Another Man's Dracula

I think some people believe men, especially French men, should be stupid so that we can all stand back and adore how unselfconscious they are, how transparent their base motives are. This is how I make sense of Luc Besson's successful career and it's how I'm coping with his new cinematic adaptation of Dracula, which was released this year in the US, last year in France. There are some genuinely good elements in this movie but they're eclipsed by the massive stupidity at work.

I didn't actually know this was a Luc Besson movie when I started watching it. Somehow I hadn't heard that he'd made a Dracula film last year, though I guess if I were on TikTok I might have found out, since the film seems to have garnered a lot of thirsty attention from that platform. What struck me almost immediately about the first part of the film as I watched it was that it was clearly a remake of Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 version. The film starts in Romania where Vlad the Impaler's love for Elizabeta is established before he goes off to war. When he returns and his beloved is dead, he makes a scene in the chapel, curses God for permitting Elizabeta's death, and becomes damned for all time. These are all elements previously unique to Coppola's film which were not in the book or previous adaptations. Even the costumes are similar, which is more remarkable considering how famously unique Ishioka Eiko's costumes for the 1992 film were.

And I thought, okay, if Werner Herzog and David Eggers can remake Murnau's version of Dracula, Nosferatu, then why couldn't someone remake Coppola's version? I thought maybe this was a young filmmaker channeling his childhood memories of adoring Coppola's movie. I can relate to that, I love that movie too. I've often said how its influence, not just on Dracula movies but on supernatural horror in general, is frequently underestimated. What's different about this new one? Well, Elizabeta doesn't kill herself, enemy soldiers murder her. There's a lot less sex and no nudity. There's less violence. Then I thought, oh, this is a remake aimed at making money off teenagers who aren't old enough to watch the 1992 movie, or off milliennials who are too prudish for the 1992 movie.

I was very surprised when the credits rolled and I saw it was directed by Luc Besson, a French director who'd established himself in the '80s and had made a number of famous films, like Leon and The Fifth Element. I think both of those movies, particularly The Fifth Element, are vastly overrated, but I'd have never thought someone of Besson's level of prestige in the industry would make a watered down remake of a Francis Ford Coppola movie. I've subsequently learned that Besson lost a plagiarism lawsuit brought against him by John Carpenter for a 2012 film Besson wrote called Lookout. It seems it borrowed too heavily from Escape from New York.

Then my mind was really blown when I read that Besson does not acknowledge Coppola's movie as an influence. He claims never to have seen it and ascribes his primary motive for making his new Dracula movie to wanting to bring out the romantic angle; "There's a romantic side in Bram Stoker's book that hasn't been explored that much. It's a love story about a man who waits for 400 years for the reincarnation of his wife. That's the true heart of the story, waiting an eternity for the return of love." As many, many people have pointed out at this point, this whole reincarnation plot is not in the book. It was added to the story for Coppola's version, based on an element from the 1973 television version of Dracula with Jack Palance, which was in turn influenced by the reincarnated lover element from The Mummy with Boris Karloff, which imported the idea from H Rider Haggard's 1887 novel She. Yep, it all circles back to She inevitably.

What it reminds me of is how obviously Guillermo del Toro's Pacific Rim borrows from Neon Genesis Evangelion, despite its director's insistence that all similarities are a coincidence. I respect Del Toro a lot more than I do Besson, though I was almost as disappointed by his Frankenstein movie last year. In both cases, the directors professed an intention to show unprecedented fidelity to the source material only for the finished film to fall very, very wide of that mark. And both movies have Christoph Waltz.

Waltz is one of the good elements of Besson's Dracula. He plays the Van Helsing character (though he goes unnamed for some reason, credited as just "Priest"). It's hard to imagine better casting than Christoph Waltz as Van Helsing and he is terrific, even if he is basically just playing Dr. Schultz from Django Unchained. I also thought Caleb Landry Jones was really good as Dracula, though he sounds significantly like he's doing an impression of Gary Oldman in the Coppola movie.

Zoe Bleu, daughter of Rossana Arquette, is fine as Elizabeta/Mina, though one of the things that really undermines Besson's stated intention of focusing on the romance is how diminished her character is, from both the book and Coppola's film. It starts with Jonathan Harker, who's introduced as broad comedy relief, blissfully unaware of the blindingly obvious evidence of the supernatural in Dracula's castle. While Keanu Reeves was obviously underqualified to play the character in Coppola's version, he's still better established as someone whom Mina is not apparently insane or stupid for wanting to marry. In Besson's version, the idea that he's any kind of rival for her affections is so ridiculous, the film avoids any affectionate scene between the two. Besson's film relentlessly removes any and all evidence of psychological depth for Elizabeta/Mina's character, starting with the removal of her suicide, going right through to the end of the film in which she no longer has any decision to make, has no battle to fight for her own soul. For a film that's supposed to be about the romance, it filters it down to something exceptionally trite. Or, more like a young adult romance in which the female protagonist's personality is kept vague to allow readers to project themselves onto her.

