Vampire's Kiss

In honor of Friday being Nicolas Cage's birthday and the opening day of Season of the Witch, I thought I would take a look at Nick's strange movie from 1989, Vampire's Kiss.

To say that Vampire’s Kiss is a strange movie would be a pretty big understatement. It switches genres constantly, going from comedy to horror to tragedy in a matter of minutes. A friend of mine described it as a combination of American Psycho, Pans Labyrinth, and Nosferatu. But somehow, despite its wildly uneven tone and it’s moments of absurdity, Vampire’s Kiss is a superb movie that gives a brilliantly realized picture of an incredibly disturbed man.

Vampire’s Kiss follows Peter Loew, played by a young Nicolas Cage, a yuppie literary agent who is slowly going insane. He goes to his job everyday where he manipulates and abuses his immigrant secretary Alva, and then at night goes to clubs and has meaningless one night stands with different women every night. But we slowly learn that Peter is incredibly lonely and depressed, and when he is alone pretends that he is in a steady relationship (making coffee for two people in the morning, and when he realizes there’s no one else there he throws a fit). However one night one of Peter’s conquests bites his neck (or at least we think), and Peter begins to think that he’s become a vampire. This leads Peter down a frightening and tragic path towards complete madness.

Nicolas Cage gives a brilliant performance here that actually takes you by surprise. Recently Nick Cage has gotten a bad rap for some of his more recent work (The Wicker Man for example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4MqTCIDKhU) and I think most people nowadays view him as a genuinely terrible actor. But I think it’s less his acting, and more so the terrible projects he takes on because he wants money so he can buy more castles. But I think his work in Vampire’s Kiss shows how great of an actor he can be. He gives such an interesting and strange performance, and clearly has no fear of looking utterly insane. For one scene in this movie where Peter eats a cockroach, Nicholas Cage actually ate real cockroaches (and he did three takes!). Out of context clips of his acting in this movie come off as silly and overdone (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68BjP5f0ccE&feature=related), but in the context of the rest of the movie his acting is both absurd and terrifying. It really makes you want to see Nick do another good movie, and not just the schlock that he puts out nowadays.

I went into Vampire's Kiss expecting nothing, but I ended up getting a lot out of it. All in all I thought that his was a terrific movie. This movie is constantly compared to American Psycho, but in many ways I think Vampire’s Kiss is superior. While Patrick Batemans illness was a commentary on the lack of individuality in yuppie culture, Kiss is simply a character study of one guy. Therefore it’s less ambitious and smaller in scale, but because of that more compact, effective, and moving. Though it isn’t for everyone, I would recommend everyone to approach this forgotten gem with an open mind and I think you’ll be surprised.

Rating: A-

"I was being stalked by a mime - silent but maybe deadly. Somehow, this mime would appear on the set of set of Bringing Out the Dead (1999) and start doing strange things. I have no idea how it got past security. Finally, the producers took some action and I haven't seen the mime since. But it was definitely unsettling."

-Nicolas Cage

Three by David Lynch

Over the last month I've been watching several of David Lynch's movies and I've felt very differently about all of them even though in many ways they're very similar. They're all very heavy on abstract disturbing imagry. They all also deal with the depression, psychosis, and evil that he feels is present almost everywhere in modern society. I didn't like Ereaserhead very much, I thought Blue Velvet was good, and I feel that Muholland Drive is a masterpiece.

Ereaserhead is Lynch's incredibly abstract first film that he made while in film school in the seventies. The film follows Henry Spencer, played by Jack Nance in an almost hypnotizing performance, a very depressed man who lives in a tiny apartment in the middle of a large field of warehouses. Near the begining of the film he finds out that his former girlfriend Mary has given birth to a severely deformed baby that barely even looks human and is constantly screaming. Mary then abrubtly leaves and he is saddled with taking care of the baby himself. The movie then dissolves into a bizzare series of visions including him seeing a dancing woman in his radiator, and his head falling off and being made into pencil erasers.

I didn't like Eraserhead because for most of the time the movie came off as incomprehensible and even kind of stupid. It seems that even David Lynch dosn't know what any of the imagery means. Either his metaphors are painfully obvious (he feels guilt about the baby, and therefore it seems revolitng to him) or don't even try to make sense (the film radomly cuts several times to a disfigured man pulling switches on the inside of a planet). However you have to give David some credit because he made it while only in college, and the things he did well he did very well. The atmosphere is so thick you can literally feel it in the room that your watching it and the black and white cinematography is beautiful and haunting. It's not a great film, but it's definetly worth watching mainly because it achives the rare feat of being like nothing else out there.

