The Canned Interview

The new Interview with the Vampire series isn't quite as bad as the trailers made it look. It's not outright stupid like Rings of Power though, like Rings of Power, it borrows pretty shamelessly from its successful cinematic forebear. But while it isn't truly bad, it isn't truly great, either. Anyone devoted to the books will be turned off by the numerous, fundamental changes to the story while more casual fans of the vampire genre will wonder why this is supposed to be better than True Blood.

There's a languid atmosphere in the show's cheap, soundstagey New Orleans that lulled me a bit early in the show. Pleasantly relaxed gradually faded into mildly bored, though. Director Alan Taylor, of Game of Thrones, and writer Rolin Jones, of Boardwalk Empire, are both experienced enough to make something competent. But somehow they failed to give this show its necessary spark, even dampening the strength of the original novel, which was its treatment of death. The series is much more about sex than death. In the fashion of many woke works of fiction, it seems to believe that characters directly stating things to the audience is more effective or progressive than portraying the lived in experience. In the first episode, Louis tells us in narration that being a gay black man in 1910 New Orleans wasn't safe. Not that we see any homophobia on display. In the book, Louis and Lestat have evident passion for each other with no mention of prejudice against two men physically loving each other. Though of course, the book's original starting period setting of the 18th century placed it before the invention of the term homosexuality.

The production values on the show are just as cheap as they looked in the trailer. We're once again treated to a sanitised, department store window version of that famously lively city called New Orleans. Louis, now played by a black man, Jacob Anderson, is a vastly different character to his book counterpart. Really, only the name is the same. This Louis lives in the early 20th century and he's a pimp with several brothels under his wing in Storyville. Some might say that this is a moral equivalent to the plantation owner Louis was originally, but not from the contemporary perspectives, which would of course matter a great deal to the character and his development.

Unlike the Neil Jordan film, we get to meet Louis' brother, who is so important in the book. But his importance in the book is largely related to his death and its impact on Louis. The new show quickly loses interest in the brother in favour of exploring the sexual escapades of Louis and Lestat.

Sam Reid as Lestat is the show's biggest asset. He's hypnotic, handsome, and charming, though, in terms of writing, this new Lestat cribs significantly from Django Unchained, casting Lestat as the bemused European white man who can scarcely believe the bigotry his new black friend has to put up with in America.

The vampires have different powers and limitations to Anne Rice's version. No paralysis overcomes them at sunset so Louis is free to demonstrate how tinted windows in his Dubai penthouse protect him.

And, wow, does that look cheap. That cityscape is as obviously a background as the backdrops in the first episode of Columbo. Actually, the show I really kept thinking of was Iron Fist, which had similarly laughably bad backdrops. Though, to be fair, the casting is better on this show. Maybe this show will catch on, I don't know. At this point, I'd be really surprised.

Interview with the Vampire is available on AMC.

Comic Con 2022 TV Trailers (Some of Them) Ranked

So I can't go to Comic Con this year. I can still see all the trailers like everyone else. And I can rank them because it's the God given right of every Internet denizen to do such things if not our sacred responsibility. Here we go.

4. Interview with the Vampire Season 1

This one doesn't look very promising. Looks like they moved up the time period so that Louis is made into a vampire in 1910. Which makes the fact that he's black a whole lot less interesting, which was likely the point. The writers aren't likely so bold. I didn't catch any glimpse of Claudia, I don't think. With only about 110 years between Louis being turned and the interview taking place, there's a lot less time for Claudia's story to get traction. Will the Theatre des Vampires stuff take place during the 1970s? I guess it would have to for Claudia's age disparity to mean anything. So far, this looks like a weak imitation of the Neil Jordan movie as much as the Lord of the Rings series looks like a weak imitation of the Peter Jackson movies.

3. The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

Like everyone else, I suspect his series will be terrible. The only thing that gives me pause is that Gennifer Hitchison, one of my favourite writers from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, is working on the series. Though obviously the material is very different so I don't know if her skills will translate. The trailers and teasers have so far offered nothing specific except it's about the birth of Sauron and Galadriel is apparently the protagonist and now she's a warrior woman. The visuals borrow shamelessly from the Peter Jackson movies, particularly the look of the Balrog. The Balrog as described by Tolkien doesn't really resemble the glorious black smoke devil from Jackson's movie. So this would seem to suggest the Amazon Prime series is set in the same universe as the Peter Jackson movies.

