#black sails cinematic universe indeed

[max-nolastname]

what is grief if not love persevering is such a black sails thesis statement but no…..this absolute banger of a line is from a silly little marvel show

[tespuco]

PotC Liveblog: Dead Man’s Chest

I’d been looking forward to rewatching DMC for some time. It was the movie that canonized my OTP and inspired so many amazing Sparrabeth fics. I fondly recalled seeing it in theaters with my family, my eyes and shipper heart growing bigger and wider with every subtext-laden appearance of Jack’s compass. I remembered feeling personally betrayed by Elizabeth’s death-kiss, like the writers had deliberately buoyed my hopes only to ruthlessly crush them. Unlike CotBP, I had only seen DMC once before, and I couldn’t wait to appreciate the complicated Jack/Elizabeth dynamic with more mature eyes.

Boy, was I disappointed. Not by the Sparrabeth, thank the gods, but by literally everything else.

Is it just me or was this movie composed of a bunch of standalone scenes and set pieces strung together? Did they bring in Tim Burton just to direct the visuals of the interrupted wedding scene? Why does the Turkish prison sequence look like the opening cutscene to a high fantasy RPG videogame with the brightness setting turned down to zero?

OK I laughed at Jack popping out of the coffin and using a femur as a paddle, but I’m confused about everything else

Oh look, the crew’s on the verge of mutiny again, and this time it is Jack’s fault

Listen, I have Ted Elliott’s compass meta tattooed on my heart, but in retrospect the “Why is all the rum gone?” scene was probably too subtle. The audience doesn’t even know at this point how the compass is supposed to work. Maybe if they had the balls to actually include the deleted Sparrabeth scenes in CotBP, Jack’s emotional turmoil wouldn’t have seemed so opaque!

Still, a character being Vexed about their affections/feelings and doing a poor job of managing that vexation is my idea of high romance

(and both Jack and Elizabeth are quite vexed with each other indeed)

I CANNOT believe I had to sit through an uninterrupted half hour of racist filler that does absolutely fuck-all to advance the plot while ticking at least four boxes on my postcolonial bingo card what the fucking fuck

Let’s tally the cinematic sins: unfunny physical comedy in a style that would’ve been more suited to animation; indigenous cannibals speaking in unrealistic, buffoonish gibberish; said cannibals worshiping our hero (and later a dog) as a deity; and worst of all--

All the brown men that Gibbs hired as extras additional crew for the Black Pearl in DMC were put into a separate cage from the recurring white characters from CotBP (btw Anamaria is absent without even a throwaway line of explanation) because apparently even barbaric islanders know and practice segregation

And so segregated, the crew enters the stupidest, most contrived rat race up a cliffside with each other that ends with the brown people’s cage falling into the ravine THEREBY GETTING RID OF ALL THE CHARACTERS OF COLOR IN ONE FELL SWOOP

Also egregious racism aside, I’m put off by the film’s rather cavalier attitude towards gratuitous loss of life? Idk I feel like in the midst of all the action and adventure CotBP knew how to handle death and violence with the appropriate modicum of gravity and horror

Meanwhile on the island Gibbs is just like “oiya we’re standing in cages built from the bones of our former shipmates ha ha”

As for Jack - Jack has yet to save a cat or anything else besides his own skin, so he’s rapidly losing the goodwill he accumulated in the first film

holy shit yet another Elizabeth Swann-related realization about my sexual awakening: her look as a cross-dressing stowaway - pretty, delicate features in a boyish, flat-chested, slender form - is literally my sexuality 

She’s literally pulling the strings of all the men on that ship! What a puppet-master queen

Tia Dalma’s interest in Will and the “touch of destiny” line is an interesting bit of foreshadowing that doesn’t get any payoff in this film. DMC and AWE have been criticized for being impossible to watch as standalone films, but I think there’s something to be said for a universe that strives for internal continuity and demands more than a casual investment in its proceedings (a related but distinct model from the MCU)

If you gave me half a reason to I would ship Jack Sparrow with anybody and everybody. Look at the flirtatious lines and looks he exchanges with Tia Dalma!! Give me that story! (Actually, artaxastra did, twice: once in her standalone Creole!Jack origin story, And All of Them True, and once again in Gods and Heroes, a Jack/Calypso interlude in her Outlaws and Inlaws ‘verse)

Tia Dalma’s acceptance (and release) of Jack’s payment for her services tells me two things about her that I really like: (1) she’s like a magpie that collects interesting miscellany (witty tricksters, cunning pirate lords, undead monkeys). and (2) she’s not interested in caging creatures (the foreshadowing!!)

FINALLY WE GET SOME JACK/ELIZABETH INTERACTION

God bless Keira’s face and acting choices!! The chemistry!! All the little smiles and smirks they share!!

