Movies: 'Stoker' is a Creepy Stalker... But To What End?

Matthew Goode is Creepy/Sexy "Uncle Charlie" in Stoker 

BY NATHANIEL ROGERS 

A few years ago Park Chan-wook, the acclaimed genre fabulist from South Korea, made an award winning vampire film called Thirst. With the exception of the Swedish instant classic Let The Right One In, it's the best vampire film of the past 20 years. Second best might not seem like high praise but consider the volume of competition!  

In Thirst, a priest and reluctant vampire, infects a young girl with his addiction and she flips from moody troubled teen to lusty adult trouble-maker. Is she his impressionable victim or his soulmate apprentice? Or is she much harder to pin down? Having raved about Thirst to anyone who would listen and being a shameless Kidmaniac I walked into Stoker with high expectations. Despite the title's nod to Bram Stoker, but I was not expecting an English language pseudo-remake of his earlier vampire feature. There are no literal vampires this time but the central power play relationship and overall bloodlust felt like eery echoes. Even the supernatural powers remain: India (Mia Wasikowska) even begins the film boasting of her preternatural hearing in voiceover while she hunts a defenseless animal in the tall grass. It's like a Terrence Malick sequence with brutality in place of spirituality. India's hearing is so acute she even catches spidery footsteps (So do we since Stoker shares with Thirst masterfully creepy and super detailed sound design.)  

"Don't disturb the family" is a stupid fun tagline for Stoker's ad campaign and poster since the warning is pointless. This family was disturbed long before you bought a ticket.

MORE AFTER THE JUMP...

Movies: Oscar Weekend —The Predictions!

Argo took the lead from Lincoln but which film will win the most Oscars on the big night?

BY NATHANIEL ROGERS 

Yesterday on Kathy Griffin's new show she began with an Oscar monologue and brought out a gold trunks-clad model with his hair cropped tight and his body sprayed gold. I'll let it slide that he wasn't actually bald but he stood with his legs spread far apart and his hands behind his back. Had he never seen an Oscar statue before?

UR DOING IT WRONG! 

As you may have guessed I hold the Oscars sacred. You might call it my religion. I've been watching them since I was a little kid and as an adult I have spend an inordinate amount of time obsessing over them and even made something of a career out of it. [Pity me!]  But never before in my life have I had such a hard time predicting the winners.

Oh sure, Argo will win Best Picture and Daniel Day-Lewis who many of us  first fell in love with as a blonde gay punk working in that Beautiful Laundrette will win for becoming President Lincoln but elsewhere in Oscar's 24 Categories there's an awful lot of room for pundits to embarrass themselves this year!

Best Director, for one, is baffling. The tech prizes look like a very bloody battle between at least three pictures (Anna Karenina, Skyfall & Life of Pi). And so on.

AFTER THE JUMP my Oscar predictions, presented in the order in which the categories were presented last year. If I get everything wrong please forget we ever spoke of this! 

CONTINUED, AFTER THE JUMP...

Best LGBT Movie Characters of 2012

Ben Whishaw and James D'Arcy as the gay lovers at the tangled heart of 'Cloud Atlas'

BY NATHANIEL ROGERS 

Have you finished movie-cramming to prepare yourself for the Oscar nominations (January 10th) and your own top ten lists. I've been screening as many titles as possible though I've somehow managed to find time to cry my eyes out through three separate screenings of Les Misérables. But we're already off topic. There are no gay characters of note in that epic musical though who knows what's going on with Marius's (Eddie Redmayne) super handsome band of brothers.

Hollywood is generally behind the curve when it comes to social movements but things are changing and that's even true on the big screen. When gayness is central to a joke now in the movies it's usually not at the expense of the gays which is a marked difference than in the past. The unexpectedly hilarious high school comedy 21 Jump Street (reviewed) is a perfect example. If I'm remembering it correctly the younger students leap all over the undercover cops for their 'that's gay' linguistic insensitivity -- the subtext being that casual homophobia is totally passé.

Not that more controversial gayness isn't still getting plenty of play. The cinema would be a much less vivid playground if you erased all Evil Queers from the celluloid. You'd ruin so many classics! Nobody wants a hopelessly bland entertainment landscape where all gays are noble beings or best friends. So the wildly acclaimed romantic drama Keep The Lights On (starring Thure Lindhardt and Zachary Booth) which is nominated for multiple Spirit Awards, the Southern gothic noir The Paperboy (which might end up with Razzie nominations) and Cloud Atlas have the self-destructive, sexually compulsive and maybe suicidal stereotypes covered for you this year.
 

