Over the weekend we watched a bunch of Dracula versions, spin-offs, and sequels. Some we had seen before, some we hadn't. The best surprise was Dracula's Daughter (1936), which I had never seen before, but it's really good. The script is strong (often stronger than the 1931 original -- shh, don't tell anyone) and the story is fascinating. Among other things, it introduces the concept of the reluctant vampire.

(Anne Rice named it as an influence for Interview with the Vampire. By the way, I suppose I should be shocked that Anne Rice has rediscovered her childhood Catholicism and is now writing a book starring young Jesus, but I really wasn't shocked. Because, in spite of this article that calls her "queen of the occult" I would have called her "best-selling gothic fantasist." And, let's face it, the New Testament is the primary originator of all gothic fiction. Of course she liked The Passion of the Christ. It's about a lovely golden-eyed Jesus getting flayed almost to death.

You see where I'm going with this.)

Also, I swear Billy Wilder based the brilliant black comedy Sunset Boulevard (1950) on it. The relationship between an isolated, melodramatic woman out of touch with the modern world and her faithful, disappointed, enabling assistant? Who she tries to throw over for a younger, prettier man?

There's also a definite Carmilla-esque vibe to the scenes where Gloria Holden's Countess struggles with the temptations offered by the bare shoulders of pretty young girls.

I suspect the implicit bisexuality of this film is a bit of an accident -- a byproduct of the old-school idea that only women can really be menaced by a vampire, therefore, if you have a female vampire she, too, has to menace females. But it works anyway.

It was interesting to watch the way certain vampire movie tropes change over time. For example, the earliest death-by-sunlight is probably the one in Nosferatu (in the original Dracula, sunlight is not fatal to vampires) -- this notion caught on quickly, and over time vampires became more and more combustible, until, by the time of Fright Night, they appear to be made out of rocket fuel.

Crosses seem strangely hard to come by in vampire movies. I suspect that is because, if they were made to seem as easy to come by as they are in real life, the vampire wouldn't seem a very big threat. Many modern vampire tales abandon sensitivity to holy objects altogether, although I like the Fright Night take on it -- that it is a strength of purpose in the wielder that actually makes the cross work, at least on mature vampires.

In film versions of Dracula, Dracula is the star of the picture. In the book, he is offstage for most of the story. I don't mind Dracula being the star, but it changes the story quite a bit to structure it that way. Stephen Dietz wrote a marvellous stage version where he recaptures this aspect of the story.

From 1931 to 1992 (Coppola's version) there are about a million flying bat effects. They look cheesy and stupid in 1931, and they never get any better. I don't know why this is. You'd think that at some point somebody would figure out a way to simulate a convincing bat, or film a real bat, or notice that the effects are terrible and decide to use bat SHADOWS instead, or something...but no. It's almost like, in some perverse way, people are looking forward to the terrible bat effects. The 1979 Langella Dracula has some real bats, too. Enormous, adorable, flying foxes which have somehow taken up residence in tunnels under graveyards in England. The poor things. They're tropical, so of course, they are probably going to freeze to death.

Bats, rats, and wolves are not creepy. I don't think I'm alone in this -- the instant there's something furry on screen, I think "awww....cute!" But this doesn't bother me the way bad bat effects do. I mean, if I'm thinking "cute!" and I'm supposed to be afraid, this doesn't ruin the moment. But thinking, "wires! rubber! stupid!" does ruin the moment.

I notice that modern vampire movies have to make things ugly for you to be afraid of them. I don't really like this trend, although it does serve a purpose -- it allows the heroes to avoid killing something that looks human, and it allows for a scary reveal when somebody turns out to be a vampire (much-used on Buffy). But -- I'll pull out Fright Night again -- there is a scene where the heroes are running away from the scary handsome vampire played by Chris Sarandon, and it's incredibly creepy the way they run and run, and he just saunters with a measured arrogance, and yet somehow he's always right behind them. And his little snarky smile is very creepy. But his monster face? Not creepy at all. Repeat after me...

Latex is never scary.

