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I watched the 1992 version of Dracula.  Not going to lie, I’m disappointed.

I should have known better.  Vampires have gotten worse year by year since the damn book was written.  I’ve never seen Nosferatu, but it was supposedly fair.  The Bela Legosi version is the classic that ‘created’ the vampire, and since then a few dozen movies, mostly of terrible quality, have solidified the quintessential, archetypal, infinitely cliche vampire.

Anne Rice ran with the idea and made a twisted cross between Bram Stoker, Lovecraft, and cheap fantasy.  Still, she probably created the best vampire beyond Stoker himself.Since then, vampires have apparently become impotent effeminate soap opera wood.  It’s a terrible fate for a creature, a character, that feels like it should have a much more profound life.

It was my fervent hope that Francis Ford Coppola’s version of the Dracula legend would get it right.  Maybe it’s dated, maybe it just didn’t click.  One way another I finished the movie feeling that it was hit everything at a 45 degree angle.  It had so many things right and so many things unforgivably botched.

Easy criticism: Keenu Reeves should never act.  East Response: Gary Oldman should have a part in everything.

Beyond the casting and the now-hokey visuals, my criticism is really with the plot.  It started off brilliantly.  Vlad went to the crusades to defend the church and came home to a dead wife, dead and damned from suicide.  I think there was room to explore the back story more, but the initial scene is probably the best in the whole movie.  Seeing the Vlad storm out of a bloody alter captures the quintessential curse of the vampires.

From there the plot can’t decide what it wants to follow.  It bounces from a burlesque horror in Transylvania, a comedy of manners in England, an adventure film, and a goofy action flick without really concentrating on any one of them.  Why did Dracula go to England?  The reason was to find Mina, his wife reborn.  That is clarified later, but given that’s the main inspiration for all the plot that  follows, it seems that angle needed to be emphasized instead of an obscure (and itself poorly narrated) real estate deal in England, that obviously preceded the film, as concerned by Renfield’s subplot.  Why did he need land in England if he didn’t know about Mina yet?  Who knows?

Renfeld was excellent, both visually and in direction.  They might have said why exactly he became the vampire’s servant, or explained why his struggle only seemed to start in the last thirty minutes, but he emphasized better than any other character (Helsing included) the power of the vampire.

The scenes with Lucy are also powerful.  They suffer from age and a certain lack of subtlety, but the Victorian eroticism is played with nicely.  England was a good mixture of modern and stately, seedy and mysterious.  It is a suitable haunt for the vampire once he arrives, but then he ruins it by jumping through nonsense montages.

What I’m really getting at is that the quintessence of Dracula was never really touched upon.  The first half of the film focused on a rare sense of eroticism that was never explained or explored.  Did Lucy fall for Dracula due to her promiscuity?  Presumably, but if that’s true than you can’t blame it on a dream later.  If her actions are responsible for her date than she must make her choices unhindered and with full cognizance.  The book managed this, but the film botched it.

The second half of the film spends too much time letting Anthony Hopkins chew the screen as Van Helsing.  Van Helsing is an awkward character either way.  He is an expert on Dracula and too many shades a double of Sherlock Holmes.  If Dracula is truly this absolute horror than having Van Helsing as a fearless knight ruins the whole creation.  Van Helsing, at best, can be a knowledgeable book expert who is faced with something far beyond his capability.  That scenario preserves the vampire’s mortal horror and gives the quest an emotional tension that cannot be grasped otherwise.

In reality, the real exploration needs to be of the vampire himself.  Many films have concentrated on vampires who must have flesh, but are equally repulsed by what they have become.  That is one angle, but I prefer the vampire who either wishes to freely grant his gift to those who would have it, a seductive vampire who has no need of force or especial guile.  Alternatively, the damned vampire is adequate, though harder, I would think, to capture.  The damned vampire is one who has come to his fate through crimes that could not be punished through death alone.  This is Satan as a vampire, a creature who suffers for their own pride.  This is the vampire that may be destroyed by love, ala Nosferatu.  The seductive vampire’s destruction is really only satisfactory through starvation.  If his victims can be convinced his gift is not worth having than the vampire has been rendered dust.

That is my mind on the matter.  The imagery was so great and Dracula, the film, tried to hit so many elements, but I found it lacking through and through.  With such a powerful character and such a vibrant story, I genuinely hope this recent fad of androgynous boy-thing vampires goes away.  It is a sad fate for the children of the night. What sweet music they might make…

How do I know our media is borderline useless?  This. Original article and link here.

Sure the government would prefer to use the U-3 rate, but why does media choose to report it?  The U-6 rate is the actual number of people unemployed and underemployed, which is the only number that actually matters.  Some contrived formula for determining who ‘counts’ might make for a nicer number, but it’s useless as far as policy or good administration is concerned.

Christmas Eve: Moon

Day After Christmas: District 9.

District 9 is another science fiction movie that I let fall off the radar. On at least three separate occasions I almost might have seen it. After striking out, I let it fall by the wayside.

It’s a gruesome bit of work, but probably the most intelligent ‘alien’ film to come…ever? It’s certainly a far cry from Independence Day, Men in Black (the first was actually somewhat clever), or the wretched Tom Cruise version of War of the Worlds.

District 9 is a ‘documentary film’. It follows Wikus van de Merwe, a low-level beurocrat responsible for moving a prison camp of aliens, called prawns, from one district to another. Twenty years prior the alien invaders landed above Johannesburg, South Africa. They were removed from their floating spacecraft and placed in camps, which have become crime-filled and unruly.

District 9 is as much a criticism of privatization and apartheid as it is an ‘alien’ film. It is an immensely difficult film to watch, but for all the right reasons. Wikus van de Merwe has his life thrown to pieces over the course of a short, but frenziedly two hours. It is bloody and gruesome, but its one of the few films where I think that gore is actually necessary. It makes Wikus’ trials all the more powerful and the conclusion that much more relevant.

