Tag: Nicholas Hoult

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Renfield

Nicholas Hoult in Renfield (Courtesy Universal Pictures)

Hear me out: Nicolas Cage deserves an Oscar nomination for his performance as Dracula in Renfield. 

I know, I know. It’s Nic Cage, dude from Con Air and Kick Ass and a couple dozen direct-to-video cash-in schlockfests. And he’s playing Dracula in a cornball B picture directed by a former Robot Chicken animator named Chris McKay. But actors have gotten Oscar nominations for lazier performances in much crappier movies. And there’s nothing lazy about Cage’s Dracula — if anything, he put way too much effort into it! But as Penn Jillette said, “The only secret of magic is that I’m willing to work harder on it than you think it’s worth.” 

It’s appropriate that, when Renfield finally got to be the star of his own story, Dracula steals the show. R. M. Renfield appears in Bram Stoker’s novel as a patient in an insane asylum who worships Dracula. He eats live bugs to gain their life force, like a vampire drinks the blood of living victims. (His doctor describes him as “zoophagous maniac,” proving they just don’t diagnose ’em like they used to.) Dracula gets Renfield to do his bidding by dangling the prospect of immortality, but never actually helping his thrall go full vamp. 

Nicholas Hoult stars as Renfield, who we first meet in a group therapy session for people in codependent relationships. He recognizes the stories of abuse he hears from his own life with the big D. He and his bloodsucking boss have fallen into a pattern of dysfunction. They move to a new place, start to hunt in earnest, but Dracula gets too greedy, and the locals are tipped off. Then a vampire hunter, usually from the Catholic Church, arrives, and there’s a big fight in which Dracula is almost killed. Renfield has to pick up the pieces, move to a new town — this time, it’s New Orleans — and start collecting victims while Dracula convalesces.

Nicolas Cage kills as Dracula in Renfield. (Courtesy Universal Pictures)

With the encouragement of therapist Mark, Renfield takes the bold steps of getting his own apartment and wearing clothes that are not black. He still has to search for victims to feed his personal monster, but he decides to prioritize the abusers who are making his new friends’ lives hell. This leads to a confrontation with gangsters inside a Mardi Gras float warehouse where Tedward (Ben Schwartz), the scion of the Lobos crime family, sees Renfield’s magical murder talents first hand. When a beat cop named Rebecca (Awkwafina) investigates the bloody scene, she sees that the clues lead back to Renfield and Dracula, embroiling her in an escalating conflict between the drug cartel and the dark lord. 

Hoult has plenty of choices for inspiration, from Klaus Kinski to Tom Waits. He has the haircut and bug eyes of Dwight Frye, who originated the character in 1931. But Hoult seems to be channeling Harvey Gullén’s Guillermo from What We Do In The Shadows. When he and Cage share the screen, sparks fly. 

Cage is not a madman. He is an extraordinarily talented screen actor in the tradition of James Cagney. His approach to Dracula is downright scholarly, mixing bits of Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, and Gary Oldman with his own personae.  His every gesture is perfectly calibrated for the moment. If you’re used to seeing a bored Cage vamp in roles that are frankly beneath him, watching him sink his teeth into Dracula will be a revelation.

Unfortunately, this movie is also beneath him. Awkwafina, bless her heart, is left completely at sea in a role that shouldn’t have existed. The whole crime family vs. corrupt cops subplot is stupid, disjointed, and unnecessary. It seemingly exists only to provide Marvel-esque moments of fight choreography — except the fights are the most boring part of the MCU movies! “Renfield tries to save his therapy group from an angry Dracula” is plenty of plot for a film where the real meat is a Nic v. Nicolas thespian cage match. Every second they’re not on screen is wasted. 

Renfield is a must for Cage watchers, which are legion, and vampire obsessives who walk the night but could use a good chuckle to break up the gothic ennui. Others will find it a pleasant but ultimately bloodless diversion. 

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Film Features Film/TV

Now Playing: Pinnochio, Iñárritu, and a Dangerous Dish

Alejandro Iñárritu's "Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths"

If you’ve already seen Black Panther: Wakanda Forever three times, there are plenty of other sources for your movie fix this weekend.

