Nosferatu - The Night Demon

Robert Eggers has quickly become one of my favorite filmmakers, but I was disappointed when I found out Nosferatu would be his next project. I wasn’t worried about the quality, but I did wonder why he felt it necessary to make yet another Dracula movie. Sure, this was specifically the Nosferatu version of the Dracula story, but that had been revisited by Werner Herzog quite effectively already. After watching Nosferatu (twice, with a third watch planned as soon as possible), I realized how stupid I was to ever doubt Eggers’s choice of source material.

Eggers has a way of making the horrific beautiful, and his Nosferatu is the best example of this yet. There is no romanticizing of the vampire here as Orlock is a rotting corpse come to life. He doesn’t de-age into a sexy Gary Oldman after drinking blood; he is constantly a truly disturbing Bill Skarsgård. Eggers makes the first meeting with Orlock equally frightening and hypnotic. It’s easy to understand how Nicholas Hoult’s Thomas could be paralyzed with fear. Yet the film itself isn’t what I would consider properly scary; it’s more about creating a horrifying experience. 

Nosferatu is much more interested in presenting a cinematic experience of horror. There are so many expertly staged shots that many frames look like paintings come to life, and when Willem Dafoe shows up with nearly every line sounding like poetry, the movie completely takes you into this dark, beautiful world. 

The world of Nosferatu that’s always been more interesting and darker than that of most Dracula adaptations is the more monstrous and deadly version of the vampire. He brings a literal plague with him when he arrives. This gives the story an appropriately apocalyptic feel.

Of course, all the bad vibes in the world are wasted if the performances aren’t there. Skarsgård is the go-to monster these days for good reason, and he somehow creates his own take on one of cinema’s most iconic characters. But Lily-Rose Depp is the most impressive, easily portraying inner and outer turmoil. One scene near the end should make her a shoe-in for starring in an Evil Dead movie. Hoult proves he can be serious as well as funny in a vampire movie after last year’s Renfield. And Willem Dafoe serves as a perfect guide to the supernatural world, running around calling the vampire a “night demon” and whatnot.

Every aspect of the film comes together to create a unique, horror experience unlike any other adaptation of the source material. At first glance, the idea of yet another vampire movie may create skepticism as it did with me, but immediately the film grabs you and doesn’t let you go until the sun comes up. Sorry about that. I’ll stop now.

Random Thoughts

“My dear husband, there’s something I need to tell you now that we are wed. Years ago, in an act of desperation, I summoned an ancient evil to satiate my carnal desires. I thought it was a passing fancy, but apparently the entity sees it as a more permanent situation. So fate, and a deranged real estate agent, will conspire to bring him here. A plague will follow him, and he will personally kill everyone I love until I swear myself to him and let him corpse-fuck me. Now enjoy your work trip to the Carpathians; I’m sure it’s not related to this.”

The count’s name is Orlock? At least it’s not something evil-sounding, like Dracula.

This Orlock doesn’t take dainty bullshit sips like other vampires; he’s straight up chugging that blood.

I think Dafoe could’ve made his trance point without pushing the needle all the way through her arm.

The scene with Thomas and a possessed Ellen is some straight up Evil Dead shit.

It seems like Hoult has been in ten movies this year, but it’s actually four: this, The Garfield Movie, Juror #2, and The Order.

The choice for the bite to be directly on the chest is creepy. Makes sense to go directly to the source, I guess. And it really seems like he’s drinking blood. Too often in vampire movies there’s a bite sound, and then there’s this little trickle of blood on the neck, like the vampire just stopped in for a sip. These motherfuckers would be gulping this shit down.

Poor Things - Kubrickian

Yorgos Lanthimos’s films have always been divisive, with films like Dogtooth, The Lobster, and The Killing of a Sacred Deer either completely working for people (like me) or falling completely flat on their deadpan faces for others. Then The Favourite came out and garnered a lot of awards attention (Olivia Colman won Best Actress and the film was nominated in nearly every major category). While The Favourite has its odd moments, it’s positively mainstream for a Lanthimos movie, which is why it disappointed me. I was afraid that Lanthimos had lost his weird edge. Then Poor Things kicked in the door holding a chicken dog, peed on the floor, tried to punch a baby, and let out a noxious burp bubble into the air.