Of the screenplay, the only thing I thought was truly interesting was that the Lucy character and the Renfield character are combined to make a new one called Maria (Matilda De Angelis), who's kind of fun and an interesting way of streamlining the story, though an unnecessary one. The costumes are beautiful, though not nearly as good as Ishioka Eiko's. Danny Elfman's score is good, though not nearly as good as Wojciech Kilar's. Again and again, I return to the puzzle presented by the existence of this movie, the fact that it got made and that it evidently has fans. It did well at the box office in Europe!

I find myself thinking of The Red Shoes, the scene in which the young composer, Craster, confronts the impresario, Lermontov, about how his score was entirely plagiarised for the new ballet. After Lermontov consoles the young man by hiring him, he says, in the closest he comes to acknowledging the plagiarism, ". . . these things usually happen unintentionally. That's why it is worth remembering . . . that it is much more disheartening to have to steal than to be stolen from." Ironically, Coppola referenced that same scene from The Red Shoes in his recent film Megalopolis. Hopefully, this new movie will at least reinforce appreciation for Coppola's work.

Daisy Ridley is Not Made of Clay

Daisy Ridley must brave a zombie infested Tasmania to find her husband in 2026's We Bury the Dead. Yep, the zombie genre is still up and staggering. This one's not bad for about thirty-five minutes or so and then it loses its way. I wonder if that's why this movie made in 2024 wasn't released until this year. I wouldn't be surprised if everyone just forgot about it.

I kept thinking about how Carrie Fisher thought Daisy Ridley might be a clone of Keira Knightley. Seeing her in modern Earth clothes made her look even more Keira Knightley-ish.

The plot here is that the US accidentally detonated some kind of experimental chemical device off the coast of Tasmania and it killed everyone. Then some of the dead people started coming back to life. Knightley, I mean Ridley, plays in an American woman whose husband happened to be in Tasmania with some kind of research group. When she hears that some of the dead are waking up, she contrives to get herself included with one of the volunteer groups going to Tasmania to dispose of corpses.

I liked how there's some ambiguity as to whether the zombies retain any vestige of their former minds. You could see this as a step beyond Walking Dead era zombies, which functioned as metaphors for people who fall into poverty. Maybe this is a sign people are starting to have more empathy for the homeless. Then again, this movie didn't exactly light the world on fire.

There's nice build up and I loved moments like when Ridley's character is in a garage and suddenly realises a zombie has been quietly watching her from behind a bookcase. And we join her in watching the reanimated corpse's face intently, searching for signs of consciousness.

The movie loses its way when she's kidnapped by a nut who wants her to wear his dead wife's clothes and dance with him. For some reason, the filmmakers decided to skip over the moment when she agrees to do this for him, perhaps because they knew how implausible such a scene when be. However, its implausibility is still very much present in its absence. From then on, her character lacks sensible motive for almost everything she does and without her point of view the tension around the zombies evaporates. In the climax, we get a revelation about her relationship with her husband that undermines the sensibility of her motives even further. In the end, this leads not so much to an obnoxiously bad film but one without much sense of purpose. So it just kind of fades out.

We Bury the Dead is available on Hulu.

The Almighty Hath Not Built Here for His Envy

Anne Hathaway finds herself under the thumb of Meryl Streep once again in 2026's The Devil Wears Prada 2. Like the first film, this surprisingly conservative tale about fashion journalism has a simplistic, occasionally amusing story.

The film hits the ground running, beginning with Andy (Hathaway) receiving a journalistic award and at the same time a text informing her that she's fired from her current, prestigious paper due to downsizing. The disconnect between shows of respect in the industry and reliable employment in the industry felt pretty spot on.

One thing leads to another, and Andy goes back to the magazine run by Miranda (Streep), the titular devil who still rules the room with an iron heel. Miranda, amusingly, can't, or pretends she can't, remember Andy and treats her as a lowly lackey once again. And, once again, Andy's best friend at the workplace is Miranda's second in command, Nigel (Stanley Tucci), who's implied to be gay but the movie, even in 2026, is still too conservative to acknowledge it openly and only features heterosexual relationships in the world of fashion. The first film always reminded me of Funny Face, the 1957 musical about a fashion magazine, because the world of The Devil Wears Prada still feels like the 1950s. However, Funny Face remains a more surprising, captivating film than either entry in the Devil Wears Prada series.

The moral of the film ends up being about how some people have what it takes to be in charge and some don't. Again, it's a surprisingly conservative point, and a valid one, though not made in any way that particularly challenges the audience. Of course, there's a lot of nice clothes in the movie. Certainly there's not a thing wrong with Streep's performance. Anne Hathaway is good, too, this being one of five major movies she's appearing in this year, two of which are currently in theatres. That beats the three movies Lana Condor's in.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 is available on Disney+.

Now Where Am I?

