"Accomplishments"
In theaters: Expanding on just a few pages of Bram Stoker's Dracula, The Last Voyage of the Demeter creates a literary slasher flick on Dracula's trip to London, and it's frankly much better than reported. André Øvredal (Troll Hunter, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark) assembles a solid cast headed by Corey Hawkins, and also starring Liam Cunningham and David Dastmalchian, all actors I like, as well as an endearing young swab (Woody Norman) for that certain frisson you only get from a child in a horror movie. The practical sailing ship makes a good setting for the action (though If they found Drac's coffin, why not do anything with it, aside from the obvious thing that it didn't happen in the book?). And it acts like a microcosm of the larger novel, with a scientist (Hawkins) and a young bitten woman (Aisling Franciosi) at the forefront of fighting the vampire. Though everyone is doomed, what we actually know is that the ship is deserted when it reaches English shores, so there comes a point where you think at least SOME of the characters might escape Dracula's fangs, and that sudden hope fuels the third act and may even make you hunger for a further instalment.
At home: Though it's a trifle, Renfield is an amusing trifle, whose success I ascribe to some fun comic performances by Nicholas Hoult, Awkwafina and Ben Schwartz primarily, with an assist by the co-dependency support group. Nic Cage plays Dracula fairly straight, as a monster who hasn't changed much (the undead are so often stagnant, for obvious reasons) over the last century plus, and the movie scores some points by reframing the master-familiar relationship as a toxic one. Inspired by a brave cop, Bram Stoker's bug eater (who here gains superhero-level fighting ability when he swallows a fly) decides to take charge of his life, just when the Count is about to make a move to take over the world via a criminal empire in New Orleans, which has to have the most hand-wavingly corrupt police department on Earth. Because this is a comedy, they get away with a lot of characters just accepting this is what's happening. But the jokes land for the most part (though it has to be said that everyone is playing to type - not much imagination in terms of casting) and the gore is all sorts of ridiculous as part of the spoofing. The first trailer was a fun little mini-movie, and the full feature is an extension of that.
What I like about the Korean television I've watched is that they really go for it. If it's going to be cheesy, it's 100% cheesy. And when it goes dark, it doesn't shy away from that either. The Glory is in the latter category, a revenge story (that in fact made me think if the American show Revenge, but more savage) in which, after 18 years, a woman enacts her revenge on the classmates who tortured her (and we're not talking about ordinary bullying either). Song Hye-kyo is the perfect shade of sad and cold to make her rare smiles resonate, and always sympathetic, in part thanks to how terrible (even evil) her targets are. As teenagers, they were privileged to the point of thinking the poor not only deserved their hardships, but to have more heaped on them. It didn't make them great adults. And though they kept in touch, their relationships are toxic and therefore rife for manipulation by our mastermind. This game of Go gets even more exciting when the baddies start to fight back. Having just watched a bunch of Oriol Paulo films, it strikes me that The Glory uses the same tricks - withholding information to create mystery and later, shocking twists. It's a very well put together puzzle, extended to a strong 16 episodes by the stories ( and revenges) required by some of her helpers.
The first of Eric Rohmer's "Tales of the Four Seasons", A Tale of Springtime (Conte de printemps) presents us with a budding friendship (where other relationships wilt or are dead on the vine) between a philosophy teacher and a mercurial young piano student who tries to throw her new, slightly older friend into her awkward father's arms even though - or specifically because - he's attached to a girl she doesn't like. Though it's spring, and the sense of something new is in the air, the film is thematically more in tune with the entire series, or at least the promise of spring, than the one season itself. Cycles are front and center, relationships are on short loops, and characters move from house to house, dislocated from fixed points. The protagonist, more observer than agent, even condemns notions of delineated space and feels at home nowhere. The dad is fidgety bordering on cringe, but I think his mobile discomfort is part and parcel of the same idea. Even the almost-plot of the lost necklace speaks of transience. So what will survive to last in these newly-formed dynamics? The philosophical underpinnings of Springtime are a little too heady for me to get a good grasp on, and the characters aren't as charming as those of earlier Rohmer film - I might end up just remembering it as that movie where no one knows how to cook properly - but it's not a bad start to a new "cycle" of conversational films.
It pings my OCD that Rohmer followed up Spring with A Tale of Winter (Conte d'hiver) rather than Summer, but less than the English translations of the titles of the Tales of the Four Seasons being all over the place. Be that as it may, they can be viewed in any order. Though this one takes place in the back half of December, it actually starts with one of those vacation romances that are practically a Rohmer trope. Except that it's all done in montage - truly a whirlwind - and then we're 5 years later and the two lovers aren't together, though it's not true to say the absent Charles isn't in Felicie's life. Not only does she have a child by him (a fun, naturalistic little actress), but every other man in her life gets negatively compared to him. Winter is symbolically death (of relationships), but this one is frozen in the ground and if Felicie is unable to make choices, it's because she's fixed in that point in time. But this early part of winter contains the promise Christmas makes of nature's resurrection, and New Year's confirmation of that promise (one of the boyfriends is an intellectual Catholic, not without reason), and Rohmer plays with that too, teasing a miracle for his lead if he can manage it, much like Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale does (as is very overtly referenced in the film).
