Going for the Jugular
VAN HELSING
[nota bene: The following review, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending, don't read on!]
I don't know about you but I'm getting tired of critics.
This feeling of disenchantment has been building for a while, but it came to a head at the screening of VAN HELSING the other night.
Now, VAN HELSING is a long movie, but it didn't feel long. It's also a horror comedy, not a horror film in the strict sense. And the audience seemed to be "getting it." So did the critics, the local reviewers who were surrounding me in the nearby seats. They laughed along with the film's comical conjunctions of monsters, the over-the-top Dracula (Richard Roxburgh from MOULIN ROUGE), the references to older Universal horror classics ("It's alive, it's alive, it's alive"), the lush photography — both digital and otherwise — and framing.
I know I was enjoying it. The film was a kick in the pants. VAN HELSING was fast-paced, but without neglecting emotional development; it was well-photographed, had (mostly) good special effects, and even undermined at times the usual expectations of the so-called tent pole summer blockbuster.
But then, once the film was over I could hear, as I remained for the credits and all the rest of them made ready to vamoose, that in fact the critics around me didn't like VAN HELSING. That in fact they hated it. They wondered what ever the hell happened to Dr. Frankenstein (played by Samuel West, he is killed in the film's prologue), they couldn't figure out who played Dracula, they disparaged the (perceived) noise, the incoherence, the archness of the thing. My sources tell me that the online geeks also hate the movie, though I haven't had a chance to check all those postings at CHUD and AICN yet.
You know the feeling. You like a movie but the critics hate it. It's as if every reviewer in the nation had received their talking points in the e-mail that morning and had their mind made up before even entering the theater. If you were conspiracy minded, you would think that there was a cabal of critics who dictate the views of the many.
Now, it is true that reviewers can be as emotional and biased and vengeful as any other human being. They get tired of, say, Burt Reynolds, and the next thing you know they are trashing a film without noticing that it is Reynolds's best performance in years.
There is also a form of groupthink involved. It used to be worse when all the critics were base din New York or Los Angeles. Then it got better with the rise of the alternative papers, spreading out across the country and more or less doubling the number of movie commentators. But then it got worse again with the rise of the WWW, when opinions were more easily accessible, and early opinions — opinions based in many cases on advance screenings that even the critics are not officially invited to — became the Holy Grail of the internet.
Call me stupid or naive, but I am really puzzled as to why VAL HELSING is viewed as such a bad film. I mean, it's not as if going into a Stephen Sommers film you don't know in advance that it is going to be a blend of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK and ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEETS FRANKENSTEIN, only without the Abbott and Costello. It's not as if you are going to think you are walking into an Alain Resnais film instead of the first of the summer popcorn films.
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But then, these nattering nabobs of negativity might charge that VAN HELSING fails even on its own terms. But I fail to see how. Sure, it takes the Universal monsters and shakes them up like a cup of Yahtzee dice. But there was no consistency to the original Universal version of these monsters who had variable powers and who died and were reborn willy-nilly or as commercial necessity demanded. And they certainly were not faithful to the source books (just as Frank Miller and others do variations on the geeks' beloved Batman). Only Coppola in his Dracula film (which VAN HELSING somewhat resembles) made a faithful adaptation of DRACULA (the first Universal DRACULA was technically based on a stage play, not the Stoker novel). Certainly what Sommers does to the Universal monsters is no worse than what HBO's DEADWOOD does to western heroes.
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One phenomenon that I have noticed over the years is the gathering of critics after a movie — not even after, but as the end credits are rolling — and the weird power psychology behind their conversation. Whoever is the alpha dog that day sets the agenda for how the film is treated. You can hear their sibilant 'S's resonating over the final chords of the music as they try to come up with a microdot of a dismissive tag line or make a connection first before anyone else can so they can claim ownership. Even if a critic silently disagrees with the alpha dog (who is usually the daily reviewer), the AD has still set the agenda because the silent critic is silently responding to it.
Black moods such as this one make me wonder what the point of movie reviewing is in the first place. My somber and inchoate brooding is reflected, or anticipated, really, by L.A. TIMES reviewer Manohla Dargis in an interview at SensesOfCinema.com. Dargis tells her interlocutor:
"Frankly, I am pretty bored with most of the film criticism I read, to the point that I am beginning to think we need to start re-examining what it is and what it's good for, if anything. Of course, most of what's out there isn't really criticism but a degraded form of reviewing — just thumbs up, thumbs down, with a heavy dose of plot synopsis. Even reviewers who are somewhat more ambitious than the average hack tend to write about movies as if they're reviewing books. They pay very little if any attention to the specifics of the medium, to how a film makes meaning with images — with framing, editing, mise en scène, with the way an actor moves his body in front of the camera. To read most film critics in the United States you wouldn't know that film is a visual medium. There is smart writing on movies out there — FILM COMMENT and SIGHT AND SOUND are two oases — but there is a wearying homogeneity nonetheless. I'm not really sure where it comes from or why it exists. All I know is that there are received ideas about how to look and write about movies, and that not many critics deviate from those received ideas. (And frankly, it can be hard to do so when you're on deadline and when you're writing a lot. I'm still figuring out how to get out of the box.) At least some of it, I think, is due to the phenomenon of critics who absorb the ideas and voice of other critics. Although I'm sure it would horrify Hoberman to hear this, there are writers who now slavishly write in imitation of Jim's style, much as an older generation imitates the late Pauline Kael in voice and prejudice. The thing is that although Jim's imitators can, to a modest degree, approximate his style they're simply nowhere as smart. They also don't get that he has a definite worldview and that his style dovetails with that worldview."
I can add some confirmation to this diagnosis. There is a writer in my home town who obviously clears his views (silently, no doubt, and from a distance) with Hoberman's reviews and the VILLAGE VOICE in general before proceeding with his critiques.
Here are some further, disconnected thoughts on VAN HELSING.
- For me, the main reason to see VAN HELSING is Kate Beckinsale. She's been creeping up on my since MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, but I'm won over. She is a great comedienne and a great action star.
- There is a scene in VH where Hugh Jackman — the new Clint Eastwood — tears off his shirt and roars. My first thought was, Man, this guy could play Tarzan, too.
- Apparently bare breasts on a woman are acceptable to the MPAA as long as there are no nipples.
- So why are the townspeople so mad at the start of the film? Is it a critique of groupthink — the kind we see in critics?
- Is the character called Top Hat an homage to Riff Raff?
- Shuler Hensley is a dang good Frankenstein's Monster.
- Every new film is really a Bond film. Here, Van Helsing gets equipment from his Q that reminds you of Johnny Depp in SLEEPY HOLLOW.
- The vampires' mouths remind me of the horrific FRIGHT NIGHT vampires.
- Kate Beckinsale reminds me a lot of Karen Allen in the first RAIDERS film.
- Did I mention that I love Kate Beckinsale?