I went to the mall yesterday and, as I was walking back to the trolley, a young man passed me and said, "How's it goin'?" I said, "Not bad, how are you?" He said something like, "Fuck you," or "Get the fuck out of here." There've been a few instances like this since I got back from Japan. It's one of the things that give me this strange feeling that I didn't come back to America at all but am really in some kind of America simulation. It seems to be more common now for someone to yell out, "Gay!" when they see me. At another mall a couple months ago, two large women sitting at a table started making raspberries at me. It was so strange, I couldn't even be offended, I just stared at them as I walked by, amazed that adults would behave in this manner. And I've never been called "Indiana Jones" so much in the thirty years I've been wearing fedoras. I used to occasionally get a "Hey, cowboy!" or even "Hey, Monet." I'm not sure why people associated fedoras specifically with Claude Monet but I got it more than once so it must be a thing. More frequently, people called me Michael Jackson, if I was wearing a black fedora. But I never heard anything as frequently as I've heard Indiana Jones cracks in the months since I returned from Japan. One guy drove all the way across the parking lot when I didn't acknowledge his crack the first time. I was almost out of the parking lot when he caught up to me in his truck to yell, "Watch out for snakes!" Sure, I thought it was a reference to Mystery Science Theatre 3000 at first but then I realised it was another Indiana Jones crack.

I realised two interesting things from this. For one, Dial of Destiny was so bad it's kind of ruined Indiana Jones. For another, Americans are a lot ruder than they used to be. Wondering if this was my imagination, I asked Google's AI, "Are people ruder since Covid?" and received this confirmation:

"Yes, empirical data and behavioral studies confirm that public behavior has noticeably deteriorated since the COVID-19 pandemic. According to a comprehensive Pew Research Center survey, 47% of adults report that public behavior is ruder than it was pre-pandemic, with 20% stating it is 'a lot ruder.' Only 9% of people believe public interaction has become more polite."

I should also note I get a lot more compliments, too. People more often randomly say nice things about my clothes or my moustache. I wonder if people are consciously trying to counter the rise in discourtesy.

I also wonder sometimes why all these people seem to be seeing me for the first time. I lived in San Diego for 40 years, mostly in the relatively small suburb of Santee. Surely people are used to seeing me. But then I remembered how expensive everything has gotten, particularly housing. Added to the fact that people who were 15 when I left are now 21, there's basically a new population of adults, some who've grown into adulthood and some who are new wealthy residents as the area has become gentrified.

I've seen a couple familiar faces. The owner of a Mexican restaurant I used to frequent recognised me. He even remembered my usual order though I'd never spoken much to him. Then, the last time I went there, he told me they were closing the mall food court where his shop had been located for decades. I guess you really can't go home again.

What Goes Around Comes Around

Yesterday, Caitlin posted a list of nine books she's read (cover to cover) at least five times that have influenced her work. So I thought I'd do the same to-day. Here's my list:

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
Paradise Lost by John Milton
The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dracula by Bram Stoker
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney

By the way, I took a crack at watching the new Vampire Lestat series. On the one hand, I marvel that Lestat really has achieved immortality as a character people are still lusting after long after he thrived as Anne Rice's romantic fantasy. On the other hand, Sam Reid's Pepe le Pew fake French accent is really distracting. Why doesn't his rock band just go ahead and cover "Thank Heaven for Little Girls"? And, boy, are they not shy about diverging from the source material. Rice's vampires didn't have sex but these TV versions not only have sex they urinate. I kind of thought it was sad Rice didn't live to see the successful TV show she'd tried to get off the ground for so long but maybe the reason it did get off the ground was that the studio wouldn't budge on making these changes she resisted. But why must they always do this? I remember now Beau Demayo's tweets about working on Marvel movies and shows in which he talked about how much the people in charge of them tend to despise the source material.

Which reminds me, Lanterns started bad enough but then hit 13th Doctor levels of bad. I mean, in just the same way. Like the Doctor's companions taking time outs to spout phony academic rhetoric about race. I saw a meme this morning predictably labelling people complaining about Lanterns as racist, the meme rebuking those viewers by sharing panels from the original DC comic in which John Stewart talks about race. Yeah, comics from the '60s and '70s did tackle racial issues. The point is they did it better. I was reading Chris Clairemont's original run on X-Men this morning in which he deliberately put together a multiracial team with members from Africa, Japan, and Russia. And Thunderbird, the American Indian character, who spends a lot of time griping about having to help white people. Sometimes it's cheesy but it's a lot better than the phony bullshit we get on Lanterns, like the brown skinned woman married to the white guy, of whom she says his whiteness gives him the "privilege" to be "eccentric", as though it's this big revelation that people of colour can't be eccentric while white people are allowed to be. Has she never heard of Dennis Rodman or Flava Flav? Maybe she never met a black guy like the one I saw on the trolley a few weeks ago using the safety bars on the ceiling to do flips while his miniature stereo blasted rap music. Sure, maybe that's anecdotal, maybe somehow, somewhere, someone has measured levels of eccentricity with statistics and found there to be fewer eccentric people of colour in the world. Somehow I doubt it. And then there was the third episode, which I couldn't even finish, in which John's mother says it's not fair for the Guardians to ask a black man if he's afraid just like they'd ask a white man. Setting aside for a moment the implication that white men inherently have a greater capacity for bravery, or are more likely to lie about it, what does it matter to the Guardian? They want someone fearless to do the job, regardless of race. What do they care what colour the candidate is? It's hard to believe this series is supposed to exist in the same universe as Peacemaker.

