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You're not a kid, you're a monster, monster, monster
I don't think I can call Låt den rätte komma in—Let the Right One In—the most beautiful film I've seen in theaters this year, because The Fall so amazed me, but it's right up there. So many directors could have taken its core handful of elements and gone for sheer splatter, suspense, even black comedy; instead it's a character piece, like the color of winter twilight, at once remote and tender, not obvious, not comfortable. Am I making it sound like a piece of sculpture, serene and chilly? Some of what I loved about the film is that it's messy: you're dying to be alive when you're twelve years old. Children are monsters. Only some of them drink blood. Only adults are sentimental about it. Let the old dreams die. I don't want to see it remade. I do want to read the book. I want to see what this writer and director do next. And for God's sake, no more sparkling.
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Move to Boston! We have cinema!
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YES.
d|p read the book right before we went. It made the movie a little less beautiful to her (to me it was amazing, and not having seen The Fall *sigh*, I will call it the prettiest movie I've seen all year); but still she liked it. The book is, apparently (I have not read it yet), a masterwork of very deliberate and satisfying character development.
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Seriously, I'm amazed that showing this film in the same state as Twilight doesn't cause broadband cognitive dissonance.
(to me it was amazing, and not having seen The Fall *sigh*, I will call it the prettiest movie I've seen all year)
It's visually stunning. And not in the way that glazes everything nicely—this is a film with acid and vomit and bloody paint-drips down a five-liter can; predators do not feed with refinement. And it is beautiful.
You will like The Fall. It's out on DVD now . . .
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I could totally be persuaded.
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Nine
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Glad you approve. It's even—discounting July—thematically appropriate!
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I read the book after seeing the film, and was very interested by the ways in which the two deviate, Particularly during that momentw hen Eli begs Oskar to "be me...be me, for a while..." In the book, this leads straight into a flashback in which she shows Oskar her origin--very specific details, a terrible fairytale with Gilles de Rais overtones, though possibly dating to the 1700s rather than the 1430s; in the movie, it seems considerably more subtle. I like lacunae generally, so the lack of explicit explanations works really well for me--it reminds me of the vampire in Stainless, who's physically more mature than Eli but so old (and uneducated) otherwise that she remembers very little about where she came from, why she's done what she's done or what she was like before she became what she is now. (Being an eternal twelve-year-old sure wouldn't help with that, either, I'd think.)
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So very much. And then I gave myself whiplash by watching Spirited Away (2001) with another friend about six hours later. I loved it also, of course, especially the no-faced spirit, but the two movies are not exactly on the same tonal wavelength . . .
That's why no one should ever be forced to stay IN that state, let alone for 250 years (or so) at a time...
Is that how old Eli is? I guessed at the least a hundred and fifty, and probably more, but of course it's never clarified.
I read the book after seeing the film, and was very interested by the ways in which the two deviate
Would you recommend the book? I am inclined to read it simply because I loved the film—a tactic which just worked spectacularly with A Room with a View—but I assume there are substantial differences. The film feels more like a short story or a novella.
very specific details, a terrible fairytale with Gilles de Rais overtones, though possibly dating to the 1700s rather than the 1430s
I can see that.
I like lacunae generally, so the lack of explicit explanations works really well for me
Yes. I loved how much the film did not explain itself; either Oskar will figure it out, or the audience will, or it doesn't matter.
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Hopefully some theater owner in Cleveland will take pity on me and actually show it. One of our local megaplexes will be getting Milk soon (which also excites me greatly), so I do have some slight hope.
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Oh, yeah. It should be like brainwashing detox—did you like the sparkly vampire? Well, then, kid, have I got a movie for you . . .
One of our local megaplexes will be getting Milk soon (which also excites me greatly), so I do have some slight hope.
Best of luck. That's tomorrow's film for me; I am exploiting my art-house resources while they last.
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*pouts*
Yes, a move to Boston (as you said elsewhere) would be wonderful :) I'm still writing about it in this old novel I just can't give up on.
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Do you have independent theaters? I recommend both of them!
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and even when you're 42
Can't wait to see this film. I'll have to see if The Fall is playing here in the Emerald City.
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I hope you can find it . . .
I'll have to see if The Fall is playing here in the Emerald City.
If it's not still in theaters, it's out on DVD.
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And for God's sake, no more sparkling.
I second this.
I feel as if I ought to try reading one of the SparkleVamp books so that I can say that I know it's bad, instead of saying I've read excerpts and they were awful, but I'm not sure I can stomach it.
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No, trust me, it's not worth it. Your brain will hemorrhage.
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All right, then, I'll not take the risk. ;-)
And thank you kindly for the warning of me.
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Too often when a filmmaker is aware of genre and wants to resist it, they decide that they will studiously avoid all the relevant genre cliches and tropes. Much baby is thrown out with the bathwater. (A cardinal example: Spielberg's War of the Worlds remake.) These movies are the equivalent of by-the-book 12-tone music, which, by avoiding tonality, is actually just as restrictive harmonically as the music it was intended to supplant.
True freedom from the restrictions of tonality mean you don't worry about tonal vs. atonal and move freely between the poles. True freedom from genre means that you can include scenes that hew gloriously to genre conventions in a movie that, for the most part, has entirely different concerns than usual for the genre.
After we saw the film we had a discussion as to whether it was "a horror movie" or not. In some senses it is obviously a horror movie and in other, more important ones, it is obviously not. Most importantly, it is not primarily interested in evoking any of the emotions that comprise the palette of horror (terror, disgust, dread, etc.) It evokes them occasionally with extraordinarily skill, but it's no more a horror movie than The Sopranos was a comedy because it was often incredibly funny.
The actual genre that Let the Right One In belongs to is teen coming-of-age, of which it is an extraordinarily insightful and beautiful exemplar. I've often described Donnie Darko as a terrific teen-angst comedy / drama that just happens to also be a terrific science fantasy about destiny and free will. LTROI is a haunting teen coming-of age drama that is inseparable from the (in many ways surprisingly conventional) horror movie that somehow shares its body. It's a different sort of trick: DD could have been two different movies, as good as each other and 80% or 90% as good as their combination, while LTROI, if it underwent the same surgery, would yield a significantly less interesting coming-of-age tale and a close-to uninteresting horror flick (which is to say the patient(s) would have in fact died on the table). Yet these same horror tropes, used sparingly within the context of the coming-of-age tale, are extraordinarily powerful, and they are the reason why the coming-of-age tale is so remarkably good.
A almost always see a movie I love this much a second time in the theater. This may or may not happen this time only because there is so much else already playing (Slumdog Millionaire, Milk, A Christmas Tale, Australia, etc.) or about to be released (Frost/Nixon, etc.) that I want to see, and because I'm not sure how much longer it will be playing. I will buy it when it comes out on DVD in March.
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And yet there is loving attention to most of the tropes of vampirism. There's neck-biting and crawling up walls and bursting into flames in sunlight and (of course) needing to be invited into rooms, all done very satisfyingly for the fan of the genre. There is even the obligatory single cool addition to the methodological canon.
There are few movies which can be called remarkably restrained but whose most memorable moments are appropriately over-the-top. This is really a magical tightrope walk of tone.
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One Last Thought
And Furthermore