How doth she look at thee? Let me count all the ways: her amused, tentatively credulous smile at Jack’s storytelling and posturing over a magical compass and chest, while Norrington scoffs disbelievingly in the background; her having to bite her lips and walk away before Jack notices her giddiness because she literally cannot handle their flirting; her little laugh as he gently rebuffs the idea that he’s a good man

Also “I have faith in you. Both of you,” were her parting words to Will and here she gets a chance to tell Jack in person yay

Their little dance of “persuasion” is hot and all (Jack literally looks like he has to bite back a groan and whimper), but I’m really here for the banter (“Friendly?” / “Decidedly not.”); they get each other, and, under the right conditions, can communicate so effortlessly

“Why doesn’t your compass work?” - alright so ofc I love the legendary “curiosity” exchange, but I’m so confused by the abrupt transition in their conversation here? Like why didn’t she follow through and tug on that line of inquiry?? The “Because you and I are alike” line that follows makes no logical sense in context (ETA: I guess it could suggest that Elizabeth already knows why the compass doesn't work for him, because he's torn between doing the right thing and the selfish thing... But at this point she doesn't suspect him of lying to her, so...idek)

“You’d never put me in a position that would compromise my honor” - my god what a TEASE my queer heart

Oh, Norrington, what’s happened to you?? What happened to serving others, not just himself?? :(( It kinda confuses me that he goes on about the “dark side of ambition” and the “promise of redemption” when he’s the one who voluntarily resigned from his post...

Norrington carrying both shovels while Jack just poses prettily though lol

JACK’S COMPASS FINALLY WORKS FOR HIM BECAUSE THE TWO THINGS HE WANTS MOST IN THE WORLD--THE CHEST AND ELIZABETH--ARE IN THE SAME PLACE AND HE KNOWS IT

idk I guess some people find the three-way swordfighting scene hilarious but I’m with Elizabeth on this one: men are stupid 

ugh this script makes no sense

I’m so fucking confused by the narrative logic here: if Jones is dead, there’s no one to call off the Kraken?? But isn’t Jones the one calling the Kraken in the first place, to settle Jack’s debt? So if they killed Jones, wouldn’t the debt be null and void? NO JONES, NO KRAKEN, DUUUH.

OK but Jack is really unlikable in this film, last-minute “heroic” acts notwithstanding. Give me fix-it fics please

I mean it’s rather telling that by the time Jack returns to the Pearl there are only enough survivors to fill a single longboat. Oh yes he “saved them all” - the few that were left!!

This script has more holes in it than the Pearl does right now: everyone unquestioningly follows Will’s orders like he’s the captain (what happened to the dork who shouted, “Aye! Avast!”?? And there’s no evidence that since his engagement post-CotBP he’s practiced any sailing)

I mean it’s like no one but Elizabeth even noticed Jack was gone; the moment he comes back Gibbs chirps, “Captain, orders?” as if he never left. This coward just abandoned you all!!!

“It’s only a ship, mate.” - This is actually just the saddest line, and I’m glad Elizabeth was there to witness it because if there’s one thing she took away from their fireside conversation in CotBP it’s that the Black Pearl is more than a ship to Jack; what it really is is freedom, and here Jack’s set to lose both

And that’s what Elizabeth--not the Kraken--definitively takes from Jack: his freedom. Not just his ability to run away from his fate, but also the chance to take a stand and face it. (I like to think that, more than the murderous act itself, is what he finds so hard to forgive post-DMC. The darker Jack in salr323′s oneshot, Perfidy, written post-AWE, articulates this eloquently: “You know nothing of my debt, love, nor of my payment. But had you allowed me a nobler death, my account might have been lighter.”) His last act of defiance entails reclaiming what choice he has left: slipping slickly out of his shackles, hat on, “hello beastie,” into the monster’s maw.

Ugh they could have given Jack’s whole arc with Davy Jones such PATHOS instead of waiting until the very end--he struck a deal with the devil in all his youth and despair and hubris; now the bell is tolling and he realizes 13 years is nothing, no time at all, and he’s not ready to die; not today, not ever--yes it’s selfish and dishonorable (Will’s willing to square the debt of a father he hardly ever knew; he wouldn’t have blinked at paying his own) but how human is that? to fight and run even as the flames lick your heels? 

omg Jack is the jackrabbit

The irony of that eulogy still gives me feelings tho: “Guess that honest streak finally won out.” Elizabeth wrested away Jack’s control over his own story, so now she has to write it for him. When she toasts, “He was a good man,” it’s in both unearned homage and recompense. 

