Vampires, cardinals and clubs: movies viewed

TYG is a big fan of the 1922 silent NOSFERATU so I bought her a BluRay for our anniversary this summer. Last weekend I watched it for myself.

FW Murnau’s film was an unauthorized, copyright-breaking adaptation of Dracula; Bram Stoker’s widow sued and won but some copies of the film survived the subsequent destrucgtion. As in Stoker, a real-estate agent journeys into Transylvania to arrange a house in his small German town for Count Orlok (Max Schreck). Rather than Lugosi’s seductive foreigner, Orlok is a desiccated figure with a tendency to materialize out of nowhere, but he’s just as deadly a neighbor. The end results lack the screen presence of Lugosi’s vampire but this take is far more interesting visually I also like the detail that rather than sleep on dirt from their own graves, vampires fill their coffins with dirt from the graves of Black Death victims.

THE LANGUAGE OF SHADOWS (2007) was a special feature on the Bluray, a documentary about Murnau and Nosferatu including the lawsuit, the shooting locations and the occult elements the production designer worked into the sets and props.

CONCLAVE (2024) stars Ralph Fiennes as the Dean of the College of Cardinals steering the next election after the Holy Father kicks the bucket — but should the new pope be reformer Stanley Tucci, twitchy moderate John Lithgow, militant zealot Sergio Castellitto or possibly Fiennes himself, reluctant though he is? A good drama but not a great drama, particularly given the acting firepower, and visually it’s flat (I concede they’re working in confined spaces but Kurosawa could have made it sing). Isabella Rossellini plays a nun. The American political dramas The Best Man or Advise and Consent might make interesting double bills. “If there was only certainty and no doubt there would be no mystery — and therefore no faith.”

Back in the 1990s, Robert Putnam stirred up a storm with Bowling Alone, a book pointing out how Americans — historically huge on joining clubs, fraternal orders, societies and bowling leagues — were now far more likely to be bowling alone and not belonging to anything. The documentary JOIN OR DIE (2023) restates the thesis, combined with Putnam’s biography and restates the arguments that joining clubs and other groups is not only good for society (though as Putnam’s book admits, groups like the Mafia and the KKK show evil groups can have social cohesion too) but for personal health and peace of mind. Pretty good. “I now discovered the National Picnic Archive.”

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