It kind of doesn't matter what the ratings are since the money's already spent on the series, and supposedly there's a guaranteed season two. I guess it's not like Amazon Prime memberships are going to decrease if the series isn't a wild success. I suppose investors might be angry but mostly it looks like a situation where there's very little need for demonstrated profit for expenditure. If only Jeff Bezos were throwing money at David Lynch. I mean, it's like he's a Renaissance art patron at this point. If only he had that kind of taste.

2. She-Hulk: Attorney at Law

I never read the comics but the trailer gives me the same impression I had of them--a slightly more serious version of Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law. The special effects still look bad. In light of the recent news of special effects artists being mistreated by Disney, I guess that's not a surprise. I guess She-Hulk doesn't look worse than Gumby and Gumby was funny so maybe she will be too. I am excited to see Daredevil again.

1. The Sandman

This one looks the most promising. I'm a fan of the comics and mostly this looks like a faithful adaptation. Minor tweaks in the casting mostly seem good, especially the inclusion of Jenna Coleman and Gwendoline Christie. The woman playing Death doesn't seem to have the laid back sparkle of the comic version but maybe she'll surprise me in the full series. David Thewlis is pitch perfect casting.

Anne Rice

I took this blurry photo of Anne Rice, who passed away yesterday, in 2011, ten years ago at Comic Con. Thank goodness for my blog which preserves my memories better than my brain does.

I stood there a moment and watched her autograph a small stack of comics with a silver pen and thought about what to say, having the distinct feeling that she's someone it's probably very easy to accidentally say the wrong thing to. When she handed the stack to the vendor, I finally said something like, "Hi. I just wanted to tell you your books meant a lot to me--I used to read the vampire novels over and over."

"Thank you," she said, but I could see her eyes glaze over as she mentally tried to check out of the whole convention.

My tone in the blog entry sounds slightly like my feelings were hurt because she didn't acknowledge my presence more but they weren't, really. I can't imagine how long she'd spent in that booth signing things but having waves of people tell you they love your work must numb you to it after a while.

A lot of people, for as long as I can remember, and even to-day, talking about her sudden death, seem only able to pay her back-handed compliments, to grudgingly acknowledge what she accomplished. Maybe she did seem a little arrogant--her books are filled with the implicit philosophy that some people are meant to live in wealth and luxury, and obviously she considered herself one of those people. She died in Rancho Mirage, California, in Riverside, not far from my hometown of San Diego, where she also lived for a time, in La Jolla, the most expensive part of town. For someone whose association with New Orleans was so famous it's somewhat surprising that she spent her last years in southern California. Except, of course, that's where the luxury is.

You see, even I'm being backhanded. But let's be honest for a moment about what she accomplished. When I saw her at Comic Con, I noted the irony that massive crowds were gathered there for Twilight and True Blood, two franchises that arguably wouldn't exist if not for her. What else owes her a debt of gratitude? Virtually any and all vampire fiction published after Interview with the Vampire. But more than just that. For many years, even people who wouldn't now rank Interview with the Vampire as their favourite work of gothic fiction would still have to admit it was their gateway, back when they were first discovering this stuff, to other things in the genre.

Interview with the Vampire was also part of a wave of postmodernist fiction in the late '60s and early '70s that reexamined famous works of fiction by writing new works from the point of view of the villain. Books such as Grendel and Wide Sargasso Sea, which recontextualised Beowulf and Jane Eyre, respectively. The success of Interview with the Vampire eclipsed all other works of the genre, perhaps because, of all of them, it most has its own identity, its own thematic drive outside the context of the original fiction it's riffing off of.

It so happens I'm in the middle of reading Interview with the Vampire again. I'm about halfway through the book and last week I reached the part where the interviewee, the titular vampire, Louis, recounts his first trip to Europe, along with the eternal vampire child, Claudia. Searching for answers to their own origins, they travel through eastern Europe, only to encounter zombie-like, mindless specimens of the undead, terrorising villagers. This section wasn't included in the famous film adaptation by Neil Jordan, possibly because it's the part of the novel that feels the most conventional. It very much has the tone of a Hammer horror film and I'm reminded now of what Rice wrote when Christopher Lee died--I can't find the exact quote but I remember she called him sexy.

