Freeze In Hell, Batman- Why The Snow Leaves Me Cold

Oh, the weather outside is frightful, but the fire is so delightful. And since we've no place to go- fuck off, snow! Today is the day where snow becomes acceptable for 25 days, and just those 25 days, each year. If you've been following the Annual Snowpocalypse news coverage in the UK, you'll notice that the cold snap started in the dying days of November.

This, to me, constitutes Not Christmas Snow. It's not in December, so it's not acceptable. Moreover, it gets me thinking about snow scenes in films that aren't set at Christmas. Particularly this last Sunday, where I had to stay in and work all day, struggling to motivate myself to write as everybody else in the house drove me nuts. It's as close to being Jack Torrance as I ever want to get. Here are a few reasons why Not Christmas Snow leaves me cold...

THE SHINING

Why? Author Jack Torrance uproots his family to take a caretaking job in the Overlook Hotel for the winter. There, they spend many happy hours and no one goes crazy. Nah, sorry, that's an awful lie. Someone's about to have a mental breakdown...
Let It Snow? Snow almost gets little Danny Torrance killed, showing up his footprints as he runs into the labyrinthine hedge maze in the hotel grounds. It also makes the whole film look very stark and clinical, even if it does lead to one of cinema's more lauded freeze-frame endings...

THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

Why? There Luke goes on the snowy planet Hoth, minding his own sweet business, when he gets knocked the fuck out by a Wampa. Then once he escapes, he's shoved inside an alien snow camel's inside by Han Solo, whose sleeping bags were never pleasant. And then giant robot camels kill several of his friends. Argh!
Let It Snow? Fuck no! See what happens when there's snow? You get kidnapped (and possibly raped) by abominable snowmen! Camel variants bring about all kinds of misdemeanours! And then Darth Vader turns up! Why are you all out sledging?!

On a more serious note, Irvin Kershner, this film's director, died on Monday aged 87. R.I.P.

SUPERMAN II

Why? Cementing 1980 as the year of Evil Snow at the cinema, Supes takes Lois Lane to his home away from home in the Fortress of Solitude for a romantic getaway. There he decides to be all about the ladies from then on, and gives up his powers. Little does he realise that the awesomeness of General Zod is tearing up the planet in his absence.
Let It Snow? It looks nice and all, but it can't be great for the depowered Kal-El, now merely Clark Kent, as he trudges along trying to hitch a ride back to the Fortress he just abandoned in order to get his powers back. Actually, where is that bloody Fortress? Lex Luthor says it's in the Arctic, but Clark can somehow hitchhike back. It has to be in Alaska or Canada, right? I like to think it's the latter, because it makes sense that Superman would get away from upholding the American way and all that shite by relaxing in Canada. Only reason why he would go where there's snow.

THE THING

Why? Antarctica is pretty remote, and John Carpenter's film is the main reason I'm never going out there. Well, one of the main reasons, but there's still plenty to be frightened of in a featureless landscape like the very very very deep South. Namely, a shapeshifting alien that can't even be distinguished for its resemblance to a camel.
Let It Snow? The snow is arguably the least of MacReady and company's problems in this film, but it can't help, can it? The ice preserved the alien til the Norwegians excavated it though, and in ten months' time, we can watch those guys make the mistake of poking around in the snow with the prequel that tells their story.

BATMAN & ROBIN

Why? Arnold Schwarzenegger's Mr. Freeze is one of the principal villains in what many accept to be the worst Batman film ever made. There are those who argue that Batman Forever is worse, but these are exactly the kind of fucking jolly people you'll see out making snowmen, having snowball fights, eating snow and making sweet love to snow. Dickheads.
Let It Snow? It all depends on Arnold. He seems to make far fewer puns about temperature once he has Gotham City enshrined in frost and rubber icicles, so maybe if we let it carry on, he'll stop making my head hurt with lines like "Freeze in hell, Batman!"

LET THE RIGHT ONE IN

Why? Oskar and Eli's friendship blooms from the frosty Sweden suburbia, a relationship that becomes more apparently hideous as the film goes on. The recent remake also looked like the most fucked-up Christmas card ever.
Let It Snow? Yeah, in this case. I think Let The Right One In is incredible, and the snow is a big part of that- there's nothing that makes blood look more striking by contrast. The only real argument I'd make against it is that Lina Leandersson and Chloe Moretz would both be more likely to keep their bare feet warm. Both seemed reasonably happy to suffer for their art though, so frostbite all around!

