Fight Club - This Is Your Life

Fight Club : This Is Your Life
by Rockinde

There Will Be Blood

New Year’s D’oh!

…yawn…

…stretch…

…is it 2008 already?

…I seem to have slept for the last week. One too many relatives: I’ll not eat another one. After this ‘holiday’ season I need a vacation.

Well, first thing’s first: a happy new year to all you lovely people! And may all your (legal) hopes and desires be fulfilled this year!

I haven’t had much time to think any randomized musings to post… so I thought, ‘what about telling you some New Year’s Resolutions that I’ve made up’. But I don’t… so I can’t… and I won’t. I’m singularly lacking the resolve for such things.

Right so, what I’m going to attempt in the near future:

• Utilize the most excellent script notes from Mistress Lucy’s House of Correction*. Well, those I definitely agree with! That should keep me out of mischief for a while.
• Finish the first of two treatment story things…
• Finish the second of two treatment story things…
• Write a couple of scripts from them… cunning, huh?
• Become the first person in the history of Oscar to win for an unproduced script: if I don’t win this year I’m going to give up writing…
• Finally quit watching TV… I actually think this every year but ‘they’ just keep making it increasingly likely!
• Make loads of money: unfortunately this means giving up proper scriptwriting and becoming an odious slimy porn baron: how hard can it be (oo-er) to write ‘I’m here to fix the heating’… ‘Ooh, that’s a massive tool’… ‘It’s so hot in here I’ll just have to take all my clothes off’… ‘Nice moustache’… and most erotic of all ‘8 litre quad-turbocharged W16 throwing out 987 horses with a top speed of 253 mph and a 0-60 of 2.46 seconds’… started to drift there…
• ...and, of course, I will continue to obey the every whim of the Kitty Overlords...

And a big thank you to Tom for his invaluable advice to this computer illiterate…

By the way, in answer to my recent request for world-peace via the medium of Nicola Bryant, the Beeb showed Blackadder’s Christmas Carol. My mighty bloginess has the power to change things: it will cause nations to tremble! Or am I being hopelessly over-optimistic? Anyway, in this Cassandra-like spirit I shall make some predictions for the coming year…

• There will be more soap operas…
• Their makers will end the pretence of bringing back previously definitively dead characters with ludicrous excuses and a character will return as a bona fide zombie: nobody will notice.
• Serious drama will become ‘just a shining artefact of the past’.
• Andrew Davies will continue to craft fine adaptations; he will take out a copyright on the classic adaptations genre: all will start with an entirely gratuitous sex scene and focus on nubile young women… 71 year old Davies will increasingly seem a D.O.M. (apologies to Dom).
• Catherine Tate, Little Britain and Jam & Jerusalem will continue to be entirely inexplicable.
• Richard Curtis will continue to be a nice chap who writes enjoyable stuff and yet everyone will continue to deride him…
• British cinema will still struggle to break free of its conventions: films that tick all the right boxes; films that tick all the wrong boxes; films in period costume and rom-coms and dramas set in Islington (or similar) which are completely out of touch…
• Jeremy Kyle won’t do the decent thing…
• Sadly, neither will The Sisters Of Mercy…

The Year may play out as follows... but probably won't!

• In January, a critic will finally dare to pipe up that, especially with its new 16 episode series, Shameless is actually just Eastenders with swearing.
• In February, I will fail in my bid to become the first person to win an Oscar for an unproduced screenplay. My failure to give up writing will cause a queue to form at Beachy Head…
• In March, a new Poliakoff drama series will be blamed for a nationwide out break of narcolepsy… later NICE will approve its use as an insomnia cure.
• In April, Big Brother will begin… this time it will never end…
• From May, all the channels on Freeview will continue to change number or completely disappear with a newfound intensity: the first major change will be when all the numbers will be reversed: 23 will become 32, 24 will become 42, etc.; later changes will include moving all the numbers up one place every time there’s an ‘A’ in the month; Channel 12 will start broadcasting every alternate week… This will not make any real difference to anyone** as Freeview is still not broadcast quality.
• In June, Russell Brand will jokingly tell people to jump off a bridge: thousands will…
• In July, Simon Cowell will be extradited to The Hague while…
• In August, the opening ceremony of the 2008 Games will climax with a mass execution of political dissidents (including bloggers), the ritual slaughter of the final Yangtze River Dolphin, the beating of some Tibetans and a cheque being handed directly to the Janjaweed; smog will render many events invisible but still they will be declared ‘the best Games ever’…
• In September, a 3 hour film will be released that features 2 people sitting near motionless, about to talk to each other but never quite manage it… As an Ang Lee film critics will rave: the same would be true if it had been Wes Anderson, Todd Haynes, Alexander Payne and a whole herd of others…
• In October, the US Presidential elections will be cancelled; all pretence will cease and Rupert Murdoch will be crowned King of America…
• In November, an increasingly uncertain Gordon Brown will crack and also hand over power…
• In December, the return of Nicola Bryant to TV will herald outbreaks of world peace…

And finally, I will continue to be nice to everyone…

There’s probably a whole host of other things that I’ve managed to forget… but there's another 12 months to grouse about them.