This is the biggest flaw in the Coppola version. They decided to make Dracula too sympathetic, so then they had to make him scary again, and they tried to do it with overwrought latex monsters. Which doesn't work at all. (Also, the reincarnation plot is a complete uncredited ripoff of House of Dark Shadows, which is annoying and stupid. Look, you're filming DRACULA, it's a long book, lots of stuff happens -- you don't have to just make stuff up, okay?)

The Coppola version and the Langella version both give Mina (although the Langella version switches the names so it's Lucy) a bona-fide, apparently freely chosen, romance with Dracula. Which is interesting. But then they sort of pull back from the full implications of that, and make it seem like she's really under a spell after all -- mixed signals that make the story murky.

The Langella version has a great scene where Van Helsing (here, Mina's father, where Mina has Lucy's role from the book) discovers Mina is a baby-eating vampire and stakes her. The scene works except that Mina looks really awful, with white skin falling off and everything, and there's no indication of why she looks so bad. Then, later, for no adequately explored reason, they unearth her again in order to cut out her heart, and she looks perfect.

The 1931 Dracula at least, doesn't have any major lapses in logic. There are some pretty good scenes, gorgeous design choices, and of course, Lugosi -- who is a great Dracula, and actually seems like the character from the book. Sort of compelling and repellent at the same time. Not too old or unattractive, nor too young and pretty -- I mean, I would totally cast him as Dracula. But I do have some problems with the dialogue. Dracula keeps saying things that, while poetic, make not one bit of sense for the character to be saying. (Unless he wants everybody to think he's a vampire right off, and this whole affair is some sort of elaborate suicide.) Also, I don't like the way Van Helsing is played. Very low-energy. The scenes between Lugosi and the guy playing Van Helsing are frustrating, they seem to be happening in slow motion. Lugosi is doing his best to be menacing, and .. is just ...reciting his lines. Oh, well. Renfield and Mina are good.

One thing that stays true, from 1931 onward, is that the vampire is always the best dressed character.

Note: reposted from the old Parlour.

Wonder Bread is leaving us. Bankrupt company Interstate Bakeries Corp is closing a bakery in Lakewood, which means, no Wonder Bread in Oregon or Washington. Apparently a Seattle plant will continue to manufacture Hostess snack cakes -- no word on whether this includes the infamous Hostess Lemon Pie so beloved by the other member of this household. (No, not the cats. The husband.)

The article claims that "increasingly health-conscious eaters grew less interested in the company's famous white bread and other treats, such as Hostess Cup Cakes and Twinkies." Yet, they are closing the plant that makes BREAD and keeping us in SUGARY TREATS. Something seems a little...off.

During the height of the Atkins craze, it seemed to me that non-sweet baked goods were becoming increasingly difficult to find. If I went to a coffee shop, where at one time they might have had an assortment of rolls, some of them sweet, now it seemed they only had the sweet ones. My theory was that people who cheat on the Atkins diet don't cheat with a brioche or a mini-baguette. They cheat with sugar. Or, perhaps I should say, SUGAR!!!.

As a carb-lover who avoids sugar, I found this disheartening.

On the other hand, at the fabulous Vancouver French restaurant Hermitage where Paul & I had the pleasure of dining with Robert Silverberg and his wife Karen Haber (plus Robert Sawyer, Kirstin Morrell, and our friends Palle and Dawna), the bread they put out on the table is possibly the best bread I have ever had. Period. Which was very heartening, since we got lost and arrived at dinner rather late, when everyone else was already deep into the appetizer course, and truly exquisite bread made me feel not a bit left out. Plus, my decorative plate had bats on it, which is guaranteed to cheer me up under any circumstances.

Consortium News has a well-written and interesting article about the rise of "patriotic" journalism at the expense of skeptical journalism. The coverage of Iran-Contra is particularly interesting, since I was young enough to be pretty new to thinking about politics while that was unfolding.

