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.

Red Dead Redemption

Now I don't usually review games, nor will I make this a regular thing, but what Rockstar has done with Red Dead Redemption is just fantastic. They take every ounce of this game and make it fit the genre perfectly, make it incredibly polished, and even make it encompass complicated themes. It's taking storytelling in the medium to a different level, and I can saftely say that it's the best game I've ever played.

Red Dead is set in the early 1900's and follows John Marston. John is a former outlaw who attempts to go straight but the government threatens to kill his family unless he hunts down his old friends. Effectivly it's the plot of A History of Violence set in the west, but that's no bad thing. During this time John comes to terms with the bad things he's done, reflects on what kind of a person he really is, and debates on wheather or not a person can truly change. Just like Cronenberg it intelligently disscusses indentity in a moving way. Not only is John a total badass he's a fantastic and relatable character who I really grew attached to as the story progressed. In fact by the end of the game I really became attached to most of the characters John met, and unlike the somewhat jokey GTA series they approached the characters and relationships in a really honest way. The fact that they dedicated two hours at the end of the game to John spending time on his farm with his family is a sign of how they care more about the story than just shooting guys in the face.

However John's story also functions as a metaphor for the death of western culture. Due to the spread of trains things like the Model-T Ford and automatic weapons are begining to make appearences. What's so tragic about this though is that you spend the first fifteen minutes of the game out in nature. Rockstar obviously put a huge amount of work into the surroundings because this game is beautiful. Simply watching the sunset in this game is a treat. They even created a realistic ecosystem in this game, with animals that behave realistically and prey on each other. So when you finally arrive in Blackwater and it begins to looks like modern society it seems so ugly and brutish it compared to the beauty that surrounds it. And it's tragic because you know that soon everything will look just like that. But another thing that Rockstar does is they paint John's old comrades actions as if they are simply fighting to preserve their way of life. So it's very sad when you actually have to hunt them down (reminded me of Shadow of the Collosus). So John's actions and surroundings serve the overarching themes of the story, making the gameplay itself completly relevant. That's a brillant example of how games can approach storytelling because if that isn't art I don't know what is.

The final thing that I found impressive was how it completly captured the genre. After finishing Red Dead I watched Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and I was awestruck. To the way all the plants looked, the mountains, the way people talked and dressed, even the way the trains looked it was dead on. The amount of detail put into this game is awestiking. You can enter every building in the game and all the interiors are detailed. The world itself is huge, covering miles and miles of terrain. It's like you stepped into the largest, most detailed Western ever, and you're the director.

This game conjured up more emotion in me than almost any film recently has, and if you have a Xbox 360 or a PS3 you have to get this game. It's evidence of how games are becoming a more sofisticated form of media and is maturing rapidly (other equally good examples include Mass Effect 2 and Heavy Rain). Even if you aren't a gamer this is a great time to start, because Red Dead is something everyone should experience.