In other words, Poor Things is wildly strange all around. It’s also the funniest, most well-acted, and inventive film of the year. (It’s also my personal favorite, and it won Best Picture from the Indiana Film Journalists Association.) 

Poor Things is hard to summarize, but here goes: Emma Stone plays Bella, a Frankenstein’s Monster-ish creation of scientist Baxter (Willem Dafoe). She begins the movie as an adult with the mind of a baby, but as she matures at a rapid rate, she decides to see the world with one of the best cinematic rapscallions of all time in Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo, in a shockingly funny performance). Bella sees the best and worst of the world, and it’s all presented in fantastical, horrible, and hilarious ways. 

I typically do not like writing plot summaries (you can always just Google it or watch a trailer or something), but I liked the challenge of it for this one since I liked it so much. This movie simply works on every level for me in a way that I haven’t felt since Stanley Kubrick’s films (more on that later).

The writing (Tony McNamara, adapting the novel by Alasdair Gray) is the standout element, as the entire film is quotable. It’s funny, but the straightforward, child-like dialogue of Bella also points out many of the ridiculous elements of humanity. And while it’s all quirky and funny, I still cared about most of the characters, though they could be framed as villains in other films (especially Dafoe’s character). 

It takes skill to deliver the funniest lines of the script, especially in Lanthimos’s signature tone. And Emma Stone is perfect. She has to play an adult baby, a prostitute, and a scientist all in one role. Her performance as an adult baby alone is adwards-worthy, the rest is just a bonus. And Mark Ruffalo is an amazing foil to her. It’s funny when he just goes along with Bella’s oddness, but it’s the best when she finally breaks him, causing him wonder, “What the fuck are you talking about?” multiple times throughout. His transformation throughout the film is equally impressive and amusing. 

The writing and acting are so great in this film, it almost seems to be a waste that the music and production design are so unique, as well, because they are nearly an afterthought when they would be the standouts in other, weaker films. The discordant score captures the unsettling mood of each scene. And the creatures (what other film has a chicken dog walking around with no one talking about it?) and set decoration complete the picture by creating a world that is recognizable but also fantastical. 

All of this is enough to make this one of my favorite movies in recent years. But it’s the Kubrickian element that I think will cement this among my all-time favorite films. Lanthimos is no stranger to the Kubrick comparison. Anyone who uses deadpan humor, tracking shots, and slow zooms gets compared to Kubrick at some point. This is why I usually don’t like calling things Kubrickian these days. While Poor Things does have all those Kubrick-like elements, I label it as Kubrickian for what it represents in Lanthimos’s career arc. 

Poor Things isn’t actually similar, story-wise, to anything Kubrick would make. But it is the kind of movie he would make. Kubrick, while toiling around in similar thematic areas with his films, never tried to make the same film twice. And Lanthimos appears to be on that same track. The fact that I didn’t love The Favourite now seems like a good thing. If he kept making movies like The Lobster over and over, it would get tiring immediately. To go from Sacred Deer to The Favourite to Poor Things shows a willingness to go to new, interesting places, much like how Kubrick could go from Barry Lyndon to The Shining to Full Metal Jacket. The style may be similar, but the content shows a desire to keep things interesting. And for Lanthimos, that also means getting very weird sometimes, and that works for me. 

Random Thoughts

I only focused on Stone and Ruffalo, but truly every performance in this is great. Dafoe is amazing, of course, and Ramy Youssef has many great moments reacting to Dafoe’s craziness. 

This is a gloriously demented mashup of Benjamin Button, Jack, and Forrest Gump.

“Fate had brought me a dead body and a live infant. It was obvious.”

“It…was?”

“She grabbed my hairy business!”

“I was chloroforming goats all morning. I may have ingested too much.”

Lanthimos is truly like Kubrick. It’s not just that their films share some superficial similarities, it’s the tone in which they are made. This very much strikes me as the type of film Kubrick would make if he were still alive.

I worry myself in typing this, but Yorgos Lanthimos gets me.

I am so happy to live in a world in which a company is willing to give this lunatic a lot of money to make hilarious shit like this, which is a film that dares to ask, “What if Dr. Frankenstein was good at his job?” 

