Father Malone's Weekly Roundup - Nosferatu, Y2K, A Complete Unknown

and one of our choices fits that description. But there's just too much new stuff out this week, so we're gonna go with the big ones, the big guns. How should we take it this week? Alphabetical by genre? I know, let's do it best to worst in reverse order. Ripley, do you hear that it's getting closer? You don't hear that? It's the sound of stacked heel boots and chunky heels. It's a Bauhouse level event. Does she want revenge? Is the Vampire ball empty and all the goths are here?

Goddamn right? It's Robert Egger's latest attempt to class up

the horror genre. This is no sfaratu chet my secret with any soul.

and renamed all the characters. Counter Dracula is now Count Orlock. That's about it, and that's not an homage, that's a ripoff. The course agreed with Bramstroker's widow when she sued they ordered all the prince destroyed. Clearly some survive since we've all seen it and we've seen the remake, that's the nineteen seventy nine Werner Herzog remake with Klaus Kinsky as

Count Orlock, I mean Dracula. Just to confuse things more, the remaker reinstated the original character names, although they've combined Lucy and Mina into Lucy Harker. Even though there's another character named Mina. It's very odd either Count Orlock or Dracula, both of them. They had the appearance we've come to know as Nosferatu, long and thin and bald, chalk white skin, rodent eers and weirdo fangs. They used that look in the original Salem's Lot and on SpongeBob square Pants and

what we do in Shadows. Can't wait to see what Robert Eggers does with it. Right, see what the update is, right, we'll get there. Robert Eggers makes period pieces that are serious, elevated horror, and they are beautiful to look at. Sincerely, every frame is a painting. You know who else has made a career making every frame a pretty picture? Michael Bay. The difference between Michael Bay and Robert Eggers is that

I'm never bored during a Michael Bay film. Oh sure, I'm completely incredulous, insulted, definitely, but I tend not to drift off during his cinematic offerings. Evidently, my snoring was so loud during the screening of the Lighthouse that I attended that I needed to be shaken awake. When I went back to rewatch the Vivich, I was shocked to find it was only ninety minutes. I remembered that fucker

being three hours. And here again with Nosferatu, he does not disappoint because once all the gorgeous photography with the handheld oil lamps blazing orange light and daytime always in a murky blue haze, once all that begins to settle, you're stuck with the story and these characters. Werner Herzeu used count Orlock as a metaphor for the death of

the bourgeois. Eggers refocuses the lens back to Stoker's original novel and its preponderance on sexuality and While the characters in this film seem to debate in a series of endless conversations that dot the film as to whether or not evil is an internal or an external phenomenon, there's absolutely no question what side this film lands on. Ellen or Mina or whoever is the absolute source of the infection. Here she is drawing count orlock across time and great distance.

But is it her repressed sexuality or inherented depravity that's bringing ruin? That is the actual question the film is interested in and dances around and never commits. Not helping is a central performance by Lily Rose Depp that is at best detached and at worst over wrought. She's no doubt a skilled and a lovely actor, but she's not exactly magnetic. And this is the one character in any

iteration of Dracula that needs to sing. By all accounts, With this cast, in this story, in this cinematography, this ought to be the sexiest vampire film ever made. Instead, it's a bloodless affair, although there is plenty of the red red creuvy flowing just so Eggers can prove he's hardcore as well as intellectual. This is a passionless film about unbridled passion. I wish Ken Russell had directed this film, or Werner Herzog had been given half the budget they

gave Eggers to do this. Dracula has always had an element of emasculation and cuckoldry with regards to the Count's relationship with Jonathan Harker, luring him and imprisoning him while he's got grand designs on his girl. That becomes a constant refrain in this film, and the solution they pose for the Jonathan Harker character is really queasy. I guess spoilers and trigger warnings for the next ten or fifteen

seconds or so. But Thomas the Jonathan Harker character, after being taunted by his possessed bride that he'll never make her feel the way the Count does, Jonathan Harker essentially rapes the devil out of her, which is a real drag because I thought this was the first decent cinematic portrayal of Jonathan Harker. That's because Nicholas Holt is playing him, and he, like the rest of the amazing cast, can't

really do wrong. It's the material that's failing them. On a side note, I find it amusing that people are still making fun of the Phantom Menace because it's about senate hearings and trade disputes. But I've never heard one person complain about the fact that the first act of Dracula is all about a real estate and document signing. It just strikes me funny. It's an incredibly disjointed film.

