The Moomins

I went to a fantastic discussion/lecture/readings evening about Tove Jansson tonight and it got me thinking about why the Moomins mean so much to me. I haven't ever read any of Jansson's other work (though I intend to after listening to people talking about it) but I don't feel that just reading the Moomins is selling her short. (I also didn't know when I agreed to go along but Samuel West was there and did a reading from a short story. I managed not to be too much of a fangirl!)

My experience of the Moomins is tied up very heavily with my father. My mum never really liked the Moomins books because they unnerved her. At the time I didn't understand, but I do now. The Moomins books are one of those wonderful experiences that delight children and terrify adults. The best children's writers understand that the boundary between enchantment and fear is easily crossed. My dad read me the books before bed and he helped me cast a sculpture of Moomintroll holding the magic hat (sadly lost, as far as I know - I certainly couldn't find it when I cleared out my father's flat). He particularly liked 'Comet in Moominland' because he was an astronomer whereas I love 'Moominsummer Madness' because I loved drama.

However, I've found that as I've got older my relationship with the books had changed. I love the adventurous parts of them, the pearl diving and exploring, but I've also found that parts of them are depressing in ways I didn't understand before. Fillyjonk in 'Moominvalley in November' is a character I can hardly bear to read about, though I know her story ultimately has a happy ending. The concept of filling your time with people to try and stop the bad thoughts is resonant. I don't think I ever truly forgave Jansson for never giving the Groke her happy ending. Her story was almost too sad for me to cope with and it never gets better. An uncompromising touch of realism in a children's book.

They are still full of wonder and joy, however, with plenty of adventures. I can still lose myself in Jansson's world, as proved by how much I enjoyed listening to the readings at the event. However, even so, I found it painful to read about how much Snufkin missed the sea. Samuel West talked about the beautiful melancholy of Keats and the Moomins and I knew exactly what he was talking about but I'd never realised that was why I loved both so much but also had such a complicated relationship with them.

Flash Fiction #1

Word count 488

My boots left prints on the wet pavement and I skirted the piles of sodden leaves with regret, navigating my daily obstacle course. Traffic whispered on all sides but my head phones were firmly cradling my ears, music turned up dangerously high. I heard somewhere that it ruins your hearing, but mine’s shot to hell anyway.

My gaze caught hazards rather than really taking anything in and snagged on a man approaching from the other direction. We occupied our discreet halves of the pavement, maintaining that studied and self-conscious gaze that avoided social interaction, however minor. He had a woolly hat and a coat, nondescript with a beard, carried a plastic bag beside him. I was always wary of people with an unlabelled shopping bag that seemed to only have one bottle in, especially so early that they couldn’t be on the way to a party. I always encountered drunks on my way home, guiltily shuffling along with a bag of bottles or, worse, swigging openly from gold and white cans outside a corner shop. We all generally kept our shames private, but I had been approached before.

My fellow walker and I passed each other and I glanced back, a nervous habit to make sure he wasn’t following me. Normally I am greeted by a retreating back, but this time was different. He had stopped still in place and had turned back to look at me. I was still walking and whipped my head round to fix my eyes on the path ahead.

That clash of anxiety, the meeting of gazes, the unspoken social contracts with their endless clauses and interpretations - I couldn’t bear to try and guess why he had taken that inexplicable action. Who stops in the street and watches the person he passed walk away? Apart from me, I mean? My spine crawled with one possibility while secret pride shamed me with the other. Not unattractive, or so I am assured, but hardly the sort to make people stop and look in the street. It is, of course, always flattering to be considered attractive, but the other blade of that double-edged sword revolts me. The unpleasant comments and unwelcome attentions, the cruel hilarity of men who make my skin creep inviting themselves to view me as their object and a barely desirable one at that. It’s not commodification - people pay for commodities, they don’t assume ownership before the bartering starts.