“And the world is a little less bright.” - OK but that’s too much. Moving words from Gibbs, but here it’s like he’s speaking directly to/for the audience, and not in a good way. It’s too obviously meta, and especially out of place in a film where Jack did not shine very bright at all

In-universe, it’s not very believable that two pirates like Pintel and Ragetti--who mutinied against Jack before, without a hint of remorse!--would now risk their lives to save him

Honestly if Disney wanted to include familiar faces/fan favorites in the supporting cast for AWE, they could’ve easily written a more realistic line like, “what the hell do we have to lose?” or some more selfish motive, none of these panegyrics

btw who are the native people standing in the swampwater? holding candles with mournful tears in their eyes?? no seriously who are they??? (I dearly hope such a striking tableau was meant to hint at Jack’s history with Tia Dalma and the residents of this bayou, but the more cynical part of me thinks: “Now hiring: extras of color, to play the part of human candlesticks lit in exaltation of an ambiguously white man” The writers get no benefit of the doubt from me after forcing me to sit through that cannibal island act)

It sounds sadistic of me but seeing how anguished Elizabeth is after claiming she’s not sorry gives me life

She keeps crying, and can’t even bring herself to drink Tia Dalma’s concoction against cold and sorrow! She just fakes a sip, which is such a great little character beat, because it shows she doesn’t think she deserves the remedy! She’ll just have to live with it...

That is, until Will decides he can’t stand the sight of her grief, and opens up Pandora’s box for her despite just catching her passionately kissing another man: “If there was anything to be done to bring him back, Elizabeth...” He really is too good for this world

And Elizabeth MUST know there’s a price, that she’d be staking not just her own life and happiness but her betrothed’s, and yet selfishly, always selfish, she says, “Yes” 

BARBOSSA!!! Still the most epic character reveal ever. I still remember the theater bursting into gasps and applause, good times

[adrianfavell]

The View from Global Britain (a small Island off the North West of Europe, sailing North-by-North-West towards an unknown destination)

Later, when he reviewed the strange sequence of events that led to the breakdown of order and the reversion of the high rise residence to a state of near primitive excess and violence, Dr Gove concluded that it might all be traced back to that one day...

A sickly, swollen orange early morning sun squinted pallidly through the chemical haze over the East End of London’s Docklands. Gove reached over casually from his balcony chair to pick up one of the three books lying on his coffee table. It was a warm day already at 8am outside on the apartment balcony:  he had not bothered to change out of his boxer shorts and T-shirt. A well thumbed classic Penguin edition of George Orwell’s Collected Essays and Journalism Volume 4, lay on one side of the reclining beach style chair, that was his usual morning professional treat before the driver arrived. It was marked with pink post it slips on the pages of the essay ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’. Underneath, was a glossy, less well read edition of translated selections from Michel Foucault’s 1970 College de France Lectures on Governmentality. But the book he perused over the top of his red designer Ace & Tate glasses – which he had bought on the last trip to Amsterdam – was a cherished copy of Roger Scruton’s The Philosopher on Dover Beach. An opera lover, the strains of one of Wagner’s Rings could be heard from his Danish Bang & Olufsen state-of-the-art stereo system inside. Funnily enough, he had seen it live together with his friend, rival and now boss, Johnson, and their now ex-wives in Germany, only a few weeks before D-Day, all that time ago. He congratulated himself once again on the purchase of the Segafredo coffee maker, as he drained the content of his third nespresso of the morning, pausing only slightly to feel the slight twinge of pain that followed in his chest. If only he were George Clooney, he thought, wryly.

Such was the cool clarity of his thoughts, that he barely stirred as a scream was heard from the Branson Mansion above him on the 255th floor of the monstrous tower block he lived in. This state of the art tower occupied mainly by high ranking government officials such as himself, or top end CEOs such as Branson, was one of two similar twin towers – “The Rock” across from “The Edge” – that commanded the entire festering zone wasteland of the former Docklands, north of Greenwich. The high rises were impregnable silver fortresses, self contained with sporting facilities, state of the art cinematic entertainment, and a high end shopping mall, that also functioned seamlessly as child care and schooling facilities for families, and contained all other essential services. The building was equipped with two helicopter landing pads that usually were high enough to clear the low lying cloud of pollution which mostly separated the social classes. Below the towers, under ground level society, was an interconnected underground elite parking facility, that led directly out on to the national freeway grid. His quizzical blue eyes lifted up momentarily from the pages of the philosopher Scruton elucidating a point about Edmund Burke, as a large dead dog thrown from above, flew past the balcony and down, a further half kilometer or so, before crashing through the roof of one of the dozen White “Go Home Immigrants” hostility vans parked there. There was a small commotion among a group of female cleaning service workers arriving for work, apparently Polish, from the distant sound of their foreign voices in the silent city morning. There were still irregularities in the population, he surmised.