When we get into the second act, after the wheels are already in motion and the horrors have already been revealed, the action moves to England, I mean Germany. There we find Mina possessed each night, and at the sanitarium, the Renfield character is ranting about his master that he's coming. And then we end up spending an inordinate amount of time with the scientists and rational thinkers as they employ all manner of draconian medical techniques on both Renfield and

Mina in an effort to disprove the supernatural. Not only is this a total waste of story time, we already know the supernatural is real and it's on the way, but it all feels like an excuse for Eggers to shoot people drooling and foaming and loving detail, as if any of that is going to distract us from the fact that the pacing is wildly off. Maybe build up to the horror instead, what we have is a pretty great and fairly creepy first act followed by a grinding

slog to the end. Unless close ups of sweaty faces and bulging eyes are your thing, because this flick is lousy with those. And now equibble Orlock sets off for Germany by boat, leaving Thomas tre in his castle. Thus begins this chase as Thomas tries to beat the count back to Weisberg. That's right, Count Orlock is traveling from the landlocked Carpathian Mountains to mainly landlocked in Germany, whose

only coast borders Denmark on the North Sea. In order to reach a body of water, Count Orlock has to travel south the approximate distance that it would take him to travel to Germany by land, and he has a magic coach and he wouldn't have to deal with pesky sailors. That's a minor quibble, But this is no quibble at all. Remember the look of Count Orlock I mentioned chalk white and all freaky. That's not what you're getting here, count Orloch.

The embodiment of lust or depravity or old es sensual Evils of the World looks like a routed out Joseph Stalin with leprosy. Pennywise, Scarsgard is under the makeup. No idea why he speaks in a broken halting English that's barely deciphered, and the makeup just turns them into some other dude. Any scares in this film are of the jump variety. You want some dread, oh, you'll get it. As these characters debate time and time again whether or not evil is around them, it is interminable. You got

a choice, rip, make it a good one. HP, play us away from the count.

two k.

possible apocalypse, the Y two K bug. You remember, computers wouldn't understand the change to double zero, and records and programs would be reset and all information would be wiped out, and electrical grids would fail and planes would fall from the sky. Basically, everyone secretly believed it was going to be like the end of Escape from La just a worldwide emp. Kyle Mooney certainly remembers, and he co wrote and co stars in a film about that fateful New

Year's Eve when we capped off the twentieth century. This film in fact marks his directorial debut, and it's pretty fucking solid as far as freshman flicks go. There's no out of the gate discernible style like you got with someone like Edgar Wright, whose influence you can feel all over this film. But nevertheless, it's surefooted and definitely cinematic. I'm curious to see what he does next. And yes, we're talking about Kyle Mooney, the SNL regular for nine seasons.

Actually he was featured for two in main cast for seven, but nine years is still nine years. That's five more than Belushi. But unlike Belushi, Mooney was never a breakout on the show because he was just so goddamned odd. I mean, he fit in. His impression of Martin Scorsese, just him laughing was perfect. But Mooney's style of comedy seems somewhere between the wildly uncomfortable works of Tim and Eric and Tim Robinson in the sweetness at the center

of the best of early Judd Apatow. It's not cringe. It's just awkward and awfully real. Now, if I were going to logline this film, and I will because I love brevity, it's super bad meets maximum Overdrive. There's about a dozen other influences I could draw in, but it's essentially those two films. Best friends and socially awkward outcasts. Danny and Eli attend a New Year's Eve party so Eli can profess his love to the prom queen in spite of her college boyfriend. Danny, he just wants to

get laid. I did say super bad, right, And it should surprise no one that Jonah Hill is a producer on this. It's a typical high school bottle party film. Until the clock strikes twelve, and all those shivery warnings about the Y two K bug beautifully illustrated through an AOL drenched credit sequence. They all come true, and not only do our electronics fail, but they become sentient and they don't like humans all that much. Every bit of

technology becomes a potential piece of invading robot intelligence. They cobble themselves together using Imax and tamagochi and VCRs and monitors. The killer robots are like Katamari Damici on legs and from what I can tell, almost entirely practical. Did I mention this as an a twenty four movie because it is. I think they're hoping Mooney turns out to be the next Jordan Peel, a comedian who makes horror sign him up immediately. As such, the production looks great in The

cast is top notch. Eli is played by Jaden Martel, who was young Bill Denburrow in IT chapter one, and Danny is played by Julian Denison from Hunt for the Wilder People in Deadpool two and super it girl Rachel lil Ziegler from West Side Story, and I think she's snow white now. She's great as always. I get why she's being cast so much. She's like an unpretentious Jenna Ortega.

