A Retrospective of Vampires in the Movies, Part 2

There seems to have been a movement in the late 80s for bringing back the classic vampire character in a thriller or serious scary movie. By this I mean the suave, sophisticated leader with power or authority, and whom all the other creatures of the night take their orders from. His power was sometimes shown in a business or a big house. Like Chris Sarandon in Fright Night, the "head vampire" in The Lost Boys (1987), or Lance Henriksen in Near Dark (1987). These guys tend to be calmer and more at ease than the others they hang with, but that only makes them seem more powerful, and they cana be very dangerous and violent when they are ready to strike.

Now, Near Dark is a movie I never knew existed before until recently. Director and co-writer Kathryn Bigelow cast three actors (Henriksen, Bill Paxton, and Jenette Goldstein) who also appeared together in the previous year's Aliens, which was directed by her future husband (now ex-husband) James Cameron. The movie takes place in present-day Oklahoma and is kind of a reinterpretation of the western and vampire genres. The plot involves an everyman, played by Adrian Pasdar (TV's "Heroes"), who gets mixed up with an outlaw gang of vampires after he himself is bitten by a innocent-looking femme fatale in the film's romantic first 10 minutes. He starts to experience the change and is rescued by her and her friends before he is exposed to too much sunlight. The rest of the film shows him not wanting to kill, but still needing blood to live, and the gang becoming impatient with this. They intend to kill him themselves if he does not embrace his new way of life and start acting like they do in attitude and bloodthirsty actions. The film is easy to nitpick - for one thing the gang makes some dumb decisions and gets in too many life-threatening situations for having survived as long as they have as vampires. But Bigelow does a fine job creating an atmosphere and tone of uneasiness, with help from a synthy score composed by Tangerine Dream.

Knowing an "Objectively Bad" Movie When You See It

On more than one occasion I’ve been in a conversation about movies and a person will ask, “Hey, what is the worst movie ever made?”  Immediately I wonder, how does he mean exactly? Is he talking about a movie that’s so poorly made that it’s not even entertaining in any way? That the only people who would give it any merit are perhaps a few of the filmmakers who gave birth to it? Or is he talking about something in the laughably bad or cringe-worthy variety. Either in the “so bad it’s good” category, where the badness is laugh-out loud funny, or the bad car accident type. You want to look away and just drive on...but there’s something about a movie like Batman and Robin that just draws you in, to gaze upon the horrendous spectacle of it all. What I’m getting at is that bad is a subjective judgement, especially in an entertainment medium as diverse as movies.

It is difficult to talk about the ways that bad is subjective without first discussing how noticing the good qualities in film also varies from person to person. The more movies a person sees, the more they are able to recognize the value that achievements in different criteria give a film. I watch a lot of movies, and I’ll admit that even I miss things from time to time, both bad and good, that would figure into my evaluation of a film. It is as one develops better taste that they are able to notice these things, and use them to be able to make good arguments supporting their opinion.

A Retrospective of Vampires in the Movies, Part 1

Does it seem like there are a lot of movies being made about vampires these days? There may be, what with the influence of the Twilight and "True Blood" film and TV series, respectively, (both adapted from book series - making them marketable), and all the levels of release nowadays (wide, limited, cable-TV original movies, direct to DVD). When you think about it though, there have been films coming out involving vampires for quite some time.

Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)

Whenever movies have been made with vampires as a major plot point there will always be some element of horror, just because of the fact that traditionally, vampires drink blood. To the casual film watcher the sight of blood being drunk, whether a human character is killed for it or not, equals horror ten times out of ten. But from that starting point, the vampire film has been combined with nearly every other genre besides horror. The exceptions might be the vampire-western (unless you count Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark from 1987, which takes place in the dusty American west, but in the then present-day 1980s) or vampire-musicals (unless you count that Dracula puppet musical within 2008's Forgetting Sarah Marshall).

Before I get into my individual film discussions, let me say that while this retrospective turned out to be lengthy, it is by no means comprehensive. This is because there are just to many vampire movies out there to see, nor do I want to see them all. There are many that just aren’t any good, not even by cult-film or fun b-movie standards. Even among the ones I do want to see eventually, I did not wish to see all of them as a prerequisite for writing about the subject, although I did see a handful of them for the first time recently just for fun.

Why I Love Film - "The Graduate"

Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft in The Graduate

I was re-watching the The Graduate the other day and I came out of it reassured that it is one of my all-time favorite favorite films. When  I get around to re-thinking my top 100 films of all time it will most likely remain in the top ten. This movie has such a simple-sounding plot, how could it be one of the few mainstream films (i.e. non-genre films) to crack my top ten? It’s not even one of these slick new films with quick edits that get the young kids all excited. This is from 1967, the second picture in Mike Nichols’ filmography which totals 22 titles. Throughout his career, Nichols has also mixed-in directing jobs on Broadway plays, and finding this out was not surprising after viewing some of the one-room, dialogue heavy scenes in his work (The Graduate has also been on Broadway, but not involving Nichols). But there also are things I like about The Graduate that I don’t imagine would transfer well to the stage. Some of these are the things I love about it, such as the the camera tricks, the musical montages and driving scenes, and the film’s setting- the 1960’s time period and the California location.