He shifted his body with discomfort, however, when he noticed that one or two drops of a rabid red froth from the half decapitated dog had landed on the page of Scruton’s text. He lay the book aside to make a note on a pad that Branson would have to be asked to leave the country.

Gove had been around as a shadowy governmental advisor in the Santiago and Buenos Aires of the 1970s; you sometimes knew when it was a time for a change. These were places he had learned his trade. He recognised though that for all its rationality, violently capturing, torturing and then dumping by helicopter these “nowhere” types in the Thames Estuary was no longer a viable option in the England of the Twenty First Century. Yes, they were a fifth column. These cosmopolitan, nomadic, “transnational” intellectuals and their rich compatriots, who shared a hypocritical nostalgia for the free moving global planet of their youth; a few were still EU sympathisers and internationalist terrorists. Still, he smiled wryly, there was no going back to the River Plate during the heady days of the 1978 World Cup. Even for a criminal like Branson, it was not a practical option. Well, he’d made damn sure that his superior Mrs Thatcher wash her hands of any responsibility for anything her old friend, General Pinochet, had done. And it was true that after, his comrade General Galtieri had returned the favour to the dear Iron Lady, who had been in a tough spot herself in 1981. What they devised was the courtesy of a staged, “low level” invasion of the Falklands Island, that had proven a pioneer of a new brand of simulacra wars (“good for politics, good for business”, a military showcase “win-win-win” all round) that independent islands could engage in to maintain autarkic economic dynamism and electoral support in an now entirely protectionist world. Those were the stuff of international relations today, but always dangerous of course given the hardware, sometimes even nuclear, involved. Protest was usually muted among any remaining “Remain” activists or (so-called) “global” protestors. There were still plenty of academic sanctuaries abroad for renegade university academics, and Branson would be easily “persuaded” – with the right threat –  to take a one way ticket to New York or Los Angeles; places where enclaves of humanitarian CEOs still grumbled together in secret societies about the policies of supreme leader Donald Trump.

He wondered about the scream, though, and idly flicked on the telescreen that was partly masked behind a reproduction of a Kandinsky print on the dining room wall. The Party spokesman was celebrating loudly another victory for the People, that had been delivered that morning, like clockwork, with monotonous weekly regularity. The magic numbers: 52% for Leave, 48% for Remain; a weekly plebiscite delivered electronically by a large, government owned public opinion survey company, Big Big DATA Inc. The weekly vote stabilised the ongoing national need to adjust the population – for example, by removing persons of certain foreign extraction – to deliver the correct mathematical proportion that had been adjusted to represent the exact optimal mix for a definitively binding democratic result (the formula went): “democratic outcomes in divided societies which had decided to resolve their differences by a simple direct Yes/No method”. It was also one reason why they could not go on more strongly with the policy his previous boss Mrs May had devised. The “Go Home” Immigration vans and deportation squads (the “weekly hostility” she called it), particularly targeted at the heavily Europeanised university academic population. Too many deportations and the Remain vote (“Remoaners”, he chuckled) might be too quickly depleted.

The screen changed to an image of a man in a red tie, the officially employed Opposition Leader that Gove himself had hired in one of his occasional, but nonetheless regular, strokes of genius. The annoying man on screen swiftly changed the topic as always to a passionate denunciation of the poverty conditions of white working class voters. What a national shame it was, he said, they had been forced to live now for several decades of austerity gentrification and slum clearance, that had left nothing much of most major cities in the kingdom except mile upon mile of concrete wreckage underneath the sporadic, tree like growth of these huge, shiny residential blocks. Most of these had been built by shady Shanghai and Istanbul owned corporations that had been offered bi-lateral franchise access to the Island, in spite of other barriers to World Trade.

He went back to his laptop writing, a new proposal for entirely consolidating a nationalisation of the national game, which he had loosely imagined as an evolution of the Eton Wall Game. An architect of the national curriculum that had expurgated any traces of “global citizenship” from the education of Engand’s youth, Gove’s influence over the last years had extended to all areas of national culture where some sort of withdrawal from the previously established global or international practices needed to be conceived. Sport was his new brief. The idea had first come to him while watching the World Cup of Summer 2018: the brilliant combination of young British Black and White talent – Ali, Lingard and Kane – that had combined to score goal after goal against foreign allcomers – Japan, Columbia, Sweden – before unfairly succumbing to evil European refereeing against Croatia in the semifinal. As all the newspapers had said, in that hot and heady summer after the first Brexit vote, all future troubles were forgotten as England had united, and seemed to throw away all bitterness and caution in celebration, drinking, cheering, loving and kissing; the white St.George red cross fluttered everywhere over a happy and unified multi-racial land.