*That's going to be fun to watch on the search engine results.
**Except those whose analogue signal has been turned off…

War Ensemble

So, as you may remember the other week, Muppet that I am, I managed to fall like a sack of spuds and managed to land on my wrist and give me what was a ‘minor sprain’. Unfortunately I have a high pain threshold (my 'physio' told me that a decade ago- I’ll tell you why some other time) and a relatively weak connexion to the real world so I was left with two choices… ‘A’, I rest the wrist and let it get better or ‘B’, I decide to ignore it and get on with it… well, I asked the audience and they said ‘A’ so I automatically chose ‘B’! Hoorah for sheer unrivalled pig-headed stupidity! After a day of trying to continue as normal I realised that there’s a reason the audience votes for ‘A’. So, having managed to successfully exacerbate the problem for twenty-four hours I decided to settle… now, my wrist is strapped up which at least reminds me that I really have to try and stop using it. It really is hard to avoid using your right hand! By the way, this episode made me realise I have a USP for any future spouse: I’m immune ‘man-ill’! So, if any future spouse can cope with my wonderful ability to get physical injuries that I don’t notice until they’re properly damaged they’ll discover that at least I don’t get ‘man-ill’. While I’ve been trying not to do anything, I really can’t stop my mind mulching thoughts around and I can’t stop scratching little notes on pretty much everything. So, here’s just a simple, easy-to-type, non-contentious thought I had recently before I return to my hibernation…

**********************

I found out a couple of weeks ago that Kenneth Branagh’s new film is a big-screen adaptation of Mozart’s opera Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute). ‘Hoorah!’ I thought, ‘culture for the masses!’. But wait… there’s more! This is Mozart’s The Magic Flute set in the World War I trenches!.

As far I’m concerned it’s not hard:

• Mozart on film: fine…
• Opera on film: fine…
• WWI on film: fine…
• Mozart Opera set in WWI on film… conceptual disaster!

The first problem is that, while Mozart is a great composer*, opera has always had a rough time in translation to the screen. The problems are diverse but the biggest tend to be:

• operas are often very long (Wagner’s Parsifal clocks in at just over 4 hours, Die Meistersinger Von Nürnberg is about half an hour longer and Messiaen’s Saint-François D’Assise is recognized as the longest standard repertoire opera at around 5 hours); ironically, there are some short ones extant because they were commissioned for television or written for audiences of children;
• operas are full of singing (I know it’s obvious) and while people are standing around singing they’re not actually doing very much of anything else like blowing up Mittel-European terrorists, spearing sharks or, often, even moving around very much; effectively operas are visually static and for a medium like film which thrives on visual action this is not a ‘good thing’;
• casting an opera for the theatre is primarily done for vocal considerations rather than acting ability so opera singers are rarely any good at the acting part any way;
• casting operas for the stage still ends up with weaker singers due to the unavailability of the ideal performer for a role- this also happens with the recordings (opera recordings are very expensive and the first recording officially topping one million pounds was Solti’s recording of Richard Strauss’ Die Frau Ohne Schatten for ‘the Opera company’ Decca in the early ’90s. It could be argued that Solti’s recording sessions of Wagner’s Ring Cycle would be more if they were adjusted for inflation.) So, if you can’t assemble the perfect cast for a run at the opera house or the recording sessions why should it be any easier to find a 6 week window for a film?
• operas are frequently unrealistic and fantastical yet somehow get away with it, presumably due to the 'willing suspension of disbelief' that is more easily achieved in a stage setting than in more realistic film- from the destruction of Valhalla in Götterdämmerung to Violetta in La Traviata warbling on over-dramatically for 10 minutes about how she’s dying from consumption when in reality she’d mainly be lying back on the bed coughing up blood while people poked her with sticks from quite a long way away.

Die Zauberflöte is one of the most fantastic and unrealistic of all operas and features a story which nobody has ever quite untangled which goes on about ancient figures from Persian and Egyptian mythology coupled with a narrative primarily revolving around some kind of expression of the various Masonic trials**. I can’t recall ever reading anybody actually having fully deciphered it though some people have suggested that it may well just have been nonsense that Mozart and his librettist, Schikaneder, cooked up as a mickey-take. The opera has a very bizarre complicated story which has much to do with symbolism, mirroring and a symmetry of structuring and characterization.

