bironic

First of all, how cute is this picture? Voldie & Harry from the Goblet of Fire premiere in NYC this weekend.

I watched a movie called “Frankenstein” today. Vincent Perez’s name caught my eye, and I was pleased to see on the back blurb that this modern-day interpretation featured multiple monsters who were all suffering from existential angst about the purpose of their lives. It was pretty good, actually, with one small problem we’ll get to in a moment. Filmed in 2004, it took place “today” in New Orleans (how prescient that the opening scene featured black children playing in the spray of an open hydrant). Vincent Perez’s character, Deucalion, all scars and dirt and vague European accent under a scruffy cloak, was Victor Frankenstein’s (or, in this version, Victor Helios’) first creation, and at 200 years old he has tracked Helios, who has been keeping himself alive through the wonders of mad-scientist technology, to New Orleans, where he plans to put a stop to his Maker’s body-building habit. Helios, meanwhile, played by Thomas Kretschmann of “The Pianist,” is keeping his own tortured and perfectionist self busy by planning to populate the world with his own creations. I don’t know why he thinks this is a good idea when half the monsters are suicidal, one has turned psychotic, and he can’t even be contented with his custom-made wife, who’s up to Version Four when the movie starts and Five when it ends. Michael Madsen (in another crazy role to follow up his stunts in “Kill Bill” and “Reservoir Dogs”) was the aforementioned psycho-by-night, cop-by-day, named Harker (in homage to Stoker, perhaps?), stumbling around New Orleans plucking organs from fellow mutants to expand his collection. Parker Posey and Adam Goldberg were impossibly young homicide detectives investigating the murders. Parker’s autistic kid brother, who looked like The Father from “Roar,” spent his scenes building cityscapes out of blocks.

The story and characters had potential, and there were hints of the great sci fi and horror tropes (the constructed woman tormented by being unable to please her master; the creator haunted by failure; the creation gone horribly wrong); I never minded that it wasn’t “true” to the original Frankenstein because it wasn’t trying to be. There were self-referential jokes like “Frankenstein was a fiction, based on reality.” The shots and some of the makeup were very pretty. Vincent Perez needs to slow down in these action-drama roles, but Thomas Kretschmann, in addition to being snappily dressed, intelligent, melancholic, subtle and really very attractive in general, gave fantastic depth to what could have been a flat villain. Helios wants perfection and can’t attain it; wants a wife he can love, but never gets her right; needs someone who won’t break under his control, yet looks unsettled when the latest version starts to show an independent personality. Of course, he’s evil – kills his monsters with little remorse, wants to wipe out humanity, smiles a little when he drowns Eliza #4, has artificially extended his life, is wholly in favor of stem cell research and cloning (gasp).

In the making-of featurette, the director and cinematographer kept bragging that their film was a modern re-telling of the myth – “this isn’t your grandfather’s Frankenstein,” “it’s a 21st-century Frankenstein,” “we really wanted Frankenstein’s lab to reflect modern technology,” “we wanted it to be like nothing that’d been filmed before,” and the like. Problem was, it wasn’t new, it was straight-up Gothic from the start: washed-out grays and browns, gloomy sets, imposing structures, shafts of light, dust and rats, mad scientist’s lab, supernatural occurrences, oppressive feeling of fear and abnormality. The lab wasn’t ultra-modern glass and steel, it was a dusty attic with a huge, swooping, rusted fan and bubbling tank. It all worked well, it’s just that they should have recognized their tradition. Not to mention that bragging that your movie is modern when the original wasn’t, isn’t fair or accurate; when Mary Shelley wrote the story, all the science in it was ultra-modern for its time, so doing the same thing now isn’t progressive so much as staying true to the original author’s intentions. Telling the Frankenstein story now requires citing today’s technology to produce the same effect on its audience; that’s why the stem cell and cloning comment worked so well.

The movie was most faithful to its source in its themes, including the warning that male-only creation courts disaster. The filmmakers took this a couple of steps further; not only are Helios’ creations doomed to self-destruction (with the seeming exception of Deucalion, who’s driven by vengeance), one of them – Harker – somehow manages to impregnate himself with a lumpy bumpy monster baby that hatches out of his stomach Alien-style after Harker plummets 60 feet onto a bunch of metal spikes, slithering away and leaving an umbilical cord.

What I didn’t know was that the movie was intended as a pilot for a television series that was never picked up. Talk about finding this out the hard way – 88 minutes in, the slurpy monster-baby is on the loose, the autistic brother hasn’t had a line yet, Helios hasn’t met the main characters, he and his new wife are metaphorically circling each other, Parker Posey and Deucalion vow to take down Helios no matter what it takes, and … the credits roll.

The credits roll!

Is there any “Frankenstein: The Ending” fanfic out there, or do I have to do this myself?

Last night synn & I watched a flabbergasting movie called “Red Riding Hood” that just defies description. Suffice it to say it involved a psychotic twelve-year-old American girl living alone in Rome who lusts after her British tutor by day and performs vigilante justice by night along with her imaginary friend in a wolf mask. When her grandmother arrives to take the girl back home to America, she keeps the woman hostage by drilling her kneecaps and tying her to the bed; when her dentist reveals he’s having an affair with the hygienist, she kills them both with a nail gun; when a homeless man tries to blackmail her, she whacks a wine bottle through his face with a shovel. The motivation for all this is apparently rage that her father died and left her alone. After a showdown in their apartment the girl is relegated to a psych ward in New York. But the movie doesn’t end there. No, a tap-dancing delivery guy gets his legs chopped off at the knee by the Big Bad Wolf wielding a katana, the wolf reveals himself to be her dead zombified father, they have a conversation worthy of Shaun of the Dead, and the two of them sing a duet.

No words.

Mythtifying movies

Mythtifying movies

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