The latest version of Mary Shelley’s 19th century novel Frankenstein has finally been brought to the screen by Academy Award winner Guillermo del Toro Gomez. I picked the adverb with an abundance of forethought. Director Gomez has said that he has waited almost all of his life to bring this story to the cinema and, there is little question, he should be the perfect guy to do so.
Pan’s Labyrinth, The Shape of Water, Hellboy, and Pinocchio were worthy precursors to the gothic film which viewers… as well as del Toro himself… might well suspect would spring from the mind’s eye of this gifted picture maker.
Was it worth the wait? Frankly, the answer is no. The first half is a bore and so much so that the second half… which is much better… cannot fully compensate for what went before.
What went wrong? Hard to know. Have we seen the filmization of this story too many times? Could be. In fairness, it is not as easy a thing to pull off as one might expect. Horror movie buffs are rebuffed by the empathic character that is the monster. The result…?… It just isn’t… nor has it ever been… a true horror story.
Man’s inhumanity to man? But is the thing … the “monster”… technically human? And just maybe none of this esoterica matters anyway. No matter how massive the sets, how glorious and mysterious the cinematography or the underscore of music, maybe … we … the picture-going audience … have stayed too long at the fair.
Mary Shelley’s story has stood the test of time, is one of the great yarns of semi-modern literature, but (frankly) we have been there and done that … and what’s more, Director Yorgos Lanthimos pretty much put a nail in this coffin with his award winning 2023 motion picture, Poor Things starring Emma Stone as “the creature.” It just may be impossible… to top Yorgos’ send-up of the genre.
That said, not all have gotten the message. Still to come is The Bride, directed by Maggie Gylllenhaal, based on the filmic concept, The Bride of Frankenstein.
Recently … and need I add not seen by me? …. Lisa Frankenstein, where a teenage girl flips the genre by creating a “mate” and then there is The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster.
About these, “… frankly, I don’t give a damn” is a suitable cinematic closer.
Besides the history of cinema, history itself has been of some more than casual interest for me even before taking it as my major as an undergraduate at the University of Southern California. Death by Lightning, a four-hour miniseries on Netflix, the story of the brief term in office of President James A. Garfield and his assassin Charles J. Guiteau, is well worth your attention.
I knew little about either of these true to life-characters, other than my parents having met at James A. Garfield High School in East Los Angeles and my more than superficial interest in the Stephen Sondheim musical, Assassins, which … among others … featured “Charlie” Guiteau.
Death by Lightning, see it. It is an informative and satisfying four hours.
I turned on Mindhunter, vintage 2017-2019, because of actress Anna Torv, the Australian beauty who J.J. Abrams first brought to my attention in his fabulous ABC series, Fringe. That was a long time ago, but Ms. Torv is still a fine actress … that is when you finally, get to see her. Listed as one of the three leads, Ms. Torv barely makes an appearance until late in the series. The two male leads, Jonathan Groff and Holt McCallany are fine but neither has the kind of star power it takes to navigate a series to anything resembling success.
I have yet to return to the Netflix series but I might. Ms. Torv’s role could get larger, the show might get a bit better, but time has sorta run out; Netflix canceled the psychological crime drama after two seasons (a total of 19 episodes).
Finally… I took a look at the latest (or, indicated in its title, last?) Mission Impossible-The Final Reckoning. The movie runs for 169 minutes and for something like 130 of those not only was the mission impossible, but it was also not even understandable.
Somehow, in the waning moments of the movie, the whole thing came together. I congratulated myself on making sense of much of the thing, despite feeling that before that moment of illumination, most of the film was being made up as it went along.
I am old enough to have watched Tom Cruise grow up on the screen. What a fantastic career. Is he finally getting a bit long in the tooth for the kind of derring-do required in this sort of motion picture? I dunno. The whole thing is so unbelievable, so contrived, so convenient to whatever the screenwriter can imagine… why not have a 63-year-old do whatever the role requires? After all, they do warn you at the very outset … it’s …
IMPOSSIBLE.
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