Indeed, as economists made clear, the date of January 31st 2020 was the demographic turning point. D-Day, it was called now, a national holiday; Independence Day, being the other major national festival on 23rd June. D-Day, Gove had argued, was the date at which Britain’s international and foreign population was at its optimal peak of absorption into a wholly national economy. The doors could be clanged shut on freedom of movement, but also on trade and industry, since Gove and his colleagues had devised a failsafe scheme to enable Britain to slowly transform all of its internationalised practices into distinct, diverse, incompatible alternatives, that would by their difference and originality, be highly innovative, rich in IP, and world beating. They would however have no compatibility with the outside; of little moment, given the huge backwater of an empire the Island still could call upon. This left a problem of course, for Britain’s national sport and greatest global export, football. This had necessitated Gove’s creative intervention, adapting the Eton Wall Game. He chuckled again at the thought of his heroes Ali, Lingard and Kane, mucking in with the boys, down in the scrum next to the wall, just as Gove, Johnson, Cameron, Goodhart and their idol Orwell had all done as youngsters.

This was still a white paper, for now, and the nation had continued to rely on bi- and multi-lateral agreements and some irregularities to allow the open labour market for the Championship League. It was true: it had more Italian and Portuguese football managers, and more star African players than ever. And yes, it was an exception to the nation’s stringent anti–immigration, zero foreigner policy. A mere “anomaly” , he had called it on Question Time.

What economists and demographers had also discovered though in 2016 was fateful. A now legendary paper by a demographer called Coleman, its framed original folio at the entrance to the British Museum, had shown that if population trends continued – with freedom of movement and immigration – the original White British population would become a minority by 2070, amidst mixed marriages, higher immigrant child birth rates, and (far) too many “people of colour” among foreign-origin migrants. Gove was analytic enough to recognise these populations had been sources of the extraordinary boom years of the 1990s and 2000s, but had been the one thinker with the foresight to see that the door had to be shut in June 2016, if Britain was ever to integrate all these human resoruces and become an independent island again. The People was called upon, and dutifully delivered its 52%. The answer was naturalising, rigorously, everyone on the Island at that moment in time – whether they wanted it or not. That was the key although it would be havoc for the weekly referendum that he knew was needed to maintain the 52% plebiscite of democracy over the Remain vote – hence the further statistical tricks and legal exclusion – and “disappearances” out to sea, if necessary.

They were well on the way to creating a new British population, however, which was remarkable for its multi-racial “super-diversity” (it was called) and yet could maintain stably what another economist, Collier, had calculated as England’s uniquely 80% English DNA national origins, traced back to the Magna Carta. Freedom and Rationality could grow again on this soil.

It was of course on that day, 31st January 2020, that England unveiled its secret plan to escape from Europe, at the cliffs of Dover: making use of the decaying tunnels abandoned by Eurostar and roll-on-roll-off transportation companies, the government had motorised the white cliffs, using a clever combination of nuclear and wind power, that in fact would enable a significant geological shift to begin to move the Island (henceforth capitalised) in a North-by-North-Westerly direction towards the Atlantic. The colony of Ireland would be merged again, as it collided with the British Isles, and a Scotland somewhat reduced -- natural shrinkage caused by damage to its exterior north west coastline buffered by the rough merging and the seas as the Island moved implacably in the direction of Greenland. The South East of England became the only temperate part of the Island as it moved out to sea, further driving up housing prices.

And so on that day, the TVs were all re-set to Telescreens and Party news only, and the new People’s Democracy began. Gove’s slightly lazy left eye almost welled with a gin soaked tear, as he recalled the first judder and grinding geological movement of the Island at the Dover coast. On the cliffs, all the major national dignitaries and leaders had gone to celebrate the occasion. Yes, the Island was moving in the sea, and it had been followed by the slow, at first imperceptible descending of a mist, then an ever thicker fog, which cut off all visible trace of the receding continent across the water. As had been planned, telecommunications and internet networks were disrupted to come under strict territorial control again, and the Island had its independence back. News footage of Lady Diana’s funeral had been used as the first broadcast, to set the right tone. The people cheered wildly, underneath the white and red cross flags, across the nation – the true World Cup spirit back again – as it headed out, impregnable and forever undefeated, towards the icy waters of the North West Atlantic....

*****

It may only have been synchronicity, but at that very moment in a liberal arts college in Southern California, Dr Wong, a young Asian Amercian academic put down her laptop, and reached for a lemonade. The book on her table was a new edition of Gayatri Spivak’s collected essays. The palm trees over the boulevard swayed lightly as a sweet breeze blew in from the desert.