The segment of her just wanting to eat, drink, and fuck reminded me of when Bender became a human on Futurama.

I never knew I needed to hear Mark Ruffalo say, “What the fuck are you talking about?” in a British accent. 

“Hope is smashable. Realism is not.”

Usually, I think movies don’t justify their length, but I could watch Emma Stone break down situations in a deadpan manner for five hours, at least. My favorite was her working out how it made sense to start working in a Parisian brothel.

Her first customer kind of looks like Will Forte from the plane sketch in I Think You Should Leave.

“Hence, I seek employment at your musty-smelling establishment of good-time fornication.”

“She is no different to the chicken dog.”

“He has cancer, you fucking idiot.”

This is the most exciting character Ruffalo has played in years, maybe ever.

Wild at Heart - "This Whole World's Wild at Heart and Weird on Top."

Wild at Heart, David Lynch’s surreal (what Lynch isn’t surreal except for the aptly titled Straight Story?) Bonnie and Clyde meets Wizard of Oz mash up, is one of my favorite Lynch films. I dig the simplicity of the plot (Sailor [Nicolas Cage] and Lula [Laura Dern] attempt to be together despite jail stints and Lula’s psychotic mother plotting against them with assassins and whatnot). But more than anything, I enjoy the constant movement necessary for a road movie because Lynch never has time to slow down and wallow in the weirdness, and neither does the audience. You’re forced to just go with it, and if you can embrace that, which I did, then it ends being Lynch’s most enjoyable (not necessarily best) film. I bought Wild at Heart a while back and never got around to watching it. After revisiting Lost Highway a few weeks ago, I figured it was time to watch this crazy movie again. Here are my thoughts.  

The Film That Fixed, or Broke, Nicolas Cage

I’ve written more than enough about Nicolas Cage over the years, and at this point it’s become a bit of a cliché to celebrate the craziness of the eccentric actor. Everyone gets it: Cage is crazy, great, terrible, etc. Obviously, I’m a fan, and I do think of him as endlessly entertaining, even when he swings and misses. But when he swings and connects, it’s something very special. Wild at Heart is one of those connections.

At first, I was just going to focus on how David Lynch and Cage are perfect for each other because they’re both so weird, but that’s a bit too obvious. I don’t think I’d be breaking new ground by claiming these two dudes are on the strange side. So I wasn’t going to write about Cage’s performance much at all aside from pointing out a few moments I particularly enjoyed. Then I came across this bit of IMDb trivia: Nic Cage states that Wild at Heart helped him get away from method acting. David Lynch's spontaneous re-writes and the film's odd characters helped him be more playful with acting.

If that bit of trivia is true (for the sake of this article, I’m going to say it is, but I have not come across this fact anywhere else and, actually, the behind-the-scenes stuff I saw brought up how he stayed in character on set, but oh well...), then Wild at Heart is the film that broke, or fixed, Cage. Cage’s method acting had already produced a few great performances (Raising Arizona and Vampire’s Kiss are my favorites leading up to Wild at Heart), but it wasn’t until this movie that you start to see roles in which it seems like Cage is willing to change things up with the characters he portrays. That’s not to say that he didn’t bring something to the parts he played, he obviously did, especially with Vampire’s Kiss. But with Wild at Heart, he was allowed to deviate from the character on the page. 

The best example of this is the inclusion of the snakeskin jacket Cage wears. He asked Lynch if he could wear it in the film, and then it became this recurring element in the movie. It’s not a coincidence that Cage’s line associated with the jacket concerns “individuality” and “personal freedom.” By wearing the jacket in this film, Cage was freed to start altering his roles in the future, for better or worse. 

Certainly part of the reason Cage was/is allowed to do whatever he wants at times is because of his undulating star power. But I think the bigger part is that directors see the value in letting Cage have a bit of freedom. Because of this freedom, we not only get exaggerated moments in big films (his moment dressed as a priest in Face/Off comes to mind), but we also get performances like Deadfall, which feel like complete Cage creations. 

Cage’s performance in Deadfall is why his change after Wild at Heart could be seen as both breaking and fixing him. For me, it fixed him and allowed for his greatest, most entertaining work. For others, his eccentric performances might come across as distracting, over-the-top disasters that ruin the movie. I feel sorry for anyone who feels the latter. I’m glad Cage put on that literal and figurative snakeskin jacket, and I hope he never takes it off. 

