Michael May's Blog, page 59

Hellbent for Letterbox | The Stranger and the Gunfighter (1974)

Pax and I examine the East-meets-West spaghetti western, The Stranger and the Gunfighter (aka Blood Money, aka El Kárate, el Colt, y el Impostor), produced by the Shaw Brothers and starring Lee Van Cleef and Lo Leih.

I also watch The Magnificent Seven's inspiration The Seven Samurai and Hopalong Cassidy while Pax reads Richard Matheson's Shadow on the Sun.

Dracula Adaptations | Dracula (2006)

Who's in it?: Marc Warren (Wanted), David Suchet (Agatha Christie's Poirot), Stephanie Leonidas (Mirrormask, American Gothic), Dan Stevens (Downton Abbey, The Guest, The Man Who Invented Christmas) Sophia Myles (Underworld, Thunderbirds), Rafe Spall (Prometheus, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Men in Black: International), and Tom Burke (The Musketeers).

What's it about?: The BBC creates the craziest version of the story yet.

How is it?: Apparently, I don't like any Dracula adaptation after 1979. This one weirdly inserts an English devil-cult that's actively working to bring Dracula (Warren) to London. They sent Van Helsing (Suchet) as their first unwitting agent, but when Dracula decided to keep him captive, they needed a new plan. Fortunately (for them), Arthur Holmwood (Stevens) is persuaded to help in exchange for their promise to use Dracula's powers to cure him of syphilis. He contracted it as an infant from his parents, but the revelation that he has it makes it impossible for him to marry Lucy (Myles) until he's healed.

When Arthur meets Lucy's friend Mina (Leonidas) and her fiancé, Jonathan Harker (Spall), Arthur hires Harker to go to Transylvania and bring back Dracula, knowing full well that there's danger involved. Harker goes missing, but Van Helsing escapes and follows Dracula back to England where he teams up with Mina to defeat the vampire. Helping them is Dr Seward (Burke), a friend of Arthur and Lucy who also happens to be in love with her.

The cast is really really good, especially Sophia Myles and David Suchet. Lucy is probably closest out of any adaptation to whom I imagine in Stoker's novel; updated slightly so that she has more intelligence and power. She's beautiful and sweet, but she knows that Seward wants more from their relationship than she wants to give and she handles that gently and firmly. As she does Holmwood's determination to keep postponing their wedding.

Suchet is a determined, half-mad Van Helsing; a whirlwind of a character who has all the passion and drive to defeat Dracula, but doesn't always know the best path to achieve that goal. I wish he was in a better version, but sadly, in spite of these bright spots, the plot is so mixed up that it's not at all Stoker's story, even in spirit.

Rating: Two out of five Minas.

Dracula Adaptations | Little Book of Horror: Dracula (2005)

In addition to all these movie adaptations of Dracula, I've been reading a couple of comics adaptations as well. The first is from the Little Books Of Horror series written by Steve Niles and published by IDW. There were three volumes in the series, including a Frankenstein adaptation drawn by Scott Morse and a War of the Worlds adaptation with Ted McKeever.

The Dracula volume may be my favorite though thanks to the art by Richard Sala. Sala is one of those artists whose aesthetic I just really connect with. His stuff is gloriously gothic and sexy while also being funny. And it works especially well here with Niles' text.

Instead of going for a straightforward adaptation (as he does in the other Little Books of Horror), Niles reinterprets the story into a fun, adventurous take. It's entertaining and funny with Mina and Van Helsing teaming up to hunt Dracula back to Carfax Abbey, getting trapped by the Count, and then a huge, dramatic, last minute rescue by an unexpected other character. Not too faithful, but I love it.

Rating: Five out of five Minas.

Dracula Adaptations | Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)

Who's in it?: Gary Oldman (Air Force One, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Batman Begins), Winona Ryder (Beetlejuice, Alien Resurrection, Stranger Things), Anthony Hopkins (Magic, The Silence of the Lambs, Thor), Keanu Reeves (Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, Point Break, John Wick), Richard E Grant (The Age of Innocence, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Logan), Cary Elwes (The Princess Bride, Robin Hood: Men in Tights, Kiss the Girls), Billy Campbell (The Rocketeer), and Tom Waits (The Dead Don't Die).

What's it about?: Francis Ford Coppola attempts a faithful adaptation and fails spectacularly.

How is it?: It bugs me more than it should that this is called Bram Stoker's Dracula, because it really, really isn't. It gets the characters and their relationships to each other right and the casting is exactly correct, at least visually. When I picture Mina, I imagine Winona Ryder. Keanu Reeves makes a very good-looking Harker. And I have much respect for including the one and only faithful version of Quincey Morris (Campbell), a great, cool character in the novel, but one who's either dropped or merged with Arthur Holmwood in other versions.

Another positive thing is just how visually inventive and gorgeous the film is. To distraction, in some parts, but I appreciate the thought and artistry that went into the film's look and visual language.