TOP TEN LGBT MOVIE CHARACTERS OF 2012...  AFTER THE JUMP

Interview: Alan Cumming on love at first sight and "Any Day Now"

Alan Cumming & Garrett Dillahunt celebrating ANY DAY NOW last spring. Now it's in theaters!

BY NATHANIEL ROGERS

SPECIAL "ANY DAY NOW" EDITION OF THE MOVIE COLUMN

Any Day Now, a new 70s based gay drama from director Travis Fine, has just dropped into the super-crowded holiday movie marketplace. Consider it counter-programming to the wealth of glitzy Oscar contenders and big budget blockbusters. Alan Cumming plays Rudy Donatello, an outspoken performer who impulsively takes in a neglected teenager with Down Syndrome (played by Isaac Levya) when the boy's mother abandons him. Rudy attempts to keep the child, fighting the discriminatory legal system with the help of his lawyer boyfriend (Garret Dillahunt). This sad and moving story (inspired by true events) is at once enraging and comforting since these same issues are still very much with us but we've made numerous legal and societal strides since then.

Any Day Now has already won several audience awards on the festival circuit but it's just now hitting movie theaters. I sat down with Alan Cumming last week to discuss the film and his eclectic career. 

TOWLEROAD: How did Any Day Now come to you. Did they seek you out?

ALAN CUMMING: Yes, they asked me. One of my agents and one of my managers said "You should read this right now." I did so it happened very quickly. It was lovely. There were several versions of the script before it was finished, before the one we shot. It was great to be part of that process and talk to Travis about each version. It changed really radically, actually. The ending was very different.

I'm guessing happier. 

Yeah, I remember saying to him 'this is a little upbeat, isn't it?' The next one... [edited for spoilers] Whoops.

I wasn't expecting it to go there!

But it had to end that way! It couldn't have ended another way and been honest. It could easily have been cloying and manipulative but it's genuine. 

Did they specifically want a gay actor for the role?

[Cumming on love at first sight, looking terrible in drag, and The Good Wife ...AFTER THE JUMP]

Movies: 'Hitchcock' (and the Best Actor Race)

Alfred Hitchcock (Anthony Hopkins) is a hands on director in "Hitchcock"

BY NATHANIEL ROGERS

YOUR FEATURE PRESENTATION

The first thing HITCHCOCK gets right about Hitchcock is the humor. Director Sacha Gervasi's serio-comic adaptation of the book "Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho" starts with a playful dodge, beginning not with a shot of that infamous house on the hill or the Bates Motel or even a Hollywood soundstage but in the rather humble yard of a Wisconsin farm. It's home to Ed Gein, the gruesome 1950s killer who inspired Psycho. The camera pans away from Gein's (fictional) murder to reveal the iconic plump suited figure of The Master of Suspense cooly observing him (Sir Anthony Hopkins in Sir Alfred Hitchcock drag).

Hopkins addresses the camera directly as if he's welcoming you to a very special edition of television's "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" or recording a promo for his latest cinematic thrill ride. He'll break the fourth wall again to bookend this film with an even better visual joke that's absurdly hokey.

The humor is the first thing Hitchcock gets right but whether or not it gets anything else right is another matter. MORE AFTER THE JUMP...

Movies: Skyfall' is Quite a Birthday Gift For Bond

Daniel Craig has returned and will return again as 'Bond, James Bond.' Enjoy him!

BY NATHANIEL ROGERS

YOUR FEATURE PRESENTATION

SKYFALL arrived on US screens Friday with such multiplex flattening hype that you'd be forgiven for thinking the title literal. The Cubby Broccoli estate, which controls the adventures of the super spy, was pulling no stops for the 50th anniversary installment of the granddaddy of film franchises. We've been inundated with Bond Mania for months now. So you'd think at this point that the actual film would be an afterthought. Not so.

The 23rd official Bond film delivers… and not just the five mandatory goodies no Bond film is complete without: Action (Particularly the Opening Setpiece), Theme Song, International Villain, 007 Himself and the Bond Girl. Unlike most modern franchises, the Bond series favors stand-alone storylines with only the five-pronged Bond template uniting them. Even Bond himself changes though Skyfall happily sticks with Daniel Craig's impossible zombie handsomeness and dangerously erotic icy blues.

Five mandatory goodies and Daniel Craig's sexual pull AFTER THE JUMP...