Embracing the Oddness

This is only the second time I have seen Wild at Heart, and I had forgotten how darkly funny and wacky this movie was. I found myself simply enjoying the film, which is odd for me, as I tend to try to decipher David Lynch movies.

Normally, the Random Thoughts section for any movie, but especially a David Lynch movie, would be the longest section. But when I got to the end of Wild at Heart, I realized I didn’t stop very often to make note of what was happening while I was watching. I couldn’t believe I had so few random thoughts about this batshit crazy Wizard of Oz sexual fever dream. I think the all out assault of weird shit throughout the film was too much for me to stop and dwell on any of it. I mean, we’re talking about a movie in which a contract killer manager(?) takes a phone call while sitting on the toilet, drinking tea, and watching a nearly naked woman dance for him. When that’s going on in what should be a simple scene, I just can’t stop to try to decipher any of it because by the time I start to have a thought, something else even wackier happens. And that’s why I love this movie. It’s Lynch unhinged just doing whatever the fuck he wants, and I enjoy the film by just embracing the oddness of it rather than allowing myself to be distracted by it.

It’s one of the only weird Lynch movies that I can just turn my brain off and enjoy. I don’t feel the need to “figure” it out. I think it’s his most simply entertaining film, even with it being one of the weirdest at the same time. Even with all the Wizard of Oz stuff, I didn’t feel the need to try to assign each character to their Oz counterpart. It’s just a movie that is heavily influenced by that film to the point that it’s kind of a new, weirder and more adult version of that film.

The fact that this is a kind of version of Wizard of Oz means that the film has to be constantly moving. There’s not much time for Lynch to dwell on anything, no matter how strange and interesting it might be. Wild at Heart comes at you fast, and the two hour run time feels like an hour at most. Because of this, it wasn’t until it was over that I had time to gather my thoughts and consider some of the crazy shit going on in this movie. I wanted to list some of my favorite weird moments:

• Harry Dean Stanton watching a nature show and growling and shit.
• The mom covering herself in lipstick.
• The constant heavy metal riff segue.
• “Fucking field, let’s dance!”
• Willem Dafoe’s fucking teeth.
• Laura Dern just puking on the floor and leaving it.
• Crispin Glover as Cousin Dell...there’s too much going on it that sequence to narrow it down but here goes: dressing as Santa in the middle of the year, living in fear of aliens wearing black rubber gloves, making a hundred sandwiches, putting cockroaches in his underwear and...on his anus, and then disappearing.
• There are plenty of references to Wizard of Oz throughout (with characters even talking about the movie multiple times), but things get truly crazy when Glenda the Good Witch shows up at the end to teach Sailor to embrace love.

And those are just what come to mind right now. I feel like I could make a list like this after each viewing, and it would be totally different. Wild at Heart is the fucked up movie that keeps on giving.

Why Do I Own This?

I buy any David Lynch movie that even remotely interests me because I know I’ll need to see it multiple times to truly appreciate it. I need to watch this one a few more times in the future.

Random Thoughts

Laura Dern always impresses me in her Lynch films. She just seems so at home in her roles, which is incredibly impressive when comparing this role to her part in Blue Velvet. She is convincing as both an innocent all-American small town girl and as an over-sexed Dorothy. I’m glad she finally won an Oscar for Marriage Story, but she deserved one at least thirty years ago.

A good triple feature would be this movie with Raising Arizona and Natural Born Killers. Of course, I’d need a lobotomy after watching all three of those in one day, but the experience would be worth it.

That is quite a beating to start a film. It definitely sets the tone for this fucked up story.

"My snakeskin jacket! Thanks, baby! Did I ever tell you that this here jacket represents a symbol of my individuality and my belief in personal freedom?" 

I feel like Cage has said this in his everyday life as well.

...and according to IMDb trivia the jacket was actually Cage's and he asked if he could wear it in the movie.

"Sounds like old Dell was more than just a little bit confused, Peanut."

"Lordy, what was that all about?" I think that could be the tagline for almost every Lynch movie.

Bobby Peru is the skeeziest character Willem Dafoe has ever played, and that's fucking saying something.

..