She finished the final sentence of the draft of of a paper for Global Text, which proposed the theoretical framework for the creation of a new interdisciplinary field of occidentalist area studies, “England Studies”. The topic had strangely never been tried before. She had made her name as a post-doc in cosmology, studying black holes (like Steven Hawking, she used to joke), but had switched briefly but brilliantly to zoology during the first five years of her teaching career, making a cutting contribution to contemporary Japanese cultural studies, writing about its remarkable population of otaku and cosplay database animals. However, publisher interest in this well known remote but inaccessible East Asian Galapagos fantasy island lost somewhere in the Pacific, had been waning for some time. Were there not other black holes to discover? One day at the gym a new idea came to her. Why not somewhere in Europe instead of Asia, as a next career move? – especially since the EU had become such a historical curiosity, since its demise. After all, nobody could now quite work out what on Earth anyone had been thinking when they dreamed ludicrously of “European Community” or – and this one really took the grand prix – “European Citizenship”!!. What hilarious and zany times those European post-war “trentes glorieuses” had been!

Yet, ten years on from Independence Day, it seemed that Britain (as it was sometimes still referred to, in academic circles) had moved far enough away from mainland Europe into the upper ocean streams of the Atlantic – somewhere between “Greenland” and “Iceland”, which already had fields devoted to them – to allow for a new field of Area Studies, however challenging the remote fieldwork there. An Island, no doubt with its own strange, unsustainable, close-to-extinct creatures, practices and ideas, like 3G phone technology before the iPhone.

This would surely get her tenure, or even an outside job offer on this year’s market, certainly good enough to allow a fresh negotiation with her Department Chair, she thought....

  ADRIAN FAVELL

Berlin, 9 Dec 2018, early AM

with apologies to J.G.Ballard (1930-2009)

[aion-rsa]

Anya Taylor-Joy and Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu Revives the Strangest Movie Vampire

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Dracula is the most prolific character in cinema. Really. According to Guinness World Records, the not-so-good count even beats out Sherlock Holmes as the literary character adapted more than any other. Perhaps that’s why learning Universal Pictures has two new Dracula movies in production barely raises an eyebrow. Yet to hear a new interpretation of the vampire’s original cinematic incarnation is in the works—to hear that Robert Eggers and Anya Taylor-Joy are at last remaking Nosferatu? Well, that’s a corpse of a different pallor… and one that’s eminently more sinister.

Yes, technically speaking, the director and star pair who made The Witch one of the best horror movies of this century are following in the footsteps of the first Dracula movie, F.W. Murnau’s German Expressionist masterpiece, Nosferatu (1922). But they’re also exhuming a legacy more twisted than that. Which provides them a lot of leeway to get weird with archetypal vampires and the ancient spells they cast.

This stems from the fact that Murnau’s Nosferatu is not officially an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel. This detail was the result of a shady attempt by the German filmmakers to get around the novel’s copyright holder, Stoker’s widow Florence Balcombe. The scheme didn’t work. Nonetheless, it allowed Murnau to take what in 25 years had slowly become the definitive vampire yarn and reinterpret it into something infinitely more gruesome.

Released nearly a decade before Bela Lugosi successfully changed the vampire into a figure of sexual desire in Hollywood’s first Dracula adaptation, the silent Nosferatu went in a starkly different direction. The ‘22 film’s Count Orlok, portrayed with an unsettling pitifulness by actor Max Schreck, appeared as more of a walking cadaver than even Stoker’s literary creation. With sunken cheeks and rodent-like teeth, he was the manifestation of disease and pestilence—a decaying rat given human shape, and who brought the literal Black Death with him to Germany.

More abstract than Stoker’s source material, the Expressionistic Nosferatu is a surreal nightmare from which the DNA of all horror cinema can be traced. And while future Dracula movies continued on an increasingly familiar path after Lugosi, the legacy of Count Orlok’s grotesque visage refused to go the same way. In fact, the first Nosferatu remake by writer-director Werner Herzog was even more artful and detached than Murnau’s film. Long cinematic sequences drenched in atmosphere and dread are built around just the image of Klaus Kinski’s vampire sailing down a river.

In ancient folklore, the vampire was neither a creature of desire or great intelligence. It was a wraith; a revenant back from the grave who existed only to leech off the living. Herzog leaned into that idea and found even a macabre serenity in it, recreating Renaissance paintings that lovingly embraced the baroque despair wrought by plagues. One of the film’s best visuals is of rats who traveled with the vampire to Wismar now swarming an outdoor feast’s table. In times of modern pandemic and renewed interest in outdoor dining, such imagery hits all the closer.