Again, I want to avoid giving away too much, but it’s not an invasion film, it’s not gun-porn, it’s not a touchy-feely allegory, or an action film. It is a film with aliens, but it is not a film about aliens. The closest approximation would be a film about humans might treat aliens, or really how we treat anyone, ourselves included.

For being a fairly low budget affair, the imagery is phenomenal. The spaceship…looks like a spaceship. The aliens are slightly, ever so slightly, cartoonish, but only a little bit. The characters beyond Wikus don’t have much screen time and they’re all basically heartless bastards, but anything more complex in the way of villainy would have required a novel, not a film.

It’s a film supposedly awaiting a sequel, but it I’m not sure it’s necessary. It’s poignant and startling, similar to Moon in that regard, and another title on my list of Science Fiction movies that aren’t trash.

When did science fiction movies get to be good? Between a Star Trek movie that might as well have been an action thriller, a wave of shoddy, childish Star Wars films, and the assorted dystopian joke-film (read Matrix 2 and 3), I’ve always felt that Science Fiction and Film were too dangerous to mix. Older movies like Logan’s Run were almost good, but either dated themselves very quickly or were just silly to begin with.

Moon, directed by Duncan Jones (David Bowie’s son), is excellent. It’s not kind of good. It’s really good. Good length (hour and a half), good acting, gorgeous, engaging, thought-provoking. Slowly paced, but never boring. Very subtle at times, never too heavy-handed. It’s probably the best film I’ve seen this year.

Sam Rockwell (I know him as Zaphod from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) plays Sam Bell, a solitary technician on a Helium 3 mining station on the Moon. His three year mission is to maintain the station and then go home to his wife and kid. He’s joined by a robot (voiced by Kevin Spacey I think) who helps out with chores around the station.

The film’s beauty comes from the moon and the station itself. Sleek, futuristic decorations correspond nicely against the sheer, lifelessness of the Lunar surface. The rocks between tossed up by the helium miners is just perfect.

I won’t give the story away but Sam Bell gets twice the screen time of most lead characters. *Wink *Wink. The ending is both happy, sad, and intelligent, perhaps the rarest thing of all, science fiction movie, or otherwise. Sadly, Moon was a limited release, but it’s on DVD now. Pick it up.

Happy Tuesday: it’s a map of cheese…in England.

I kind of want some Isle of Wight Blue.

I finally got around to watching The Queen. It follows the Royal Family and newly elected Prime Minister Tony Blair as they deal with the after math of Princess Diana’s death.

The Queen’s reluctance to engage the media was apparently a rather large story in England. Over here, I don’t recall it being much of a story. It’s an interesting drama though.

The royalty, with a thousand years of precedent and tradition, isn’t often forced to deal with a new phenomenon. The benefit of having royalty is that it puts some institution beyond politics. A president may ‘lie!’ and a Prime Minister may have to defend himself during PMQs, but the Queen is above it all. It’s idealistic and abstract, but I can see why England keeps it.

How then, should royalty respond when one of their former members dies tragically. If Lady Diana had been hated than it would have slipped by quietly, but she was quiet beloved. Her death then becomes an issue of state. The royalty is bound to honor it in some manner simply because the nation grieves as well and they must join.

The acting if phenomenal and they all pretty much look like their counterparts. The scenery is also excellent. Balmoral Castle, the royal vacation estate, is suitably gorgeous for the Royal Family.

All in all, a most fascinating film telling a story that just never drifted my way previously.  Worth picking up or renting!

How many months ago did Watchmen come out?

Don’t know. Here’s Alan Moore reading Rorschach’s journal.

You don’t hear author’s reading their works all that often. Occasionally at readings, occasionally audiobooks. Conferences will have parts of that.

As for Comic Book writers, hmm? Has Frank Miller ever read Batman outloud?

Enjoy the weekend!

http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1924722

Greatness

Why even bother trying to come up with fictional settings?  Really.  It’s a complete waste of time.  For every space station or foreboding castle I could come up with, there’s already some real place that’s twice as cool.

Now if only they took on renters.

Another Windows 7 Saga, but much more trivial.

The Windows 7 machines I work with are not on a domain and never will be.  Given the distinct lack of file sharing that we want to encourage, we prefer they don’t even share a workgroup.

By default it appears that Windows 7 like to put up a welcome login screen with icons of each valid user account.  From a security standpoint I really don’t want all of the user accounts listed.  I really don’t want some moderately clever user logging out of their public of staff account and seeing the various administrative accounts we put on there.  They’d still have to guess the passwords, but I’d rather keep them as many steps away as possible.

Disabling the login icons in this Windows release was a bit harder than usual.

Part 1:   in the run menu type ‘control userpasswords2′.   Go to the advanced tab.  Set Ctrl-Alt-Dlt secure login.  This used to be enough..

Part 2: in the run menu type ‘secpol.msc’ From here you need to find the interactive policies, which are located under Local Policies->Security Options.   Change the Ctrl-Alt-Dlt login policy.

Note: these only work on the professional or higher versions of windows 7.

Secondary Rant:  Why is Printers now Devices and Printers?  Who is looking for Printers under D?  How did this not come up?  What name-guru thought that was a good idea?  Also, why can’t I have a flat list of control panel items instead of the three column debauchery that it spits at me?  Why!

Tertiary Rant: I’ve been a Windows defender and apologist for a while and Windows 7 has a lot of things that I like, but on the small stuff…they just suck.  The loss of the ‘up’ key from WIndows XP navigation to Vista was when I decided to start counting all of small and unnecessary nubbishness coming out of Redmond…