Horror-thon: Part II - Transylvanian Terror

The first two films I watched for my Oktoberfest of Horror were two versions of Dracula, the 1931 classic starring Bela Lugosi and the 1992 movie Bram Stoker's Dracula, starring Gary Oldman.

As someone who has read the book,  I must say that the '31 adaptation doesn't stand up to the novel. In fact, that version of Dracula wasn't technically based off of the novel itself, but was instead the adaptation of a play based off of the book. It is one of the downsides of the movie that the plot is much too simplified. Granted, it dates back to the 1930s, when movie norms were quite different from what they are now, but when I compare the movie with the novel, I can't help but notice certain jarring simplifications. Easily the most unsettling is the treatment of the "White Lady." The audience is shown that one of Dracula's victims has become a vampire, and is preying on children. And then?.... Nothing. The main plot line continues on without any resolution whatsoever of what you would think would be an important issue. After all, this only means that there's a second vampire loose in London.

On the plus side, however, there is the superb performance of Bela Lugosi, who effuses a wonderfully sinister charm and charisma. It is commonly said that Lugosi, a Hungarian, had to learn his lines phonetically because he didn't speak English when the movie was made. This is actually incorrect, although there is an element of truth to it, as Lugosi had played Dracula for years in the stage version mentioned above and had to learn his lines phonetically because of his then-poor English.

The 1991 version adheres more closely to the novel. It still has multiple alterations, however, but it is far from the simple story of the original movie.  Perhaps the alteration that I most like is the movie's introduction, which provides the origin story of the dark count. In fact, the overall arc of the movies suggests that Dracula is not so much a horror villain as a tragic character, a man who, when confronted with immeasurable and eternal loss, chose to renounce both his soul and humanity, and suffers the consequences over the following centuries.

Definitely an old man...

Another distinction of this version is its quite overt sexuality. I generally think it works on multiple levels. It taps into the longstanding perception that, in the stuffy Victorian age, sexuality was tantamount to depravity. And few things are as depraved as the depiction of the undead slacking their lust for the living (and not just for their blood...).  Then there's the juxtaposition of the sexually repressed Jonathan, generally considered the hero of the story, with the aggressively sexual Dracula, which further questions the distinction between the living and the dead.

It goes without saying that Gary Oldman is fantastic as Dracula, and Anthony Hopkins is a riot to watch as a callously straight-forward Van Helsing. Keanu Reeves, on the other hand, is cringe-inducing, mostly because of his horrific attempt to use a British accent. Among other butcheries, he possibly committed the most laughable mispronunciation of Budapest, "Byudapest," during a voice-over narration. I don't know what Francis Ford Coppola was thinking when he cast him.

Horror-thon

In response to a complaint that I didn't have anything to blog about, a friend suggested that I blog about my recent spate of horror movie watching. The month of October has two inconveniently contradictory realities for students (or at least me): one, the existence of midterm exams and papers, and two, the overwhelming desire to sit around watching horror movies, at the likely expense of performing well on aforementioned midterms. As someone who has loved horror movies since I was a pre-teen, I've been spending a bit too much time on the latter, but I don't care.

Unfortunately, my ability to watch my favorite horror movies has been hampered by my recent severing of ties with Netflix's DVD mailing service, which means I'm limited to whatever's available on instant viewing, Hulu, or movies that I own. Unfortunately, this means I can't watch films like Psycho (1960), The Birds (1963), Halloween (1978), Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Friday the 13th (1980), Ringu (1998), and Ju-On (2003). 

Nevertheless, I have made the best of a disappointing situation. So far this month, I've watched twelve horror movies, for a current average of one a day. (I've also had one in-class midterm, but the horror movies are obviously more important...) They are: Dracula (1931), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), The Fog (1980), The Thing (1982), The Lost Boys (1987), The Exorcist (1973), The Masque of the Red Death (1964), The Evil Dead (1981), An American Werewolf in London (1981), The Howling (1981), Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), and Scream (1996). I will be writing blog posts about most, if not all, of them and other horror movies in the near future...

