I'm learning to live with a lot of things

So if no one has told you anything about Darkman (1990) before the lights go down, except for a brief mention by your husband that it was badly mismarketed and among other things positioned as a successor to Tim Burton's Batman (1989), it is a really pleasant surprise to discover that the experience is essentially like watching a mashup of five classic Universal horror movies,¹ only with widescreen cinematography, color film, and the degree of splatter that comes from being on the other side of the '80's. There are more montages in this movie than in anything I've seen made since the '40's. There's also the time-slipped quality I associate with Jeunet and Caro, where Peyton Westlake's Polaroid-scanning, skin-synthesizing technology is futuristic, but everything else about the nameless, industrial city is either perfectly contemporary, like the villain being a rapacious corporate developer, or just a little retro, like Julie's mourning veil or the colorful thugs Durant commands. Trenchcoats are in, and so is an eventually noir sensibility where illusions exist to be walked away from, not cherished. And yet I find myself thinking of the movie like a comic book, just this side of black comedy despite the weird outcroppings of ultraviolence and a genuinely upsetting premise. In an objective sense, it was probably not the best film to see during a year when my teeth are in all the wrong places and my speech is damaged and my smile feels painful and alien and even the set of my jaw is different because of the positions into which my back teeth have been moved; I have enough trouble even without looking into mirrors these days, I'm not sure it was strictly necessary for me to watch a fictional character break down in tears over the casual, comfortable, taken-for-granted physicality that was brutally stolen from them and is never coming back. Subjectively, fortunately, it's a terrific midnight movie and I'm not at all sorry to have seen it. It's nearly the youngest I've seen Liam Neeson and the first role where I noticed how seriously big the guy is. He's not just tall and lanky, his hands are huge. Watching him with Frances McDormand, it's like he's simply built a size and a half bigger than she is. And it makes him very effectively menacing even before he changes his body language, this towering presence in what derspatchel dubbed a "trenchcloak" and a broad-brimmed hat, like the Phantom or the Shadow or reaper Death. He's good with pathos, too. I am trying not to feel like an idiot for needing IMDb to remind me that I saw him first in Schindler's List (1993). In tenth grade, I really didn't know any actors unless they danced in Hollywood musicals or appeared on The Muppet Show.

I have now seen three films by Sam Raimi. Eventually I'll get around to The Evil Dead (1981).

1. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), The Phantom of the Opera (1925), Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932), and The Invisible Man (1933). Some are explicit shout-outs, like Peyton wrapped in disintegrating bandages or crouched between two gargoyles; others are more evocative, like the mad science bric-a-brac of Peyton's makeshift lab or his mental state slowly eroding within his transformed body. I mean, this is also a movie in which fingers are clipped like cigars and our hero receives his dubious superpowers thanks to crazily radical surgery at the most irresponsible hospital on the planet—seriously, my only explanation is that those people are all mad scientists and just experiment on the homeless population without really mentioning it to anybody. License and latitude of the Pre-Code era notwithstanding, there's much about this film that could only have existed in the last quarter of the twentieth century. But the older films are there, their famous monsters reinterpreted in allusion rather than straightforwardly remade, and I think their echoes are really what sealed the deal for me. Also, I must admit it, the montages.