Two posts in one day, what a time to be a chive, huh?
So yeah, as the title says. I took myself to the movies today, something I very rarely do. I don’t enjoy being around people I don’t know, especially when I’m trying to watch something and I might have feelings. But I wanted to support this film as the story is one of my favorites. Bram Stoker’s delivery aside, I think at its core, Dracula is a love story, and it’s the type I find most beautiful: the yearning.
First of all, whoever made the choice to cast Caleb Landry Jones as the count, give them a raise because my fucking god. I am actually struggling to find words other than just noises of astonishment. Incredible performance. He gave the right amount of camp and the 100% perfect amount of obsessive yearning the role demands. And it looked like he had fun doing it, so that added even more of a level of delight for me. I love it when it looks like someone’s having fun doing a project. There’s a moment (sorry for spoilers, but the story’s been out for decades and decades, so hush) when the count bites Mina, and I swear to the sun and all the planets in the sky, the anguish in his eyes at understanding what he’s just done. The shame, the despair. All of it, right there in his eyes. JUST his eyes because of how it was shot.
Christophe Waltz plays… himself. I don’t mean that badly, but he tends to deliver the same performance in most of what I’ve seen him in. Which for this role? It was perfectly fine. The priest needed a bit of sarcasm and nonchalance in his delivery of the most brutal lines. He’s been part of an order searching for the head of the snake, as it were, for four hundred years. I think they’re allowed a little macabre humor.
I keep getting stuck in my thoughts about Jones’s performance. I want to tell people to go watch it just to see him on screen. Is he this arresting in his other movies? I haven’t seen them, so I can’t compare, but I might need to if this is what he delivers.
Danny Elfman composed the score for this, and there’s the typical Elfman swoops and swings of the strings. Typical sounds rude, but maybe I mean classic. He’s got very distinctive style, and you can always tell when it’s him on the score because he has that kind of waterfall swoop of strings, and there’s a choir in there somewhere singing.
I’m gonna need a moment before I go do other things. What a way to spend a Saturday afternoon, huh? I need this to come out on … DVD? is that what kids use these days? Blu-Ray? I want to own this.
And that’s all I have for now. Thanks for stopping by my even further rambling thoughts.
Until next time, friends. It’ll be longer than a few hours, haha.
salisbury.fake 