Single blog in search of a name

So, after yet another unintended hiatus, I've decided to tweak my blog, hoping that it might spur a burst of creativity. Part of this blog renovation is a change in name. Unfortunately, it's taking me a while to thing of something I like (the front-runner was part of a quote from Les Misérables, but I just wasn't satisfied with it), so for the time being this will be The Blog With No Name.

If any of you have any suggestions, please, by all means, let me know.

Plans for the summer

So, my semester is over and I have almost four months before things pick up again in late August. I've been thinking about what I want to do in that period of time. Obviously, I'm going to be doing a lot of reading about Yemen, which is the topic of my thesis. I expect, however, that I'll still have a lot of additional time to spend when I'm not researching. So, here are some of my plans for the summer:

-Read for fun. One of the things that I love about breaks is the free time I have for reading. Within the last 24 hours, for example, I read almost 150 pages of Sarah Vowell's Unfamiliar Fishes, which I consequently finished.
-Write (which includes contributing to this blog). I really want to try to write more for fun. I'm planning some blog posts, including one on Unfamiliar Fishes. I also want to work on some more substantial stuff, such as a paper giving a psycho-dynamic analysis of the reaction to Osama bin Laden's death. And, of course, I'd like to write some creative stuff too.
-Work on foreign language skills. I'm going to try to improve my Arabic and French skills over the summer. Also, I might take a GLN course depending on what they're offering this summer.
-Lose weight. Two summers ago, I lost about thirty pounds without really trying. I'm hoping that if I actually made an effort, I might lose ten or maybe twenty more. Probably not, but I'm going to try.

The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day

So, Saturday night I finally forced myself to watch The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day on Netflix. It appears that there's a reason why it sat in my queue for months.

Simply put, it was awful. I'll be honest and admit that the first Boondock Saints isn't a particularly good film, but it's a lot of fun to watch. Considering that there was some ten years between the films, the second one should have been much better.

I'll put a spoiler warning in case any of you want to watch this festering turd of a movie.

So, the film starts out with the MacManus boys and their dad in Ireland, and judging by their hirsute visages, 1) they've been there for a while, and 2) there aren't any razors on the Emerald Isle.

The boys find out that they've been framed for the murder of a priest, and come back to America to bring the vengeance of the Lord upon anyone connected with the crime.

The actual killer, a hired gun who is 5' 5", is obsessed with his lack of height. Pretty much half of his screen time is him silently gauging how short he is. It's pointless and annoying.

There are also a myriad of flashbacks and dream sequences. The primary purpose of which apparently is to provide an excuse to have the deceased Rocco make an appearance. Also pointless and annoying.

There are gun fights, and (generally lame) wisecracks, and a disturbing amount visible of an overweight man. Judd Nelson plays the son of Papa Joe Yakavetta, which is kinda weird since he's two years older than Carlos Rota.

An insufferably long story short, it turns out that Noah, the MacManus' father, who was simply known as "Il Duce" in the first movie, is being lured back to America by an old friend of his played by Peter Fonda. This friend helped Noah become the badass assassin he was in the first movie, and then arranged for his incarceration. The background for this showdown was provided throughout the film by additional flashbacks that appeared to be a tacky imitation of The Godfather Part II. In my opinion, the back-story, which casts Noah as a vigilante killer of Mafiosos, doesn't seem to mesh with the first film, which implies that he's a Mafia hit-man with a moral code.

Anyway, a violent shootout precedes the film's ending, which suggests that there may be another sequel in the works. Saints preserve us from that day.

Thoughts on "Breaking the Real Axis of Evil"

I recently read “Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World’s Last Dictator’s by 2025” by former ambassador Mark Palmer. It’s an interesting book, and I more or less agree with its basic premise that the world would be a better place without dictatorships, and I thought that many ideas for bring about such a world are interesting. I do have some quibbles with the book however.