I was already pretty cynical about the Reagan administration by that time -- I thought the popularity and prosperity was all smoke and mirrors, and Reagan the (admittedly charming) magician misdirecting us. Look over there! No, not here, there! This was mostly because of his attempts to move us backward environmentally, my sense that his policies were manufacturing temporary prosperity at the expense of long-term economic viability, and my disgust that our commitment to "freedom" and "democracy" in foreign nations was really code for "installing governments sympathetic to American interests without regard to how badly they treat their own people." Which mostly translated to: "Left wing despots baaaaad. Right wing despots gooooood." (You're supposed to say that in a sheep voice, like in that Animal Farm cartoon)

The Iran-Contra affair was when I realized how corrupt and partisan our country, particularly the church, had become. The Iran-Contra affair was when, in my heart, I dropped out of my parents' church, after being led in a group prayer for "Oliver North, that great, Godly man." That was when I first identified the widely-applied, "it's okay if you're a Republican" double standard.

So it's interesting to revisit that moment in historical context. I still don't like where it's led us.

Of Time Magazine top 100 books in English since 1923 list, I have read:

• Animal Farm, George Orwell
• Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, Judy Blume
• Catch-22, Joseph Heller
• The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
• A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
• The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon

  Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison

• The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis
• Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
• Lord of the Flies, William Golding
• The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
• Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
• Neuromancer, William Gibson
• 1984, George Orwell
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
• Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut
• Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
• Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
• To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
• To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
• Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibb

Quite a few others on the list are books that I mean to read someday, but probably won't. All in all a pretty good list -- they weren't afraid to include SF and fantasy, and there's one graphic novel, so it doesn't suffer from academitis. Of the books I read, the only one I didn't much like was Are you There God? It's Me, Margaret. I remember liking The Crying of Lot 49, but don't remember a single other thing about it. All other books are really good books that I like a lot. So. Yay, books.

Saw it. Twice. I wanted to write a real review, but somehow, all that came to mind was a bunch of pull quotes:

"A witty and fast-moving Star Wars for a new generation."

"A giddy pop-culture explosion, Star Wars by way of Shaun of the Dead."

"Spacefaring SF has always been firmly rooted in the tropes of the western -- the mighty Star Trek was originally conceived of as "Wagon Train in space." Serenity takes the western concept and gallops merrily away with it, with supremely entertaining results."

"Funny, scary, even heartbreaking -- Serenity succeeds where other recent SF offerings have failed by being about authentically human characters, struggling to survive in a compellingly grubby and lived-in futuristic universe."

"You know what Joss Whedon likes? Joss Whedon likes diminutive girls who kill monsters with big axes."

"A ripping SF adventure yarn with heart and humor."

"The only thing Serenity is really missing is, sadly, a memorable theme song. That's a shame, because it would be much more likely to become an instant classic if it had one. And make no mistake -- it deserves to become an instant classic."

"Wow! SF that assumes I'm intelligent enough to follow an actual plot and keep more than three characters straight! Be still my heart!"

"I can't say I was entranced for every single moment. But I can definitely count, in mere seconds, all the times that I wasn't entranced."

"Packs enough story into a two-hour movie for a whole season of a television show. And that's a GOOD thing."

Okay, so, go out, make it a big hit, ensure that we get a sequel. Do I have to tell you twice?

Lemony Snickett's A Series of Unfortunate Events

Very mixed reaction to this one. It LOOKS great, the cast is appealing, and some of the script is very funny. But it has two notable problems. First, a number of key scenes fall curiously flat. Especially scenes with Jim Carrey as villainous Count Olaf, when he is abusing the unfortunate Baudelaire orphans. It's weird. He LOOKS perfect in the role -- and his scenes with Olaf's dreadful acting troop work fine -- but somehow when he plays off the kids it just...sits there. The timing is off, or something. But, since Olaf's relationship with the kids is central to the movie, this flaw turns out to be pretty major.

The other problem is how the baby Sunny was scripted. She is pre-lingual, which in the books (and in the introduction) is handled like: Sunny said, "Urgle!" which probably meant, "Who is that man over there and why is he wearing a bowler hat on the beach?" But in most of the movie she is given subtitles. And the subtitles are hideous. A completely different sense of humor from everything else in the movie. Things like, "she's the mayor of crazy town!" Cringable.

Overall, though, I was still glad I saw it. I would recommend getting the DVD and watching it with commentary from Lemony Snickett and the director. Mr. Snickett is really funny. He does things like calling Cedric The Entertainer "Mr. The Entertainer" and playing the accordion during the scary bits.