Kinski would reimagine this version again in Nosferatu a Venezia (1988), a schlocky Italian pseudo-sequel that moves yet further from traditional vampire storytelling, reinterpreting “Nosferatu” (as he’s now simply referred to in that film) as a creature of comfort; a demon lover who frees his prey from the dreariness of this mortal coil and the constraints of their youth.

That Robert Eggers of The Witch and The Lighthouse fame is going to add his own distinct flavoring to this legacy is genuinely intriguing. As a filmmaker compelled to unearth the historical roots and wellsprings of our culture’s collective nightmares, Eggers will be liberated by the simple title “Nosfertau” to bypass a hundred years worth of Dracula, Anne Rice, Twilight movies, to name but a few. It’s worth remembering that the original 1922 Nosferatu already has its feet more firmly rooted in the 19th than 20th century. Still, revisiting a legacy with two horror masterpieces to its name is risky. Eggers told us as much in 2019 when we asked him about whether he was still moving ahead with a Nosferatu remake then.

“I spent so many years and so much time, just so much blood on it, yeah, it would be a real shame if [Nosferatu] never happened,” Eggers said at the time. “But also, I don’t know, maybe Nosferatu doesn’t need to be made again, even though I’ve spent so much time on that.”

Apparently, Eggers couldn’t let the project go, even as his and frequent muse Anya Taylor-Joy’s profiles continued to rise. Indeed, Eggers’ The Lighthouse won several Independent Spirit Awards, including for Willem Dafoe’s performance and cinematography. Meanwhile Taylor-Joy’s career has skyrocketed in recent years thanks to roles in Emma. and The Queen’s Gambit, and with the coup of being cast as a young Furiosa in filmmaker George Miller’s upcoming Mad Max: Fury Road prequel. Yet she and Eggers appear drawn to the same spirits, having already reteamed for next year’s Viking drama, The Northman. And it was Taylor-Joy who revealed this week to The Los Angeles Times that she and Eggers are prepping their third collaboration: Nosferatu.

Which raises the question of what Eggers and Taylor-Joy might bring to the material. Likely it’d be something as rooted in ancient vampire lore as the witchy authenticity of their first film, and the nautical superstitions in The Lighthouse… but also perhaps something that can justify a third major interpretation of such a storied title. A Countess Orlok, perhaps? It’s easy to imagine both parties sinking their teeth into that kind of interpretation…

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[robedisimo]

Black Panther [SPOILER-FREE REVIEW]

[Disclaimer: this review is based on the Italian dub of the film. As such, all opinions on the quality of dialogues and acting are subjective and partial.]

So, it’s been a while since my last review and, to be completely honest, I didn’t expect Marvel’s Black Panther to be a hard one to come back on. I went into this movie expecting to enjoy it thoroughly, and in many respects I did, just... not as much as I thought I would. To cut a long story short, I spent the better part of a week trying to make up my mind about whether I walked away from this movie impressed or disappointed. Here’s what I’ve got so far.

First of all, let’s address the mini-skirted elephant in the room: in more than just a few coincidental ways, Black Panther is a retread of last year’s Wonder Woman. Both films star characters who were introduced as supporting players in a previous movie, in both cases big tentpole cross-over films – Batman v Superman and Captain America: Civil War, respectively – revolving around a conflict between the two main figures within the respective mega-franchise universes. Both act as more self-contained tales, in terms of cross-franchise elements, than previous movies in their narrative universes, and both feature different but thematically contiguous settings in the shape of secluded, secretive, mythology-laden kingdoms ruled in utopian perfection by a fictional society reflective of one of America’s mistreated social minorities.

On the production side of things, both were surprisingly helmed by directors known for poignant, socially-involved projects – Monster’s Patty Jenkins and Fruitvale Station’s Ryan Coogler – and, on the promotional side, both sailed towards theatres on a wave of sheer hype, being hailed as the beginning of a new era for Hollywood blockbusters and propelled forwards by baffling headlines – born, I assume, either out of stunningly poor memory or else a frankly understandable wish to forget that Steel, Supergirl and Catwoman ever happened – about how they were the first female-led, or black-led, superhero movie ever made.

Neither film, it goes without saying, rises to meet those unrealistic expectations. Though entirely enjoyable in its own right, Wonder Woman was an uneven and ultimately formulaic film that tried to juggle too many things and be too many different movies at once, and Black Panther certainly falls into the same category to a lesser degree. Part James Bond instalment, part Lion King and in part also Thor rerun, what we got on our hands in the end was a fairly mundane genre flick with a number of highs but also a handful of lows.

The good: the film looks amazing. Where its DC equivalent was content with just a few opening minutes of generic pseudo-Greek utopia, Black Panther instead realises its fictional setting to a much deeper, richer degree, to often impressive results. The mythical kingdom of Wakanda is most definitely a kind of spectacle not before seen in theatres, a bold vision of African futurism that meshes hi-tech sci-fi with tribal spiritualism in oftern stunning fashion. Its setting is easily the film’s best aspect, brought to life on the shoulders of the great conceptual design work done by Marvel’s art team.

