Track of the Vampire
More specifically, in vampire movie terms, I just finished watching
Track of the Vampire. I didn't know much about the movie when I watched it, just that it was cheap, early 60s, and the bad guy was a vampire. The movie was kind of a mish-mash. Fortunately, our minds will add sense to things that aren't all that coherent. In particular, the Vampire does not look like, move like, dress like, or in any way echo the evil artist, Soldi, though we soon learn they are the same. My mind, helping out the movie, understands that the spirit of the vampire is kind of like The Incredible Hulk. When it takes over, the artist is transformed. I could even ignore that the the artist is pretty freakin' evil when he isn't transformed. He drops people in wax, and paints them when they're dead. Still, he does love at least one woman.
I also noticed that sixties women look really hot in sixties-style bikinis. Women from this century, when trying to play sixties women, never get it right. Maybe we've lost the combination of fitness, weight, and softness that made those suits work so well. Modern women can be hot, but they are usually too skinny or too buff, or too big to play that sixties idea woman.
I also noticed that the movie is a great play on art schools. The "hero" is a classic self-absorbed artist with a small following, who thinks of himself as being on the forefront of the next great thing in art. He resents the commercially successful Sordi (the vampire) who paints Nude Red Deads. The group of followers this guy has remind me of real-life bohemian cliques who view all art not accepted by the group as crap. And the standards of the group keep changing. Interestingly, there is a lot of play between the "good" artist and his model, who wants to be seen as a beautiful woman. He, naturally, wants to paint her in some kind of abstract way. When he's finally done a fairly natural portrait of her, and she seems excited, he demonstrates "quantum art" by spraying something over the face. Later, we see this group experimenting with using the model directly as brush. This destructive relationship to the models is, of course, a parallel to Sordi's more extreme method, which include boiling them in wax.
It did occur to me, more than once, that the character was only marginally a vampire. At times, it didn't seem that was the case. He was plenty evil enough without that element. But that didn't bother me too much, mostly because it's not that great a movie.
Then I did some reading. Turns out this movie was produced by Roger Corman. His first director left, he insisted on using footage from a Yugoslavian vampire movie, even though it was otherwise unrelated. Then a second director fit the vampire element in, shot the rest, and Corman edited the whole thing together.
So he knew, the bastard, that even "smart" guys like me would help him out, inventing the linkages needed to bring the fairly unrelated footage together into a single story. If we're being entertained, we'll make it make sense. Sometimes.
Track of the Vampire
Of course some vampire movies really aren't.
Blade, obviously.
Underworld.
Van Helsing. (not to pick on Kate Beckinsdale, but she needs a better agent.) What makes a vampire movie authentic? Reading through visitor comments on Amazon, Netflix, and IMDB, you might think it was following the rules. You know, vampires cast no reflection, hide from crosses, burn in the daylight, and possibly avoid garlic. Approximately one-third of all vampire movies now contain a joke about crosses and Jewish vampires. But these "rules" have been tightly followed by action-adventure style movies, like Blade, while only invoked in a small percentage of genre core movies. The vampire rules come from the early cinematic representations of Bram Stoker's version of the tale. The older peasant stories aren't nearly as clear about daylight, crosses, or garlic. The stake through the heart has always been popular, however. And this gave birth to the idea that we've filtered away in film, the horrible breath of the vampire. That's because when they actually did dig up corpses suspected of being vampires, and drove stakes into their hearts, usually there was a forced exhalation of all those gases building up inside. It was certainly not pleasant. But our modern cinematic vampire has grown more and more sophisticated, urbane, seductive. Bad breath doesn't fit, so we've dropped it. I'll get back to vampires, but for now we'll say that an authentic vampire movie should include the horrific power of the mind of the vampire taking away the will of the victim. It should include a sense that something ancient is continuing to live by taking away the lives of the young and current. It should include a power that exists in darkness and hiding, that cannot be fully seen. Any movie that just has undead creatures wandering around taking over the world is more of a zombie movie. [Note, we'll do Chinese Vampires as a whole separate topic.]
A Point of Reference for Kung Fu Hustle
I saw
this movie twice. Each time with a different person. The first woman loved it, the second, well, thought a couple parts were funny. Oddly, though I enjoyed it greatly the first time, it doesn't hold up well. Worse, it has no point of reference for the
non-Kung Fu movie person. The slapstick in this movie relies on an understanding of the well-exaggerated effects in the older Kung Fu movies, especailly those like
Tai Chi master that portray the hidden forces of Qi power.