Perhaps he had taken it as an invitation? The thought made me quicken my pace and my mind moved to the usual precautions: walk home a different way, don’t take the most direct route, check for people following, feel reassured that I’m wearing heavy and comfortable boots and try to remember my martial arts lessons. The everyday stuff, you know?

I ran for the traffic lights and felt some comfort in the river of cars and lorries blocking the path behind me.

Goals for 2012

Not to run with the crowd, but this is as much for my benefit as everyone else's.

1. Complete Masters degree successfully
2. Get a full-time job (after Masters degree)
3. Walk to and from work at least once a week, weather permitting (this has actually been every work day since the 3rd January so far, but I don't want to give myself too many unreasonable goals)
4. Get Shades of Norwich organised in a more efficient way (the Vampire: the Requiem game I help run for 40+ people)
5. Write every day. Yup, snowball's chance in hell, especially with my study currently filled with an airbed for one of our friends. But this is a thing where aiming for the stars just might work, and I'll take a good average as success for this.
6. Get the extra people out of my house. For the past few months, we've had two friends living at our house because they had nowhere else to go. Hopefully one of them will be going to China sometime in February and the other will be moving into his own place. So really this goal should be 'hold it together until you have your house back'. I'm not doing so well at that right now. (Breathe. Remember that they are your friends, you love them, they are not taking advantage, they will be out as soon as they can be, they help around the house, they do not mean to be rude or inconsiderate or judgemental and they put up with your mess and stress)
7. Do thank you letters in a more timely fashion
8. Budget. Oh God, budget. Partly as a result of 6, finances have gone to hell. Overdraft is scary, impulse control is poor. Then there will be more chance for nice things
9. Get on top of e-mails. Hotmail keeps accidentally putting all my inbox e-mails in the deleted folder, which just reminds me how many e-mails I have in my inbox. Ugh.
10. As part of 8, eat better, make bulk food to freeze, find more economically sensible and healthy lunch substitutes that can be made with a minimum of effort and time

It was a dark and stormy night...

Since the Internet ate my last post, which was about both Hallowe'en and NaNoWriMo (choose to believe that it was literally the most awesome post ever), I've decided to update from the first day of NaNo.

I've got off to a pretty flying start (4118 words and counting!) but I know better than to trust that. I'm sure I'll lose that head start next week sometime.

But my post today is about competetiveness. See, one of the major ways I kept myself motivated to get a lot of words out of the way today is by looking at my buddies list word totals (in the absence of a Word Scoreboard for 2011 at this point) and insist on beating them all. And one of my friends is at almost four and a half thousand words today. So, of course, I decided to work my way up with my friends who were (sensibly) sticking to a bit over today's recommended word count so as to do important things like eat and eventually ended up battling for top spot with 4 and a half k. I claim I'm not competetive, but that's just because I restrain myself normally :D

I've heard that one technique for motivation is to check the scoreboard for the person a few steps above you and try to beat their wordcount. I could see this turning into a hilarious battle for dominance, but it sounds good to me. Looking forward to the scoreboard working so I can give full rein to my competitive streak!

Redefining a very naughty word

OK, OK, so 'porn' isn't really a naughty word. But it implies a guilty pleasure, a seedy kind of gratification.

Zombots has an interesting look at the phrase 'torture porn' and whether it can reasonably be applied to films such as 'Hostel' and 'Saw' given as the phrase implies torture used as a way of sexually exciting the viewer. This is apparently not true of most of the 'torture porn' genre - I wouldn't know because I am a wuss and get freaked out by extreme violence in films, and therefore have never watched 'Hostel' (ugh...blowtorch) or 'Saw' (I could probably handle the kinds of violence in the first film, but don't fancy trying). In fact, one could argue that the implied meaning of the phrase is shown more literally in a recent episode of 'Supernatural' (6.10, 'Caged Heat') in which a woman (OK, possessed by a demon, but we've established that demons have to use human bodies and our attention is drawn to it constantly through the episode) is tortured while strapped to a medical bed through her...um...yeah, 'Supernatural' doesn't show that much stuff, but it sure implies it. Sexual jokes are made and she's all naked (though covered by straps where it counts). Torture + naked chick + sex jokes = at least closer to 'torture porn' than 'Saw'.