Blue Velvet, which was made in the eighties, is all about asking one question. What is the real America? People would traditionally respond with traditional values, friendly people, beautiful neiborhoods. Lynch would argue that there's a layer of filth laying under the perfectly trimmed grass of the American suburbs. The film follows a college student named Jeffrey who is home from college to care for his ailing father. However while out on a walk he discovers a severed ear laying on the ground. He becomes incredibly determind to find out what happened and this leads him into a underground world of violence, torture, and perversity.

I liked Blue Velvet better than Eraserhead. This was mainly because it actually had a comprehensible story to tie it's imagery to, so things actually could be put together. It seems like at many points he's making two different films which bothered me. At points the film feels very conventional and tame as if it were a detective after school special. However at other points its incredibly wierd and very much like Eraserhead. If sure that this was intentional in order to make it seem like there are two very different world in the same place, but this made the film very disjointed. My favorite thing about this film is Dennis Hopper's totally off the wall performance as the psychotic helium inhaling Frank Booth. He is given some of the most ridiculous dialouge in any film ever (he says fuck at least once every sentence) but he manages to make himself always believable. He is at the same time incredibly terrifying and hilarious and I think it's incredible. In the end however David Lynch attempted to make a more conventional film, but he lost a lot of the atmosphere that made him special in the first place.

Muholland Drive, made in 2001, is David Lynch's most recent major work. It follows Betty, played in fantastic performance by Niomi Watts, a wannabe actress who has just moved to LA. At the same time a woman named Rita narrowly escapes being murdered by her chauffeur while in her limo by getting hit by a car. She survives but loses all her memory. The two run into each other and attempt to figure out who Rita really is. Scattered throughout the film are several seemingly unrelated vignettes, such as a director being blacklisted for not casting a girl that the mob wants him to cast and a hitman botching an assassination and killing two people who witness it. Then the movie upends the entire plot and makes you reconsider everything you've seen in it's incredible final half hour that I'm not going to spoil.

Muholland Drive quite simply is a brilliant film. What it does is find the perfect balance between his other two films that I've seen. It's strange and interesting and you'll be searching for clues during the entire movie, but unlike Eraserhead all the wierdness makes sense and comes together at the end. It also has brilliant acting, characters we end up caring about by the time the movie is over, and interesting relationships. I won't say in what context but the way that the movie portrays dreaming, and dreams themselves is incredible. The atmosphere, and the way that events move from one to another is exactly how dreams themselves really feel to me. Even the way that relationships and objects from reality carry over to dreams is dead on. Effectivly this is the movie that I wanted Inception to be. It's one of my favorite films ever and I couldn't recommend it more. This movie shows that Lynch has learned perfectly how to deal with his quirks, and I can't wait for his next film.

Speed Racer

A certain friend of mine had told me several times several times that she loved the film Speed Racer, and I had ridiculed her for it. But given the fact that I had never actually watched the movie I had no right to judge, so I decided to actually watch the film. And when I did it suprised me. Although not by it's quality, but by how absolutly horrible it was.

Speed Racer is a reboot of the 1960 anime show of the same name, written and directed by the Wachowski brothers. The film follows Speed Racer (yes, that's actually his full name), played by Emile Hirshe, a teenager who loves racing and his family. However racing is shown to be extremely corrupt, and it follows Speed Racer's journey to win the Grand Prix without becoming corrupt himself. Now just by hearing the plot you would think that it's very simple and easy to follow. However I was completly unable to follow a large amount of what was happening. The movie is filled with unnessasary dialouge about the buisness of racing that's loaded with subtext that I was complelty unable to pick up on. I'm saying this as someone who had no trouble following Inception and Memento, and this is a movie made for little kids!

And that brings me to my second point, which is that if you are over the age of ten it's impossible to enjoy this movie. About a good third of the film is spent on horribly unfunny slapstick between Speed's chubby little brother and his monkey. Even in the relativly serious race sequences they find some way to work them in. Unlike charming comic distractions like Dug in Pixar's Up, they're obnoxious and dumb and ruin the chance of any adult enjoying the film. I thought I would never say this, but they're worse than Jar-Jar.

Another problem I have with the film is the use of special effects. The purpose of the film is to be a live-action cartoon, so everything but the actors is CG. Everything is extremely colorful and over the top, and it had the potential to be extremely cool and artsy. However they attempt a degree of realism, and it puts all the scenes in this ackward looking middle ground that causes everything to look cheap and bad.
Speaking of things that are cheap and bad, lets talk about the script. I think it speaks for itself so I'll dicate to you a conversation between two characters after a ninja attack.
Trixe: Oh my god, was that a Ninja?
Pops: More like a non-ja. Terrible what passes for a ninja these days.
Trixe: Cool beans!
It tries so hard to be ironically retro, but because it tries so hard we end up laughing at them rather than with them. Also there isn't a single character in this movie that has an ounce of dimention to them. Speed is the good guy and is always incredibly good, the bad guy is always incredibly evil and has no real motivation.

