exciting candidate, and I was very worried for a long time that the Democratic campaign was relying too heavily on merely pitching him as 'not Trump', rather than offering enough that was positive and different. But I didn't follow the campaign at all closely. Maybe he offered more than I could see, or indeed maybe just not being Trump was enough this time? Certainly, Trump has set the bar for being better than him extremely low indeed. Just having a grown-up in charge who doesn't respond to a global pandemic by claiming it's a hoax, blaming it on the Chinese and suggesting people inject themselves with bleach will be a big positive change.

As for Kamala Harris as VP, what an amazing historic first and a wonderful precedent for all women and girls, but especially those of colour.

I just hope that one way or another the transition of power happens smoothly, all Trump's legal challenges come to naught, and his supporters don't rise to the violence he's already been inciting them to.

Meanwhile, those of us elsewhere can hope that Biden might reverse the tide of isolationism which has seen American pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement, the WHO, UNESCO and heaven knows what else. And in Britain specifically we can cross fingers that Biden's obvious commitment to the Good Friday agreement will push our own horror-show political leaders towards a softer Brexit, and at the very least enjoy the sweet, sweet knowledge that N*gel F*rage lost £10,000 betting on Trump winning. Muahahahaha!
strange_complex: (La Dolce Vita Trevi)
I went to see this with [livejournal.com profile] big_daz on Wednesday night at the Everyman, Leeds. It's the second new release I've seen in the cinema this year, which is already more than I manage some years in total. If there were more films like this to go and see, that would be very different.

It is framed in multiple ways as a fairy tale. One is the two bookended voice-over sequences which begin by describing the main character, Elisa, as a princess and end by talking about her happy ending. They turn out to be voiced by her neighbour, who has spent his life painting advertising posters but is quickly being made obsolete by the camera, who keeps his television permanently tuned to old black-and-white musicals and comedies, and who ponders whether he was born too early or too late. That is, we are being told a story by a man disconnected from reality whose job is to sell fantasies. Elisa herself we first meet fast asleep on her couch, sunk deep into a watery dream-world, while throughout the film sound and light from the cinema over which she lives leak up into her apartment, and at one point she herself breaks out into a black-and-white song-and-dance routine to voice the love for the creature which she cannot speak. Perhaps some time in the decade before 1962 (the film's dramatic date) she has sat downstairs watching Creature from the Black Lagoon, absorbed its soundtrack in her sleep, and been living it in her dreams ever since? Later on, she returns the favour, sending the watery by-products of her own fantasy romance dripping onto customers nodding off in the auditorium below when she floods her bathroom to turn it into an aquatic playground. In fact, between her voicelessness and the fact that she was both found by water as a baby and ultimately finds her happiness there, she may as well be the Little Mermaid, on land only ever temporarily while she finds her prince.

All these markers of fairy-tale status are of course crucial cues in allowing us to accept the extraordinary story of a romance between an ordinary woman and a humanoid amphibian with magical powers. But they also allow us to enjoy another kind of fantasy alongside it: that of a bunch of underprivileged outsiders successfully sticking it to The Man. Elisa is mute. Giles, her ageing advertising-designer neighbour, is gay. Zelda, her best friend at the facility where they work, is black. And infiltrated into the facility's team of scientists is 'Bob', aka Dimitri, a Russian spy who has come to feel as strongly about science as he does about the motherland. Meanwhile, The Man himself manifests as Colonel Strickland, the facility's authoritarian, racist, misogynistic boss, who tortures the creature as much for fun as to learn anything from it and who takes the decision to vivisect it rather than trying to study it alive without it even occurring to him that this might be something to pause over, let alone actually doing so. In all this, he's the successor of Dr Mark Williams from the original film (LJ / DW), but much more starkly militaristic and exaggeratedly nasty. And boy, is it satisfying to see him out-foxed by our plucky band of misfits, pulling off the creature's liberation from the facility while he can't begin to imagine that they could even be capable of any such thing.