The First World War, for those who live on Mars or are Rachel and Joey from Friends, was a nasty incident that occurred from 1914 to 1918 and primarily involved aristocrats ordering heavily laden soldiers to walk slowly through thick mud towards heavy machine guns. Less frivolously put, it was horrendous and even ITV’s otherwise excellent My Boy Jack, I suspect, downplayed the truth considerably. The First World War was true horror. On the notorious first day of the Somme some 19,000+ British soldiers were killed in about 12 hours: this works out around one death every two seconds for half a day. These figures don’t even include 38,000+ British casualties; 7,000 French and 10,000 Germans. Is it really appropriate to set a light, essentially frivolous opera amongst this misery and suffering?

The Magic Flute project has apparently cost some £13million (or £27m on The Late Review although I suspect they meant dollars). You can see the trailer on the official site and there gaze in bemused awe at the bizarre nature of it all… nuns dancing in the middle of the battlefield, soldiers tied to burning windmill sails, giant lips, bad CGI… it is actually quite hard to work out where the money went. Lengthier sections were shown on The Late Review complete with a stylized (idealized?) version of the First World War complete with pastel uniforms. Through these excerpts it also seemed to be somewhat kitsch, quite ‘camp’ (for want of a better world) and very ‘eccentrically’ directed with wild camera movements and angles of such a hallucinatory feel as to make Apocalypse Now look sane. To me the key to filmed opera is surely to prevent the audience from thinking that what they’re looking at is of an essentially theatrical or artificial origin, to make the whole thing become so immediately alive and real as to distract from the peculiarity and no matter how light the opera may be it should be made in all seriousness- as they say comedy is a serious business! Consider how many film-makers deal with the fantastic without making the audience step out of the reality of the fantastic: Terry Gilliam, David Cronenberg, Tim Burton, etc. It would be intriguing to see what they might do if filming an opera! More worryingly, from looking at the clips one questions recurs, who is this expensive creation aimed at? People who don’t like opera won’t go; people who do may well be put off. This would make it seem like work done solely for the benefit of a select few (mainly the creators): certainly it’s not an attempt to disseminate culture to the non-opera house masses^. Of course it’s always possible to make strange elements work, Cabaret shouldn’t work and does so amazingly well^^ and if you compare it to the straight dramatic version, I Am A Camera (1955, Henry Cornelius), it’s possible to see how well Cabaret really does work.

The Magic Flute libretto has been re-translated from the German by Stephen Fry so will be nothing less than literate (even if, in my not-so-humble opinion, he did completely miss the point of Vile Bodies- Waugh didn’t like the rich fly-by-night lifestyle and satirized it while Fry seemed enamoured of it and content to lionize it, this may not have been his intention but it’s certainly how it comes across to me) but I fear nothing will save a creation, a Frankenstein’s monster if you will, born of such disparate and jarring elements. The whole conceit of the film seems to be wilful, elitist and borderline offensive.

They’ll be doing musicals of singing nuns and Nazis before long… just you wait and see!

*Mozart worked bloody hard at his work and his scores are over-written with a large number of corrections despite what that Schaffer wrote in Amadeus. Amadeus is a rather good film but it’s so factually inaccurate it might just as well have called the composers Pinky & Perky. To paraphrase ‘Shattered Glass’… ‘is anything accurate here?’ ‘there was a Mozart apparently’.
**For a good starter you could try watching Inspector Morse: The Masonic Mysteries… it’s shown on a TV channel somewhere often enough!

^Which certainly excludes me: the tickets are excruciatingly expensive!
^^One of the best films ever made… see I do actually like some films!

The Facts Of Life

Today you’ll just have to put up with a random unfocused musing. My leg went numb in my sleep and this morning when I was got up I tried to put some weight on it, fell ass-over-tip and, of course, my hand went out to break the fall. Minor wrist sprain, no great shakes... I'm more concerned about the landing on my ribs, given that I broke three of them many years ago since when they've never stopped hurting, particularly when I do that whole breathing in thing... So, what you’re getting is spell-checked but not especially brain-checked! (The bulk of this post was actually written yesterday though- so not much of an excuse really!)

So, on Sunday those good people at the BBC showed the enjoyable comedy How To Murder Your Wife (1965, Richard Quine*)^ starring the ever dependable Jack Lemmon and, surprisingly, Terry-Thomas. The basic story is of Stanley Ford (Jack Lemmon), a newspaper cartoon strip writer-artist who lives a happy well-ordered playboy bachelor life aided by his British manservant and general factotum, Charles (Terry-Thomas). The cartoon strip chronicles the travails of a super-spy named Bash Brannigan. Stanley tests out the basics of his stories for the character in real life before inking them up. Then, after a drunken party Stanley wakes to discover he’s married to the Italian Miss Galaxy contestant who wants to change pretty much everything about his well-ordered life and Charles quits his employ. So, Stanley writes this marriage development into the Brannigan strip (and doubles his audience) but as he vents his (humorous) frustrations through the strip his thoughts turn to murder: he rehearses Brannigan’s wife-killing murder plot in reality (though without wifely participation) then inks it up and publishes. Of course, his wife leaves him and he’s promptly arrested for her murder… the evidence is damning and his confession witnessed by 80 million readers of his syndicated cartoon strip…

