Yeah, I had concluded as much, as per my last post above. It’s a shame that a fine work of cinematic art had to be tainted by this kind of bullshit.
The Artifice Girl (2023). Another exploration of artificial intelligence, but clever and original. The title refers to a perfect visual and voice simulation of a young girl that was developed as bait to lure pedophiles, but the AI predictably soon becomes more than that. But don’t let that deter you – there’s lots more going on here than just that predictable AI evolution..
I like the way the movie is staged in three acts, each in a completely different setting and timeframe, all the while telling a single coherent story.
This didn’t blow me away like some of the other movies I’ve reviewed recently, but that’s a pretty high bar. The 93 minutes or so is well worth your time.
I watched a couple of movies this weekend.
The Phantom of the Opera (1943) – I’ve watched the silent version (the REAL original version, from 1925, without “Carlotta’s Mother” in it.) and the 2004 Musical, but I hadn’t watched the 1943 version in a long time. It’s justifiably forgotten, although it’s got a couple of things going for it:
1.) It was the only Universal horror film to be made in color
2.) It was the only Universal horror film to win an Academy award – two of them, in fact.
On the minus side, it’s also the film that changed the phantom from an isolated, insane, but creative genius into a maudlin, acid-scarred musician (although apparently the idea of a ghostlike acid-scarred musician had previously appeared in the 1937 Chinese film Song at Midnight, which is based in part on Leroux’s novel, but not very closely. The Chinese film would be remade twice later.).
The film came with a feature on the history of the Phantom which was co-written and directed by David J. Skal, author of Hollywood Gothic and The Monster Show. He knows whereof he speaks.
One critic remarked of the film that it had “Too much opera, not enough Phantom”, with which it’s hard to disagree. Claude Reins makes a disappointing Phantom, bumbling and ineffective instead of being a masterful behind-the-scenes manipulator. I think the studio was dithering between trying to make him a sympathetic figure and a villain, and couldn’t manage it. Merian C. Cooper managed it with King Kong – boasting that he’d have the audience crying for Kong at the end, despite the body count he’d racked up. But Reins’ Phantom, despite the sentimental backstory they give him, never achieves this, even though he murders the printer he thinks has wronged him, drops a chandelier on an audience, and commits other assorted mayhem.
It doesn’t help that they give Christine two suitors in this version, and don’t really take either of them seriously. Christine, at least, isn’t the ditz she is in other versions, but apparently they thought Americans couldn’t pronounce or understand her last name “Daae”, so they changed it to “DuBois”. Lon Chaney, Jr. was reportedly pissed at Universal for not giving him the chance to reprise his father’s role.
One thing that would have made the film more comprehensible would have been if they’d left in the part about Christine being The Phantom’s daughter, which explains why he is taking such pains to give her a music education, using all his money to provide her with lessons secretly. But the studio heads thought tis sounded too much like incest, since the Phantom wanted to be Christine’s lover in both the novel and the 1925 film, so it was axed.
The film ends too abruptly when the Opera House caves in on the Phantom after Christine is rescued, leaving only his mask and violin exposed.
This film also started the tradition of the Phantom not actually being that ugly, which Skal explains as something done to avoid raising the spectre of ghastly wartime wounds in the WWII-era film. Skal had pointed out the link between the greater rates of survival (yet the grotesque mutilation of) WWI survivors in shaping the Hollywood monster type in his book The Monster Show.
Apparently there were plans for a sequel, which was eventually made with Susanna Foster (who’d played Christine) and with Boris Karloff (!!) as the villain, but they erased any connection with or mention of The Phantom of the Opera from the film, and it flopped at the box office, starting a tradition of unsuccessful Phantom sequels. I’d never even heard of this film before last weekend. It was called The Climax, a title I don’t think they’d be able to get away with these days.
The opera productions were lavish and, indeed, took u too much time in what was supposed to be a horror film. They couldn’t be sure of the rights during war time, so most of the “operas” aren’t really – they’re repurposed non-operatic pieces or original works, although a couple of real operas got in there. I think they just couldn’t help themselves once they got those colorful costumes in front of the Technicolor cameras. But it din’t really help the film.
Incidentally, I want to observe that, although it’s really easy to find a copy of Gaston Leroux’s novel in bookstores these days, often in one of those embossed hard-bound omnibus editions, this wasn’t the case when I was growing up. I looked for YEARS for a copy of the novel, and couldn’t find one. I finally came a ross a copy in a used book store . It was a paperback version, issued as a tie-in with the release of the 1962 Hammer version of the film.
Suddenly in 1986 paperback editions of the novel were all over the place, and I knew that somebody must be ,making another adaptation of the story. I didn’t realize at the time that this was a stage musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber, which revitalized the story (and which also rescued it from that acid-scarred musician plot, which had shown up in two more movies since the 1943 version). Since then, it’s been easy to get hold of copies. But Leroux’s novel has not always been an eay to obtain “classic”.