This might all sound rather heavy-handed, except that each character is drawn with such humanity it's impossible not to believe in them. In fact the entire story is approached with the same utter seriousness which makes Hammer's dark fairy-tales just as compelling. No-one here has their tongue in their cheek, or behaves like an avatar standing in for a particular social group. Instead, each has their own inner turmoil and believable home-life (Zelda's lazy husband, Dimitri's careful ironing), including Strickland, whose career trajectory still doesn't quite satisfy his perfect all-American wife. On both sides of the balance, it's important that these characters aren't clichés and don't jump straight into their assigned roles. Elisa's friends need a lot of persuasion before they'll help her rescue the creature, while we see the system that creates Strickland in the even less sympathetic General Hoyt above him, and in how easy it is for a smarmy car salesman to talk him into buying an expensive Cadillac in a colour he doesn't like.

The film is also dripping with deeply symbolic detail, which likewise might have seemed over-done if it weren't for the fairy-tale framing and the believability of the characters. Most obvious is the colour-palette, all muted, swampy greens and blues in scaly patterns to suit the aquatic theme, but also to set off occasional departures the more starkly - like the red dress and shoes which Elisa is suddenly wearing the day after she and the creature have found out how to express their affection physically. Perhaps next most obviously, the oppressive machinery of capitalism. Vents and pipes above the creature's tank resemble not only the original Gill-Man but also (to me at least) the Machine-Mammon from Metropolis (1927). Elisa, Zelda and their co-workers are slaves to the facility's clocking-in system and CCTV cameras. And when the creature staggers into the cinema below Elisa's apartment, he finds it showing scenes of slaves working in the mines from The Story of Ruth (1960).

shape-e-23118.jpg Machine Mammon Metropolis.jpg

The cinema complex itself is called the Orpheum, perfectly underpinning Elisa's use of music (and boiled eggs) to win the confidence of the creature - though she plays it jazz on a portable record player rather than singing to the lyre. The facility is called the Occam institute, which drove me to Wikipedia - I know the basic principle and couldn't see how it might apply to this story, but found my answer in the biology section, where it turns out that it has featured quite heavily in debates around evolution and the matter of whether or not any animals share human-style psychology. There we are very much amongst the concerns of del Toro's story. Finally, in case it wasn't clear enough how rotten Strickland is, he spends most of the film with two of his fingers, severed by the creature after one too many electric shocks and reattached by surgeons, blackening and reeking as the attachment fails and they die on his hand. Towards the end, in one of several body-horror moments which had me squirming in my seat and putting my own fingers over my eyes, he acts out just how literally he has gone to pieces by pulling them off and throwing them at the terrified Zelda. I'm sure there is much more besides.

Nothing quite stops the niggling world-building questions bubbling up. Like, if the creature is 'from the Amazon', why does it seem to need saline water and return quite happily to the ocean at the end? And how exactly would its ability to switch between lung- and gill-based breathing systems be any particular help in the Space Race, as both the Americans and Russians seems to think? But ultimately none of these matter next to Elisa's coy, satisfied smile and the electric blue lights flickering across the creature's body. For that, everyone involved deserves my profoundest thanks, and I only hope the cinema industry as a whole is watching and learning.
strange_complex: (Invader Zim globe)
Watched because shingles, and because magister noticed I had not seen it, and therefore lent me the DVD. It is a pastiche story about a washed-up super-hero, who was America's golden boy in the 1940s, but then fell foul of McCarthyism and ended up drinking meths in the gutter. When his arch-nemesis, Mr. Midnight, makes a re-appearance, steals a government-developed hypno-ray and uses it to gather all of New York's ethnic minorities into a new housing project so that he can blow them up, Captain Invincible has to be brought back into shape to save the day.

It's quite funny, and a perfectly acceptable way to spend an hour and a half, but I think there's a sort of cap on how funny feature-length pastiches can be - generally the joke tends to wear thin after a while, and this is no exception. There are hints also that the script aspired to being more bitingly satirical than it actually is, but that the ideas weren't followed through. This applies especially to the notion of the US government developing a hypno-ray, and Mr. Midnight's declared belief that the 'pure genetic Americans' will applaud his ethnic cleansing of New York and carry him into the White House as a result. Obviously both of those ideas are scathingly critical of America's government and its voting public (the film is Australian, BTW), but they aren't really worked through properly, so that the critique fizzles out rather than hitting home, and the eugenics project in particular just feels weirdly distasteful. In the end, the plot boils down to a standard good vs. evil story, with Captain Invincible saving the day and getting the girl.

