![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
One Last Thought
And Furthermore