Insomnia

Disappointing. It starts with beautiful northwest scenery (filmed in British Columbia and Alaska) and an intriguing premise (cop starts to lose it when he can't sleep during Alaskan white nights, kills the wrong person, then develops weird relationship with the original killer as he covers up his mistake). But the story ends up being thin and rather dull. Lazy writing is the big culprit here -- the script advances the plot and a couple of really obvious themes, but doesn't do much to make the characters or their world seem compelling. Motivation is often frustratingly murky. The cast (Al Pacino, Robin Williams, Hillary Swank) indicates this was an A-list thriller. Not recommended.

The Business of Strangers An intriguing little movie that flirts with the edges of psycho killer movies, yet -- to its benefit -- never really goes there. Stockard Channing is delightful as the hard-driven and successful executive uncomfortable with her human weaknesses. Julia Stiles is funny and weirdly compelling as the mysterious younger woman who originally shows up to work the audio visual equipment. Recommended.

Lost in Translation

A good movie: funny, well-acted and carefully scripted. Yet, ultimately, fairly simple and obvious. I feel it was...overpraised. I remember reading so many "best of the year!" reviews of this, that to encounter a film that is merely good comes as a bit of a disappointment.

One DVD extra is worth watching: the full footage of the bizarre Japanese talk show (Matthew's Best Hit TV) that Bill Murray's character appears on.

On a side note -- since the movie gets a lot of humor mileage out of the cultural displacement of an American in Asia, I missed the scene where we get to see weird foreign junk food. There are a couple of "weird food" restaurant scenes, but they're not nearly weird ENOUGH, and there's no JUNK food. Asian junk food is one of the funkiest things about going to Asia (or, let's be honest, some parts of the lower BC mainland). Because you can tell it's junk food -- bright cartoony packages of crunchy salty things, sweet goop, and cans of carbonated beverages -- but everything else is up for grabs. Like, it's SODA POP, and there's a picture of fruit on the package, but you don't even know what kind of fruit it is.

Oh, well. Maybe movie stars don't eat junk food.

TV

The War at Home

Unbelievably unpleasant, baffling, and unfunny. Takes a page from All in the Family (everybody is either a bigot, or an idiot, or both) but it's the WRONG PAGE. (Hint: All in the Family worked because Archie Bunker was not ACTUALLY the viewpoint character, because the stories found the humanity under the characters' terrible behavior, and because, uh, THE SCRIPTS WERE FUNNY.)

This is by far the worst new show I've seen in a long time. It's so bad that I wonder how it even got made. Was there ever a point in its development when somebody working on the show actually read a script, or watched a scene, and thought, "yeah, that's funny"? Because it's really difficult to imagine that happening. I can only come to one conclusion:

They are still doing way too much coke in Hollywood.

On the plus side, it gets me to shut off the TV immediately after the Simpsons are done. When they jumped into Malcom in the Middle or Family Guy, I would sometimes watch the show that followed. But I never really got anything worthwhile out of the experience. They were neutral TV. Brain numbing mild diversions.

The War at Home? That's the kind of show they will make me watch in the afterlife if I'm really bad.

Kitchen Confidential

Saw this because it immediately followed Arrested Devlopment on its new Monday night. And, it has Buffy cred! Nicholas Brendan plays a pastry chef. Not a terrible show at all -- paced very much like Arrested Development, with no laugh track and lots of offbeat humor. But the humor and story are a little more typical -- which makes it less fun, but perhaps more likely to get a mainstream audience. Also, pilots aren't usually the BEST example of any show, so I'd definitely give this one another chance.

Bones

Saw this at the comic convention, actually, but thought I'd mention it here -- more Buffyness! David Boreanaz plays a cop, in a show about forensic anthropology. I liked the pilot okay -- good cast, interesting characters, intriguing premise, occasionally surprising humor -- but it had some major awkward spots. You know, the kind of mind-numbingly obvious dialogue like: "You have trouble with intimacy, don't you?" "I don't know. I guess maybe I do have trouble with intimacy." "That's because of your trouble with intimacy."

But that's exactly the sort of thing that tends to get smoothed out when a show finds its stride, so I'm optimistic and will give this one another chance.