Which is a grudge-match I'd pay to see, although I imagine it would be over fairly quickly. Count Orlok is pretty slow, and it's all very well being able to suck on blood and make people delirious and junk but a light-disc to the bollocks and his creepy vampiric arse'd deres faster than you could say - well - anything, inter-titles in silent movies tend to be on screen for AGES.
On Tuesday night we went to a screening of Nosferatu, accompanied by a live-score by a Melbourne composer called Worng*. I can't speak for y'all, but I'm feeling fatigued by the glut of fatuous vampire-themed film and television being spewed into the cultural atmosphere at the moment. Watching Nosferatu revivified my appreciation for the vampire genre - specifically, the possibilities of the vampire genre. Filmed in 1922, it didn't labour under the weight of telling a story previously told a thousand times - which made it far more compelling to watch than a story embarrassed by how often it's been recounted. The oily sexuality and existential angsting of modern vampire tales was also blessedly absent - Count Orlok is a freaky fucked-up blood-sucky bat-man, and so looks like a freaky fucked up blood-sucky bat-man. Which is refreshing. STEPHANIE MEYER FEEL BURNING CHEEKS OF SHAME.
The musical accompaniment was all synth-keyboards, styled after John Carpenter's scores with lashings of Tangerine Dream. They worked well within the film's more surreal moments - as when Hutter's wife falls into a somnambulant trance - but his attempts to ratchet up the horror during moments when Orlok was on the attack were far too aggressively 'scary' and actually detracted from the action. Horror music score-writers: unless you are Bernard Hermann, you are probably well-advised to keep the music subtle, otherwise you are likely to interrupt proceedings. (I don't know what I'm talking about here. Forgiveness Please).
Last night was Tron: Legacy at the Imax cinema 3D. Unusually for a blockbuster, I was left wishing they'd attempted less story - nonsense involving long-lost fathers and blah blah blah - and just followed the formula of the first film, which was to splurge out a tenuous explanation in the film's opening salvo and then DO NOTHING BUT HAVE SUPER COOL GAMES AND SET-PIECES FOR 60 MINUTES. Instead proceedings were periodically interrupted for 'plot.' I mean, come on. This is tron. Don't arse around with plot, PLAY THE SUPER COOL GAMES ALREADY.
I found it really rather beautiful, a wonderfully rendered sci-fi landscape, which there seem to be a dearth of, and the Daft Punk soundtrack worked just as well as you'd hope. Michael Sheen popped up for a good ten minutes and left me squealing with orgiastic glee, and then disappeared and left me saddened because the best actor in the film had disappeared. The fem-program eye-candy is hella hot, and Jeff Bridges is always likeable, even if the digitally-rendered 30-year-old version of him was languishing hopelessly in the Uncanny Valley . This didn't feel revolutionary the way the original film did (because it was revolutionary) - though it certainly was pretty - but without wanting to labour a point, everything would have run a lot smoother if they'd attempted less and done nothing but PLAY SUPER COOL GAMES.
*This is a stupid name.
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I haven't seen Tron: Nostalgia yet, but I seem to recall that the first movie did its fair share of "cut to the real-world Tron guy way too often to explain plot we don't care about" along the way.
ReplyDeleteI have not watched a post-1970 movie so far this year - in fact it's all been Lovecraftian Hippies. But tonight, I shall watch Solomon Kane. Ramsey Campbell wrote the novelisation, so how bad can it be? (I'm guessing really bad, but I have not read any reviews or indeed anything at all about the movie.)
How was Solomon Kane?
ReplyDeleteAlso - you're wrong about the original Tron. Once they get into the computer, all the action transpires in the computer. There are a couple of characters burdened with Basil Exposition lines but thankfully these explanations are brief and perfunctory. By comparison, Re-Tron is laden with typical Hollywood 'filial-devotion-informs-my-actions' type plot, which I wish they'd dispense with. Better a clunky line scarcely justifying yet another super-cool-game than a belaboured attempt to make a glorified video game mean something.
On the plus side, now I know what David Bowie would look like if he spiritually inhabited the body of Michael Sheen.