Misrepresentation (or, more charitably, misinterpretation)

-Palmer inexplicably claims that “more women have led Islamic countries than have led non-Islamic democracies….” Honestly, I have no idea what math Palmer is using. By 2003, the year the book was written, there had been one female head of state and six female heads of government of Islamic states. What Palmer means by female leaders of non-Islamic democracies could be tricky, since he may mean women who were elected rather than appointed. I personally don’t think that there should be a difference given the fact that either way the transfer of power would be based upon a rule of law. However, to rattle off just a few of the female heads of government who were elected before 2003: Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, Corazon Aquino, Helen Clark, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, Mireya Moscoso, Violeta Chamorro, and Eugenia Charles.

-In his afterword, written in 2005, Palmer writes about Russia backsliding into Not Free status. He claims that Putin’s popularity in Russia is in decline as a result. I think this is blatantly wishful thinking on Palmer’s part. While there has been a steady opposition to Putin in Russia, a vast majority of Russians support him and have supported him throughout his presidency and premiership.

Over-simplifications

-Palmer writes only a couple of paragraphs on Palestine, which (justifiably) criticize Yasser Arafat, as well as call for elections in Palestine. While the government of the Palestinian Authority has some responsibility for the poor lot of Palestinians, I would argue that the Israeli occupation of Palestine is more to blame. Additionally, Palmer failed to even mention Hamas, let alone anticipate its victory in the 2006 parliamentary elections.

-In what was essentially a throwaway sentence, Palmer writes that the issue of Kashmir will only be resolved when Pakistan is democratic. This may, in essence, be true, as a dictatorship would be likely to use the conflict to shore up support among Pakistanis. Considering, however, that there have been periods of democratic rule in Pakistan which did not resolve the conflict, it appears that merely hoping that democracy will end the problem is dangerously simplistic.

-Palmer pays little attention to the problem of democratization in multi-ethnic or multi-sectarian states. As we have seen in Iraq and Lebanon, democratic government can result in inter-group clashes, where differences are used for political advantage, or even result in merciless violence.

-Dictatorship is typically considered to be the absolute rule by one individual. Palmer reinforces this conceptualization by frequently referring to the forty-five individuals who are the world’s “least wanted.” A few of these dictatorships, however, are hardly run by individuals. Some, while they may have individual figures who represent the government, are in fact run by groups of people, such as some single-party governments and military juntas. Palmer seems to recognize this by dividing the dictatorships into typologies, including military dictatorships and one-party dictatorships, but he persists in identifying the regimes with single individuals.

Random acts of bizarreness

-Palmer arbitrarily picks a single warlord as Somalia’s “dictator” to be ousted. Google "Somalia" if you don't understand how ridiculous this is.

-Palmer criticizes Bhutan’s then-king for cracking down on pro-democracy activists. This may be true, and I’m not an expert on Bhutan, but I find this behavior to be rather odd since a few years later the king abdicated in favor of his son, and, at the same time, made Bhutan a constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament. From what I’ve gathered, throughout the ’90s and ’00s, Bhutan actually was preparing for the transition into democracy despite the apathy that the Bhutanese had for self-government.

-Palmer lumps the central Asian –stans in with the Middle East, as well as North African states, and calls them all the Greater Middle East. I’ll admit that the term “Middle East” is pretty arbitrary, as well as the group of countries that are included in it, but creating a “Greater Middle East” makes even less sense. The countries involved are hardly all that similar, especially the central Asian states when compared to the Arab states.

Honest disagreement

-Palmer, in his prescription for ousting Iran’s dictator, argues that the United States has taken the wrong lesson from the American-backed 1953 coup: that Iranians don’t appreciate our involvement in Iranian domestic affairs. Instead, Palmer argues, the lesson should be that the US has influence in Iran; it just needs to use it to support Iranian democrats. I disagree. Pretty much all of the literature I have read on Iran states that, in general Iranians love Americans, as well as many of the ideals of America, but have a deep distrust, even dislike, for the American government. Openly aligning ourselves with Iranian democrats is probably the best way to ensure that they are viewed with skepticism by the Iranian population as a whole.