Fresh off the success of his Cabinet of Curiosities, Guillermo Del Toro unveils more potentially holiday-related eye candy with his long-awaited adaptation of Pinocchio. Del Toro says the $35 million stop motion film is the project he’s been wanting to do his entire life. Based on a version of the story by Nineteenth Century Italian novelist Carlo Collodi, it’s not the little wooden boy you remember from the Disney vaults. Voice actors include Ewen McGregor as Sebastian J. “Don’t Call Me Jiminy” Cricket, Tilda Swinton as a Wood Sprite who is totally not Tinkerbell, and Cate Blanchett as a monkey.

Ralph Finnes is serving the most dangerous dish in The Menu. Director Mark Mylod, late of HBO’s plute-shaming soap Succession, has gathered an all-star cast of Nicholas Hoult, Anya Taylor-Joy, John Leguizamo, and Hong Chau, for dinner, and class war is what’s for dinner. Yum!

As a journalist, I know that the best films of all time are all about newspaper people. As a filmmaker, I know Harvey Weinstein is a depraved, power-mad rapist who hurt a lot of people and did irreparable damage to the independent film world. She Said is the story of Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan) and Jodi Cantor (Zoe Kazan), two New York Times reporters who broke the story of Weinstein’s reign of terror by convincing his victims to go on the record. He’s currently in jail for 23 years in New York, and yesterday the prosecution rested in his California trial, where he is facing 60 more years in the hoosegow.

Alejandro Iñárritu is no stranger to Memphis. He shot 21 Grams, his second feature film here. Since then, he’s won nine Academy Awards. He’s back with Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, a satirical look at Iñárritu’s native Mexico through the magical realist filter of his mind.

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Film Features Film/TV

The Current War

The two stories of The Current War are both fascinating in their own way. The first is the actual story told by director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon and writer Michael Mitnick: In 1879, Thomas Edison’s team invented the incandescent light bulb in his Menlo Park, New Jersey, laboratory. To the masses who spent way too much of their time trying not to burn down their houses with candles or asphyxiate themselves with gas lights, the clean, steady light from the bulb seemed like magic. But the bulbs, and new applications for electricity being developed by industrialists like George Westinghouse, couldn’t run without juice. In 1880, unless you had a dynamo in your back shed, you were out of luck. Thus, the most pressing problem for engineers in the early Gilded Age was how to get electricity into businesses and private homes all over the country.

Benedict Cumberbatch (above) stars as inventor Thomas Edison in The Current War.

There were two possible solutions: direct current (DC), where the electrons flow through the circuit in one direction like water in a river; and alternating current (AC), where the electrons shuffle back and forth through the circuit like line dancers. DC is the simplest and most versatile. You can run lights, motors, and anything else you can dream up on DC, but the stream of electrons tends to peter out over long distances. AC is more complex to implement, and in 1880, you could run a light bulb, not a motor, from it. But you can transmit AC power over thousands of miles without significant power loss if you crank up the voltage high enough.

Edison had spent all of his time experimenting with DC and had developed short-range distribution systems, which he first implemented in densely populated New York City. But most of America is much more spread out, and a new coal-smoke-belching power plant every square mile was only an attractive prospect to the guy who would get paid to build them. AC transmission, which Westinghouse favored, was much more efficient, but the high voltage carried with it a danger that didn’t even have a name yet: electrocution.

Michael Shannon as George Westinghouse

The Current War is the story of how Edison (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Westinghouse (Michael Shannon) waged a two-decade contest to decide how the world would be wired. It was a conflict that played out in laboratories, in boardrooms, in the media, and, in the film’s telling, climaxed at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. The wild card came in the person of Nikola Tesla (Nicholas Hoult), the immigrant super-genius who, among other things, figured out how to run a motor on AC power. Tesla first went to work in Edison’s proto-corporate invention mill, quit to go into business for himself, and then sold out to Westinghouse.

You can’t fault Gomez-Rejon and Mitnick for lack of ambition. This is a complex story with huge historical repercussions and potentially something to say about our own late-stage capitalist moment. But that’s where the other story of The Current War comes in. The film originally premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2017. Producer Harvey Weinstein was not pleased with the reception there, so he took it from the director and was re-editing it when multiple sexual assault and rape charges ended his career and collapsed the Weinstein Company. After extensive bankruptcy litigation, Gomez-Rejon regained control of the film and made his own improvements. Thus, the version that goes into wide release this week is subtitled “Director’s Cut.”