Finally there's the acting which contains some of the only redeeming qualities of the film. Emile Hirshe is excellent (although he makes some really ridiculous faces during the racing scenes) and so is John Goodman and their scenes together provide some of the only honest material in the entire film. But the acting also provides some negative elements, mainly Matthew Fox as Racer X. I love Matthew Fox on Lost and I think he deserves the Emmy, but he simply cannot play the tough guy and his acting in this movie is laughably bad. On the brightside though they were considering Keanu Reeves for the role who undoubtably would have been worse.

So Speed Racer is bad. Really bad. But I did enjoy watching it, even if it was just so I could laugh at it. So it's not completly without merit. But to actually enjoy it as a legitamate film is impossible for me, and I cannot fathom how someone else could. I'll leave you with a clip from the movie that sums up almost all my problems.

Splice

Splice opens with a first person view of Adrian Brody and Sarah Polley delivering what seems to be a baby. They look at it with pride at what they have created. Then you discover that what you thought was a baby was actually a genetically created dog sized worm. This misplaced feeling of parenthood is what Splice is all about.

I'm going to begin by saying that Splice is a very strange movie. But despite how bizare it might get at points it's incredibly interesting and genre bending. It takes the plot of what would be a cliched horror movie and they turned it into a character driver drama about family. So even though it has several flaws its premise is intriguing enough to make up for them.

The movie follows two scientists, who are also in a relationship, named Clive and Elsa (played by Adrian Brody and Sarah Polley) who work at a bio-engenering lab. Effectivly what they do is splice the DNA of different creatures together and then use the chemicals in those creature's bodies to make medications. Their ultimate goal however is to create something using human DNA because they believe that it would lead to a great medical breakthrough (cures to cancer, parkinsons, ect...). However due to economic and social reasons the pharmaceutical company they're working for forbids it. So in stardard horror movie fashion they do it anyway and create a creature that they name Dren (nerd backwards). As it begins to grow older it matures rapidly, eventually looking very similar to a human female (besides the strangly jointed legs and the tail with a stinger). And inevitably it dosn't end well.

Now just by hearing the summary above you would assume that its basically a bad rip off of Species, but it's so much more than that. As Dren begins to mature Elsa begin to treat it almost like a child by giving it toys, dressing it in peoples clothing, even putting makeup on it. And in their handling of the creature you realize that each character isn't who you think they were. Elsa turns out to be incredibly emotionally damaged, and you begin to realize that her motives for creating it in the first place were less than scientific. Clive initially reacts with disgust which gradually morphs into something very different. The movie turns into a character study and isn't really a horror movie at all as the advertising would lead you to believe. If anything the creature is more sympatetic than frightening. In fact the movies weakest moments are when it's attempting to be scary, because it seems that they were just tacked on so the movie could be more commercial. Also Vincenzo Natali can't direct horror very well so some of the sequences near the begining and the end fall flat.

Splice is also acted extremely well. I think it says a lot about how clever Natali is when you look at the casting of Adrian Brody and Sarah Polley. First they're fantastic actors, particularily Polley who brings out Elsa's quirks and tendencies in a really interesting and believable way. Also though they are both very interesting looking and aren't generically attractive like the characters are in most horror movies (AKA Nightmare on Elm Street remake) and this in a way makes them more believable and interesting characters. the performance that is really scene stealing though is Dren, partially played by Delphine Chaneac. The creature effects in this movie are just fantastic, probably some of the best I've ever seen, especially in the early parts. The way it interacts with the environment and how the actors react to it is simply breathtaking.

I will warn you though, there's a certain point in the movie where you're either on board or you're off because things get a little crazy and more than a little wierd. I won't spoil it for the people reading who havn't seen it but it's messed up. It makes sense in the genral ark of the story, and is VERY Freudian, but in the theatre where I was watching the movie it was divided between people laughing hysterically and people really wierded/grossed out. I personally liked it and it's something very memorable, but you might not be able to get past it.

In a way the film reminded me of some of David Cronenberg's early stuff (wow, second Cronberg reference in row) like The Fly. It deals with metamorphosis, identiy, and what really makes you human. But it also confronts way the strange aspects of parenting in a very upfront way. Splice is crazy, facinating, sometimes disgusting, and thought provoking. It's different than anything in theatres, or mabye even out of theatres, and I highly recommend it.