Right, so what’s actually happened is a bloke researches and rehearses a plot for a fiction which is then mistaken for reality. A slightly more obscure film, the comedy Please Turn Over (1959, Gerald Thomas), from the writer that brought us the early more gentle black and white Carry On films, Norman Hudis, tells of a small 50’s English village that gets fired up over the publication of steamy novel written by the Headmaster’s over-imaginative teenage daughter who has clearly drawn all the characters from life but precisely none of the situations that she puts them in. Reputations are all in this village and so, for example, the imaginary revelations of womanizing by the local doctor are damaging. But what is so wrong, all this young woman has done is draw her characters from life and that’s what writers are meant to do, isn’t it?

So, here’s where I’m going. Where does fiction end and life begin or, alternatively, where does life end and fiction begin. In doing the research for a project these days you run the risk of breaking the law without knowing it: if you research methods of poisoning or bomb-making you could be unwittingly breaching one of the myriad recent Terrorism Acts. (Fight Club and Spooks both require- and give- information that could be material in the 'preparation of an act of terrorism'.) If you write your murder plot story in the wrong way it may end up looking like you’ve been plotting to kill your nearest and dearest.

For veracity’s sake you should research things but if you draw too shady a character from life you could end up indicting them and end up with both criminal and police on your back. (And how are you really meant to get in touch with these various nefarious characters in the first place?) If you delve too effectively into the underworld you may end up looking like you have been enjoying a bit of a double-life yourself! And if you just ground your characters too closely in people you know you may end up losing all your research subjects!

I’ve realised that the artist, writers in particular, is effectively committing themselves to a lifelong public Rorschach test, exposing their inner self on a regular basis for little remuneration. So, you’re meant to do the research without getting arrested, draw some characters from life without getting a ‘contract’ taken out on you or losing your friends then weld these to some original ideas and characters and situations. No matter how many times I’m told to the contrary I have never believed anything other than that the writer’s personality and stance seep in: they’re cutting their cloth from their imagination they can’t help but add some of themselves. A diamond may no longer be coal but its raw stuff is still carbon; such is the case with the writer. So now, the writer’s trying to avoid arrest, being the subject of a hit and worrying about giving too much away… such as their dark desires to invade Antarctica or ride off into the sunset with Skippy the Bush Kangaroo…

Now, if a writer puts the same characters, themes and situations in repeatedly there must be some reason, from trauma to obsession to deeply held belief, even if this doesn’t manifest itself in the most obvious of manners it will still be there. If you continually show shots of bare feet there may just be something going on; if there’s always a character plummeting from the heights the author may just have vertigo… There was an anecdote on The Culture Show the other week while Cronenberg was discussing his new film Eastern Promises. Cronenberg said that in the early 80’s he was at some event and saw Scorsese across the way. The two men finally spoke to each other and Scorsese confided that he’d been nervous about meeting someone he’d assumed to be disturbing given the nature of his films. Cronenberg thought this was amusing coming from the man who brought us Taxi Driver! But if a Scorsese can make such an assumption what hope for the rest of us…

I’d love to think I can keep myself covered and make sure I give nothing away but I’m sure as my body of specs are (when completed and) read in concentration they’ll give me away with every word on the page!

So to my conclusion… er, you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t! So, I suppose you just have to get on with it and be damnd... or do nothing! I don't know... why you looking at me?

*Script by George Axelrod who also wrote the wonderful Breakfast At Tiffany’s.
^apologies for my continued use of the pro-director, anti-writer format but it’s how I was taught on my aborted Ba. and is the usual way these things are done.

Night Shift

…and so the dread dates have passed, the festivals of larkness and fright, and I ascend once more to my lofty crag, there to stare mournfully into the Heavens…

Actually, I have mixed feelings about Hallowe’en. I like the idea of Hallowe’en far more than the practice. Maybe my feelings are best summed up by the statistics: five years ago Britain spent about £8 million on the festivities; last year it was £100 million. This sheer profligacy tends to irk me to a certain extent. I don’t much like the way that, like virtually everything, it’s been hijacked by the true blood-suckers, the free market capitalists. It seems to have reached the point where nothing is genuinely pure, untainted by the desire to extract the last penny. From love to death, weddings to funerals, nothing is left unexploited.

I have images in my mind of what Hallowe’en should be but the reality always fails to live up to it. I like the idea of Hallowe’en as a breach between our world and the next, a mingling of the Quick and the Dead. I see the Eastern European customs of spending the night in the cemetery commemorating the lives of the departed with food, reflection and celebration and I see a culture more in touch with something deeper. It seems strange that for all the violence in the news and on-screen death has become unmentionable and unthinkable. Personally, I’m not frightened of being dead, merely of the dying.

