From the biochemist in Jared Leto in the Marvel movie to the vengeful feminist in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, the bloodsuckers of the new generation live, walk and even laugh freely with us.
I’m writing this week’s column, in this case, from Cluj in Romania, during a stopover at the Transylvania Film Festival, where sunny days are long, morale high and threats from the undead that you can also see regularly. Going on holiday to Transylvania is very far away. We don’t like vampires very much in the middle of summer, but then, with stranger things fever in the air, the scary season would possibly have come sooner: Sony took the opportunity to release Morbius. in VOD, a darker comedy adaptation from Marvel, which hits the audience off guard with the double terror of fashionable vampires and Jared Leto at his best.
But it’s quite funny, balancing the soft styles of gothic horror with properly self-aware stupidity, all a million miles away from Bram Stoker. he tries to mix his DNA with that of a vampire bat. Either way, the brilliant scientist can’t see coming what someone familiar with his stable partner from the Spider-Man franchise could, and vampiric chaos ensues. Swedish director Daniel Espinosa guides the whole thing with a terrifying flash, and Leto, a performer who comes with a faithful guarantee, never knowingly underestimated, is in his menacing element.
This is just the newest access in an ever-expanding canon of neo-vampire films, committed to selling the concept that, just as not all heroes wear capes, neither do all vampires: that mold in Central European castles, live and walk among us. today. It’s rarely the first time Marvel has been lucky with the concept: Wesley Snipes’ tough leather-clad guy on Blade (NowTV) marked Morbius’ style, but with a little more enthusiastic action and rave scenes. illuminated through strobe lights. It is aggressively “modern” and a quintessential piece from the 90s period.
Blade was a more violent evolution of the ’80s era that reinvented the creatures of the night into elegant new wave nightclub creatures. The Hunger (Google Play), very well dressed, atmospheric and strangely eroticized by Tony Scott, with David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve too cool. being warm-blooded: He christened the phase, before Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys (Amazon) became a more adolescent place. Sleeper Near Dark (Apple TV) has been the most fashionable and cult vampire story.
In the twenty-first century, the era of the emo vampire is upon us. The Twilight videos that shaped the culture were less interested in the fangs of their teenage characters than in their feelings: they’re all on Netflix and, despite all eyes, provoke today, they’re getting bigger (and crazier) as they go on. extra passne to soften the symbol of the fashionable vampire: his bloodsuckers are an organization of silly and interrupted roommates.
However, it is in global cinema that one tends to encounter the most attractive and unlikely new vampires, starting with the tender and trembling romance of Tomas Alfredson’s formative years Let the Right One In (iPlayer), whose younger fragility acted as a solution to Twilight’s Most Troubled Soap Opera. Meanwhile, Claire Denis’ brutal and nihilistic Trouble Every Day (Shudder) takes credit for freedom of art and rehearsal to accentuate the sexualized and libertine bloodshed. – loosely based on Zola’s Therese Raquin and bringing a new view of Catholic guilt into the proceedings – turns out to be retained through comparison. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Apple TV) via Iranian-American director Ana Lily Amirpour, meanwhile, mixes the popular blood of the genre with a feminist composure of steel: if Jared Leto’s Morbius opposed Sheila Vand’s Vengeful Madonna-worshipping vampire here, you wouldn’t need it possibilities.
Ambulance (Universal) Once lambasted by critics, Michael Bay’s impetuous and muscular action film logo now looks like a setback enough to earn the respect of tired Marvels. Full of car chases and thieve melodramas, this LA mystery is precisely elegant, but it has a taste: in the age of identikit franchises, that stands out.
Petrov’s Flu (Sovereign) Not all superhero videos have to feel corporate, as evidenced by this lush, quirky Russian twist of the genre influenced by Gogol (and more). The first film directed by the embattled avant-garde director Kirill Serebrennikov after an era. Of space arrest, this delusional vision of an e-book artist comedian and his super-powerful wife battling a pandemic-stricken dystopia seems to oppose the system with restless power and rage.
Language courses (Amazon/Apple TV) The “Screenlife” cinema – this type of videos that place all the action on PC or phone screens – has lived a golden age of confinement due to Covid that already feels connected to a certain time and place. But Natalie Morales’ sweet dating drama was one of her sweetest products, tracing an unforeseen Zoom friendship between a gay widower and his Spanish instructor, played with a warm humor through Morales herself.
Belle (Anime Ltd) Respected anime writer Mamoru Hosoda is inspired by Beauty and the Beast for this story of a shy high school woman with a glamorous parallel life as a pop star in a virtual realm, we decided to locate the identity of the seductress. monster that disrupts their virtual exploits. Narratively busy and visually hyper-designed, it gives it a game-like sugar rush, but it lacks a bit of heart.