I was expecting “Dracula 2000
” to be a giant disaster of a film, but was pleasantly surprised by it. This film doesn’t have the ambition of, say, “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” but it still takes the genre seriously and does right by it.
In many ways, the movie is extremely faithful to the original book, just presupposing that Dracula wasn’t able to be killed at the end of Stoker’s story, and was just sealed away instead, waiting for some idiot to free him from his imprisonment …
I don’t want to say more, but vampire fans will find a lot to like in this. There’s some nastiness with leeches that is even cooler when explained, nice dream sequences, excellent stuff with Dracula’s three new “brides,” solid acting by all involved (although no one in the cast is going to be up for an Oscar, they act to the best of their ability, and Vitamin C is surprisingly good — those interested in seeing the film for her might want to know that she’s the star of the film’s brief nude scene) and some good stunts and action sequences. There’s also a nifty Biblical origin given for vampires that I quite liked.
There’s one or two goofy bits — are we expected to believe streets in New Orleans’ French Quarter are EVER totally empty during Mardi Gras, any time of the day or night? — but overall, it was a nice lightweight vampire flick. Nothing brilliant, but not maddening in its stupidity like “John Carpenter’s Vampires.”
I’d rate it better than “John Carpenter’s Vampires,” but below just below “Fright Night” and a littler further below “Lost Boys” and “From Dusk Til Dawn” in terms of lightweight vampire flicks. A solid rental choice.
If you’re a kid who grew up in the 1970s — and still like rock and roll — Saturday Morning Cartoons’ Greatest Hits is a must-buy album. Many of the artists on the album weren’t well-known when this first hit the streets, although pretty much all of them deserve to be.
“Saturday Morning Cartoons’ Greatest Hits” benefits by having artists of the right generation (mostly) playing the covers. Everything from the amazing Liz Phair’s cover of the “Banana Splits” theme song to Matthew Sweet’s “Scooby Doo, Where Are You” to Sumblime’s “Hong Kong Phooey” to the Ramones’ “Spider-Man” are incredibly fun tunes that both evoke the classic cartoons and are representative of the musicians’ work.
I picked this album up the first day it was in stores, having heard choice cuts from it on Washington, DC’s WHFS all week prior, and it remains one of my favorite albums to this day, years later.
I only picked Higher Learning up during the Liz Phair drought waiting (seemingly forever!) for her “whitechocolatespaceegg” album. Her Grammy-nominated song, “Don’t Have Time,” really isn’t one of her better tunes, but it is a standout on this soundtrack … which should say something about the overall quality here.
This isn’t a bad album, per se, but it’s ultimately very ordinary.
While I found “Where is Joe Merchant” to be trying too hard, the earlier “Tales from Margaritaville” is one of my favorite books by doing just the opposite: The stories here — often little more than vignettes — pour out as easily as Jimmy’s songs, which isn’t surprising, since many of them are expanded versions of songs off his album “Off to see the Lizard.”
Taken together, we get an extremely good vision of the Gulf Coast and the lives of the characters in Jimmy’s musical world, where a big heart is worth more than a fancy car or the nicest clothes, and where good music and good food and good company are more important than who one is in the community or how successful they are.
The book only falters when it leaves the more realistic settings behind for the more fantastic, something that threatens to swamp the novel he wrote as a follow-up to this work, “Where is Joe Merchant.”
No, this isn’t brain surgery, and Jimmy didn’t win the Pulitzer for fiction for this work, but it’s more-than-pleasant summer reading and a worthy companion to his music.
I’d heard nothing but bad things about “The Beach,” from people who’d apparently come to it expecting “Titanic II.” It’s certainly not that, but it’s also not a terrible movie. The problem is that it’s the “Trainspotting” director giving us a story that’s an odd hybrid of “Six Nights, Seven Days” and “Trainspotting” — with a contempt for ordinary travelers that even the movie eventually acknowledges if fatuous — that veers off unexpectedly to become “Lord of the Flies” or “Apocalypse Now.”
Which isn’t to say that there’s nothing good in the movie. The setting is breathtaking, and many of the performances — by a who’s who of indie film regulars — are extremely well-done. Even many of the story and directorial conceits work well, most notably a videogame sequence late in the film.
But ultimately, the movie’s lack of focus makes for a frustrating experience. There are flashes of a great film in here, although too often they’re flashes borrowed from other, better movies.
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