And this brief list is to say nothing of Fargo, which has the real-life tragedy of Takako Konishi to make it extra unappealing. Or Groundhog Day, where Bill Murray relived the same freezing cold day over and over until he was a better man. Or Frozen, which I was supposed to have seen by now to review for today. Or Alien vs. Predator, which was shite.

Heed the lesson cinema offers us, kids! Don't go playing in the snow!

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, watch out for camel variants!

Sweded- LET ME IN Review

Took me a whole hour to come up with that pun! Awesome, isn't it? You see, on many levels, that's what Let Me In is. It's a Be Kind Rewind rendition of the much acclaimed Swedish vampire film, Let The Right One In, on a bigger budget. As remakes go, it's playing it safer than any of them in recent memory, perhaps since Gus Van Sant's Psycho, to which the only notable addition was a scene with Vince Vaughn masturbating. But I digress.

The story is the same, but with the characters' names changed to protect the identity of the original film. In New Mexico in the 1980s, Owen is a 12 year old boy who's being tormented by his classmates. Stuck in a state of inaction and terror, he's galvanised slightly by the arrival of Abby, a girl who moves in next door. Abby helps Owen to stand up for himself while at the same time revealing part of her terrible secret- ABBY'S A VAMPIRE! EVERYBODY COME AND SEE THIS VAMPIRE FILM!

How far into Let The Right One In did we get before it became clear that Eli was an immortal bloodsucker? Let Me In's biggest change to the source is to trumpet Abby's true nature from very early on. The original defies classification even once you know it's a vampire film- it's not a horror film just because it contains vampires. In a weird way, it's a romance, but not in the way of Twilight or all the other vampire romances that have sprung up. The ambiguity of intent was bound to be lost in translation.

The thing is, Let Me In isn't a bad film. It's only bad insofar as that it's a carbon copy of a film whose only problem, to the mainstream audience, was the fact that it wasn't in English. When you copy a film as good as Let The Right One In as closely as Let Me In does, there's no way you can fail. It occasionally puts a foot wrong, as in the unnecessary throw-forward that opens the film, but it's largely very faithful. Even in the transfer to America, all the locations look uncannily similar to those of the Swedish film.

I like Matt Reeves as a director, and I like both of his films to date, but I want him to do something new. Cloverfield was a film very much led by its concept, and restricted by what you can do in a found-footage film, and now he's made a note-for-note remake. The only major change he makes is in the scene where the Håkan substitute, credited here as The Father and played excellently by Richard Jenkins, makes a potentially fatal mistake. It takes the pedestrian scene from the original and transforms it into an excellently shot sequence that's loaded with tension- it's one of the highlights of the remake.

After this small degree of improvement, Reeves returns to the script for the original film, which is replicated almost exactly. If the whole film had been as bold as that scene in the car, it might have been different. It might not have exceeded Let The Right One In, but then neither does the film we got. At least it would have been more distinctive.The effect is that an otherwise excellent film becomes an advert for the original Swedish language version, purely because it's so reverent to what came before.

The other distinguishing marks on Let Me In are made by the actors. Kodi Smit-McPhee is the weak link, as he was in The Road earlier this year. I've yet to be convinced of his talents, having winced "Papa" at Viggo Mortensen previously, and here being out-classed by everyone else with his wimpier-than-wimpy spin on Owen. In vast contrast, I'm actually weighing up whether or not I prefer Chloe Moretz's performance as Abby in this to Lina Leandersson's as Eli in the original film. Moretz has a hell of a career ahead of her.

I saw Let Me In in advance of its release, and if you've seen Let The Right One In, then so have you. It's almost exactly the same length as its predecessor, so safe is the adaptation. It's undoubtedly a good film, with an astonishing performance from Chloe Moretz and the added value of Reeves' directorial choices flourishing through the colour-graded fug of an otherwise unnecessary remake.

The price of admission in cinemas will be close to the price of the DVD of Let The Right One In- if you haven't seen the original, then you make your choice. As much as I like Let Me In, it's films like this that make me dread the prospect of an English-language remake every time I see a foreign film. It's a good film, but its baggage overpowered it for me.

Let Me In is now showing in selected cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen Let Me In, why not share your comments below? If you're unsure of whether or not this is a recommendation, then believe me, so am I. See it if you don't like subtitles, I guess. Your being wrong about subtitles is something we'll debate later on...

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

Cos you're gonna see it on every cinema trip anyway...

Yeah, it's another one of those ads! I don't think you can beat last year's Autumn compilation (I think that young man ATE it all, bless him), but I do believe it's worth mentioning.