The writer of the above article mentions that Cyraique Lamar redefined porn as a kind of shallow, two-dimensional representation of a real experience. I'd actually go further - I'd say that the word porn does not necessarily have to imply sexuality but instead excess and guilty pleasure. You can say 'foodporn' or 'visual porn' to imply excessively enjoyable and luxurious food or beautiful sights or filming deliberately designed to make the viewer revel in the sensual stimulation of a shot. It implies a hedonistic indulgence of sense, senses or experience that has associations of violating society's restrained niceties.

So, to come back to the writer's point, 'torture porn' could therefore mean an excessive indulgence in torturous violence for its own sake, which is the same conclusion reached at the end of the article, but the writer sees that as a defining point of difference in the nature of the movies and the phrase used to describe them. The term 'porn' is assumed to be sexual in nature due to its associations, but I think that's an outdated use. It is pejorative in some circles, sure, but that's mainly to do with the context. So, yeah, some people get annoyed about 'torture porn', but you'd be unlikely to find people getting annoyed about 'foodporn'. Redefine your terms, ladies and gentlemen.

'The Last Airbender' (film!)

Yeah, yeah, I know. Shooting fish in a barrel, exercise in pointlessness, why did I even watch this film when I knew how bad it was going to be?...but I thought it needed at least a mention.

'The Last Airbender' (not allowed the total title of the series, 'Avatar: the Last Airbender' because of a certain blue alien film that came out around the same time, which is, I will grudgingly admit, at least the better of the two films) was a movie that did not need to be made. At all. It's based on a wonderful animated TV series about a world in which the four nations utilise the four elements in 'bending', a martial arts/magic fighting style. The Avatar is the only person alive who can bend all four elements, and keeps the nations (and the elements) balanced, as well as being able to access the spirit world. When one Avatar dies, they are reincarnated as a member of a different nation. Aang, the hero of the series and film, is the Avatar who ran from his role and ended up frozen in ice for a century, but is discovered by a water bender named Katara and her brother Sokka, children of the Southern Water Tribe. Unfortunately, Zuko, the disgraced and scarred son of the Lord of the Fire Nation, Lord Ozai, can only regain his father's favour by capturing the Avatar, who is the only person who can stop Ozai's expansion and conquest of the four nations. Got it? It's a really, really good series, with surprising depth for what is ostensibly a kids' show, decent characters, great elemental action scenes and a fleshed-out spiritual and philosophical basis for the entire setting. If you haven't watched, go and do so right now.

Because this film is just a live-action remake of the first series, but with large chunks taken out and the good bits done again, worse, it brings precisely nothing new to fans, even annoying them with the changes made, and won't entice new fans because it completely fails to convey the wonder and beauty of the setting or the compelling dilemmas the characters face. The sad thing is, you can tell it was made with love, but that really doesn't translate to good film-making. M. Night Shyamalan can do good film-making. We've seen it, and now at least he's broken out of having to have a twist at the end. OK, apparently his more recent films were rubbish, but 'The Sixth Sense' and 'Unbreakable', while flawed, were still deeply enjoyable watching and will remain minor classics. So what happened? Well, some of this film's complete fail might be to do with the editing and the way the whole thing is fitted together. I mean, it jumps around like nobody's business, going from the antarctic wastes of the Southern Water Tribe to the Southern Air Temple in a matter of minutes, without even a travelling sequence in between. Then *poof*: they're in the Earth Kingdom. Then *bamf*: they're captured by Fire Nation. The pacing is awful too, as important bits of plot whiz by in a matter of seconds and a seriously annoying voiceover tells us things they couldn't be bothered to film. Sokka's girlfriend in the series, Yue, princess of the Northern Water Tribe, was the first chance we have to see a more serious, committed side to Sokka, as his infatuation becomes more like love. In the film, they have a gaze-a-thon across the throne room and then next thing we know, they're in a relationship! One which, emotionally, is the focus for one of the most tragic dilemmas in the series but in this is barely glanced over.

