Gather 100 Hollywood vampires in a room and they’ll have less in common than you think. Some looked like the old world aristocracy, others like the crazy kids of the millennium. We’d find vampires who spend their days dating mortals, vampires whose job it is to kill other vampires, and lately vampires with really lousy officer friends.
The film industry excels at nothing but cycling (and recycled) materials, and when it comes to bloodsuckers, certain thematic archetypes have been formed in the century since FW Murnau’s death. nosferatu. At first, vampires were scary. Then they were sexy. Then stupidly, again scary, sexy, stupid, scary stupid sexy…
With the constant squeezing of pop culture, evolution has accelerated to Mach. Nearly fifty years have passed nosferatu For Ingrid Pitt to block everything Vampire Lovers, and another decade, until the immortal satire of the ’80s. Things went gothic in the ’92s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, severe From Twilight to Dawn, and burst into sex with the aughts twilight And real blood. Thus, the immutable Vamp Hour returns, from horror to humor and back again. And if any player is going to be hit with this quadrant twice, it’s Nicolas Cage, who was gearing up again last weekend. renfield.
Is Nicolas Cage an actor? Definitely. He’s also a semi-normal guy foolishly trying to pay his backlogs, whose 10 craziest stories are on a list on this website. In other words, if vampires are a post-beast monster, Cage is a post-actor actor. We experience a strange, ever-changing vertigo when he moves around the screen, where we see Nicolas Cage playing a movie role, not a movie role. Apparently, he even sees himself this way – he admitted to the same thing as last year. The Unbearable Weight of Colossal Talent.
When Cage got his first bloodsucker call in 1989, he was an up-and-coming guy who hadn’t broken the fourth wall yet. Fittingly, the vampire role gave him his first and biggest sledgehammer. by Robert Bierman vampire kiss It’s not a particularly good movie – it may be downright bad – but Cage’s enigmatic portrayal of demented literary agent Peter Loew leaves you with an indelible aftertaste. What did I just watch?
at Nicolas Cage vampire kiss.
MGM
“The movie is being manipulated and destroyed by Mr. Cage’s chaotic, smug performance,” he wrote. New York Times film critic Caryn James. To be honest, I’m not sure vampire kiss He had accumulated enough material to demolish it.
Eating a live pigeon, shouting the whole alphabet to his psychiatrist, and jumping on the Manhattan sidewalk, “I’m a vampire! I’m a vampire!” a young Cage was spreading the quirk that he would one day be famous for. Was Peter Loew “really” a vampire? Nobody knew. Was Nicolas Cage a “good” actor? In the sense that you can’t look elsewhere, of course.
Thirty years and 100 movies later, Cage returns to Vamp Land this week with Chris McKay’s movie. renfield. The movie is more or less a worthwhile endeavor – much better than the movie. vampire kiss. Even if much of its watchability is still due to Cage’s appeal.
No longer is Peter Loew the delusional, plastic-toothed literary agent, this time Cage Definitely vampire. actually he the vampire. Dracula. Yet despite all of Cage’s 34-year transformation, the corresponding change in vampirism – vampire kiss with real blood with What are we doing? Shadows—feel even more prominent.
Vampires are an ever-recurring topic as they surprise us. To ask why, we may want to capture our source material. Vampires, movie? He asks his friend who knows everything. “Have you ever read the book?”
Sink Your Teeth in History
The origins of the vampire realm and my metaphorical “Vamp Hour” come from a folk tale that emerged unannounced in the early 1700s when an Austrian army doctor sent home a letter saying he saw Serbian villagers digging up bodies. and burning them at the stake. When asked why, the villagers explained that these corpses were resurrected and killed people.
Nicolas Cage as Dracula renfield.
Universal Pictures
Villagers added, they tended to kill already sick people. But whatever. The doctor’s report is gone, starting an irreversible European rumor mill. Suddenly the word “vampire” appeared in magazines, books and Ye’ Ole Daily Bæst.
Vampire scholar Erik Butler explains that the beast is entangled in an existing Church-State debacle by “parodying and perverting the idea of religious resurrection.” On top of that, poor Serbian roots infused vampirism with a classist, Oriental bent, so famous bloodsuckers often come from places that border on the imagination (sorry, Transylvanians).
After a vampire gossip spree gripped the Holy Roman Empire, these pre-modern Europeans “became clever” and regained their sanity. They remembered that only one person could be resurrected. And he it was definitely not vampire!
But the term now ran like a wolf in the pastures of Western culture, and “Vampire” became a defamatory term for those who exploited power. That greedy Baron von Münchhausen, what a vampire. Superyacht owners? Definitely vampires. Even Karl Marx joined the fray: “Capital is undead labor, like a vampire, only by absorbing living labor.”
Despite the sexual oppression of the time, vampires simultaneously stepped into eroticism. In Charles Baudelaire’s 1857 “Les Metamorphoses du Vampire,” the defeatist Frenchman portrayed the bloodsucker as a pleasure-seeking lover, “forming her breasts against the metal bands of her corset, / Writhing and writhing like a snake on the fiery sand.” As she wraps up the show, “In all the mattresses fainting from estasia / Even the helpless angels curse themselves for me!”
Nicolas Cage and Nicholas Hoult renfield.
Michele K. Short/Universal Paintings
long before the cinema cycle that began with nosferatu, literary vampires have been in scary/silly/sexy fluctuations for hundreds of years. With the birth of the movie, the frequency of the loop was halved. It halved again as companies turned Hollywood into a massive marketing ploy. These days, in the spirit of post-internet Dadaism, it looks more like a Pollock script than a “loop”.
blood stops here
renfield It markets itself as a horror comedy, but it makes you laugh more than scare. Yes, there is blood – buckets of blood – but it flows in an absurd and non-threatening way. Like this renfield pursues his contemporaries, especially those broadcast on television. What Do We Do in the Shadows? (Favorite). Renfield’s press release me movie Based on an original idea by Walking Dead And Invincible creator Robert Kirkman.” That’s why I’m saying it, really?
throughout qualifying renfield for the sake of originality, what we got 10 times out of 10 is Cage’s performance. The story fails, no matter how many times. Awkwafina does an admirable job as the star of a B-plot cop drama. Menuand Ben Schwartz looks funny with neck tattoos. But without Cage, renfield empty calories. He carries this thing like a bucket of water does, and I think he kind of manages to cross the finish line with it.
Meanwhile, Vamp Clock continues to spiral out of control, and I worry that the bloodsuckers will lose their sincerity if we go too far along the path of satire. If the genre ever reached any post-millennium peak, it was definitely Tomas Alfredson’s. Enter the Right One, taking death with appropriate seriousness and reminding us, oh right, that it would be very difficult to meet a vampire in the wild very scary!
Call me maudlin, call me old-fashioned. But I need a break from irony and shlock. I want to feel something real, like Serbian villagers who literally scratch their loved ones out of fear of the undead. Until then, at least we have Nicolas Cage.
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