If you’re going to read the novel, I recommend Leonard Wolf’s annotated edition, The Essential Phantom of the Opera, which gives a lot of insight into the story. When you read the novel, you wil be amazed that Christine is even more of a ditz than she is in the movie, and that her suitor and the"Persian" are also slow in the uptake, being taken in by subterfuges that wouldn’t fool a schoolchild these days. You eventually lose sympathy with these klutzes because they’re so dumb. Terry Pratchett gleefully pointed this out in his Disc World novel Maskerade, which is essentially a send-up of “Phantom”.
The other movie we saw this weekend was the latest version of Nosferatu
I liked it. I’ve watched the original silent version countles times, and the Werner Herzog/Klaus Kinski remake in English and in German. This version isn’t as boring as the latter, and it does homage to the original.
The biggest problem in adapting the novel Dracula to the stage or screen is how to trim down the ridiculously large cast of characters and locations into something comprehensible, and that will fit into the time allowed. In adapting the silent Nosferatu instead, they have the opposite situation – there are far fewer things to include. They actually increased the cast size and number of incidents.
The film is pretty faithful to the first film. The scene between Knock and Hutter plays out much the same way, and with similar dialogue (although they leave out the “what matter if it cost you a little blood” line as too on-the-mark) Knock even looks similar o his silent version, with his absurd tufts of white hair.
They dispensed with the heavy makeup from the original (which has been much copied since), instead having Count Orlok simply look angry and grim (although he still has the long pointed fingernails), speaking in a slow, gravelly, monotone.
They still maintain the “dreamlike” feeling to encounters with him (see my essay on “Vampires and the Dreamlike State” here – Vampire Movies and the Dreamlike State – The Writings of Stephen R. Wilk )
And they emphasize shadows – the original film made expressive use of shadows (as in the first image on my essay), but later films used shadows even more significantly Carl Dreyers’ Vampyr introduced shadows that moved independently of the person throwimng them, and even shadows without someone throwing them. Francis Ford Coppola stole this for his own version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It’s used here, where Orlok’s shadow falls on drapery when he is not nearby, or moves across walls.
The film goes beyond its vampire influences to steal an idea from the silent version of Faust (also directed by Murnau), in which Orlok, like Murnau’s Mephistopheles, spreads his shadow and influence over the village. Disney studios had previously stolen this image , along with others from Faust, for the “Night on Bald Mountain” sequence in Fantasia.
More later.
Does the Phantom not qualify as a “Universal Monster”? I was completely ignorant of this film even though I have read multiple books about Universal monsters. 1943 was the year Universal was attempting to make Lon Chaney Jr. the new face of Dracula. Son of Dracula started filming the same month Phantom of the Opera did. Producer George Waggoner didn’t have time to work on both films, so I doubt Chaney would have. My guess is that Chaney was more pissed about Rains’ film having the budget for color and his did not.
Only tangentially relevant, but the line of movie monster model kits put out by Aurora in the 60’s started with Frankenstein, Dracula and the Mummy and included the Phantom.
Of course, it also included King Kong and Godzilla…
My apologies – the 1925 Phantom did have a few scenes in color, but not the whole movie.
The Grand Masque sequence was partly in what some people call “two strip Technicolor”, which doesn’t give a full range of colors, but which gives you pretty good reds (perfect for the Phantom’s “Masque of the Red Death” costume and giving decent skin tones) and halfway decent blue-greens. They’ve recently found another sequence in Technicolor, but AFAIK it hasn’t been incorporated into any available version, and isn’t even on the internet. There’s also a sequence atop the Opera House in which the Phantom’s billowing oversized cape (a la Spawn’s) is colored vibrant red using the rare Handschleigel process. I don’t know if any prints with this survive, but the Criterion DVD reproduces this color using modern techniques.
There were reputedly other scenes in color, but they are apparently lost. The whole 1925/1929 gilm was never in color.
I doubt if Chaney was angry because the original hadn’t been in color – It simply wasn’t cost effective back then. Besides, it was his father who played the Phantom. If Lon Chaney Jr. had played The Phantom , he would’ve been the only actor to play the part (or close to the part) of every significant movie monster they had - The Wolfman, the Frankenstein Monster, the Mummy (but as Kharis, not Im-ho-tep), Dracula (well, his son, Count Alucard, anyway), and then The Phantom.
I was addressing the part about Jr. resenting not being given the role in the 1943 film. His film that year, Son of Dracula was in black and white.
Aside from Phantom, though, All of Universal Monster films were in black and white. That stayed the same until the 1950s. Other films in production at the time were also in black and white. Phantom, with its lush opera scenes, was obviously an exception and a prestige production. I doubt he would have been angry over that.