Well, I mean, there's some information in the voiceover, but this film is an example of what happens when someone gets confused about whether it's "show" or "tell" you're meant to do. The cinematography is, frankly, dreadful. I'm not a film student and even I know the extreme close-ups were a seriously bad idea. In the aforementioned courtship of Yue and Sokka, the only bit of development we get is where the film stops its frantic bouncing around long enough to give us a few minutes of bad dialogue between the two, which is of course intercut with preparations for war and unflatteringly shot. Due to getting Dev Patel to play Zuko (he tries hard, but unfortunately wasn't as complex as Zuko in the series), he's unrecognisable as the animated character. But y'know what the most recognisable quirk of Zuko's appearance is? That big old flame shaped scar that covers a good portion of his face and is the physical reminder of his disgrace and banishment by his father? Yeah, it's there, but only barely. It wasn't ever made a big deal of. Guess they didn't want to make a pretty guy less pretty. Plus Patel just looks really angrily at the camera without subtlety.

The one thing I would say is that I find the accusations of whitewashing a bit extreme. Yeah, OK, they did get white actors for Aang, Katara and Sokka, and went with a non Inuit set of actors for the Water Tribes, but Shyamalan has clearly designed a racial spread for the nations, with the Fire Nation as Indian and the Earth Nation as East Asian. In contrast to most Hollywood films, it has a surprisingly diverse cast. Still, that's only in comparison and not really addressing the wider issue that gives rise to the problem, and it did annoy me that they went for Nicola Peltz and Jason Rathbone for Katara and Sokka, but that's mainly because they sucked at playing characters I care about. Noah Ringer was actually pretty good as Aang, and though my fellow viewers were complaining a lot about the martial arts, he was the only person who looked at all convincing, given as he studied Taekwondo for quite a long time before auditioning for the part of Aang. Maybe it's my affection for Taekwondo showing through, but at least Ringer had the right sense of balance and rhythm for martial arts, whereas Peltz clearly had no clue whatsoever and just looked awkward, despite having supposedly had a martial arts boot camp for six months. Sadly, much as I like Dev Patel, he clearly wasn't particularly confident about the fire-bending fight scenes (probably quite difficult to do, to be fair) and the way they were filmed almost looked like it was designed to obscure the lack of competance. However, the fight scene at the end between Aang and Zuko was actually quite well done. And the Blue Spirit looked great - whoever did that stunt work was wonderful, but the big fight where they held off a whole load of Fire Nation was both creative and disappointing. It's a cool idea having them in a training room, but Aang basically seemed to be using his airbending to play with the dummies while the Blue Spirit single-handedly held off an entire freaking army. This was mostly because it was very confusingly shot, but it could have been good.

By the way, this film was made for kids, right? So...there's this bit near the end where an undeniably nasty Fire Nation guy has wrought havoc but the fight has turned against him and he's turned tail and run. Guess what the heroic (faceless) waterbender army does? Drowns him. Seriously. They trap him in a bubble of water until he stops moving. We even see him drop to the ground and just lie there. I'm all for a touch of darkness in kids' films, but we're just going to let that go? Just...killing people is OK if they're bad people? Especially if they're running away like cowardly custards? Wow. Great message, Shyamalan.