I was not at Toronto in 2017, so I don’t know how much of the movie has changed since then, but something about The Current War doesn’t feel right. It somehow manages to be simultaneously undercooked and fussed-over. I generally advocate for shorter films, but this is a lot of material to pack into 107 minutes. For big chunks of its running time, it feels like a sizzle reel for The Current War mini-series. Have you ever wondered what it would be like if you made an entire picture along the lines of a Rocky training montage? If so, this is the film for you. Edison and Westinghouse take turns doffing their hats and proclaiming their latest accomplishments while years fly by. Tesla, the most genuinely interesting character, feels like an afterthought.

Nicholas Hoult as Nikola Tesla

And that’s a shame because the cast, which also includes the underrated Katherine Waterston as Westinghouse’s wife Marguerite Erskine Walker and Tom Holland as Edison’s right-hand man Samuel Insull, are clearly committed to the project. When Shannon and Cumberbatch finally confront each other at the World’s Fair, the scene crackles. The cinematography by Chung-hoon Chung is frequently exceptional, with compositions that seem to come out of a Gilded Age Harper’s Bazaar illustration.

I didn’t hate this film. There’s a great movie hiding in there somewhere, but it’s ironic that a story about capitalist greed and executive malfeasance threatening scientific advance and engineering progress seems to have been thrown off track by executive malfeasance.

Or maybe that’s not ironic at all. What’s the opposite of ironic? Expected.

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Film Features Film/TV

Mad Max: Fury Road

I was going to start this review with an extended riff on how the thread of apocalyptic science fiction in novels like Walter M. Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz and J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World found its ultimate cinematic expression in George Miller’s Mad Max (1979), The Road Warrior (1981), and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985), but you know what? Forget that. Just go see Mad Max: Fury Road.

I was going to title this review “Punk’s Sistine Chapel,” which is what Ballard called The Road Warrior, but never mind that. I figure going on about the web of symbolism and allegory woven into George Miller’s first visit back to the blasted Australian outback in 30 years would obscure the central question in many readers minds: Does stuff blow up good?

Stuff blows up. Real. Good.

And it’s real stuff, really blowing up. It’s not that there’s no CGI in Fury Road. It’s just that Miller sees it as just another tool in a toolbox that also includes armies of stunt drivers piloting a fleet of custom vehicles, many of which are on fire at any given time.

Mad Max: Fury Road

Miller, cinematographer John Seale, production designer Colin Gibson, and editor Margaret Sixel have composed a symphony of revving engines, crashing metal, and thundering reports. Unlike most action movies made since The Bourne Ultimatum, Fury Road doesn’t try to disorient you. Quite the opposite: Miller is a master of creating a space inside your head that feels real, then hurtling you through the space in the most exciting way possible. He has exposed most Hollywood action directors as highly paid frauds. Miller’s not here to slap a bunch of disjointed images on the screen, throw millions of marketing dollars to persuade an audience that dreck is acceptable, and chalk it up as a success. Miller delivers an object of pure cinema that wouldn’t work as a novel, a comic book, or a video game. He uses exquisitely detailed images and minimal dialog to carefully parcel out just enough information at just the right time to keep you emotionally engaged in the mayhem on the screen. Actions have consequences, effect follows cause. When people get hit, they get hurt. The world feels real. There’s a guy suspended from cords on the front of a giant war truck playing metal riffs on a guitar that shoots fire, and he fits right in.

Seriously, you should see this movie.

And then there’s Charlize Theron. Her Imperator Furiosa is a woman of few words but limitless steely gazes. She’s somewhere between Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley from Alien and Clint Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars. There’s no shortage of good performances, including Nicholas Hoult as paint-huffing bezerker Nux, Mad Max veteran Hugh Keays-Byrne as warlord Immortan Joe, and Riley Keough (who is Elvis’ granddaughter in real life) as Capable, one of the five sex slaves whose rescue provides the story’s catalyst. But Theron just flat out steals the show.

I know it probably feels like I’m laying it on a little thick for what is essentially a big car chase movie, but when I left the theater I felt like a starving man who had just been fed a steak. It’s a rare film that engages the mind while rocking the body. Miller’s vision of a world consumed by its own greed, where water, gasoline, and bullets are the most precious commodities, seems even more relevant today than it did 30 years ago. In 2015, armies of men in makeshift war machines crafted by hand from Toyota trucks really do fight over basic resources in places like Syria, Chechnya, and Mali. ISIS, a reactionary, apocalyptic religious cult led by a divinely inspired warlord, looks a lot like Immortan Joe and his War Boys. It’s Mad Max’s world, we just live in it.

Why are you still here? Go see Fury Road!