Movies, Films & Flix

Quick Thoughts

1. Between The Boy and The Beast, Belle, and Scarlet, Hosoda loves featuring multiple worlds and time frames in his films. 
2. It does seem like Hosoda was too focused on the gorgeous visuals to clean up the screenplay. The story isn’t tight, which hurts the flow of the film.
3. I love a random dance scene in a movie about a revenge-driven princess.
4. It’s worth a trip to an IMAX theater.
5. The opening five minutes rule.

With an 80% CGI and 20% hand-drawn blend of animation,Scarlet is an interesting film to behold. The screenplay is far from tight, but it looks and sounds great in theaters, which means there’s enough good stuff to justify a trip to the cinema. Perhaps it’s because Hosoda wrote the script by himself, and not with Satoko Okudera (Wolf Children, Summer Wars, The Girl Who Jumped Through Time), or maybe it’s because the retelling of Hamlet becomes too ambitious, but the film lacks momentum and sags after an excellent opening. 

I’ve watched Scarlet twice and I have some contradictory feelings about it. I love the idea of a 16th century Danish princess named Scarlet (Mana Ashida) battling her way through an afterlife dubbed the Otherworld, but the storytelling behind her revenge mission to kill her uncle Claudius is too naive and broad. The biggest problem with the movie is that Scarlet’s journey towards enlightenment is loaded with platitudes and on-the-nose dialogue that is about as subtle as a punch to the nose. On paper, teaming Scarlet up with an idealistic modern-day nurse named Hijiri (Masaki Okada) is a fun idea (being that they are complete opposites), but Hijiri never registers as a real person because he’s wildly naive in a world filled with death and destruction, which means he’s a plot device and not a three-dimensional character. This is a shame because Hosoda’s filmography is jam-packed with well-written characters who bridge their differences to find friendship, balance and maturity (Watch Wolf Children, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, and The Boy and the Beast now). 

The opening five minutes are gorgeous and ironically don’t help the overall film because they create visual expectations that aren’t matched until the finale (the middle section of Scarlet is a slog). Watching Scarlet wander around an Otherworld that is home to lightning-spewing dragons, vast deserts, and dead soldiers (whose weapons and armor are used by Scarlet) is highly entertaining and showcases the world that Studio Chizo and Digital Frontier created. While in the Otherworld, she engages in some fun scraps with warriors sent by her power-hungry uncle Claudius (Kôji Yakusho), who isn’t pleased that his niece is trying to send him into nothingness (you can die in the Otherworld purgatory). Scarlet is justifiably angry at Claudius because he killed her father (his brother) and poisoned her while she was attempting to poison him. Now, she’s in the Otherworld looking for revenge. Her quest for murder opens up an expansive world filled with nomads, bambits, cavernous castles, fist-fights, stairways to heaven, and assassins named Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. 

Hosoda spent four years making this film and the overall look is wonderful, but its technological achievements far outweigh anything the story has to offer. Hosoda made sure to respect traditional Japanese 2d animation while updating the methods used to create the animated experiences. The end result blends hand-drawn animation stylings with an eye-pleasing 3D world. 16th Belgian was created with hand-drawn work, while the Otherworld is CG. Scarlet and Hijiri were designed by animation legend Jin Jim (Frozen, Big Hero 6), which explains why Scarlet looks awesome.

Final Thoughts – If you can watch it on an IMAX screen I totally recommend you make the trip.

Dracula (2025) thoughts

1. You haven’t fully lived until you’ve seen a gargoyle land a hurricanrana on a Romanian soldier.
2. Matilda De Angelis is the MVP. She’s on another level
3. It’s a Dracula film directed and written by a person who has no interest in Dracula. It’s an interesting choice. 
4. After appearing in Frankenstein (2025) and Dracula (2025), Christoph Waltz should continue appearing in monster movie remakes. 
5. I love that a $50 million budgeted Dracula film exists because Luc Besson loves Caleb Landry Jones.
6. Between Get Out, The Outpost, The Dead Don’t Die, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, The Florida Project, War on Everyone, Byzantium, and No Country for Old Men, Caleb Landry Jones has a stacked filmography. 

After Guilermo del Toro (Frankenstein) and Robert Eggers (Nosferatu) tackled their long-time passion projects with intense reverence, it was a unique experience watching the Luc Besson directed Dracula. What’s interesting and unique about Besson’s film is that he isn’t a fan of Dracula, or horror movies. The reason Dracula exists is that Besson loves Caleb Landry Jones (who starred in DogMan, which was directed by Besson), and he wanted to create a starring vehicle for him. The end result is a tonal mishmash that ends with a gang of gargoyles battling a platoon of Romanian soldiers led by a guy named Prist (Christoph Waltz). Besson wasn’t interested in blood-sucking, vampire orgies, or a dreary mood, and instead was laser-focused on an immortal vampire spending 400 years looking for his reincarnated wife. Dracula’s sharp edges (and teeth) are softened as he becomes a tragic villain who after attempting to kill himself many times (in a funny moment involving at least eight jumps from a castle tower), develops a perfume to help him find his reincarnated wife. 