In A Summer's Tale (Conte d'été), Rohmer gives Amanda Langlet another starring role, and I have the feeling of seeing Pauline again, at another beach, a dozen years later. There are certainly echoes of the decisive, observant teenager in Margot, and it's kind of nice to fall in love with her here. She's one of three girls Gaspard (Melvil Poupaud) gets entangled with on his summer vacation, an embarrassment of riches for the shy mathematician/would-be musician. Seeing as it's summer, Rohmer gives us one of his stolen seasons where anything could happen (romantically), but as with the other "Tales of the Four Seasons", he upends and parodies what usually happens in his films and others'. Gaspard has too many meet-cutes than he knows what to do with, which leads to some amusement and light drama. This subgenre can often end with a pressure cooker relationship ending, and so in the universe of the film, the lead seems destined to zero out no matter what he does. Winter reversed this entirely, creating a fantastic aftershock to the summer romance, while Spring refused all romances and killed them on the bud. The Summer's Tale knows its own tropes and therefore is too wise to believe in their illusion. May turn out to be my favorite of the four.
Rohmer's last "Tale from the Four Seasons", An Autumn Tale (Conte d'automne) takes its cues from the first three - Spring's unwooable woman, Summer's bounty of love interests, and Winter's touch of Shakespearean comedy - presenting us with a romantic harvest that's driven by psychology rather than the tropes it seems to set up with its farcical premise. Béatrice Romand is Magali, a winemaker who two friends are independently try to match with a man with convoluted ploys. Her younger friend would have her be with her own, older ex-lover, to safely keep both in her life. The other impersonates her to lure a man through the classifieds, a fantasy that makes her true feelings ambiguous even through to the last shot. These engineered meet-cutes really go against Magali's mindset, which prefers the organic to the artificial, and disorder to imposed structure. The resolutions work because they are true to each character, which makes Autumn Rohmer's most naturalistic despite the cinematic set-up. A close second to A Summer's Tale in terms of enjoyment for me.
Ozu's first collaboration with the always-touching Setsuko Hara, Late Spring (1949) is also a story he'll come back to again and again with variations - a father feels he must marry off his daughter even though she's quite content living at home and taking care of him. This is an early film in Ozu's post-war output, and the war feels more present than it does in later iterations of this tale, and is more than demarcation between traditional and modern Japan. The War is more overtly referenced and characters - spouses, illegible men - are conspicuous by their absence. If Noriko is unmarried in "late spring" (at 27 years old), it's because so many young men were killed in the conflict. If she doesn't want to marry though, it's still because of the clash between tradition and modernity as exemplified by her divorced friend who lives by herself in an Americanized house. When father and daughter go to see a Nô play and contemplates leaving her father for matrimony, we feel the crushing weight of tradition on her. Ozu intercuts his domestic tableaux with nature, tradition and modernity in still life, and that scene is followed by a large ancient tree, another metaphor for tradition and in this case, family. Nariko is a pleasant-spirited lady, full of smiles and extremely content in her lifestyle. Her father (Ozu steady Chishū Ryū) loves her and sacrifices his own happiness and comfort for what he believes is her path to happiness. In doing good, they do each other harm, though you're free to believe otherwise, as we're never shown the groom, nor even the vaguest sight of her fate.
If you're wondering where the line between spring and summer is in the Ozu canon, Noriko (Setsuko Hara) is 27 in Late Spring and 28 in Early Summer. Only two years after Late Spring, Ozu returns to that film's premise, but if Ozu returns to this theme often, it's because it's a transition point, not unlike what Japan was going through at the time. It's time to move on and stop clutching old ideas. Instead of an intimate father-daughter dynamic, Noriko lives in a full house, with three generations, two of them held back by her unwillingness to marry. Her brother-in-law (Chishū Ryū who was her aged father in Late Spring - I find him nearly unrecognizable when playing nearer his real age) is especially keen to get her married so the parents can retire to the country and he can inherit the house, but... will they agree with her choice of husband? Meanwhile, on an almost separate track (and that's a pun), the younger kids seem to spring out of Ozu's silent comedies about little boys getting up to all sorts of shenanigans (and heralding the TV-obsessed kids of Good Morning), lending the film a more comic tone that makes the drama all that more effective. In the end, tradition will win and therefore the sadness of the inevitable does too. Ozu knows we must move on, yes, but also feels what is lost in the process.
An aging ballerina (which is to say she's now in her late 20s) finds herself reflecting on an intense summer romance in Ingmar Bergman's Summer Interlude, even more intense in that it turns to tragedy, though functionally, it ends like most stolen season stories do. She grieves for a lost love, but for her lost youth, lost ideals, lost happiness, and because this is a Bergman picture, lost faith. And through that grieving, a certain catharsis, and perhaps a shot at bouncing back, or at least standing on iron toes, where the ballet metaphor takes shape. The romance, on one of those silver bodies of water affected by the director, is necessary context to her malaise, but is to me the least interesting thing in the film (give or take the small bit of animation!), a little wholesome and from an idealized point of view. But we are molded by our memories, and Marie (Maj-Britt Nilsson, adept at playing both ages) is more interesting as a result of those memories.
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