So...good points...good points...well, Uncle Iroh was pretty cool. I mean, he wasn't played by Mako, for obvious reasons, and they had him getting foot massages instead of drinking tea and playing chess, but he wasn't that out of character. They actually started introducing Zuko's strained relationship with his ambitious sister Azula much earlier than in the series. They got the same voice actor to do Appa and Momo, though Appa just looks weird. Why are his paws hanging down like long child-catching fingers? They actually bother to go to the Northern Air Temple (in the series, the technological modification of the Air Temple by a group of refugees was a really big personal dilemma Aang had to negotiate) but they only spend a couple of minutes there. They did bother to cover Aang's backstory and his awesome mentor, Monk Gyatso, but for some reason they change Gyatso's final stand (he was sitting cross-legged surrounded by the skeletons of his enemies in the series) so it wasn't as iconic, or as badass. Almost every good thing I have to say about this series has a caveat. The set and production design was incredible, but it's rarely used effectively, especially as the low light levels of most of the film makes it insanely difficult to see (apparently even worse in 3D). The martial styles connected with the bending styles were well thought out, but badly performed and the CGI seriously didn't back it up. I know it's difficult to animate water and fire, but that's no excuse for laziness in making it respond to the bender's martial arts moves.

Oh yes, and 'bender' is indeed inherently hilarious to British people. I always assumed that was the joke of Bender's name in 'Futurama' (apparently not, actually a pun on his job and a reference to a character from 'The Breakfast Club'). I kind of became immune to it due to watching the 'Avatar' series, but it is pretty funny to hear people say, "You're a bender!" It's falling out of use, but don't call people benders in Britain unless you want a thump.


Factoid, since there were no quotable lines: the guy who voices Zuko in the TV series (Dante Basco) is the guy who played Rufio (RUFI-O, RUFI-O!) in 'Hook'.

'Van Helsing'

Ugh. I hate this film. And yet I keep going back to it. I actually own it now - that's right, I bought it voluntarily and then rewatched it all the way through. And it was just as bad second time round, though I could appreciate the silliness more when not blinded by incoherent rage.

Still, there are some very, very few good points. Not enough to salvage it, but you have to take your jollies where you can find them. It's such a pity, too, because I love 'The Mummy' and 'The Mummy Returns' ('Tomb of the Dragon Emperor' sucked but that was due to some particularly poor choices that could easily have been done differently). They're silly pulp fun with a modern appeal and a classic atmosphere, but are good-hearted and loveable in a way few Hollywood films are. Plus they show Sommers can do genre, as long as he isn't expected to take it seriously or respect it or anything. And, frankly, I could easily have liked a Universal Horror-style monster movie pitting everyone's favourite vampire hunter against the three big guys in Universal's canon. But 'Van Helsing' is really bad. Not funny bad - it's where parody goes to die.

This is mostly due to a string of baffling decisions that, as with 'Tomb of the Dragon Emperor', just make the whole thing not work but could easily have been set right. First, Van Helsing. I'm a massive fan of the original 'Dracula' novel and Van Helsing's character. He's not exactly nuanced but he's a gloriously bonkers doctor and expert on blood-borne diseases who happens to kill vampires on the side. It's very telling that his first name was the same as Bram Stoker's own - Abraham. I'm not exactly a purist when it comes to Van Helsing. He's been mercilessly recast for years into whatever a director or screenwriter demands of him, but Peter Cushing is the ultimate Van Helsing. He can pull off old world academia, wiry athleticism and because Cushing took his acting seriously no matter how bad the film he was in, he brings weight to the proceedings so that even in the silliest films like 'The 7 Golden Vampires', you suspend your disbelief the minute he enters a scene. Hugh Jackman is not a bad actor - I actually quite like him. I love him in 'The Prestige'. He, like Brendan Fraser, Harrison Ford and Cary Grant, can carry off pretty much anything with a wink and a roguish smile. He doesn't take himself too seriously as an actor, which really helps when playing pulp characters, and while he's been pigeonholed by X-Men and 'Australia' as a growling manly man, he can play delightfully against type, and does. However, Stephen Sommers takes no advantage of this whatsoever, giving us a cut-and-pasted growling badass hero with no emotional depth or skills beyond killing, barely any good lines and a complete lack of reference to the original character who still remains in the popular consciousness because of Cushing's incredible portrayal. He doesn't have the charm of Rick O'Connell to balance it out and too much of the 'rogue demon hunter' to pull off the light-hearted aspect. Plus there's this weird thing where they changed his first name (what's wrong with Abraham?) to Gabriel and imply, for some completely unknown reason, that the character is actually the angel Gabriel now working for the Vatican...or something. It's stupid and completely unnecessary.