On top of that, Black Panther is energetic and well-acted, perhaps with less overt humour than most recent Marvel projects but certainly fast and action-y enough to satisfy genre fans. The story is emotional and poignant, and Michael B. Jordan definitely shines – although I feel a pang of white guilt in reporting that Andy Serkis, for once appearing with his own tribal mask of a face, steals away the trophy for most enjoyable performance in the film – as one of the MCU’s most complex theatrical villains to date... if not, like Cate Blanchett’s Hela before him, one that truly and definitively manages to buckle well-established Marvel villain trends.

The soundtrack – if a touch obtrusive at times – is another of the movie’s high points, way less hip-hop-heavy than trailers suggested and much more genuinely African in its tones and beats. For a film that’s obstensibly about identity, the fact that its visuals and acoustics come together to form such an original, easily-identifiable cinematic brand is certainly Coogler’s, and everyone behind him, greatest achievement here.

The bad: the film looks amazing, except when it doesn’t. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is definitely developing an overreliance on CGI lately, and even Black Panther’s rather sizeable budget can’t do much to distract from some of the film’s worst effects – no spoilers, but you’ll know when you see it – and its general overabundance of green-screen shenanigans, especially in the cliché-laden climax.

The action itself isn’t especially praise-worthy either, despite a couple brief highlights: much like in Creed, Coogler blows his best action scene midway through the film and it’s all downhill from there, with a few missed opportunities along the way. The film’s focus on hi-tech gadgets, for example, sort of fizzles out without much fanfare after a while, with the same two or three tricks being repeated throughout the movie.

Other issues may be found in certain aspects of pacing, although in that area your mileage may vary. Black Panther starts off a tad slow, and then unfolds as a series of self-contained vignettes that take too long to develop a coherent throughline. When the plot finally kicks in it works in fairly satisfactory fashion, but there’s one big twist that honestly could’ve been dropped earlier in the film’s generous runtime and, generally speaking, I feel that the script could’ve stood one more round of polishing.

So make no mistake: on my personal scale, as far as enjoyment of my theatrical experience is concerned, the verdict at the bottom of this review should not rise above “MOSTLY POSITIVE”. It gets knocked up a peg for two specific reasons:

Black Panther’s impact on the American public is undeniable. In the United States, the film’s themes resonate in a way they simply can’t anywhere else, and as such this is the one Marvel movie that is perhaps the least designed for, and the least accessible to, foreign audiences... even if it is frankly quite mystifying that Wakanda’s core values would end up being framed in the context of the plight and struggle of people of colour in America, rather than pretty much anywhere in the surrounding African continent. Ultimately, I think, it’s not even a matter of said themes being satisfactorily addressed or resolved, and indeed Coogler’s film presents challenging ideas that are entirely unexpected from a superhero movie, but – partly because the script starts dealing with them too far into its runtime, as I mentioned – there’s not really the proper time for them to breather. Other critics have written that Black Panther is more interesting to think about than it is to actually watch, and I tend to agree: the ideas behind this movie are impressive, but their execution is not always the best. Despite that, Black Panther most definitely is an important film, at least in the here and now. Its missteps are easily overlooked in light of that, just as I imagine Martin Luther King, Jr.’s historical speeches would’ve still be commended for their convention-buckling message even if the reverend himself had been saddled with a comical stutter. This movie’s heart is in the right place, and it’s easy to see why that is being rewarded above all else.

From a purely technical standpoint, my viewing of this film was crippled by an adequate, and just adequate, Italian dub. I’m perfectly capable of recognising when a mediocre localisation gets in the way of a film’s original underlying richness and this was most certainly the case, with the whole English-language cast providing an array of diverse – and, I’m sure, memorable – performances, many of them in fictional African accents, that got “flattened” to an unvarying standard inflection in the version I got to see. At least in that respect, I expect a second home-video viewing in the original language to elevate my opinion of the performers’ work.

So in the end we’re left with a pretty tough question on our hands: is Black Panther a movie that exploits the genre to draw attention to relevant political themes, or one that exploits those political themes to justify its run-of-the-mill script? It is perhaps both, and that becomes a rather large problem when the film can’t make up its mind as to which of its two identities deserves its full commitment. Nonetheless, I’m eager to see how this franchise, and the larger Marvel machine whose gears grind around it, carry forward what’s been put in motion here. For the time being, Black Panther is perhaps not as good as it could’ve been... but even then, it seems to be good enough.

[Verdict: POSITIVE]