The film opens with Prince Vladimir of Wallachia (Caleb Landry Jones) and his wife Elisabeta (Zoë Bleu) enjoying a loving romp in their large bedroom located inside a gothic Romanian castle. The two are clearly in love and they genuinely seem to like each other, but their lovemaking is interrupted when Prince Vladimir is dragged out of his bed so he can fight a group of invading Ottomans (his ornate armour will remind many people of Dracula’s red armor in Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula). While he’s away, Elizabeta is sent to a safe location several miles from the battlefield. While on her journey, her convoy is attacked, and she’s killed during a skirmish between Prince Vladimir (who left the battlefield to save her) and several Ottoman soldiers. After her death, Vladimir renounces his faith, kills a head priest, and is cursed with immortality by God. From there, Dracula travels the world for hundreds of years looking for his reincarnated wife, with little success. During his quest, he creates a pungent perfume that intoxicates women, and the smelly concoction aids him when he turns a group of French socialites into an army of vampire investigators who scour the world looking for Elisabeta. Chief among them is Maria (Matilda De Angelis – having a blast), who locates a woman named Mina (the reincarnation of Elisabeta) in Paris after Dracula sees her face in a locket owned by solicitor Jonathan Harker (Ewens Abid), who visited Dracula’s Romanian castle for business reasons. I don’t want to spoil the rest of the proceedings, but I will say that there are beheadings, dance scenes, sword fights, mouse blood cocktails, lobster towers (amazing), magic candles, transfusions, sinking gargoyles, and ornate rings worn by Dracula. 

The interesting thing about Besson’s Dracula film is that he’s clearly not interested in the action or horror elements that come with Dracula. The opening battle looks cheap, there’s never any tension, and the final battle features Dracula’s gargoyle servants using WWE wrestling moves on overmatched Romanian soldiers. What Besson was interested in were the costumes, castles, makeup, ballrooms, and music of the era. This kept Corinne Bruand (costume designer), Danny Elfman (composer), Julia Floch-Carbonel (key makeup artist) and Hugues Tissandier (production designer) very busy as they were tasked with creating gowns (there’s a gown with an eight meter headdress that looks great during a horse chase), ballrooms (which took up entire soundstages), musical cues, props, and prosthetic makeup to transform Caleb Landry Jones into a 400-year old vampire. Overall, it’s a fantastic-looking production that was clearly focused on lavish production design and costuming.

In interviews, Besson has said that Dracula was sparked by his “fascination” with Caleb Landry Jones rather than by a particular interest in the Dracula tale. If you’re looking for something akin to Bram Stoker’s Dracula or Nosferatu (any of them), you’ll be disappointed because Besson’s take on a vampire legend is more interested in love, perfume, and Caleb Landry Jones.

Quick Thoughts

• Director and co-writer Mascha Schilinski has crafted an intimate and haunting film.
• The film is loaded with memorable moments that are beautifully filmed by cinematographer Fabian Gamper.
• It makes me happy knowing that Schilinski created the film’s soundscape by first asking herself “what does a black hole sound like?”
• Sound of Falling is a good title, but I prefer the original title more. The Doctor Says I’ll Be Alright, But I’m Feelin’ Blue, is neat.
• It’s wild that the film was shot in 33 days. There’s an incredible amount of coverage.

Shot in 33 days, in the Altmark region of northern Germany, Sound of Falling is a sensory-blasting experience crafted by director Mascha Schilinski. She and co-writer Louise Peter spent years writing, researching and location scouting to create a “stream of images from all of the people who lived in this same place.” While there is a connected storyline, the nonlinear film relies on snippets of memories that showcase a myriad of memorable moments involving suicide, belly button sweat, and limb loss. 

The film opens with a teenager named Erika (Lea Drinda) using crutches to walk through the hallways of a spacious farmhouse. At first, you think she’s had a leg amputated, but she has it tied up so she can understand the sensation of missing a leg (it’s wild). She unbinds her leg and sneaks into a room occupied by her uncle Fritz (Martin Rother), a bedridden amputee who forcefully had his leg cut off to avoid being drafted into World War 1(we learn this later). It’s hot in the home, and Erika watches drops of sweat make their way to his belly button. In an unexpected twist, Erika sticks her finger into his belly button and tastes the belly button sweat. After tasting the sweat, she runs down to help her brother in the courtyard, who had been yelling her name during her sweat-tasting dalliance. The scene ends with Fritz watching her through his bedroom window as she gets slapped by her annoyed father. 

From there, we follow Erika, Alma (Hanna Hekt), Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky), and Lenka (Laeni Geiseler), whose stories take place in the same farmhouse. The location stays the same, but the characters come and go as the decades roll on (1910s, 1940s, 1980s, 2020s). The house (and its ghosts) observe these women as they deal with trauma, sexual awakenings, painful falls, terrible uncles, suicidal thoughts, blurry photos, and shoeless runs through wheat fields that result in dozens of open wounds. 

The first image that Schilinski had in mind before writing the screenplay was of someone looking into the sun and closing their eyes, and “there’s this orange, wavy flickering thing, a pre-ancestor picture.” It’s admirable that Schilinski crafted a film that sets out to recreate an orange, wavy-flickering thing. The most admirable aspects of Sound of Falling are the little details that make the film feel real and lived in. Whether it’s the way a grandma’s hand skin stays in place when squeezed, or how a mom winks at her children to tell them she loves them. 

The voyeuristic cinematography by Fabian Gamper is outstanding. The 1.37:1 (4:3) aspect ratio was a nice choice as it adds a claustrophobic vibe to the sprawling farmhouse. Gamper used the lightweight ARRI Alexa Mini and Sony FX6 cameras to stay mobile, which allowed the cameras to act like ghosts watching the goings-on of the household. The Sony FX6 is also ideal for low-light situations, this was handy in the dark barns and candlelit rooms. There are some beautiful visuals in The Sound of Falling, and it’s neat knowing that the filmmakers were deeply influenced by photographer Francesca Woodman.

Final thoughts –Sound of Falling is expertly crafted and will linger in your memory.