Why? Because summer's more or less over. The nights are drawing in, sunsets will arrive around 3pm and movie buffs will begin talking about which of their favourite films of the year will be entirely ignored during awards season.

It also falls to me and my ilk to declare which films we're most looking forward to for the rest of the year, so with that in mind, this post is going to be all about the five films I'm most looking forward to seeing in cinemas this autumn. On the evidence of that trailer, one of the highlights is going to be a re-release of a 25-year-old film, but I suppose that's because it's Certifiably Awesome.

But skirting around Jack Black raping literature, babies projectile vomiting on Ben Stiller for recycling the same joke for a whole movie (again) and Jackass 3D, here are some of the gems in that trailer I'm most looking forward to in what remains of 2010.

THE SOCIAL NETWORK


Whozat? It's "That Facebook Movie", and I was highly sceptical that it would be any good until I saw the trailer embedded above.

Why? Aside from Jesse Eisenberg continuing to set himself apart from his similarity to Michael Cera, it'll be the first big acting showcase from both the new Spider-Man, Andrew Garfield, and Rooney Mara, the new Lisbeth Salander. David Fincher's directing, and with the early reviews and previews, I'm hoping for a critique on a generation, closer to Fight Club than to The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

Expect... a metric fuck-ton of "like" and "poke" wordplay from reviews across the board.

DESPICABLE ME


Whozat? Like Megamind, the other big CG-offering in that trailer, it's a film told from a supervillain's perspective- in this case, one who plots to steal the Moon with the help of a bunch of chattering yellow midgets he's created to serve him.

Why? Unlike Megamind, it looks kooky and different enough to have piqued my interest. It also got rave reviews when it came out Stateside earlier in the summer, and has the voice talents of Steve Carell, Jason Segel and Russell Brand behind it, to name a few.

Expect... something along the lines of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, would be the best case scenario. Worst case scenario... well, Megamind.

RED


Whozat? Based on the DC graphic novel, it's about a band of retired CIA assassins who club together when one of them comes under fire from their old employers. Carnage ensues, and Helen Mirren takes control of a gun turret. That never happened in The Queen.

Why? I've seen that trailer many times in the cinema and I'm always happy to see it. After the embarrassment of Jonah Hex the other week, it's nice to see John Malkovich actually having fun instead of slumming it to pick up a cheque.

Expect... the Academy to be intensely confused that a film they'd consider so low-brow features so many of their favourite people. Maybe it's hoping for too much that the stalwarts here would get acting nods at the Oscars.

LET ME IN


Whozat? The English language remake of Let The Right One In. No, no, no, hold on. It actually looks quite good if you give that trailer a watch. The basic story is more or less the same- a young lad who's victimised by bullies in his school finds a way to fight back when he befriends the vampire girl who moves in next door. 

Why? With the talent involved, I'm being open-minded. Even though it looks like they're playing up the horror angle (something that's largely absent in the original film) the director seems to have the utmost respect for the sources, and he's assembled a great cast too.

Expect... criticis to close their minds entirely and lambast it no matter what. They're so convinced the original is perfect that it'll be like having a one night stand with someone who looks exactly the same as your long time partner. But hey, I might like it!

HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS (Part One)


Whozat? Are you kidding? The only thing I should really need to explain at this stage is how they're splitting the original book into two films to make more money to give the finale room to breathe. It's a move I'm not entirely convinced by, especially as most of the stuff in the trailer above will be from Part 2.

Why? It's the end of a massive cinematic undertaking, or at least the beginning of the end. Under director David Yates, the films are the best they've ever been, with the exception of the series benchmark, Prisoner of Azkaban. This time around, Yates is taking the fairly pedestrian opening of the book and turning it into a paranoid road movie with our three heroes against the world, and even turning on each other...

Expect... half a film. If it exceeds my expectations, I won't come out of it thinking "well I have to wait until summer for all the good parts", but for now I'm keeping my hopes down. Oh, and make sure you don't give any money to the shitty 3D conversion, which is going to hurt how this film is received, in my opinion. Maybe they'll change their mind about the stereoscopy in Part 2.
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All of this without mentioning the myriad 2010 features that don't appear in the uber-condensed trail for the season, but somehow I'm still looking forward to them. Amongst those, Burke and Hare, Monsters, Buried and Jackboots on Whitehall.

Hey, the alternative today was to write a review of Cyrus. You want that? I didn't review it because there's not an awful lot to say about it. That's because it's not about much. It's been misleadingly advertised to people who like actual narrative events. The cast do a fine job, but it ultimately fails to take mumblecore into the mainstream. There, mini-review.

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

Vampires- Why Do They Suck Lately?