Lee plays Mr. Midnight, of course, doing exactly what he normally does best in this sort of role - playing the villain with deadly serious professionalism, yet with a little twinkle in his eye that lets us know how much he is enjoying pushing the performance just as notch or two over the top. He also gets to sing, as the film is a musical comedy. On the whole, the songs aren't up to much, and have that quality of feeling like they are just interrupting the story which is the hall-mark of a weak musical. But Lee's turn close to the end in the alcoholic pun-based 'Name Your Poison' is justly famous, and this Youtube video (which also includes a minute or so of confrontational dialogue between Mr. Midnight and Captain Invincible) captures pretty much everything which is worth seeing about his part in this film:


In short, once you've seen that video, you can safely skip the rest of the movie.

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strange_complex: (Sebastian boozes)
I get the impression it is more of a north American than an English thing. Our trans-Atlantic cousins' equivalent to mulled wine, I suppose. In fact, the only time I can recall actually drinking any was at a Christmas party hosted by the lovely [livejournal.com profile] redkitty23, who is indeed American. It seemed OK, but I haven't felt inspired to track any down since.

In the course of a quick Google to remind myself of what is in it, though, I stumbled across something called the Eggnog Riot, which was apparently sparked off in 1826 after some hot-blooded young cadets smuggled whiskey for making eggnog into an American Military Academy. I do feel that knowledge like that ought to be shared.

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strange_complex: (Miss Pettigrew)
This was the latest Cottage Road Classic, which I went to see on Wednesday with [livejournal.com profile] ms_siobhan, [livejournal.com profile] planet_andy and [livejournal.com profile] big_daz. The cinema had really gone to town on creating an appropriately festive atmosphere: not only was the film itself a Christmas classic, but they had also put on mulled wine, mince pies and Christmas cake, as well as making sure that the usual prelude of vintage adverts, public information films and cinematic announcements included clips wishing all patrons a merry Christmas and a happy New Year. We weren't wished a Gay 1964 this time, as happened at the December showing last year, but we were apprised of the benefits of smoking Grandee cigars, and of making sure that we took food with us on a day out.

We also enjoyed a ten-minute silent 1920s comedy short about police cars rushing to the aid of a child who had wandered out on a beam balanced precariously on the edge of a cliff. It involved a lot of slap-stick stunts along the lines of cars getting stuck on train tracks, people being repeatedly run over, people trying to clamber onto moving cars, cars falling to bits while people were driving them, and so forth. As far as I could tell, most of this must have been done by using old cars which nobody minded damaging, practising all the timing very, very carefully, and (in the case of running people over) taking advantage of the fact that 1920s cars had quite a high ground clearance, so that you could actually run someone over quite safely as long as you made sure that the wheels went either side of them. It was also obviously filmed at less than 25 frames per second, so that it looked like it was all happening incredibly quickly, which made it all look a lot more alarming than it probably was in real life.

The main feature is obviously a great classic, but I had never seen a single second of it before, so it was all new to me. I enjoyed it, and thought that it did what it was setting out to do very nicely. But I think it can probably only really enchant those who believe quite genuinely and wholeheartedly in the values of small-town American life, complete with the designated roles for women and ethnic minorities which that demands. It reminded me rather of Pleasantville, except without anyone ever turning into colour - which is no surprise, really, given that it idealises the very values which Pleasantville sets up and then deconstructs.

Funnily enough, after having had that thought I was rather surprised today to see on TV a clip from the film in colour, which was not how we saw it on Wednesday. In fact, according to Wikipedia no less than three colourised versions have been produced. It's almost as though people were retrospectively trying to help poor old George Bailey (the hero) finally realise his dreams and escape from drab old Bedford Falls into a better, brighter world after all.

As for me, I was obviously watching it all with too cynical a head on. In particular, I found it next to impossible to swallow the scenes in which George manages to talk his customers out of a bank run, magically acquires a dream house by moving into a run-down wreck in imminent danger of collapse, and is finally saved from financial disaster by everyone from the town coming round and 'chipping in' to cover his partner's absent-minded loss of $8000. I know that the whole point of the film is meant to be about how setting out to help other people rather than exploit them for personal gain brings its own rewards, and that it isn't trying to set out a realistic alternative model for ethical economic prosperity. But I'm afraid I just found myself sitting through those scenes and thinking "Oh, please!"