That's right, No mercy for Goths on tonight's episode. Oh and if the lead from It wasn't teen horror cred enough for this film, One of the delinquent characters that joins them on their quest to survive is played by the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina actor Lachlan Watson, who also

plays Glenn and Glinda on the Chucky TV series. John Landis wrote American Werewolf in London in like nineteen sixty nine, and he spent the next decade giving it to everyone who would read it, and he got a lot of writing gigs from it, but no one wanted to make it because they all kept saying it's either too funny to be scary or it's too scary to be funny. That's a really precise tightrope to walk, and there are only a handful of films that actually achieve it. American

Werewolf is the platonic ideal. The comedy gets downright silly at times, but the scares are fucking riotously good evil. Did two gets there? Show of the Dead? Maybe, But most times comedy horror does in fact tend to lean into the comedy more than the horror. And once you've gone there, it doesn't really matter how high you raise the stakes. It's just a comedy we're watching. So when a usually stationary blender latches itself onto a kid's genitals and begins to blend how am I supposed to take

any potential character death seriously in this film? Which isn't to say that this film doesn't work. It does as a comedy with fucked up plot points. Mooney shows up as a dreadlocked video snort clerk stoner who has a showdown with one of the robots. That was as funny as anything I've seen in forever. And like I said, he's a solid filmmaker. I think if you can get the balance right, he'll be a righteous force for good in the horror community. I mean, this film was never boring.

Robert Eggers. Oh, and I've been finding of length that anytime I watch a new movie, I'm always looking for a moment of poetry, just a few seconds of a shot that transcends everything. They don't show up a lot, but Moon in his first film manages not only to grab one of those moments, he then diffuses the sentiment in the most disgusting way possible. Bravo, sir. I don't want to say anything else. I want you to see it. Y two K. It's in theaters right now, Okay, final

pick of the week, and it's another current flick. But before we get there, it's time for an annoying autobiographical pause. I was sixteen years old when my pal Pat Sullivan gave me a Bob Dylan mixtape. Pat had introduced me to the Joys of the water Boys earlier in the year with a similarly lovingly crafted mixtape, and knowing virtually nothing about Dylan other than that Boomers wouldn't shut the fuck up about him. But trusting Pat, I dove right in.

It was a tdksa ninety cassette. That's a Type two cassette, which means you'd get less hiss, but the trouble would be low. It doesn't matter. It was labeled Dylan sixty two to seventy, but the tracks weren't arranged chronologically. Pat had gone through the trouble to tell a story. With all those stories, the end of s featured Girl from the North Country sliding effortlessly into Tangled Up in Blue, which is my favorite Dylan song and my go to

at karaoke. Wait a minute, That tape had a couple of tracks from Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, which came out in seventy three. You lied to me, Pat Sullivan, that was no decade, being that this was a ninety minute ascent. All of Dylan was on there, the chameleonics, switching of styles, the mad genius lyrics, the anger, the longing, the petulance. Once you started listening, the whole voice of a generation Moniker started to make a whole lot of sense.