I've been rereading The Vampire Lestat as part of my research on H Rider Haggard's She. I wondered how no-one had ever noticed that Akasha was clearly based on Ayesha and Lestat had acquired the "de Lioncourt" name as a reference to Leo, the handsome reincarnation of Ayesha's lover, who's often compared to a lion. But then I asked Google's AI and it helpfully pointed me to academic papers in which people had drawn that comparison. Reading the last segment of The Vampire Lestat, the comparisons become even stronger. Both books feature the protagonists ruminating on the nature of immortality and the goddess-like woman who can grant it. So in its way, She does live on in the public consciousness, I guess.

Bad

Michael Jackson's life contained genius, controversy, complexity, and tragedy. 2026's Michael contains none of those things and has less ingenuity and courage than a two hour M&Ms commercial.

I like Michael Jackson, I was a fan of "Thriller" when I was a kid, especially the music video. These days I tend to think "Billie Jean" is his best song. Don't expect any insight into the writing of these songs in the movie beyond the fact that Jackson liked old horror movies. My level of knowledge about Michael Jackson is about at the level of any average layperson but this movie still told me less than I already knew about him.

I knew Jackson's father, Joseph, also manager for Michael and his siblings, was said to be abusive. To which members of the family, in what ways, and for how long, I didn't know. And I still don't know. We're shown one scene where Joseph takes off his belt menacingly but it's not revealed whether or not he carries out the implicit threat or how often he did so.

I know Michael had a famous sister named Janet who was also a pop star but the film is apparently unaware. Despite featuring his other siblings prominently enough, Janet goes unseen and unmentioned, apparently because the real Janet Jackson objected to the film's sanitised depiction of her family and refused to allow herself to be depicted.

The movie checks off each famous incident in Michael's life that required the least amount of contemplation, like his hair catching fire in the Pepsi commercial shoot or his friendship with the chimpanzee, Bubbles. The film refrains from any rumination on sexuality and only has a few superficial references to race. Detractors and rivals have no presence in the film.

Jaafar Jackson's performance as Michael is unvaryingly bland.

How this movie made so much money, I don't know. I hope to God everyone was texting and making out in the theatre. Those are more worthwhile things to do with your afternoon.

Fairly Average Girl

I was predisposed to like 2026's Supergirl so it kind of sucks that it's a lousy movie. The negative reactions I saw to the film ranged from the misogynist to the petty. It was weird how many people attacked Milly Alcock's physical appearance, for example. So, even though it wasn't a box office success, I was hoping I could watch it and at least call it an artistic success. Unfortunately, it's a muddled mess with a screenplay filled with nonsensical and frustrating turns.

As a strategy for introducing Supergirl to the new DC cinematic universe, it seems bad. You can see why they'd want to go in a different direction for the character. After a long running Supergirl television series recently concluded in which the character was closer to her traditional portrayal, it's only natural that they'd want to distinguish this new movie version. And sloppy drunken characters tend to be terrific in James Gunn's work, as seen in Guardians of the Galaxy and Peacemaker. But while Gunn is said to have micromanaged this Craig Gillespie film as producer, it still feels more like a weak James Gunn imitation film rather than like a real James Gunn movie. Mostly because, whatever conceptual thing is going on, Gunn's work succeeds because of its fidelity to character development. But this Supergirl movie has too many "so the plot can happen" decisions from its characters.

Why does the evil brigand poison Krypto instead of killing him? So the plot can happen. Why doesn't Supergirl want to help Ruthye stop the brigands otherwise? So the plot can happen. Why are the brigands always carrying kryptonite weapons? So the plot can happen. Why don't we see Supergirl with her full powers very often? So the plot can happen.

That last one is crucial. This is our introduction to Supergirl in this new iteration of shared universe DC movies. It's frustrating to have her hamstrung throughout the picture for the convenience of this lame imitation True Grit plot. And while I like Gunn's sloppy drunks, the great thing about his Superman movie was how he brought the character back to something closer to his original concept after Zack Snyder's Batman-ified version of the character. So this grim/dark Supergirl doesn't feel subversive, she feels like a return to routine.

I do like Milly Alcock in the role. And fuck the haters, she's gorgeous. I think she'd probably make a better Power Girl.