Talking of stupid and unnecessary, what was Richard Roxburgh on during this film? I mean, he's an awesome actor and, well, damn, he actually managed to make that aging Anne Rice fan outfit look good, but his Dracula is a bizarre, mewling idiot who bears no resemblance to any serious Dracula on film. Lugosi had dignity, Lee had the whole forbidden pleasure thing and was almost animalistic, Oldman brought emotional depth and a sense of ancient madness. Roxburgh has wacky. I mean, the Count hasn't exactly been treated with respect for a lot of his career, but he needed to be a genuine threat to Van Helsing, since nothing else is. Besides, his evil plan is just...stupid. It involves wanting to make vampire babies. Why? Becuase Fuck You, that's why. The Brides are one-dimensional characters who alternate between screaming hysterically about their babies and turning into badly-CGd flying vampire monsters. As bad guys, the terrible foursome are hardly threatening.

Now, three of the great strengths of 'The Mummy' and 'The Mummy Returns' were the leads and the villain(s). But we've established that Van Helsing lacks the uniqueness and charm to hold this all together (though his actor doesn't) and Dracula is too ineffectual and plain old bonkers to make a decent villain (despite his actor being a lot better than this). So the female lead, the love interest, the lady of the hour? How does she hold up? The answer is, not well. Kate Beckinsale, who plays Anna Valerious, is another actor I rather like. Her 'Emma' is by far the best version. 'Underworld' sucks like a Twilight vampire but she's surprisingly likeable in it. However, she's not suited to playing an action girl, perhaps because she seems like she's trying too hard to be rough-spoken and dangerous. I would far rather see her play a clever, competant woman with a good head on her shoulders, perhaps a female hacker in a heist movie (notice how they're always male?) or an FBI agent who takes control of the situation with an uncompromising and straight-laced attitude. But in this she plays a werewolf-hunting gypsy princess in rural Transylvania, so it's action girl all the way. Compared to, say, Evelyn from 'The Mummy' (as played by Rachel Weisz, unfortunately Mario Bello just didn't cut it in the third film), who is a wonderful charicature of an academic but has a likeable personality, Anna is...um...well, she kicks ass...and her family has a dark past...OK, Anna basically has no personality. She seems to be some kind of leader of her village, but she does precious little leading because she's so busy having her own adventures. Her profession is presumably monster-hunting (a valid career choice in Transylvania, if horror films have taught me anything) and I would guess she can afford to live on her family's wealth, but what does she do for fun? Brood?

So the main trio are either underdeveloped or plain old bizarre. The plot is completely laughable. Dracula's big plan is to use Dr Frankenstein's research to conduct lightning through a living body into a massive machine and thus make his babies live, but no body can take it. So Frankenstein builds him a monster, but that pesky mob comes and storms the place, Dracula kills Frankenstein and the monster 'dies' in an explosion in a windmill (which actually makes sense since flour is highly combustible), putting Dracula back at square one. Meanwhile, Gabriel (shudder) Van Helsing is hunting Mr Hyde in Paris (this is somewhat explained in the prequel animated film 'The London Assignment', where Hyde was Jack the Ripper despite the fact that the book Hyde mostly stamped on people's heads or hit them with sticks to kill them and probably lacked the finesse to channel Jekyll's doctor abilities). Van Helsing is a monster hunter in the employ of the Vatican who can't remember who he is, and is dispatched, along with his comedy sidekick, to Transylvania. Meanwhile meanwhile, Anna and her brother Velkan are catching a werewolf and Velkan gets bitten because he's an idiot, meaning he'll become the Wolfman. There is horribly forced sexual tension between two great actors, fight scenes with the Brides, some exposition and then they find Frankenstein's monster in the windmill. Dracula's using Velkan to try and channel lightning to make the babies live or something, but he isn't up to it. So through various convoluted plot twists and ham-fisted action scenes, they end up with Van Helsing confronting Dracula as the Wolfman and Anna fighting one of the Brides with the help of the monster.