So how can you possibly cram that bredth of work into a feature film? Never mind the guy's life, never mind the myths that have sprung up around him, in most cases generated by the man himself. It's an impossible task, and there have been attempts. I'm not there back in two thousand and seven featured six different actors playing Dylan. That's one way to show multidimension, and it does work, but only to a degree. There have been documentaries. Scorsese

has made two, one of them good. Not even the Don't Look Back documentary in nineteen sixty seven really gave us the whole version of the man, and that featured the man himself. But man, Hollywood loves a challenge. This is a complete unknown, long.

how not to make a musical biopic. I sincerely urge anyone who's going to sit down and start writing a screenplay about their favorite artist, watch walk Hard, and if you were going to do anything they do in that movie, don't. I'm guessing James Mangold saw Walkhard because I was so fucking pleased that this film about one of my favorite

artists definitely avoids all of that troublesome bullshit. He keeps the action focused between sixty one and sixty five instead of boring stretches of his young life, and they do a time jump in there, so it's not even a full four years. He keeps true to the events as they went down, with some obvious license here and there. He has a specific event in Dylan's life in mind as a finale. Was it the most important moment in

Dylan's life? It's one of them, and it may the case for it, while never skimping on either performance or character. That's another tendency in music biopics. Have you heard people saying, biopic, what the fuck is wrong with you? You don't sound sophisticated. It's the equivalent of holding your telephone upside down while you're trying to look busy.

I'm Not There. He's not doing a caricature, but all the signifiers are there. The nasally voice, the twitchy not comfortable in his own skin demeanor. Hell, the way he holds his cigarette is eerily evocative, as is the singing, which isn't a stran which Bob Dylan wasn't Freddie Mercury, and is one of the many reasons he's my go to karaoke guy. But I've been listening to the songs they feature in this film since the late eighties, and if you handed me a tape of this soundtrack and

told me they were original outtakes, I'd believe you. And he manages something even more remarkable. He seems to make sense of all of the different personas and attitudes that Dylan was throwing off. He humanizes him in a way that I didn't think was possible. I felt about it the way I felt about the Last Temptation of Christ.

If you remove the controversy there, that film is an honest portrayal of Jesus as a man, not some lofty statues spouting platitudes instead of engaging in quiet conversation with his friends. Rounding out the cast here r El Fanning as Sylvie Rottolo, Dylan's early love. That's her on the cover of The Free Wheeling Bob Dylan. Monica Barbara as Joan Biez. She's even more impressive than chalameagn when it comes to mimicry of performance, kind of astonishing. And Boyd

Holbrook shows up as Johnny Cash. So this is Mangold's second go round with mister Cash and fuck man, it's even better than Jakie. I have not seen a bad performance from mister Holbrook, and he looks so much like Johnny Cash at times that it was fucking weird. Edward Norton shows up as Pete Seeger in all his gentle glory.

He's kind of the villain here, which is hilarious and appropriate because the central conflict here is the friction between the old guard of folk music, who Dylan had been propped up by as their savior, and Dylan's own desire to be more than the sum of his parts and go electric, mixing that old folk with rock and coming up with something new. It's a quiet kind of conflict with no real stakes and yet all the stakes in

the creative world, in the creative universe. This is my favorite James Mangold film, which is something I tend to say after every James Mangold film, where it has it that he's thrown in with the folks over at the DCU and is prepping a swamp thing film. If it were literally any other director, I would be nervous. But if he can wrangle a cojin portrait of Bob Dylan in less than two hours. I think he'll do doctor

Alec Hollin proud. Why are you still listening? Listeners? You should be on your way to your local cinema to see a complete unknown immediately. How often do I recommend something new this vehemently? Now, i'd say, And God damn it, I'm gonna have to get back into Bob Dylan and I'm gonna have to dig out all my vinyl. Oh, you're in for a treat, young Ripley. Oh, wait till you hear knocking on Heaven's door, you are gonna cry.

We are both grateful you've tuned in once again, Midnight viewers. Thank you for joining us here on Father Malone's weekly roundup. Tune in later this week. We've got Anthologies Attack coming back with director Antonio Lapour. We're gonna be discussing the ballad of Buster Scrugs from those rascally Cohen Brothers. If you want to support midnight viewing, you can give us

a five star review. Go ahead, just click it. I'll wait, Or you can write us a nice review or share it on social media, or call your best friend and make them listen. If you want to hear episodes early in commercial free head on over to patreon dot com

slash fatherm Alone. Subscribers also get bonus shows like Cable Box Theater, where noise junkies host in midnight Viewing composer HP and I take a look at Broadway shows being videotaped for cable television in the late seventies and early eighties. We've already got two episodes up, so head on over there and check them out. We're going to leave you with a few words from mister Dylan words I think every goddamn dead.