Shameful #8 - Let the Right One In

Let the Right One In (2008, Alfredson) 

First, let me say that I’ve loved the whole vampire lore since I was a kid. Not like one of those kids who is like, totally secretly a vampire, but I loved them. I even wrote my eighth grade research paper on them. Nowadays, everyone is on the hate bandwagon because of Twilight, and now everybody talks about how vampires are brooding and whiny and boring, but I still think vampires are fucking awesome.

Let the Right One In is really a great departure from the vampires everyone is sick of. Oskar, a shy boy who’s being bullied at school, meets Ely, a girl who just moved in with her father, and they begin to fall for each other. It’s a simple, cute story, except for the fact that Ely is a vampire, the man, Hakan, isn’t her father, and he’s been murdering people to drain their blood so he can feed her. The great thing about Ely is that while we feel the tenderness between her and Oskar, the film never lets us forget that she is, at heart, a monster. She still has the mind of a twelve year old, and unlike many vampires today, she’s apologetic, but not ashamed about what she has to do. She feeds on blood, and she has to do what she has to do. It’s a really great contrast to the romance in the film.

Very soon, the American remake, Let Me In, is coming out. I have to admit, I’ve never been a fan of the whole “foreign film does well? Let’s remake it in English!” trend, especially since the remake rights were sold for this film before it even got released outside of film festivals. I feel like it says that 1) foreign films aren’t good enough, and 2) Americans don’t like/want to read subtitles (which personally, I’ve always thought was stupid, but that’s another story later). However, from what I’ve seen of the previews, Let Me In looks like it stays true to the original and will be just as eerie. I still say watch the original, but it definitely looks good, so I guess I can’t complain about it.

Shameful #7 - North By Northwest

Warning: the review below has some spoilers.

North by Northwest (1959, Hitchcock)

Before this, I had only seen one other Hitchcock movie, Rear Window, which I really liked. I haven't seen it in probably two years, but I thought since I liked that I'd really love this. After all, Hitchcock is the king of thrillers.

Unfortunately, I wasn't really too thrilled. The story is intriguing (Roger Thornhill an ad executive gets mistaken for a spy named George Kaplan and has to elude men from the "other side" who want to get him out of the way), but the mistaken identity shtick got old a bit quickly for me, especially when he starts posing as George Kaplan and yet is still surprised when people think he's George. The biggest flaw (yes, I'm saying a critically acclaimed Hitchcock film has a flaw) is that we learn that George Kaplan doesn't exist way too early, and so the search turns from suspenseful to tedious. We know he's on a wild goose chase, so it's really just a countdown until he figures it out. 

Near the end of the first act Eva Saint Marie's character shows up to help him, and it's so obvious that she has something to do with this that it's insane that Roger doesn't suspect anything. Their flirting seems almost required by the plot, but to be fair, she has a reason for doing it. The film didn't really grab me until Roger confronts the man who thinks he's a spy, Van Damm, and cleverly manages to get in the hands of the police and away from him. At that point the Professor, one of the people who created Kaplan, comes to re-explain what we learned about an hour before, and things get really interesting as now Roger has to actively fake being Kaplan to protect another agent. That's when the tension really begins to build, especially when the other agent's cover is in danger.

The very end disappointed me a bit though; it takes you right from the climax of the suspense down to a cute Hollywood ending through a match cut, which for me really jarred with the otherwise fantastic third act.

I can't stand it when I don't like a film I know is good, but I just wish there had been more focus on the spy games going on and a bit less of the love story and Roger's floundering. I guess maybe I should just go and watch Suspicion to make up for it.

Bullitt - Steve McQueen is awesome, y/y?

Bullitt (1968, Yates)

I watched this right after The Magnificent Seven, but before that all I knew about Bullitt was that it made the cowboy cop, had a really famous car chase, and Steve McQueen was literally the coolest man ever to walk the earth.

I was not disappointed, and even a little surprised. Bullitt really does make the cowboy cop trope; Frank Bullitt ignores the pressure of a smug and slightly slimy politician, and goes out to investigate on his own to take down the mob. The film is most famous for its 100mph car chase, which hasn't aged well now that every other film has some giant exploding car chase (and it doesn't help that I'm a gigantic Top Gear fan). That said, it's still awesome.

The real surprising thing about Bullitt is that for a film that's said to have created the cowboy cop, it actually deconstructs it. I don't want to get into spoilers, but suffice to say that Bullitt doesn't entirely save the day, and at the end he's questioning every single decision he made in the film. Bullitt is more than Steve McQueen being awesome (which he completely is); the last act gives it some unexpected depth.

This isn't really a good post, so here's a picture of Steve McQueen to make up for it.