‘O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!’ For my part in the Hallowe’en revelry I removed the chimes from the doorbell (not that I need worry on my mountain crag… the lengthy climb usually puts off all but the most ardent trick-or-treater) and watched The Blood Spattered Bride (La Novia Ensangrentada) (1972, Vicente Aranda), which has brought my Spanish up to about ten words.

If I’d seen The Blood Spattered Bride earlier I’d have included it on the vampire film list but I hadn’t… so I didn’t. This film caught me by surprise as, while by no means a masterpiece, it was a well-above average genre entry being far more serious-minded than some of the associated lurid artwork. It was made at the same time the Hammer studios productions were starting to wind down, and two years after the studio made their own adaptation (The Vampire Lovers) of the same story, Le Fanu’s Carmilla. The two could not be more different in both execution and outlook. The Spanish production has a contemporary setting, a couple of (comparatively) shocking violent moments and a refreshing lack of obsession with the Lesbian elements (I say this not pejoratively but because other productions have dwelt on these scenes sensationally.) Many of this era’s Euro-horrors tend to portray women as grasping harpies or pathetic victims while their husbands are invariably womanizing sadists; not here, he’s actually a normal human being. And this is possibly where the film really scores, by having genuine sympathetic characters involved in the otherwise strange narrative. The most striking revelation was that the endeavour was interested in a real theme (male fears of female empowerment and female fears of aggressive male sexuality), although I couldn’t quite work out which, if either, side of the fence it chose to fall on. Though the last couple of images give a hint to the makers’ stance. There are some wilfully bizarre decisions including a woman snorkelling under the beach sand and, for no readily apparent reason, they changed Carmilla’s patronymic from Karnstein to Karstein.

I can’t help thinking there is interesting work to be done on Spanish cinema under Franco given what came out during and shortly after the regime: The Spirit Of The Beehive, Cria Cuervos, the Blind Dead series and so on. There’s also probably something to be done with the cultural differences between various different Euro-horrors of the 60’s and early 70’s. Clearly, Italian horror is different from Spanish is different from French is different from British. Of course, it’s probably all been written but I won’t let that stop me from musing.

I hope you liked my rundown of my vampiric treasures. There were a couple of titles I nearly included but didn’t; quickly here’s what and why:

The Mask Of Satan (1960, Mario Bava) a fine looking film and certainly Bava’s best. I probably should have included it!
The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967, Roman Polanski), while there are some marvellous scenes (the vampire ball and the mirrors, the Jewish vampire) for a spoof it is not nearly funny enough (especially when compared with Young Frankenstein) and it’s also quite slow and overlong.
Martin (1978, George A. Romero), perhaps, along with Season Of The Witch, Romero’s least typical film. (The Crazies is more or less Night Of The Living Dead with a different MacGuffin.)
Nosferatu, The Vampyre (1979, Werner Herzog), a fine film yet surely rendered superfluous by the original. However, the line of coffins being carried through the town has a power all its own, Isabelle Adjani is striking and the score has some great moments, the most unsettling and greatest being the choral piece borrowed for Kate Bush’s amazing Hello Earth (buy it!).
Nightwatch (2004, Timur Bekmambetov), this is a great fun film and a lot of care has been taken to fill it with novel touches- even the subtitles are interestingly done- but there seems something missing.

Then there’s the fun Razor Blade Smile (1998, Jake West); the fascinating Wisdom Of Crocodiles (1998, Po Chih Leong); the strange Australian Thirst (1979, Rod Hardy); the lovably daft Love At First Bite (1979, Stan Dragoti); Kiss Of The Vampire (1964, Don Sharp) and Queen Of The Damned (2002, Michael Rymer), which is just a guilty pleasure…

Of course, all this fangtastic vamping around (*feel free to groan*) has made my mind wander back to the vampire films I’d like to write. This is a very bad thing. I’ve thought on the one many times before and it always defeats me. It’s probably a novel rather than a film and yet the images that come to me seem so rooted in the cinema. I have vast quantities of notes, more ideas than a single film could support and yet at heart there is a giant problem… I can’t decide on the focus of the story. Do I go with the main character’s past or stick to their present? Do I risk comparisons with Blade or Interview With The Vampire? In my head it works, but on paper it would only ever be like Ives’ Universe Symphony*, a monumental conception probably never intended to be performed. It looks absolutely beautiful in my head but it doesn’t really make up for a lack of a coherent plot.

“O friends, no more of these sounds!
Let us sing more cheerful songs, more full of joy!”

-Friedrich von Schiller

*The Universe Symphony was intended to be played by three full orchestras each on top of a hill or mountain top and augmented by steeple bells. There is now a recording available but it was recorded in the same manner as Stockhausen’s Grüppen. Grüppen was supposedly ground-breaking with its three orchestra line-up but was predated by Ives’ nigh-on unperformable work by some 30-40 years.