Sonnet 2007

Indulgent lizards play in mudless pools
With piled sand, the tar could never trap
Such problems lead to angry thwarted ghouls
So cops have placed a certain morbid cap
Success has coaxed the shaded eye abroad
No muscle mount could cross the River Thames
Constructed states confused the messy god
We saw this all when playing through The Sims
They babbled 'bout the need to cross the deck
But bed conducts the dream of sleeping dogs
Across the sea of sheets there lies a wreck
'Cause iron spinach wound about the cogs
So now there's just the bones about the bay
As silly watchers haven't much to say

Checked In Again

Now I've seen four movies this year about people trapped in hotels and this latest one is by far the best. So far. 2026's Hokum features Adam Scott as an ornery writer who travels to Ireland to finish writing a novel. He finds himself trapped in a phantasmagoria himself.

Hokum comes from Irish director Damian McCarthy who also directed 2024's Oddity, a good movie, but I'd say Hokum is the superior work. I've seen Adam Scott on Severance and he does a decent job as a generic point of view character.

The hotel interiors are fantastic, with wooden art nouveau panelling. It's clearly sound stages with hallways meant to accommodate camera movement but it's beautifully designed. The exteriors feature spooky Irish woodland settings.

As the story unfolds, the viewer encounters subtle shifts in what genre the movie might belong to. McCarthy plays with the viewer's expectations only enough that one finds oneself in a bracingly unstable situation. There are elements of haunting and of murder mystery and of psychological unreliability. I don't want to explain too much because it's a joy to let it unfold at its own pace. Suffice to say, there's a honeymoon suite which the bartender at the hotel tells Scott's character hasn't been opened in years, there's a bellhop who swears he saw the ghost of a witch in the elevator, and, later, there's a corpse in an unused dumbwaiter.

McCarthy does a fabulous job building mood and tension and making subtle suggestions about character motivations. It's terrific.

Domestic Murder Games

A husband and wife who want to kill each other are held captive by escaped convicts in 2026's Over Your Dead Body. This is a remake of a 2021 Norwegian film I've not seen but I liked this one pretty well.

It's a good autumnal film, filled with leaves the colours of the season. For some reason it was shot in Finland, though it takes place in the US. Nearly all of the movie takes place at a lake house where the married couple have gone ostensibly for some peace and quiet. But as we're clued in by the awkward alibi set up by the husband (in conversation with a coworker, he randomly volunteers that his wife wants to go hunting in the woods alone) the real point of this trip is murder.

Jason Segel plays the husband, Dan, and Samara Weaving plays his wife, Lisa. Both are quite good and very funny--this is a comedy thriller. Critics have referred to Hitchcock and, with the autumn leaves, it does kind of remind me of The Trouble with Harry. Hitchcock would also likely have been interested in the procedural qualities. As you can see in the trailer, Dan and Lisa both go over their plans in detail.

The unhappy couple's conflict is interrupted when two escaped convicts show up along with the corrections officer who helped them escape, played by Juliette Lewis. She's in love with one of the two convicts, played by Timothy Olyphant. They're both quite good and well cast. The film pulls no punches for threats of violence and sexual assault, which is of course crucial for a dark comedy. I found it all quite funny though maybe the funniest scene is right at the beginning when we seen Dan at his job, which is directing pop-up ads. The one we see him making captures the insipid tone of one of them so well that the inherent comedy in the fact that real human beings make these things (though perhaps not for very much longer) lands nicely. It's kind of similar to how Segel's character in Forgetting Sarah Marshall was set up as being a composer for cop mystery shows, writing scores that basically consisted of him holding one finger down on the key of a synthesiser. It works, though.

Tim Curry

Tim Curry has died, also, like Dolly Parton, on August 25 at the age of 80. It's hard to overstate the cultural importance of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, of which Curry was the most vital component. The horror parody film elevated camp to something sharper and more elegant than it had ever been. Curry's transvestite character represented a marked shift in how queer characters could be portrayed onscreen. In this movie, the man dressed as a woman was the cool mastermind while the square heterosexuals were the butt of the joke. Curry's catlike face and infectious smirk succeeded in reorienting audience identification.

His cunning, mischievous presence made him a perennial top choice for villain roles. He was the Pennywise I remember from my childhood. He was one the most noticeable recurring performers in project after project so that, when I was just starting to think about actors and the craft of filmmaking, Curry was one of the first names among supporting players I began to recognise.

In recent years, his performance in 1985's Clue has attracted attention, though I don't have particularly strong memories of that film.

However, Tim Curry in the makeup and prosthetics for Ridley Scott's Legend has long been one of the most indelible images in fantasy. Even people who don't know the movie have probably been at some point struck by the image of Curry in devilish red makeup and enormous black horns. For many it's the most perfect depiction of a devil and has influenced depictions of Satan ever since. No one's ever made it look so good.