Let's for the sake of an intro assume that you have never heard of a vampire. A vampire is an undead being who survives by drinking the blood of the living. They're imbued with natural charm and good looks so as to lure in their victims, they're generally pale and have sharp fangs. Vulnerable to religiously symbolic items, sunlight, stakes through the heart, and for some reason, garlic.

Apparently, the most elaborate way of identifying them in the olden days was by sending a virgin boy riding on a virgin horse through a graveyard and watch the horse throw up when it trots by the grave. Not a genius ritual, and given the mess of horse vomit to clean up thereafter, I'd suggest looking for the other symptoms I listed instead. The modern vampire myth was born generally of Bram Stoker's 1897 novel, Dracula, and there have been countless films, television series and books featuring these creatures of the night ever since.

HOW CAN YOU GO WRONG WITH A PREMISE LIKE THAT?!

I'll tell you how! By generally beating the shit out of the idea over the course of so many years that vampires just aren't cool anymore. Most of these producers that claim to have a visionary new outlook on the vampire myth are talking out of their arse. What's prompted this rant is the particularly frequent shitting upon the idea from a great height recently, and also the over-powering urge to have a rant about one of the biggest afflictions upon teenage culture in the 21st century.

Yes, of course, I refer to Twilight. Or The Twilight Saga, as the probably-not-very-popular-when-she-was-at-high-school Stephanie Meyer and the profiteering Summit Entertainment would have it. Again, for those unfamiliar, here is Bullshit 101. Twilight is the story of a vampire's relationship with a human girl in a small town in America. Said vampire, Edward Cullen, is... well, he's supposed to be a perfect character. Converted at the age of 17, he's going through high school over and over again for no real reason other than to be admired by the female populace from afar, given how he's decided to abstain from drinking human blood. The latter is used as a metaphor for sexual abstinence, which brings some tension to the relationship he starts with Bella Swan (the biggest Mary-Sue in recorded history), who has all the charisma and sympathy value of a baked potato.

There have been four books to date, the first of which, if the film is anything to go by, centres largely around Edward and Bella getting together. Indeed, besides a few mentions of how repressed and lonely Edward's been until he decided he liked the smell of Bella, (not a joke, this is really why he likes her) they don't really play on the vampire angle until the end of the film when some obligatory baddies come in, apparently from nowhere. And teenage girls love this shit. They lap it up.

So yeah, that's a quick summation of my thoughts on the story and general approach, but let's have a look at how Stephanie Meyer has fucked up vampires. First and foremost, vampires stay out of the sunlight for a different reason in this story. Rather than being scorched alive because the sun is emblematic of holiness or whatever, a scene midway through Twilight reveals that the skin of vampires apparently sparkles when exposed to sunlight. Wait, WHAT? That's the lamest thing I've ever heard, and I've heard some DOOZIES in my time. Secondly, Edward is apparently more human on the virtue of his being a "vegetarian". Oh, he and his family still drink blood, but only from animals. Sorry, but that still makes you an undead parasite. Very anthropocentric- I'm at least reassured that the "I'm a vegan and if you're ok with that, I'll argue with you anyway" caste of teenage girls probably don't like that about this series, even though they seem to make up the target audience.

Finally, with Bella being as apparently perfect as Edward- see how she's instantly loved by everyone at her new school, contravening every social convention in existence- I'm still halfway convinced that vampires were just shoehorned into Meyer's masturbatory sub-Mills and Boon story just to make it interesting. Instead, it just made vampires boring. The success of Twilight means it's likely we'll see vampires being characterised the same in future films, because it's a formula that's proven to make big bucks at the box office. And sadly the sequel is due in November this year, and the third in July 2010, having hastily had a "The Twilight Saga" label slapped on as a prefix to their titles to cash in. The cash cow will hopefully be put down in a few years, or perhaps "sucked dry" would be a more appropriate metaphor, because this series does suck.

As much as I've laboured to make a point about the contradictory nature of Edward as a vampire who doesn't feast on humans, it brings me nicely to Being Human, an absolutely brilliant series aired by BBC Three earlier this year about the lives of three housemates in Bristol- a werewolf who's actually quite nerdy and mild-mannered for 27 days of the month, a ghost who's pining after her still-living fiancee and perhaps most importantly to this post, a vampire who's abstaining from blood-drinking. All blood-drinking.