To tell the truth, I can’t think of any films with Lon Chaney Jr. that were shot in color until the 1960s (The Haunted Palace)
Getting back to Nosferatu, they added to the plot by including the Hardings and their children, who sort of take the place of Lucy Westenra and one of her suitors from Stoker’s novel, as sacrificial lambs killed by the vampire. They didn’t have counterparts in the novel.
“Dracula” films are notable by the quality of the character playing Van Helsing – we’ve had Edward van Sloan, Peter Cushing, Herbert Lom, Sir Laurence Olivier (!), Anthony Hopkins (!!), Nigel Davenport, David Suchet, and others – a pretty impressive gallery. This version gave us Willem Dafoe, although he frequently felt as if he was channeling Mel Brooks in Dracula – Dead and Loving It
The original film Nosferatu drew a parallel between the vampire infestation and plague (which also explains Max Schrek’s rat-like features), which is particularly appropriate. The legend of the vampire probably owes its existence to actual diseases (see Barber’s book Vampires, Burial, and Death). The first remake re-iterated this connection, and so does this version.
In that light, Ellen Hutter’s sacrifice in the original film to detain the vampire until the light of day, and the vampire dying in daylight make a sort of sense – it was known that sunlight was a disinfectant long before it was known why this was the case, so the vmpire’s death by sunlight in the first film has a logic to it. (although vampires were always “creatures of the night”, they didn’t die of exposure to sunlight. Dracula walked the streets of London by day. Murnau’s film was the first appearance of this trope, which then disappeared from film and literature for decade until resurrected during WWII. See my essay here – Vampires — Keep Out of Direct Sunlight – The Writings of Stephen R. Wilk
But this film makes it more complex. Ellen Hutter doesn’t merely sacrifice herself out of altruism – she feels that she began this whole cycle by contacting the vampire herself in the past and committing herself to him. So all the events of the story happened because of her – she was the prime mover, so she felt that she had to atone fo it with her life. A unique take on the story.
I like that, although sunlight was fatal to Orlok, he didn’t dissolve in it, but merely expired. Aside from the dreamlike images, this version tried to keep things appearing realistic. So no animated effects, no day-for-night coach ride, and no miraculous dissolution of the vampire.
But it makes you wonder what the hell they did with that gross, misshapen body. Burned it, I guess.
My take below. When I say “it did stick we me more than I expected”, it has stuck with me even more since then. I’ll definitely rewatch it.
The Electric State (2025) RT lists 15% from Critics and 69% from fans.
Ugh, I am with the critics on this one, even as a dystopian CGI fueled feast for the eyes it was dull fare. Hard pass for any adults out there.
Yet my young teenage son liked it.
I thought it was OK, but never think about it. So I guess it was pretty lame, then.
They did reference Barry Zuckercorn from Arrested Development, though. You can see a billboard for his services and the catch phrase is “He’s very good.”
The directors also directed Arrested Development episodes.
Ok, that may be why I bounced so hard off of it. Different strokes and all that, just want to know what I’m getting myself into.
Final Destination 3. Really not bad. Mary Elizabeth Winstead near the beginning of her career and four years before appearing in Scott Pilgrim etc. None of the other actors are familiar, but there are some funny bits and some easter eggs from the first two movies.
I’ve seen them all* and it is helpful to see them as comedies for the most part.
*new one this year!
The Accountant 2016 Ben Affleck
I found the treatment of autism very interesting.
Affleck’s character is autistic and had a challenging childhood. He learns to channel his emotions into accounting and a regimented life.
He was also trained in fighting and weapons by his father. That’s useful when people try to kill him.
It’s a very good movie with an excellent supporting cast.
The sequel comes out April 25.
Preview Accountant 2
Daniel Radcliffe. The plot is stupid, but the character interaction is fun. And that’s not even mentioning Brad Pitt, whose role I will not spoil further.
Nosferatu (2024). I know this has been mentioned several times, but hey, gotta get my 2¢ worth in!
Mainly what I have to say is that out of the big crop of Dracula movies made over the years, this is probably the best, although the 1922 version was a landmark in its day and still chilling today. The script – written by Robert Eggers who also directed – bears only a rough resemblance to the classic old story line (like in the famous 1958 Hammer production which I think was pretty faithful to the Bram Stoker novel) which was a wise decision. Crafting what was in many ways its own plot helped keep the story fresh and interesting.
Fun fact: the actress who plays the central role of Ellen Hutter is Lily-Rose Depp, Johnny Depp’s daughter. She got well-deserved praise for her performance. Bill Skarsgård as Count Orlok is completely unrecognizable under about a ton of grotesque makeup, and Willem Dafoe is appropriately creepy with little help needed from the makeup department.