Bela Lugosi's Dead

So, it’s another Hallowe’en; the one night in the year when the shackles can be shaken off and children can use threats of violence to get free stuff and adults can use somewhat ‘unusual’ ingredients in confectionary. In honour of this auspicious date I thought I’d share, and praise, some of my favourite vampire films. Some lauded, some derided; some good, some… not so good.

Nosferatu (1922, F.W. Murnau)
The father of a race of monsters, to purloin a phrase. Although there are references to a Roumanian film named Drakula from a year earlier this ‘lost’ film is apparently a biopic of the original Vlad. So Nosferatu is arguably the first vampire film. Illegally produced, we’re lucky to have this expressionist masterpiece. Refulgent with evil, disease and decay, 85 years old and still magisterially above all that came after. One tomb rose larger and more lordly than the rest and on it but one word, Nosferatu.

Vampyr (1931, Carl T. Dreyer)
Dreyer is now mainly praised for his later (and earlier) weightier films and Vampyr would appear to be an oddity in his canon. It is a genuinely odd experience. It’s supposedly a ‘talkie’ but the dialogue is so sparse as to make that a misnomer. I would argue it is the final European Expressionist horror, at the border with the American Universal horrors. It’s almost plotless, dreamy, almost hypnotic. The hero’s waking interment is perhaps the most notable moment. The curious pervasive bleached out effect was caused by the brief and deliberate opening of the film cans to the light after shooting.

Dracula (1931, George Melford)
Forget poor old Bela a while and track down a copy of this. During the silent era films could be exported round the world with only the inter-titles needing to be changed but as sound came the studios were posed a problem of exportability. The answer initially for companies like Universal was to make their films again in Spanish for the South American market. These versions were filmed using the same sets and often the same storyboards but they had one startling difference: they were exempted the strictures of the Hays Code. While Browning’s version is ponderously directed, restrained, rather slow and bound to the stage version and therefore stagy, this Spanish language version has a more spooky atmosphere, better acting, a looser feel (it’s half an hour longer), an eroticism entirely absent from the Lugosi version, heaving bosoms and an expanded climax (Lugosi’s demise is entirely off-screen and denies the audience resolution). The minor flaw is that this Dracula is only marginally better acted than Lugosi’s.

The Isle Of The Dead (1944, Mark Robson)
This is praised here. I suspect this is the best vampire film from the 40’s. By the time Lewton came along Universal were reaching the bottom of the barrel, packaging and repackaging their classic creatures in increasingly desperate ways. This was something else, something different, and it had Karloff.

Dracula (a.k.a. Horror Of Dracula) (1958, Terence Fisher)
One of the big ones and an obvious choice. Never mind that about the only thing it kept from the novel was the title, this is a good film of the old man. It’s well cast, well made, makes good use of this new-fangled colour thing and Christopher Lee surely makes one of the most imposing presences as Dracula. 1966’s Dracula, Prince Of Darkness is maybe, marginally, the better film with it’s widescreen and bolder conception but this has a much better ending… which harks back to the original Nosferatu.

The Hunger (1983, Tony Scott)
Alright, it’s more flash than real substance but is that a major problem? This has several of the same themes as brother Ridley’s contemporaneous Blade Runner: mortality, passage of time and memory, etc. This also seems to prefigure Anne Rice’s Queen Of The Damned. On top of this there’s the luminous Catherine Deneuve and a great piece of Schubert. Recent pictures of Deneuve would seem to indicate that she’s as ageless and timeless as her character here.

Hellraiser (1987, Clive Barker)
Hellraiser? A vampire film? The bad guy’s a dead man revivified with blood who then gains strength through drinking blood from the necks of his victim. This is one of the few modern horrors to actually take itself and the genre seriously: cinematic, intelligent and generally well-acted. The score is a marvellous work in itself. All of this is carried over into the sequel, which has better acting by the presence of Kenneth Cranham. Personally, I think there are unconscious references to Dracula, Prince Of Darkness even though Barker asserts that he doesn’t much care for the Hammer Draculas.

Near Dark (1987, Kathryn Bigelow)
Vampirism brought kicking and screaming into the modern age in a way that Dracula A.D. 1972 could only have dreamed about. This has a genuinely grimy edge of society outcast feel that is impossible when the bloodsucker is in a tuxedo. These are vampires that exude a sense of threat reinforced by the fact that it could be the guy next to you in the bus station.

Nightlife (1989, Daniel Taplitz)
A strange sad comedy-horror. It’s set in Mexico City which lends a new angle to the proceedings. The story is a love triangle: evil vampire and young doctor in love with the same vampiric Maryam d’Abo. Strangely, it’s quite melancholy for an ostensibly light comedy.