Yes, it wears him down to the level where he's perhaps not as able to do all the usual things that come with super-vampire powers, but he's fine with that. And more importantly, the show always portrays vampires, even our protagonist Mitchell, as parasites. Although Mitchell is possessed of the natural charm and good looks that enable vampires to capture their prey, the weaning off blood is very much a parallel with trying to get off drugs. It's odd how Mitchell's sex life being strangulated due to his fear of relapsing is a far more accurate representation of how a teenager would feel about such abstinence than Edward Cullen is, given how the latter is in fact, teenaged.

Elsewhere, the head of the vampires is Herrick, a pudgy-looking and, on the surface, quite friendly police officer. The first episode finds him doing magic tricks for elderly hospital patients, of all things. But underneath all that, he has that really creepy lord of all darkness thing going on. It's a wonderful use of the mundane being made scary, and that's what makes Herrick so effective as a character- the contrast between someone like that being head vampire, and between someone like Bill Nighy's Victor in the Underworld films. The first series' arc saw Herrick co-ordinating a world vampire revolution, from Bristol of all places, and trying to bring Mitchell back over to the side he's been on for about 90 years. Herrick makes one of the most menacing and brilliant villains on telly in a long time, and he dominates every scene he's in.

I do feel bad for covering Being Human in an blog about vampires because it means I'm naturally going to neglect the representation of werewolves and ghosts, both of which are also done splendidly by writer Toby Whithouse. But if you feel I haven't quite explained what's so good about it, just go and watch it on DVD or Blu-ray! Thank me later! The series is one I would recommend to absolutely any vampire fan seeking an antidote to Twilight, but just to sweeten the deal, there's one other recent film I saw after I had the idea for this blog, but a film that is absolutely essential to mention now that I have seen it.

I refer of course to the Swedish vampire film, Låt den rätte komma in (Let the Right One In). You can forget your Twilight, your Underworld and your Count von Count. This film has one of the best screen vampires I've ever seen and she's a twelve year old girl. This is Eli, the new next door neighbour of a bullied and subdued young boy called Oskar. He's oddly enamoured of this peculiar young girl who he only sees at night, in the play area outside their housing estate, and it's through her that he finds revenge on his tormentors. Behind closed doors however, Håkan, the man who everyone believes to be Eli's father, is actually her very own Renfield- he protects Eli's secret by going out and murdering young men. Draining them of their blood for Eli to drink, he facilitates her survival out of utter devotion to her.

THE NEXT PARAGRAPH FEATURES MAJOR SPOILERS FOR LET THE RIGHT ONE IN.

What makes Eli so creepy is not the transformation of the mundane into something more sinister a la Herrick in Being Human, but something far more subliminal. Håkan botches one attempt to gather blood for Eli near the start of the film, and in her subsequent hunger, she goes out hunting herself and kills a local man. Håkan is both worried that she'll be caught and jealous of her burgeoning friendship with Oskar, and so tries again. This time, he's caught in the act, but pours acid on his face- he can't be identified, and thus Eli stays safe.

The most chilling scene of the film soon follows, as Eli scales the wall of the hospital that Håkan is taken to, and he opens the window to let her drink him dry. She then lets him fall to his death, and never so much as mentions him again. What's disturbing is that while the very end of the film has a positive spin, with Oskar and Eli on a train, living free and together, the audience may find it difficult to shake the feeling that Håkan was once like Oskar, aging while the object of his devotion remained young. And thus as much as it's a love story between two young souls (or at least one young soul), Eli remains a parasite, and one of the creepiest order.

END SPOILERS

Creepiness aside, Let the Right One In is in equal measures creepy and thought-provoking, and the prospect of an upcoming Hollywood remake fills me with dread. Not to say that Hollywood is always in the wrong, but I can't imagine it retaining even a trace of the subtlety that Tomas Alfredson's film is so rife with. The idea of a post-Twilight US version of Let the Right One In seems like the stuff of cinematic nightmares, but as far as that goes, whatever happens, happens. The simple fact is that Let the Right One In does vampiric adolescents with a beauty and, though I shudder to use the word, magic that Stephanie Meyer and Summit Entertainment could only dream of matching in Twilight. While Being Human offers both a comedic and dramatic take on these creatures, Let the Right One In does it seriously but without the po-faced nature of Twilight.

Had enough of my Twilight bashing? Well, tough, because incongruous with the title of this blog entry and with my thoughts at the outset of writing, vampires don't suck lately- they're just utilised by sucky writers sometimes. Vampires haven't become any less inherently creepy or frightening through the romanticisation that some films and books have put them through. They're just fine when used right. Though with so much use in the media today, I suspect that they just need to be rested a little. Take them out of the spotlight, because the light will disintegrate them. Not make them fucking sparkle.

Until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch,
Mark