Is there an authentic basis for Kung Fu Hustle? The slapstick humor is an exaggeration of an exaggeration. The only people who should really laugh are those who've seen enough crazed cheap movies to know what is being laughed at. Otherwise the movie comes close to being cartoonish farce. Fortunately, many American audiences have seen the various high-end martial art movies that have come around recently, including
House of Flying Daggers,
Hero, and
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. And, of course, there's
Kill Bill. To a lesser extent, the choreography and exaggeration of magical Kung Fu has been done in the Matrix.
Still, it's a bit surprising this movie is getting pushed in the American market. Unlike a Jackie Chan or Jet Li movie, (or even Tony Jaa), there are no visually amazing authentic stunts, and very little honest martial arts. Also, Jackie Chan built his routines and shoulders of American silent stars, like Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton. But here, Stephen Chow utilizes, at best, a three-stooges aesthetic, one that has not been popular in this country for awhile. Certainly not among the women.
Law School Ruined me for Watching This Movie
I watched
The Verdict, with Paul Newman, and greatly enjoyed the tale of a bottom-feeding alcoholic trial attorney, a plaintiff's attorney in a medical malpractice case, fighting the odds. The acting was great, the critical turns were well-concealed until the last moment. One turning point was done entirely without dialog, ending with a marvelously deserved sock to the jaw.
As I left the theater, I heard two guys behind me talking. One said: "Law school kind of ruins you for this movie." Years later, I went to law school. I never became a plaintiff's attorney, or even did the kind of litigation defense that was the subject of this film. But I can testify to this: the movie is still fine.
When I first saw
The Devil's Advocate, I also enjoyed it. A brilliant defense attorney goes to work for Al Pacino's devil. Really, it's hard to go wrong. But, though the movie was enjoyable from almost every angle, Law School really did ruin this one for me. Why? Because the outcome was no longer morally tenable.
In The Verdict, what the guys were complaining about was a matter of process. Rules of discovery and evidence make real litigation plodding, no matter how gripping the underlying issues might be. But it's still a story of the triumph of truth and the little man over powerful institutions. The story has moral authenticity.
The Devil's Advocate, however, takes aim at an unfair target. The first step on Keanu Reeve's descent into satanic servitude occurs when he gives his client, who we learn is guilty, the best defense. In movies there has long been a conciet that heroic attornies defend innocent clients. The structure of the Hollywood legal story is always the uncovering of innocence. An attorney who defends a guilty client is compromised under this system.
Yet real trial attornies are, more often than not, defending the guilty. That's how the system works. Litigation is a testing process from which the truth is supposed to emerge. If defense attornies only took on innocent clients, then you would, before you could find a defender, have to prove your innocence to the attorney, first. And he or she has less at stake. So a good defense attorney, a moral defense attorney, does not distinguish between guilt and innocence. He takes his client and gives him the best defense.
Cape Fear explored what can happen when a defense attorney overrides the judicial system, allowing his client to be punished. In the classic balance of the horror movie, the punishment is vastly disproportionate the moral failure. Still, within the context of horror film, it's a moral balance.
Like most people, I have many areas of specialized knowledge. I also have the ability to disable them when watching movies that tread loosely with reality. But there's a difference between suspending judgement as to the description of a a process, and accepting the complete moral reversel of The Devil's Advocate. Not saying I can't do it.
Tarantino and Gritty Realism
There is a certain visceral violent feel to Tarantino that is both real and exaggerated. When he came onto the scene, he was celebrated for bringing a gritty realism to an overly formalized action genre. But, like Sam Peckinpah, was it realism or a different kind of exaggeration? Peckinpah wanted to show that gunfights weren’t clean, so he slowed them down and spurted blood all over the place. However, though the slow motion was described as realism, there is never an observer who actually sees the event really occur in slow motion. It is more akin to looking at something under a microscope. A laboratory analysis rather than a representation of anyone’s actual experience.
Though Tarantino is more committed to genre conventions, in fact he celebrates them, his reputation for realism comes from the gritty dialog and bloody, bloody violence. If the pure spurting of blood is all it takes to create realism, Tarantino has probably gotten us there, all by himself. But, like Peckinpah, Tarantino doesn’t just add in the gritty details that had previously been missing, he isolates them, celebrates them, worships them even. The trademark ripped off ear is not just tossed in, it takes over the camera. No real observer could focus on that ear the way Tarantino does. Anyone who has ever been in an accident will probably tell you that, the action may slow down, it doesn’t focus in on the gross element the way Tarantino’s camera does. Violence and gore cannot be called gratuitous in a Tarantino movie. The movie is about the violence, or at least it is driven by the violence.
