In February, 1977, a man walked into an office and kidnapped his mortgage broker, took him back to his apartment, rigged with explosives, and held him at the point of a shotgun for days. Gus Van Sant dramatised the events in 2026's Dead Man's Wire. It's a movie filled with tension and suspense with a good performance from Bill Skarsgard as the kidnapper, Tony Kiritsis.
Tony wants to kidnap the owner of the company, M.L. Hall (Al Pacino), but the big man's on vacation, so he takes Hall's son, Richard (Dacre Montgomery) out into the street. He puts the "dead man's wire" around his own neck and Richard's, so if anyone tries to stop them as they walk from the office to Tony's apartment, the shotgun will go off, killing Richard. They're confronted by a cop, Mike Grable, played by Cary Elwes with a gruff, conspicuous affect. It turns out he's an acquaintance of Tony's and can't believe the man would do such a thing.
Tony had bought a 17 acre property through the mortgage company with the idea of turning it into a shopping centre. After Tony was unable to attract investors and developers, he was unable to keep up mortgage payments and the company took the land back. He decided it was all due to a conspiracy on the company's part to flip the land, which had become more valuable, and turn a profit.
Despite Skarsgard being best known for playing movie monsters at this point, he and Van Sant frame Tony sympathetically. Perhaps there is some moral greyness to Tony's situation but it looks pretty cut and dried to me. A lot of guys have Tony's kind of luck who don't threaten to murder anyone over it. It's insane, so I guess it makes sense he was found not-guilty by reason of insanity. I wonder if the trial would've gone differently if he'd accidentally blown Richard's head off. The movie leaves you with questions, which I appreciated.
Have you ever wanted to buy something from me but you just didn't know how, or what? Well, how about I sell you a car? I have a 1964½ Ford Mustang on auction (click here to see it and bid). It belonged to my grandfather, who bought it in the '70s. When my father passed away this year, the Mustang had been in his garage in Tennessee for 10 years. I got it repaired and in working order and it can be yours. I honestly wish I could keep it, especially given how long it's been in the family. And it's just a beautiful car apart from that. Why do cars have to be so ugly now? We all kind of recognise this. That's why people are usually driving vintage cars in movies nowadays. I was just watching Honey Don't again, which is currently on Netflix, and realised there's no logical reason for her to be driving a beautiful, pristine vintage car. But no-one's complaining about that. Is there anyone who ever said, "These movie detectives and crooks are always driving beautiful vintage cars, it's just too unrealistic!"
But maybe you don't want to buy a car from me, maybe you want to buy comics. You can do that, too, for a much lower price. Currently you can buy The Adventures of Boschen and Nesuko and/or Venia's Travels on Amazon. Read them on your kindle app, settle in a cushy chair with your tablet, and indulge in hundreds of pages of full colour comics scrawled by some nutcase. It'll be a memory you'll treasure always.
Sonnet 2008
A sack of grass was left beside the hall
The garden team dispatched delaying chaff
Like fighting dogs, the planes relayed a call
A missile lock destroyed the golden calf
In pepper time, the salt expired fast
A growing beard reveals a shorter man
A club of cats devotes themselves to Bast
A pail of pens reserved themselves for Pan
No language found the toothless man at large
Reduction built inversion underground
At night, we hear the ghost of driven Marge
Some years ago, the tape was not rewound
A pastry brain constructs a head of food
Those kinds of carbs will sure affect your mood
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
