The Wolfman was YES YES YES

The Wolfman:

new release starring benicio del torro and a girl who looks really familiar

(the blog title is a modified quote from arrested development, by the way--in season 2, george michael gets an extremely dangerous rocket that allows him to fly kind of, and the title of the informational dvd [i think] is "jetpacks was yes." you're welcome.)

man alive, is this ever the last time that i do that: i went to rottentomatoes.com--a site which gave the film let the right one in, the experience of the watching of which could be leagued with something like getting your eyeteeth ground down to stumps, a 97% rating (this still makes my jaw drop)--to see why precisely the wolfman is getting a 31%, and was redirected to someone else's blog in order to read a "splat" review. garth franklin of dark horizons. he really knew the horror genre. i very much enjoyed the style of his writing. he's WRONG, but i enjoyed reading him.

instead of taking on garth franklin on a point-by-point basis, which would be self-indulgent to the point that i can hardly resist the temptation but am going to make myself do so, i'm going to talk in terms of analogy. i'm going to talk about mansfield park, because that's what's springing to mind. now, more than one austenite might say that aside from northanger abbey, which can't be blamed because it was one of the very earliest written of her published novels, mansfield park is the hottest mess out of all of them. "sure, it's good, because it's jane austen, but if it weren't jane austeney, it might not be that good," said austenite might claim.

this hypothetical austenite, however, is falling into the same trap that garth franklin seems to me to have fallen into: mistaking unevenness for crappiness. mansfield park is one of my top two jane austens, not (only) because i'm a twisted weirdo, but because i feel like austen kind of lets it all hang out--and the book still ends up being a work of genius. she's brutal to everyone in that story...and still the characterizations don't suffer. that's what, to me, makes mansfield park stand out. you don't even like edmund by the time it's over, but her depictions, however harshly worded, remain masterful, amazing, empathetic...you can see austen hurting herself for an ending, and when the ending comes, it sucks, but it's true.

i feel that this the wolfman is like that, but multiplied by anywhere from 10 to 45: it might suck in all the ways that franklin points out, but it's still true. it still gets at the spirit of the universal horror film tradition.

i keep making analogies because it's hard to get to what i'm trying to get to: a sense of the film as valuable either despite or because of its messiness. another analogy i'm thinking of is ang lee's the hulk. which was just a mess, period--in part because ang lee wasn't, from what i remember anyway, really working within the genre of superhero films...and not that i know much about the hulk, and not that i don't love ang lee, but he didn't seem, frankly, to really be working within the genre-area of the hulk, either.

whereas this the wolfman, to me, was working within the genre. admittedly, it threw the signifiers of the genre around like they were...i don't know, dollar-store candy? the post-post-german-expressionist the others/the orphanage* atmosphere of the filming and editing mixed with various dismemberments mixed with freudian interpretation, man-vs-woman, man-vs-beast, good old fashioned doses of victorian (edwardian?) mental torture, hammer studios-style set-the-entire-house-on-fire-for-some-reason-probably, and the usual "the evil was us all along" sort of late 20th century aesthetic--it was all crammed in there.

but i feel like the film survived all that. i couldn't say how, exactly. the soundtrack was nothing special, though unlike some it was entirely adequate. it might have been the acting. someone on rottentomatoes says that they thought anthony hopkins' dis-involved madman act was ridiculous, but i thought it was pretty brilliant. and emily blunt could have been SO MUCH MORE ANNOYING than she was--i thank her for that--she did a great job. and benicio del torro, to me, nailed it. granted, i think that possibly the main reason for this movie happening was that one day a film producer was staring at del torro's face, and suddenly said, "wolfman!"--that's just how logical of a choice he is--but despite being born for the part, i think he played it really well.

it might just be the fact that i like films that attempt to appeal to my senses as well as those that try to gross me out, and am willing to forgive them for lots of stuff provided they do said stuff in style (the tom jane the punisher, for example. i love that movie. i know it's exploitative and ridiculous, but i feel like it comes out the other side of said exploitative ridiculousness--it gets to a place that's true). rottentomatoes posited that the marriage of old-style horror monster movie with new-style gross-out monster movie is unfortunate--i don't agree. i'd say maybe it's awkward, but i like it anyway.

that might in fact be what i have to say about the whole thing. i'd agree that it's kind of awkward--i really like it anyway. don't try to tell me that none of the kaleidoscopically-multifaceted plot-points are fleshed out enough, because i don't think i care. are our plot-points fleshed out for us in real life? well, yes and no--but you can say "no" enough that the wolfman could be seen as a reflection of that. don't try to tell me that there are too many different types of filming styles, because, again, don't really care. ang lee's the hulk didn't pull it off for me, but i feel like the wolfman did.

to conclude:

in the movie, near the end, there's a shot of del torro walking through some woods that are being chopped down. now, we see it, and if we're certain types of viewers we say, "SYMBOL!!!" and then we start to drool slightly. and then we wipe ourselves off and think about what it meant. some of us say, "industrial revolution for 200, alex." others of us say, "the wolfman's habitat--his place of filmic existence--is within the woods. for them to be being chopped down is symbolic of the dissolution of the place of the horrific--the driving inward of mankind's demons--its leaking into reality as is exemplified in wes craven's new nightmare." OR we can say, "it's walking music, del torro! walk, walk, walk to that walking music!"

i think i make the third choice. i couldn't tell you what the truth is that's contained within that moment of del torro walking in woods that are being decimated. i can only tell you that there is one. it may seem superfluous, but to me it's superfluous in a bleak, wild, but life-affirming way, as opposed the the terrible algorithmic superfluity of, for example, the entirety of love actually.

kind of like mansfield park, in that whole part with the hee-haw (or the ha-ha?).