Cult Classic Movie Review: Horror of Dracula

In honor of the late Christopher Lee, whose June 7 death was reported yesterday, I took a first look at the first of his series of iconic career-defining roles as Dracula. Lee is best known to modern audiences as the wizard Saruman in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies or as the Sith Lord Count Dooku in Attack of the Clones. But in the 50s and 60s, he starred in many of Hammer Films’ British horror films.

His first turn as the vampire was in Dracula, which was re-titled Horror of Dracula in the United States to avoid confusion with the Tod Browning-directed version from 1931 starring Bela Lugosi. The Hammer Films series was the second big iteration of attempts to bring Bram Stoker’s novel to the screen. Universal had made the Lugosi film and a few follow-ups, but Lee became a new generation’s face of Count Dracula for several years. Since the late 70s pop culture has been inundated with vampire stories ranging from the grotesqueries of John Carpenter and Stephen King to the comedy of Once Bitten starring Jim Carrey and then finally landing at teenage soap opera thanks to Stephanie Meyer by way of Anne Rice.

Anna Karenina Movie Review

The classics of Russian literature don’t tend to have definitive film versions, though it may be that Tom Stoppard’s adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina changes that – for a while anyway. There was a Hollywood version in 1948 starring Vivien Leigh, but it has not stood as an important work of cinematic adaptation. Generally speaking, the literary adaptations from Hollywood in the Golden Age offered little in making the works cinematic. They were so often (and still are, for that matter) like filmed stage plays with sumptuous sets and intricately patterned costumes and British actors donning an air of pomposity. These films feel stifled by a desire to be ‘true’ to the material, making for very boring viewing experiences. To read Anna Karenina should not be the same experience as it is to view it.

Jane Eyre Movie Review

I feel a little ashamed that I came into Cary Fukunaga’s lively adaptation of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre without ever having read the book or even seen an older film version. This is in spite of the existence of about ten versions from both cinema and television in the sound era. I didn’t even know the story. So my approach to the film has little to do with the film as an adaptation of a novel and story I’m familiar with and much more to do with how Fukunaga’s telling, from a screenplay by Moira Buffini, affected me as I watched.

Classic Movie Review: Long Day's Journey Into Night

After Sidney Lumet's recent passing, I present a fresh look at one of his early films.

It’s not an easy thing to adapt a stage play for the screen, especially most 20^th century American drama that centers on family conflicts. Dramatists like Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller and Eugene O’Neill present intimate portraits of a handful of characters, usually bound by time and place. The drama is designed specifically to play out on a stage where there are far more limitations than in cinema.

Director Sidney Lumet, who recently passed away after a long and distinguished cinematic career, got his start in television presenting teleplays and his early cinematic efforts were often adapted stage plays. His Twelve Angry Men was a film adapted from a teleplay that was later adapted for the stage. Of course the film was almost perfectly tailored to be done on stage, although he made it cinematic.

His 1962 adaptation of O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night feels much more constrained by the conventions of theater and a bit hamstrung by what appears to be an attempt to take the drama off the ‘stage’ and into the camera.

Spanish Dracula Movie Review

Carlos Villarías uses this expression about 50 times throughout the film.

First published at Mostly Movies on 29 November 2010

It was a common practice in the early sound era for Hollywood studios to produce a second, nearly identical, version of a film in a foreign language. They were produced in Spanish, French and German most often and very few of the foreign language versions survive to this day. One of the most famous that does survive is the Spanish language version of the 1931 Tod Browning Dracula.

George Melford served as director, as was his station at Universal pictures during that period. He directed Spanish language versions of several films. According to IMDb, he neither spoke nor understood the language, but Wikipedia tells me he got the job specifically because of his knowledge of Spanish. Oh what a perfect example of how unreliable the Internet is. Ten years before Drácula he directed Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik, which survives as one of the classics of silent cinema.

Classic Movie Review: Tod Browning's Dracula

What’s most striking about Tod Browning’s Dracula is how, despite being almost comically stylized by modern standards, you can still see its profound influence on horror films through the decades straight up to the present. The camera and lighting techniques were mostly still in their infancy in 1931, and (apart from Fritz Lang’s M from that same year) film makers had yet to learn how to effectively incorporate synchronized sound in a way that augments the action, but most films of the genre that have followed owe some bit of credit to Browning. That said, Dracula itself, the first official film version of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, exhibits the influence of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, the 1922 German silent film that was an unsanctioned adaptation of the famous vampire story.

The Age of Innocence Movie Review

Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Edith Wharton’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Age of Innocence, has not really received its due praise. Perhaps because at the time it seemed such a departure for the director of quintessential New York stories of Italian Americans, often involved in crime. Now that 17 years have passed and Scorsese has gone on to create a body of work with much broader settings and themes (Kundun, The Aviator, Shutter Island), it’s fair to say there is little unusual about seeing it as very much a Martin Scorsese Picture.

Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis) is one in a long line of Scorsese male protagonists trying to escape from the clutches of a world not of his own choosing. Consider Charlie in Mean Streets coming to terms with his lack of faith; Travis Bickle trapped in a sewer of crime; Jesus of Nazareth wrestling with the forces pushing him; Teddy Daniels in Shutter Island a prisoner of his own psychosis.

Dorian Gray Movie Review: Where, Oh Where Has My Little Soul Gone?

This film has been released commercially in some European markets and will get a direct-to-DVD release in the US on 10 August.