This is to say, Interview with the Vampire may have its genesis in postmodernism but it lacks the self-devouring, cynical quality postmodernist fiction usually has. She really loved vampires and the genre and this was her story with her heart in it.

The book was written shortly after the death of Rice's young daughter and it's easy to see how this influenced the character of Claudia. Moreover, the driving impulse of much of the book is an implacable grief. Louis and Claudia's search for answers to their own existence has, for Louis, a spiritual quality. His unsatisfying encounter with a Catholic priest underlines it. Here he is, this extraordinary, terrible creature, and there seems to be no reason for it. Every attempt to find reassurance or a sense of order is met with signs of bleak emptiness. The vast period of time with which he must live with this, the natural brutality of his own nature and the cosmic silence in regard to it, must have in itself been a heavy part of the burden. And I can only imagine all the time Rice dwelt with frustrating silence. It's not unlike Bergman's The Silence or Winter Light.

I was reading Interview again because I think it's a great novel about death and it was what I thought of when my grandmother passed away earlier this year. My grandmother was about the same age as Rice. Interview with the Vampire was the only Anne Rice novel I didn't sell before moving to Japan and it ended up with me in Japan entirely by accident, being in one of the unlabelled boxes of books my grandmother sent to me. It's the same old paperback I read in the '90s when I was in high school. And Anne Rice died near San Diego. Should I look for meaning in all this coincidence? It would be nice to think there is.

Vampires Turn Up

I'm still watching Angel and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, now into season two of one and five of the other. The two shows deepen their fantasy cost of living in California--On Buffy, Xander is easily able to get a huge, beautiful apartment using himself as a reference in "The Replacement" while Angel just appropriates a 68 room hotel on Angel in "Are You Now or Have You Ever Been".

Just two episodes earlier, Angel had expressed concern for Gunn's current living situation and Gunn had told him a property owner was allowing his crew to stay there in exchange for keeping the area safe from vampires. Meanwhile, a whole hotel with working utilities just falls into Angel's hands. I know there's a small arc about Wolfram and Hart buying the building under Angel's nose but that elaborate bit of lampshading kind of highlighted the issue more than alleviated it.

I might take a cheap shot at the show's internal logic but, the truth is, that hotel is a big part of why I love Angel. It is a fantasy, but that's not a bad thing. I'd love to live in my own hotel. Few people not named Howard Hughes ever know that luxury. But I think this hotel ties into my love of stories about groups of people trapped in large haunted houses. Which reminds me, of the three boxes of my old books my grandmother sent me before she died, I found my copy of House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski that Caitlin gave me. Maybe I should read it again.

Currently I'm rereading Interview with the Vampire, though. The old paperback I bought in high school, the first copy of the book I ever read, was also in one of those boxes. It's funny, I bought a nicer hardback copy a few years ago but I think I ended up selling it. I find myself marvelling at what things manage to stick around in my life.

I started reading Interview with the Vampire again after my grandmother died because I think it's one of the great books about death. Unlike the rest of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, something about Interview really captures a consciousness of death. A few days ago, I was watching Carl Dreyer's Vampyr on The Criterion Channel and it was only then it struck me how, between that, Angel, and Interview with the Vampire, I seem to be circling a lot of vampire fiction lately. I really don't know why. I sought out Vampyr because I wanted something soothing.

I talked to one of the students in art club a couple weeks ago about a manga she's reading called Vampire and Rose, a series about which I can find little information on the internet--a google search turns up a couple different series with a similar title but only a few images of the one my student was reading. I wonder if it's any good.

Twitter Sonnet #1465

The ladles wait for soup surpassing pea.
American, the ties were dollars less.
The train derailed to catch some time for tea.
Barbarian, the hordes would fain profess.
The missing tracks reduced the disk to grammes.
The loyal horse advanced on flame and frost.
An icy sabre cut the winter dams.
A heavy tender spread at dire cost.
An extra thirty minutes bought the bread.
With harm we relish nothing less than time.
Replenish pencils, stubs adorn the head.
Extract the lemon, leaving only lime.
The extra rooms were magic gratis fruit.
A streaming service dripped a lotus root.