Still, the clothes were nice, the scene at the dance where everyone ends up jumping into the swimming pool was fun, the crow which randomly lived in the Bailey family's bank was cool, Henry Travers as the angel was lovely (and reminded me quite a lot of Derek Jacobi), and at least I will properly know who people mean when they talk of James (or 'Jimmy') Stewart now, instead of having to just nod and smile vaguely. So I'm glad I went, but I don't think I'm going to be joining the fan-club for this film any time soon.

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strange_complex: (One walking)
So this one is from the same hand as The Myth Makers (Donald Cotton) - and to me, that means: Do. Not. Underestimate. On one level, Cotton does here what I thought he was going to do in The Myth Makers (and which was really pioneered by Dennis Spooner in The Romans, anyway) - that is, he gives us a story which draws broadly on the Wild West films and TV series that the audience will have been familiar with, serving up a sort of pastiche while showing scant regard for the real history of the era. But I don't think what's going on here is quite as simple as a case of just ignoring the real history of this era (this time known, of course, with a security that was never possible for The Myth Makers) and having a laugh. To me, this story also demonstrates much the same kind of knowing commentary on what he is doing that Cotton presented in The Myth Makers.

A fancy dress party gone horribly wrong )

Lyrical narrative )

Comments on the Doctor Who format )

The Doctor's double (again) )

The Doctor out of his depth? )

The Doctor's new ethical stance )

Audience reaction )

Heh - it's been a busy weekend, during which I've done virtually nothing but watch and write about Doctor Who. But that's pretty much my ideal weekend anyway. As a result I have at least got myself into a situation where there are only two of the early, 'pure' historicals left for me to watch - so it is perfectly possible for me to do that (though probably not also to review them here) before leaving for the CA on Wednesday morning. OK, so there are also four other stories in between them which I really ought to watch for total familiarity with this era. But I think I can hold my own now.

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strange_complex: (C J Cregg)
Seen last night at the Cottage Road cinema with [livejournal.com profile] ms_siobhan and [livejournal.com profile] planet_andy.

I didn't expect to be so absolutely gripped by this, but it really was enthralling. At micro level, it focusses entirely on the preparations for and recording of the series of interviews which Nixon gave to David Frost in 1977, but in the process it casts a very searching light indeed over the nature of politics and the media and the relationship between them.

Martin (oops!) Michael Sheen and Frank Langella are absolutely brilliant as the nervous young Frost and the ageing and embittered Nixon respectively, managing to capture the mannerisms and speech patterns of their subjects beautifully without ever coming across as slavish impressionists. And I very much liked the device of having most of the major secondary characters appearing not only within the story itself, but also in 'talking head' guise, looking back on their experience of the interviews from a perspective in what appears to be something like the early '80s. It was a great way of allowing the interviews to be commented on from a position of hindsight at the same time as presenting the unfolding process as it occurred, which was important given that one of the main things the film wanted to do was emphasise the contrast between the eventual success of the project and the risk of total failure which had been run along the way.

That said, I think it would also be incautious to be too easily swayed by a film which demonstrates so clearly the persuasive and distorting power of the screen (small or large). It's fairly clearly mythologising both Frost and the interviews, and it presents Nixon's final confessions about Watergate as a crushing and unexpected defeat for him. But I find it hard to believe that so canny and manipulative a politician as Nixon would really have allowed himself to be pushed by Frost into saying anything he didn't entirely want to say anyway. And then again, we do in fact see Nixon's Chief of Staff looking back on the interviews a few years later on and saying that he felt they had been a success - so maybe the possibility that Nixon knew exactly what he was doing is allowed for as well.

Anyway, I very much enjoyed the close treatment of such a fascinating moment in the history of both television and politics. I'll be looking out to see how this one does at the Oscars.

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Ook!

Thursday, 5 May 2005 12:53
strange_complex: (Penelope Pitstop)
Apparently, the UK consulate in New York has been bombed. (Thanks to [livejournal.com profile] rentaghost31 for the tip-off). Nothing too serious, but erk!

It's fairly obviously election-related, but I suppose in a way we can be paradoxically reassured. It suggests that whoever is behind it (presumably al-Qaeda or similar) doesn't have operatives capable of doing the same in the UK itself, and, at least on this occasion, wasn't able to mount a particularly effective attack.

I mean, these are still only small comforts, but you know... I'm just sorry that the attackers obviously do have operatives in the US.

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