Sundown, The Vampire In Retreat (1990, Anthony Hickox)
Vampire comedy with everything thrown into the mix from mad scientists to cowboys. This is great fun. I initially watched this trepidation expecting something stupid but passable… then all of a sudden it’s excellent, smart, scary and funny. And it’s full of people that make you say ‘that’s what’s-his-name… you know…’

Tale Of A Vampire (1992, Shimako Sato)
An unfairly maligned, deeply flawed film. Deeply romantic, deeply melancholy. Virtually a three-hander from Kenneth Cranham, Julian Sands and Suzanna Hamilton. It’s a little slow, a little dreamy and very good-looking. It’s not a perfect film by a long distance but it has a certain something; a spot of imagination that is lacking in many films with many times the budget. And what happened to director? He apparently returned to Japan to continue making films.

Nadja (1994, Michael Almereyda)
A playful yet serious film, seemingly a deliberate return to the atmosphere of Vampyr with a plot liberated from Lambert Hillyer’s 1936 Dracula’s Daughter. This is from the days of American Indie cinema when there was genuine variety. Quirkily cast with memorable turns from Elina Löwensohn in a role she seems to have been destined to play as Dracula’s Daughter and Peter Fonda as a Van Helsing only eclipsed in eccentricity by Hopkins for Coppola. The chiaroscuro photography is radiant with a nifty trick of becoming ‘pixelvision’ for the vampire’s p.o.v. as filmed with a toy camera.

Interview With The Vampire (1994, Neil Jordan)
A fine version of Anne Rice’s only genuinely readable ‘Chronicle’. The tale of a strange and dysfunctional vampire family this film shouldn’t work: while the costumes and design are as sumptuous as would be expected and the direction is great, it does have Tom Cruise, a story told entirely in flashback narrated by a main character who’s clearly still ‘alive’ and a strangely enervated performance from Pitt. Strangely all the script drafts pre-release solely have Jordan’s name as writer by the time the film was released the sole writer was Rice. There seem to be few differences between the early scripts and the film. Quite odd.

Blade (1998, Stephen Norrington)
Portentous and groaning under the weight of it’s own seriousness it’s still a thoroughly enjoyable and very stylish action-horror-thriller. Del Toro’s sequel is interesting; Goyer’s isn’t.

Dracula- Pages From A Virgin’s Diary (2003, Guy Maddin)
Dracula the ballet. This is a wonderful dreamlike, mist-enshrouded film. Maddin is clearly indebted to expressionism and the black and white is only broken by the addition of vivid blood red. The music’s Mahler. That should have been enough to get it on the list.

Shadow Of The Vampire (2000, Elias Merhige)
How can you not love a film that has the central conceit that Murnau’s Nosferatu wasn’t fiction? This is more than just an interesting concept: this is a film about film. This is about the artist, about what or who they are prepared to sacrifice for the sake of their vision. Dafoe’s performance as Nosferatu is superb as is the make-up that renders him nigh-on unrecognizable. And that brings us neatly back to where we came in. Aren’t the cycles of life wonderful?

And that’s that. So, have a happy Hallowe’en and, should you observe such things, a contemplative, commemorative and comforting All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days. And the sun arose once more, shining its light and life across the land...

Isle Of The Dead

As I've been neglecting you recently I thought I'd just share something with you... because I like it. And because I care.

This is the Isle Of The Dead (1880) by Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin. It's been the inspiration for numerous painters, novelists, composers and film-makers. Those that stand out, for me, are Rakhmaninov's tone poem of the same name, H.R. Giger's Homage series* and, of course, the eponymous 1944 film.

The Isle Of The Dead (1944, Mark Robson) is a sadly neglected and under-rated minor masterpiece from Val Lewton's famous RKO unit. This genuinely spooky chiller starred the inimitable Boris Karloff as a hardened Greek Officer of the First Balkan War quarantined on the titular island with a mixed ensemble as a plague stalks them... the plague of the vorvolaka, vampirism. The basic material could have inspired a mediocre or melodramatic slice of hokum but in the hands of the Lewton team it becomes so much more than its inauspicious premise. While it could be considered a horror, the atmosphere conjured is something entirely different to the standard; dreamlike, almost ethereal, it conjures the feel of such horror aberrations as White Zombie (1932, Victor Halperin), Vampyr (1932, Carl T. Dreyer) or Lewton's own production I Walked With A Zombie (1943, Jacques Tourneur). Some 20 years later Karloff seemed to retread this territory for his segment ('The Wurdalak') of Mario Bava's unrecognizedly influential Black Sabbath (1963).

*I don't think it would be too great a stretch to see the influence of this painting on Giger's design of the derelict spacecraft in Alien.

A Life Less Ordinary?