In Oliver Parker’s latest Oscar Wilde adaptation (with a screenplay by novice Toby Finlay), Dorian Gray, Ben Barnes spends most of his time in the titular role standing around looking pretty. And that’s pretty much what Wilde’s original novel was about, wasn’t it? It was about this beautiful young man who stays beautiful.

No it wasn’t! It was a serious examination of the power of vanity on the human soul and the consequences of trading your soul for everlasting beauty. The novel was infused with Wilde’s classic wit, expressed mostly through the character of Lord Henry Wotton, mostly absent here except for the occasional biting comment expertly delivered by Colin Firth, who is the only actor in the film who seems up to the challenge of, you know, acting.

Alice in Wonderland Movie Review: Tim Burton's Hit and Miss streak Continues with Another Dud

I should admit up front that somehow I’ve managed to get through more than 30 years of life without ever having seen any adaptation of or read either of Lewis Carroll’s books Alices Adventures in Wonderland or Through the Looking Glass, both of which provide the source material for Tim Burton’s latest, Alice in Wonderland. A little bit of nosing around the Internet led me to discover that both books generally form the basis for most iterations of the story, that they are deemed members of the genre of literary nonsense, and that Burton wanted to imbue the story with a narrative thread that would make it easier to connect with Alice and other characters.

That’s all well and good, but somehow Burton has directed a film completely absent any sense of joy or wonder, the latter of which I would say is a necessary component to a story entitled Alice in Wonderland. The screenplay (competently written by Linda Woolverton) seems to be capitalizing on the previous decade’s fascination with fantasy/adventure stories featuring a Chosen One tasked to save the world (a trend started by The Lord of the Rings). Alice (Mia Wasikowska) is prophesied to wield the sword of destiny (or some such hooey) to kill the dreaded Jabberwocky (voiced all too briefly by Christopher Lee) in order to save Underland (turns out Alice misunderstood the name once upon a time) from the clutches of the Red Queen.

One of the major changes to the original stories is the much expanded role of the Mad Hatter, which gives Johnny Depp the space to create yet another bizarre character to add to his growing pantheon. He does a fine job, switching emotions and vocal characterizations at the drop of a hat (ha ha!) to illuminate the sheer insanity of the character. However, the real centerpiece of acting is Helena Bonham Carter, perhaps by virtue of the fact that there’s so much to relish in the character of the Red Queen. Every time she shouts, “Off with the head!” she seems to find a new way to express the joy she feels at her power and the frustration at being nothing more than a feared tyrant. Crispin Glover also makes a notable appearance as the Red Queen’s dastardly and obedient enforcer.

In an attempt to provide pathos to the narrative and a protagonist we care about, the story opens with six-year-old Alice waking in the night to another bad dream featuring a white rabbit and blue caterpillar. Her loving father indulges these fantasies and helps her return to restful slumber. Flash forward 13 years. Alice’s father is dead, and her mother has all but arranged her marriage to a sniveling bore of a creature. And in case you didn’t pick up on Alice’s predominant character trait during the intro, Woolverton’s script hammers the point home with as much nuance as a sledgehammer to the skull: Alice refuses to wear a corset and stockings; during a staid dance routine she bumps into others because she was contemplating the clouds; she is too distracted by a rabbit in the garden to pay attention to a lecture from her future mother-in-law. Do you get it? Alice is a dreamer NOT MEANT FOR THIS WORLD of stuffy British attitudes and rules.

Perhaps the story will enthrall you in ways it failed to for me. That being the case, I will turn my attention to what I believe is the film’s most glaring misstep which is the visual scheme. Burton has always been a master at creating an on-screen feast for the eyes and he certainly earns his pay in that respect here. But his overreliance on CG effects to create about 75 percent of what you see is the biggest failure. Much of the effects work looks cheap. There is nothing here on the level of what Peter Jackson achieved with The Lord of the Rings or King Kong or James Cameron with Avatar.

With the exception of Alice and the White Queen (Anne Hathaway), incidentally the least interesting characters in the film, everything that moves is at least partially altered by CGI. This includes the Mad Hatter whose eyes have been enlarged and Glover’s legs have been abnormally stretched to make Stayne taller, giving him an unnatural gait as he walks and mounts his horse. With so much CG on the screen I’m left asking myself why the film wasn’t simply made as an animated film. The answer is perhaps because Disney (which financed and distributed the film) has been there and done that. But if it had been made as a CG animated film, which is essentially what it is anyway with a few live actors thrown in for good measure, or even better as stop-motion it might have been much better. Imagine what this film could have been given the gothic vision Burton brought to A Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride.

As it is the CG characters are not meant to be animated as far as the story is concerned, in the sense of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, but to replace the difficult to render physical characters. But then we end up with a muddled mash of animation that doesn’t look real and live actors interacting with things I kept recognizing were not actually there on set.

I must say that the one exception is the Red Queen, who I think has a great look to her. With her oversized head and small body she’s been made to resemble a toddler – a perfect fit for her petulant personality. And the effects rendered on Carter don’t distract from the performance or the character, but rather enhance it, unlike most of the others.

Burton might be better off sticking with what he has always been quite successful at in the past: traditional effects used in more original stories that allow him the freedom to impress his unique vision onto the story. I’m thinking of films like Big Fish and Edward Scissorhands. His least successful films (from this critical standpoint) have been those drawn from established works of fiction such as Charlie and the Cocolate Factory, Planet of the Apes and this newest offering. When you see this white rabbit disappear, I advise you not to follow it down the hole.