Dolly Parton

Unless you're living under a rock without internet, I'm sure you've heard Dolly Parton passed away at the age of 80. The odd thing about it for me is this isn't the first post I'm making about her this year. On May 12, I posted an entry which began with the remark, "Dolly Parton has been cropping up in my life lately." And now she's come up again.

A lot of the commentary about her life and career has come back to the fact that she was not partisan. She refused throughout her long career to endorse certain political candidates and believed not judging the lifestyles of others was simply part of being a Christian. I don't know how clear it's been if you've been reading my blog entries for a few years, but in all the political rancor that has calcified in the past ten years or so, I've come to particularly dislike partisans and zealots of both the right and left, anyone who would seek to dehumanise an opponent, who would at every opportunity push a biased interpretation of some action done or belief held by those of the opposite persuasion. The heartening thing about the reaction to Parton's death is the evidence that a lot of other people are sick of this, too.

I was in Tennessee for a few weeks in April and May this year, assisting the executor of my recently deceased father's estate. His name's Ricky and he used to work for Dolly Parton and her brother, Randy, as a sound engineer and musician. He told me a lot of stories about her and her tendency to take a personal interest in the lives of her employees and their families. Ricky said he hadn't been able to get in touch with her for a while and he was worried about it. Now we know why.

We spent time in Sevierville, where Parton was born. I donated some saddlebags that had been in my family since the 1800s to a museum there. A bookstore across the street had a poster for Dolly Parton's Imagination Library, Parton's organisation devoted to fostering literacy in young people and encouraging them to read books. Hopefully people will now feel even further inspired to teach children the value of reading for pleasure and instruction.

I thought Parton was a decent actress and I like a few of her songs. I was never really a fan but I have to say she's earned a lot of respect from me.

Another Dangerous Dame and Arrogant Young Man

A pair of young lovers embark on a road trip and a life of crime in 2026's Carolina Caroline. Critics have compared the film to Bonnie and Clyde and True Romance and it's likely both films were influences. But while Carolina Caroline is an interesting film noir, it lacks the courage to stand on equal ground with those earlier films.

Caroline (Samara Weaving) is a small town girl, working at a convenience store, when she overhears a handsome young man named Oliver (Kyle Gallner) duping her employer with a simple confidence trick. When the clerk tries to give Oliver his change for a small purchase, Oliver asks to have the larger bill and from there tricks the man into giving back double the change so that Oliver essentially gets his item for free. Caroline sees what he did and follows him outside to confront him about it. Instead of turning him in, Caroline joins him in his wanderings and the two make a living off this same trick.

No-one else ever figures out what Oliver's doing, which I guess makes Caroline an abnormally intelligent person. Except we, the audience, can see how simple the trick is and it seems implausible that no-one else ever picks up on it. The film indulges in a kind of naive, narcissistic fantasy. Oliver also waxes philosophical about how theirs is a victimless crime, going on to say how what they're really doing is sticking it to shareholders in a triumph against capitalism.

This isn't good enough for Caroline, though, who doesn't just want to survive. She wants to be fabulously rich so they start robbing banks. And yet, she's presented as the moral centre of the film and she's horrified when things inevitably escalate.

Gallner's performance projects a little too much smugness so that it's especially implausible that he's able to fool so many people. Weaving's performance is a little better and she's certainly gorgeous with an extraordinary figure. She's framed as the moral centre but she's really a femme fatale, personally responsible for Oliver's downfall, which makes for an interesting shift in narrative perspective.

The film takes too many shortcuts in its conceptualising to be on the level of an Out of the Past or Double Indemnity but it's about at the level of Gun Crazy, which the film most reminded me of.

I struggled to place the time period in which the movie's set. Oliver drives a '70s car and their clothing and hairstyles both look very '70s but then I started noticing many of the cars in the background looked like they came from the '80s. When I googled to find out when the movie's supposed to be set, I was surprised to find out it's supposed to be the late '90s. I suspect the film was originally meant to be set in the '70s but then they ran into budget issues and started using whatever vintage cars and props they could get their hands on. There's a reference to Cowboy Bebop at the end so maybe they decided it an alternate stylistic universe.

What Could Go Wrong in the Demoniac Mortuary?

A nervous young woman is working with dead bodies alone on a stormy night. Yep, it's a horror movie, it's 2026's The Mortuary Assistant. It's clearly a low budget movie and the whole thing was clearly shot on cheaply dressed soundstages. The first part of the movie didn't impress me but by the end I was kind of liking it.

Based on a video game I've never played, the movie stars Willa Holland as Rebecca, the titular mortuary assistant. Her employer is Raymond, apparently the only other person working at the mortuary, played by Paul Sparks who seems to be doing a low key Jeffrey Combs impression. He speaks with feverish but steady authority and assures Rebecca she's ready for her first night alone in the place.