There's a big plot about how Gabriel is an archangel and killed Dracula centuries ago, causing him to make a pact with the Devil to become a vampire and that's all been leading up to this climactic battle. At what point was it not awesome enough to just have werewolf-Van Helsing and Dracula duking it out atop Frakenstein's ruined castle on a moonlit night in Transylvania? Hell, at what point did Van Helsing have to become an angel to be awesome enough for this film?! If we go by book canon rather than film canon, he freaking murderises Dracula when he is an old man. Why the hell does he need to be an angel? This is one of the major decisions that annoys me about 'Van Helsing': the film-makers seem to think they have to top everything they do with further levels of epic for the trailers. It's a Van Helsing movie! Where he fought Dracula as a young man! In Transylvania! With the help of magic gypsies and steampunk technology! Alongside Frankenstein's monster! While becoming the Wolfman! And Dracula's a giant bat monster! And Van Helsing is an angel with amnesia!

*headdesk* It sounds like something a ten year old would come up with. And frankly, if this was a comic that had spread all that across a big arc, it would actually be pretty cool. I would buy that. But it was all crammed into one film that is structured like they needed to shoehorn an action scene in every five minutes or the kids with ADD would get bored and start kicking the backs of the chairs and it all results in a big CGI-d monster mash that gets boring very, very quickly. And then there's the schmaltz at the end which even involves a character's smiling face looking down from the clouds. OK, in this case there was a point to that (SPOILER! Anna dies, but because Dracula is dead, her family, who have previously been denied Heaven because of a vow her ancestor made, can rest in peace) but it was so, so cliched that I almost couldn't believe they included it.


Like I said, there are some good points. It'd be difficult for there not to be really, in a film with this much talent. For a start, the film looks really good. The steel grey skies and gloomy weather give a real stylishly overcast look to the whole thing, and the use of a village set remarkably like the Universal village set is very effective. All very Gothic. The opening sequence is wonderful, as well: a black-and-white sequence reproducing the "It's aliiiiiive!" and windmill-finale scenes from the James Whale 'Frankenstein', with Samuel West, one of my favourite lesser-known British actors, as the good doctor and Schuler Hensley as the monster (yeah, I had no idea who he was, apparently some kind of Broadway actor and singer, but he's really good as the monster). Sometimes I just go and watch that bit on Youtube to remind myself what a cool film this could have been if it hadn't sucked so much. It has given me the awesome "Whhhyyyyyy?" soundbite, which is really affecting in context. You know the one thing that I can point to as ruining this glorious homage? Dracula. From the minute he starts going on about his weird plot to the moment when he drags himself along a sword to kill Frankenstein, he makes a brilliant scene bad. *sigh* And you know this isn't because I dislike Richard Roxburgh, but Frankenstein is tragic, and this Dracula is high camp.

Other good things: the ball scene is pretty cool, if rather borrowed from 'The Fearless Vampire Hunters'. David Wenham is the comedy sidekick, Carl, who provides Van Helsing's gadgets (which are very silly), and he's a delight, playing a comedy character with charm and evident enjoyment. Plus I love that the nerd monk (well, friar) is the only person who gets laid in this film, unless you count Dracula. Schuler Hensley is good as the monster (as mentiond before) and they do get kudos for not referring to the monster as 'Frankenstein' for most of the film, though eventually they fell into the trap of saying "We have to rescue Frankenstein!" I'd be impressed if they could given as he was in an exploding windmill in the first ten minutes. The technology is pretty fun, and the production design is lovely, especially in the laboratory, but none of this is really enough to salvage 'Van Helsing'. Sure, there are moments of fun, but they won't get you through the ten-minute chunks of boredom. I'll probably watch it again, but it's not something I'd recommend as a sure-fire enjoyable film.

Van Helsing: "You're a genius!"
Carl: "A genius with access to unstable chemicals!"