But what I absolutely can't get over is the way the film makes Mina a consensual participant in an actual romance with Dracula. I hate that more and more with every viewing. There's at least one other version where Dracula believes that Mina is the reincarnation of his wife, but that's not what bothers me. It's that she acknowledges it and embraces it. The "Love Never Dies" tagline is shameful. Coppola's Dracula owes more to Anne Rice than Bram Stoker.

And that's not even getting into Van Helsing's (Hopkins) humping Quincey's leg. There are so many weird, unexplainable choices in this film and it kills me that the title presumes to herald it as Stoker's vision brought to the screen. The fact that I do keep rewatching it is a testament to its look and mood and Quincey Morris.

Rating: Two out of five Minas.

Mystery Movie Night | Rustlers' Rhapsody (1985), Young Guns (1988), and Blade (1998)

Things get spooky... for the vampires when they're hunted by Blade. But what does that have to do with Billy the Kid and Rex O'Herlihan the Singing Cowboy? David knows the answer, but Evan, Dave, guest Paxton Holley, and I have to guess.

00:01:15 - Review of Rustlers' Rhapsody (1985)
00:10:49 - Review of Young Guns (1988)
00:20:29 - Review of Blade (1998)
00:37:13 - Guessing the Connection

Dracula Adaptations | Dracula (1979)

Who's in it?: Frank Langella (Masters of the Universe, Superman Returns), Kate Nelligan (Wolf, US Marshals), Laurence Olivier (Wuthering Heights, Rebecca, Clash of the Titans), and Donald Pleasence (You Only Live Twice, Halloween, Escape from New York)

What's it about?: Universal remixes elements from the novel into a lavish, gothic spectacle.

How is it?: Let's get the movie's big problem out of the way first and that's Dracula's costume. He looks like he's wearing a white turtleneck with a vampire cape from the Halloween aisle at Target. But there's nothing wrong with Langella's performance and he's an excellent, good-looking, suave, and charming Dracula. I believe it when characters fall under his spell. (His hair is too poofy to be believable in the nineteenth century, but oh well.)

The rest of the cast is good, too. I've read somewhere that Pleasance was offered the role of Van Helsing, but turned it down because it was too similar to Dr Loomis in Halloween. I agree and I'm extremely happy with him as Seward: a monster hunter, but sort of a reluctant one and certainly not the obsessed pursuer that Loomis and Van Helsing are.

Speaking of Van Helsing, Olivier disappears into that role. He's doing a convincing (to my ears, anyway) Dutch accent and his facial hair threw me off so that I had to actually go and remind myself who was playing him.

Kate Nelligan brings extra gravity to her role as Lucy. For some reason (that I'll have thoughts about in a second), Mina and Lucy are switched in this version, so that Mina is Dracula's first victim and Lucy is the one whom everyone's trying to save for the rest of the story. Because the movie plays up the seduction angle, Lucy doesn't try to resist in the same way that Mina does in the novel. Instead, she's intrigued by the gorgeous count and starts to fall for him, even though she suspects that something's not quite right. It's more similar to real-life romantic attraction than the novel or the Lugosi film are with their emphasis on Dracula's supernatural will.

And yet it never asks viewers to believe that Lucy is completely consensual in her attraction to the Count. That's a big problem I have with Coppola's version, but this '79 version walks the tightrope nicely. Dracula exerts power, so Lucy isn't just abandoning her commitment to Harker, but Nelligan plays her more or less as a woman who's heart and head are telling her different things and there's a real struggle as she tries to choose between Harker and Dracula. I believed her falling under Dracula's spell much more than I do in other adaptations.

About the switching of Lucy with Mina: It annoyed me at first, because I didn't see the point, but as the movie went on, I started to see how it affected the characters of Van Helsing and Dr Seward in a powerful way. Like in other adaptations, Lucy is Dr Seward's daughter, but in this one, Mina is actually Van Helsing's daughter. So when Van Helsing arrives in England too late to save his own girl, it adds a layer of tragedy and motivation to have him trying to save the daughter of his friend. Pleasence adds to this by being pretty helpless in the whole affair, while Olivier is acting the crap out of his failure to protect Mina and his determination to not let the same thing happen to Lucy.

Describing it that way makes it seem like Lucy's story is subservient to Van Helsing and Seward's, but the movie is concerned about them all. I felt the stakes in a way that's pretty rare for Dracula adaptations.

Rating: Four out of five Minas

Fairy Tale Friday | Fables, Part 6: Barleycorn Brides

Fables #18 is a standalone story that (like the Jack story in #11) abandons the fairy-tales-in-other-genres format and simply tells a story from the Fables community's past. There's a framing sequence in which a Lilliputian youth escapes the Farm and comes to the city to try to steal some magic barleycorn. He's caught, but when Bigby Wolf goes easy on the sentencing, the Frog Prince questions the decision. Bigby then relates the story of why attempting to steal the magic seed has become a rite of passage for Lilliputian males.