At key moments of dialogue, lightning flashes outside. It's that kind of atmosphere, like you might expect the Cryptkeeper to pop up at any moment. We get a lot of shots of corpses opening their eyes or grinning when Rebecca's back is turned. So we're distanced from Rebecca's point of view which contributes to a self-aware, schlocky horror movie vibe. For some reason, too, not a single one of the film's jump scares works.

The movie didn't start to get me until it became clear that a lot of what we're seeing is entirely in Rebecca's head. How much of it is due to Rebecca's own mental health issues or due to a demon is not clear. This has led some reviewers to call the movie "muddled" but I like this kind of thing. This movie isn't as good as Lost Highway but it's in that ballpark.

The Mortuary Assistant is available on Shudder.

The Face of Free Publicity

I was making a list of 2026 movies I still want to see and I came across Her Private Hell, Nicolas Winding Refn's new movie. I saw it stars Sophie Thatcher and I wondered if I'd ever seen her in anything so I checked her Wikipedia entry where I was confronted with this picture:

I thought, "Oh, someone's vandalised her page." That's the trouble with an online encyclopedia anyone can edit but, fortunately, Wikipedia's editors typically catch these things pretty quickly. I checked the View History page to see how long this picture had been there and found a version of this photo was made her top photo in June of this year. This photo was cropped for a tighter focus on her face in July. I thought, "Oh, maybe she always looks like that."

I went to the Talk page to see if the editors have discussed her photo but all I found was a discussion about her previous photo, which looked like this:

The discussion:

The current photo was apparently put in place without any discussion. I guess someone said, "Better to look like a doofus than a Goth." I guess I've seen her on The Book of Boba Fett and on the Exorcist TV series. I don't remember her looking like a doofus on those.

Sonnet 2006

A bolder face retreats to coward rocks
A boulder town was chiselled down to Hell
A pair of hooves would break their silken socks
A pear of man was wrinkled dry to sell
A colder grace repeats in forward bars
A shoulder frown was buckled down for creeps
A dare just proves you'd take electric cars
A mare of Pan was singled out for sweeps
An older chase completes in backward lanes
A Mulder shirt was rumpled down for ships
A care for grooves would make for record gains
A chair at Cannes was slobbered on by lips
A giant bug attacks the fallen bud
A shapely gal revives the coldest blood

The She You Know

Every now and then, it's worth remembering that there's more in the library than you can find on the internet. Yesterday I was at SDSU's library, reading about film adaptations of H Rider Haggard's She. A book called Rudyard Kipling and Sir Henry Rider Haggard on Screen, Stage, Radio, and Television by Philip Leibfried had all kinds of information you can't find on Wikipedia. I was finally able to get more information on the lost adaptations of She from the late 1910s. I also learned that Helen Gahagan, who starred in the 1935 version, attempted to have all copies of it destroyed when she ran for the United States Senate in 1950. I suppose some people prefer not to look like a despot when running for office. Or they used to. She lost to Richard Nixon.

The 1935 version is the one that most portrays She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed as a villian. The Hays Code essentially forbade moral ambiguity, though talented filmmakers found a way around that, most famously with film noir. But it's no surprise that the story wasn't adapted again in the west until the 1965 Hammer/Seven Arts adaptation. Though there was an Indian version made in the early '40s that Wikipedia evidently doesn't know about. I'd love to get my hands on it. The actress playing Ayesha is one of the most beautiful I've seen.

Google's AI seems to be of two minds about the existence of such a film. First, it gave me this answer:

Then, when I switched to "AI Mode", I got this answer:

I don't remember the name of the movie mentioned in the book but it was not Aayiram Thalai Vaangi Apoorva Chinthamani, which bears no resemblence to She.

I asked the AI again and received yet another answer:

Remembering the massive collections of vintage books I see whenever I'm at the library, I'm sure this Indian adaptation of She is just the tip of an iceberg of shit AI doesn't know.

I wanted to see what the "P.S. Rukmani" named by the AI looked like but now Google is telling me no such person ever existed. I wonder what corner of the Twilight Zone she's trapped in.

Arr, Pirates be Unmotivated!

If you're going to make a pirate movie, you should probably know what a pirate is. Or maybe the makers of 2026's The Bluff have a different idea of what a pirate movie should be. It's a shame because the cast of this movie is pretty good.

Priyanka Chopra plays a former pirate called Bloody Mary trying to live a normal life in the Cayman islands, now going by the name of Ercell. Of course the past comes to call, in this case in the form of a former partner and lover, a Captain Francisco Connor, played by Karl Urban. Urban is really well suited to playing a pirate and he looks good in his black justaucorps, wielding a small revolver.

Yes, he wears what appears to be a late 18th century coat while wielding a gun from the latter half of the 19th century. We're told this movie is set in the 19th century but it's not clear exactly when. This isn't really a problem since the film is essentially a fantasy movie. The problem comes when Ercell explains to her son what a pirate is.

Hiding out in the caves within a bluff while the pirates terrorise the island, she explains to her son that real pirates aren't like the ones in her son's books. Real pirates, she says, are "colonisers" who worked for the East India Company. She says they took her as a child and made her an indentured servant.