According to an article on IMDB Tim Burton has just been honoured with a lifetime achievement award at the Venice Film Festival this year as "one of America's bravest, most visionary and innovative filmmakers". Their choice, of course, but…

…while I love Burton’s films as much as the next-potential-outsider-on-the-street there are a couple of flaws:

• Burton has directed 12 features in 22 years which can’t really be considered a huge canon (still trumps our very own Ridley Scott: 16 in 30 years),
• the canon, while excellent, does not show a huge variety- all wonderfully Gothic, stylish, sympathetic to the outsider, etc.- but not something for all tastes yet,
• he now lives and works in Britain and has for quite some time,
• but above all, Tim Burton is only 49! This is a lifetime achievement award? Do they know something we don’t? Do they decide these things, not based on work, but from spirit consultations? Has Burton himself worked out the horrifying implications?

So, there you go… Tim Burton gets an award for being good (which he is) but also for living his lifetime (which is hopefully nowhere near done yet).

Just to make this clear: I love Tim Burton films, might even love Tim Burton (but I’ve not met him so wouldn’t know) but I’m thoroughly baffled as to what exactly constitutes a lifetime these days. This gives most of the scribosphere 10-15 years before our lives can be officially classed as either over or a failure. Whichever’s worse. And before complacency sets in... you may think you've got 15 years to achieve in but they’re handing these things out younger and younger.

Next month’s lifetime achievement goes to Haley Joel Osment.

*Peter O’Toole, of course, didn’t get his lifetime until he was 71. So we’ll swiftly ignore that.

Shock Of Point 6*

******Here be spoilers******

for The Piano, The Fencing Master and possibly The Official Version, Hellraiser, Odishon, The English Patient and The Big Heat (depending upon your definitions)

I watched Fritz Lang's 1953 movie The Big Heat again the other night. Fritz Lang's style has always struck me as a touch cumbersome but he is how he is and the films are still better than being pegged out on a rock for vultures to peck at. The Big Heat is arguably from the last wave of the film noir cycle and can be safely described as 'hard-boiled'. It's not quite at that point which came soon after where not only were the crooks are bad, the system corrupt and all the good guys were just a lighter shade of pitch black but it was on its way there. Glenn Ford's cop here may have been pushed to the limit and started to use 'questionable' means but he's not that self-same hair's breadth away from the bad guy that comes in a film like Kiss Me Deadly. As the one character says to Ford on his insistence that he could have killed a corrupted widow, "I don't believe you could, if you had there wouldn't be much difference between you and Vince Stone (the hood)." But such rhapsodizing is merely a digression and padding to an otherwise rather short posting....

The Big Heat was notable for a new zenith cum nadir in the field of shocking Screen Violence. A rather young Lee Marvin throws a pot of boiling coffee into Gloria Grahame's face (done off screen) and I noticed it still has an ouch factor. (There's also a shocking car-bombing which everybody forgets but must have his the period audience... I can't think of an earlier one.) This coffee incident got me to be thinking of what makes a moment of shocking screen violence. I've seen Jason stab, Freddy slice and Pinhead dice; I've seen anonymous hordes shot and thumped and batted less than an eyelid but some moments always stick out. They have that bit that makes you go 'Mary, Mother of God, what the...!'

I think there are some key factors to these really shocking moments (list time!):

• they come in films which you do not expect to be violent and look even less likely to be... imagine if you will what it would have been like to see the finale of A Room With A View with a hint of Se7en,
• they need to involve appendages (preferably) that are held in deep affection by the general public- something to empathize with, something that you may have imagined losing,
• they need to involve an implement that you use regularly, may use regularly or have seen used at close hand and therefore may have had paranoid fantasies about the disasters misuse or fate may bring... chainsaws still count higher than hand gun,
• this implement needs to be something that would make your fantasy 'hideous accident' overly messy and preferably red-sticky-wet,
• the incident itself should barely be shown- as various members of my family have put it- the pictures are better on radio... the imagination is a powerful tool sometimes it's better to use (and get a more audience friendly 15 cert.)
• they need to involve a character that has a name and has some kind of connexion to the audience.

I'm sure there's a couple more reasons but those are the big ones that struck me. So, where can we find such hideousness? Here's the incidents that are quite high up my list and in no particular order.

1. The Piano: Holly Hunter's meeting with an axe,
2. The English Patient: Willem Dafoe's date with some nasty Nazis,
3. The Fencing Master: Assumpta Serna's date with Destiny,
4. The Official Version: involves a door... and most of us will have come close to doing it ourselves,
5. Hellraiser: doesn't involve fish-hooks or the like but does involve a sticking out nail and a hand...
6. Odishon: the whole end section rather comes out of, not so much left-field but, an entirely contiguous field altogether!

I know there's a couple that I can't remember right now but there you go... distance over time equals forgetfulness... possibly.

The lesson for today is: if you want to make an audience squirm, badly hurt a character that they know with an everyday object that they have used. Then light it nicely and put everybody in period costumes! So, we're looking at Merchant-Ivory's Helena Bonham Carter in the Edwardian conservatory with Professor Plum and a chainsaw....

*Shock Of Point 6 is a track by My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult and is quite good. Best title I could come up with at short notice.