I won't spoil the whole thing, but it has to do with a bunch of male Lilliputians' escape from the Fables' Homelands after the mysterious Adversary took over, as well as the story of Thumbelina. It's a fun, adventurous tale and gives a tantalizing peek at the Homelands and the armies of the Adversary.

Another fun note about the issue is that it was drawn by Linda Medley, who was quite popular at the time for her fairy-tale-inspired comics series, Castle Waiting.

Dracula Adaptations | Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979)

Who's in it?: Klaus Kinski (For a Few Dollars More, Doctor Zhivago, the 1970 Jesús Franco Dracula adaptation) and Isabelle Adjani (this is all I know her from, but she played Emily Brontë in the French film Les Soeurs Brontë that I'm all interested in now).

What's it about?: Werner Herzog remakes the 1922 silent classic, but with sound, color, and the original names of Stoker's characters (mostly).

How is it?: As much as I love Murnau's version, I was all about seeing an update. I don't know that I've ever actually seen a Herzog-directed film, but he's a legend and I do love it when he appears as an actor in various things, like Jack Reacher or that episode of Parks and Recreation. I also thought it was cool that he cast Kinski as Dracula after Kinski played Renfield in Franco's adaptation. So I was quite looking forward to this.

It was great going for a while. It moves slowly, but it's a rewarding quietness with lots of lingering shots of landscapes and beautiful, atmospheric music. It's a gorgeous film. And Kinski makes a surprisingly sympathetic Dracula even under all that horrifying makeup. He also has a temper and of course a very nasty thirst for blood, so I was never on his side, but there's an ironic humanity to him that I liked a lot.

Adjani is the film's standout though as the extremely sensitive and heroic Lucy. Like in Murnau's version, she's susceptible to premonitions and would be sort of maddeningly paranoid if she weren't so unbelievably sweet and of course right. As much as I love her and her heart though, I have a couple of big issues with the character.

First of all, the script insists on calling her Lucy for some dumb, nonsensical reason. She's clearly the Mina character from the novel. But that's the lesser of my problems. I'd heard that Herzog changed the ending from the silent version and even thought it sounded interesting, but when I actually watched it, I hated it. Like in Murnau's film, Mina (I still think of her that way) sacrifices herself to defeat Dracula and hopefully save her town. But Herzog robs the action of power by having it be effectively meaningless. Her act of courage is invalidated and I was left wondering what the point was.

Rating: Three out of five Minas

Dracula Adaptations | Count Dracula (1977)

Who's in it?: Louis Jourdan (Anne of the Indies, Octopussy), Frank Finlay (the George C Scott A Christmas Carol), and Judi Bowker (the 1981 Clash of the Titans)

What's it about?: The BBC makes a faithful mini-series.

How is it?: Seriously, it's the most faithful adaptation of Stoker's novel. Cinemassacre agrees. (Thanks, Erik, for sharing that with me.) It only makes two major changes and they're both fairly benign. Mina and Lucy are sisters rather than just good friends, and Arthur Holmwood has been combined with Quincey Morris to become Quincey Holmwood, an American diplomat from Texas. That last one's an especially weird change, but all it does is let Morris out of the story (he's a cool character in Stoker, but superfluous) while still paying homage to him. Otherwise, the adaptation is so faithful that it even shoots on location in Whitby for the parts of the story that take place there.

Jourdan is an impressively suave and smart Dracula. He feels dangerous not just because he's a superpowered monster, but also because he really seems to know what he's doing. He has a plan, as of course, Stoker's version does.

Finlay may be my favorite Van Helsing yet. It's hard to beat Peter Cushing's awesome, dangerous vampire hunter, but that's not really Stoker's character. Finlay plays the literary version with competence, but also humor and a fantastic bedside manner.

Bowker's Mina is pretty great, too. She's the one version I've seen that portrays both the character's gentle naivety and her intense intelligence. She never crosses into buttkicking hero territory, but she's brave and figures out what's going on ahead of most of the dudes around her.

My one complaint about this version has to do with the look of it due to its being shot on video tape and the limits of its special effects. I appreciate that it uses video effects to try to convey some things that were missing from earlier versions, but some of them look silly to today's eyes.

Rating: Four out of five Minas

Hellbent for Letterbox | Seraphim Falls (2006)

Pax and I watch Liam Neeson hunt Pierce Brosnan in David Von Ancken's thriller (and probably parable) co-starring Michael Wincott and featuring cameos by Anjelica Huston, Wes Studi, Jimmi Simpson, and Xander Berkeley.

Also: a podcast recommendation, Wild West magazine, a couple of silent Jesse James films with James' real-life son playing the legendary outlaw, and this excellent primer on Hong Kong cinema.