In real life, as in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, pirates were the natural enemies of the British East India Company and any other European company with an official charter for trade outside of Europe. So this begs the question: if pirates weren't fighting against the colonies and the merchants, whom were they fighting? The movie never answers that question. Trying to think about it logically leads one into a nonsensical loop. If pirates are basically the East India Company's private navy, then they would naturally fight against people who would unlawfully attack and rob East India Company ships. Such an assailant would, in plain English, be called a pirate, or possibly a privateer. But if a pirate is, by definition, an employee of the East India Company, whom did pirates fight? The line of thinking just goes in circles.

Some would say, oh, the movie's a silly fantasy, don't worry about it. Except Ercell's past is integral to the plot. She's trying to protect her son and sister-in-law, the two of whom come across evidence that Ercell had done terrible things as a pirate and we're invited to wonder with them if they can trust her. How can we participate in this puzzler if we don't know what she did? We're shown flashbacks of her on ships, apparently fighting individuals that go unnamed. She had a mohawk in the past. The real logic here is wrapped up in the anachronistic term "coloniser" which some academic screenwriter is clearly trying to turn into as easily a comprehensible villain as "Nazi". Certainly, the East India Company was responsible for colonising India, where Ercell is presumably from, though we're never told. But why would an East India Company ship capture a little girl and force her to be a sailor? The filmmakers rely on audience prejudice to fill in a lot of blanks. The action scenes are okay, if a little silly and outright nonsensical, as in one standoff where Ercell faces off against the pirate crew clutching ropes that she somehow attached to bombs that are buried in the sand under each of them. Not since Ator built a hang glider in ten minutes has a fantasy movie asked me to suspend my disbelief this hard. The actors are all good. Tamuera Morrison is also in the film as Karl Urban's second in command. What a wasted opportunity. The Bluff is available on Amazon Prime.

She Sells Cereal by the Silo

I was going to skip 1984's She (1985's by Amazon's reckoning) because it looked like it was totally unrelated to H Rider Haggard's novel and it looked terrible. But damn it, I'm too much of a completist, and there it was for free on Amazon Prime. So I soldiered through it. It turned out to be a terrible movie but not totally unrelated to Haggard's novel. It has a quote from the book at the beginning. It features a female ruler as one of the main characters. The male lead is a handsome blonde. Otherwise, there's no resemblance.

It's kind of like a cross between Conan the Barbarian and Mad Max with a dose of Terry Gilliam. It's labelled as "post-Apocalyptic" but I seriously started to wonder, halfway through the movie, if that was the filmmakers' intention. After the Haggard quote comes a caption that informs us it's "Year 23, After the Cancellation". This is preceded by crude but effectively creepy animations of burning corpses and floating skulls. It could have been a depiction of apocalypse. On the other hand, we're never told what "the Cancellation" was exactly or how "Year 23" relates to our calendar. If it is meant to be a post-apocalyptic story, writer/director Avi Nesher must have decided everything would be totally random after the apocalypse. This movie has a mad scientist wearing an 18th century justaucorps and a baseball helmet, a society of werewolves who wear short Roman tunics by day and tuxedos by night, and a comedian guarding a bridge who spawns duplicates of himself whenever one of his limbs is cut off.

The title character is played by Sandahl Bergman, the biggest name involved with the movie, except perhaps Gordon Mitchell, who appears very briefly (Mitchell's Wikipedia page says this movie was made in 1982). Bergman is best known for playing Valaria in Conan the Barbarian and she seems to still be wearing her costume from that movie in this one. Since this is an Italian production (though the director's Israeli) the real protagonists have to be men, of course, so we have a Clint Eastwood-ish guy named David Goss played the handsome blonde, Tom, accompanied by his best friend, Dick (Harrison Muller) and his sister, Hari (Elena Wiedermann). So, yes it's Tom, Dick, and Hari. Hari is kidnapped at the beginning of the movie and is absent throughout. This is not to remain a source of tension, Tom isn't on a quest to rescue her throughout the story. The movie just seems to forget about her, possibly because Wiedermann was clearly no actress, and she bears the same blank expression in every scene she's in.

She, the Sandahl Bergman character, has what appear to be a dozen or so people worshiping her as a goddess. She goes through a trial that requires her to be topless at one point. She captures Tom and Dick, who escape, then she chases them with her second in command, Shandra (Quin Kessler), they all team up for no apparent reason, and they have a series of bizarre episodic encounters. They meet several groups worshiping an apparent human as a god, the most powerful being a guy named Godan who can shoot green lasers from his eyes. He's adopted the hammer and sickle as his symbol for no apparent reason.

Perhaps this was meant to be more post-modern than post-apocalyptic. But if this movie was trying to say something, anything, damned if I know what it was.

She (1982/1984/1985) is available on Amazon Prime.