The Unsettled Interview

It'd been at least sixteen or seventeen years since I last watched 1994's Interview with the Vampire. I used to watch it over and over again in high school, in the late 90s. Nowadays if I feel like watching a Neil Jordan movie I'm more likely to watch The Butcher Boy, the movie he made three years after Interview with the Vampire. Though with murderous little Claudia in Interview with the Vampire it's easy to trace a path of ideas from one film to the other. Both films are fantastically beautiful, as Jordan's films tend to be, and this is one of the things I loved and hated about Interview with the Vampire. In itself, it's great, but its more appropriate for the books Anne Rice wrote after the first book in her long running series than for the first one. The 1976 novel Interview with the Vampire had a kind of bleakness, a sense of terrible nihilism, that Rice's later novels lacked. A proper film version of the novel may have been served better by Lars von Trier or David Cronenberg. It's been almost as long now since I read any Anne Rice novel as it's been since I've seen this movie but I feel basically the same way. Still, the movie is terrific in so many ways.

Tom Cruise as Lestat is the same kind of inspired casting that put Heath Ledger in the role of the Joker. Before actually seeing him in the movie, he seems absolutely wrong; seeing him in the movie, it's hard to imagine anyone else in the role. And of course, given the relatively small emotional breadth covered by the character in this story, star quality and charisma are the most important things, things you only get with a star like Cruise. Though he's almost upstaged by the brief appearance of the deflating Tom Cruise puppet created by Stan Winston.

There is cgi in this movie but relatively little, not much more than the kinds of transformation shots already seen in Willow and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. One is used to change Kirsten Dunst as Claudia from a Linda Blair-ish dying kid into a perfect porcelain doll vampire girl.

I don't find Dunst's performance as impressive now as I did back then; her delivery and on-beat head tilts seem like the product of obvious coaching. But finding a decent child actor is hard enough, finding one for this material even harder, probably impossible in the U.S. to-day. Even in the 90s they had to age up the character six years from her age in the novel.

In addition to the practical effects, there's a magic in the deliberate artificiality of the sound stage locations which often look like they came straight from a Hammer film. I found myself thinking of 1970's The Vampire Lovers and Ingrid Pitt's (perhaps unintentionally) sympathetic portrayal as the vampire Mircalla. Interview with the Vampire came from a period in which books like Grendel or Wide Sargasso Sea took villainous or monstrous characters from classic literature to recast them as protagonists of their own stories, not necessarily changing the facts but asking the reader to consider an alternate perspective. Rice's work brilliantly reveals the implications inherent in extending this project to vampires. Instead of their typical role in stories representing ideas about heathens and the wealthy as near caricatures, Rice's book and Jordan's film is about people trapped in a physical state with physical needs that they feel varying levels of guilt about. As Louis seeks answers for what vampires are, he asks, as Armand tells him, the wrong questions. They can intellectually rationalise their nature, they can even find aesthetic or moral justifications, but then something happens that reveals a contradiction and they're back to square one. It's always an itch that can never be scratched.

This is why newer vampire stories don't work as well--when that guilt is just a metaphor for forbidden love, like in Twilight, it's too easy for the audience to say, oh, the poor, handsome, misguided soul. In Interview with the Vampire, these are people who are naturally compelled to live off murder. It's a much more interesting question with broader applications to human experience. It's not about thinking you might be wrong and then finding out you're not in the happy ending of the story; it's about never knowing, always having good reason to fear you're wrong, but still needing anyway.

I love the makeup. This is one of the few movies where they really get around the cakey look of pale makeup--all the vampires have visible veins drawn on their faces. It has the perfect effect of making them look eerie and vulnerable.

Twitter Sonnet #1165

The glasses fell for lighters clogged with rain.
A working bike emerged from soggy sand.
The dog removed his leash aboard the train.
A case of dollars showed upon demand.
The sep'rate thoughts create a feeling sight.
Determined sleeves create a proper shirt.
Remembered loops complete a yearly night.
A focused fork preserves the knife from hurt.
A waiting straw consumes a canvas face.
The light upon the stage was even dark.
A trick of moving eyes was pulled with grace.
A big fatigue invites the sleeping shark.
The liquid decks degrade the wooden hulls.
Divided brains create united skulls.