Movie Review: Let the Right One In

I’ve been watching vampire movies for most of my life. Starting with Bela Lugosi’s Dracula on late night creature-feature TV, along with turns by John Carradine and Lon Chaney Jr. (not a high point for the Count), and then on to the theater with Christopher Lee, William Marshall (the awesome Blacula!), Frank Langella, and Gary Oldman. There are certainly more vampire movies than those with Dracula in them, though. There’s the underrated, campy, and amusing Fright Night, the grim vampires-as-homicidal-vagrants Near Dark, the droll/grotesque vampires-as-strippers Dawn to Dusk, the funny and entertaining vampires-as-high-school-dropouts The Lost Boys, and now we have another vampire movie to contemplate. No, not the anemic vampire-as-metaphor-for-sex, drugs, & rock n’ roll-abstinence Twilight, but the truly excellent and moving Let the Right One In.

Let the Right One In is a Swedish film from director Tomas Alfredson starring Kåre Hedebrant as Oskar and Lina Leandersson as Eli. Oskar is a 12 year old boy who is being bullied and tormented at school. His parents are divorced and neither one pay much attention to him or notice his problems. Eli is a young girl who moves next door to Oskar. They meet one night as Oskar is repeatedly stabbing a tree with a knife, while he’s fantasizing about how he will deal with his tormentors. Of course, it turns out that Eli is a vampire forever stuck at 12 years old. They turn to each other for friendship, companionship, love, and ultimately protection.

This film is completely anchored in the themes and social problems of today. Without mentioning Columbine, this film draws comparisons and similarities between that horrific occurrence and the boy Oskar. It’s about alienation, isolation, and feelings of powerlessness. The story is so solid that you could easily subtract the vampire elements and still have a wonderful and moving story about growing up and coping with life. To be sure, this Swedish film is quite different from most horror movies of today—the gore and violence is seldom directly shown, dialog and characterization are handled as a priority, and special effects (with two notable exceptions involving cats and one extreme sunburn) are practically nonexistent. Though this film is obviously a low-budget project, no expense was spared on imagination and passion. Let the Right One In is filled with characters that are fully realized and I was hooked from the opening credits. The characters and the story continue to haunt me. Not only is this one of the very best vampire movies ever made, but it was one of the best movies I’ve seen this year. If it comes to your city, see it. When it comes out on DVD, rent it or buy it.

New Stuff

Hi there. It's been a while, but I do have a couple of new reviews up on Audiophile Audition. You can read the David Grier (Bluegrass guitarist) review here and the Blue Cranes (Indie Jazz) review here. Both are very fine CDs, though they will appeal to quite different listeners.

Also, I wrote a profile for the latest issue of Mandolin Magazine about the Vancouver luthier Chris Standridge. He's making some of the best sounding mandolins around.

As far as movies go this summer, I'm afraid I have rather different opinions than most of the reviewers out there. Speed Racer, Wanted, and Hancock have all suffered from hostile, negative, or lukewarm reviews, but I rather liked them. Speed Racer is particularly underrated. It's a great little kid's movie, which is not what you'd expect from the Wachowski Brothers, I suppose. Iron Man is probably my favorite blockbuster so far, with Hellboy II: the Golden Army a reasonable second. If you have the opportunity, see Son of Rambow. That's my favorite overall movie so far.

Well, stay cool and take care.

Hermon

What I've been reading lately

I've been a fan of detective/mystery fiction for a long time. I love the classic authors like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and the current writers like Robert Crais and James Lee Burke. So it was a pleasant surprise to come across a "new" author--Chester Himes, an African-American expatriate writer. The thing is, Himes was writing in the 1950s and 60s, so he isn't exactly a new author, but he is to me. And he's great. I read his book, "Cotton Comes to Harlem" (1965). It's very urban and African-American centric, successfully capturing the times and the attitudes. The two protagonists are Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, two police detectives that work the Harlem beat. In the book, they are up against con-men, Southern white racists, murder, racial politics, and a missing bale of cotton. There aren't many, if any, hardboiled detectives that can match this pair. Tough as forged steel, deadly as a hair-trigger .45--they are more than a match for all the bad guys they go up against. The characters were vivid, the dialog was colorful, the plotting was tight, and action was unsparingly realistic. After reading this book, it now comes to the top of my list of great detective novels, right up there with "Farewell, My Lovely" and "The Maltese Falcon." It really is that good.

As a side note, "Cotton Comes to Harlem" was made into a film in 1970, starring Godfrey Cambridge and Raymond St. Jacques, and directed by Ossie Davis. It was one of the first so-called blaxpoitation films, and is actually a very entertaining movie. If you can find it, watch it, but also try to find a copy of the book. The book is better.

Haiku 2

Recently I sat in on an open mike ukulele session. Just as a listener, but since I'm learning to play the uke, maybe some day Ill join in. Anyway, here's a haiku I wrote while I was there. The house "band" was playing a funny variation of the classic cowboy song, "Ghost Riders in the Sky." Their version was called "Ghost Chickens in the Sky."


ghost chickens clucking
flea-jumping ukuleles
Hawaiian shirts laugh

The Return of the Bomb-Throwing Anarchists?

There’s one facet of our western history that I’ve never really understood and that’s the bomb-throwing anarchists. Anarchists were around in Europe, England and the US in the late 19^th and early 20^th Centuries. Mostly what I remember of them are seeing old political cartoons that depicted them as bushy-bearded madmen dressed head to toe in black and poised in mid-throw holding a round “bomb” with a burning fuse. What were they so mad about? Why did they throw bombs?

The image of the bomb throwing anarchist was cemented in the public’s eye in 1886 during the Haymarket Riot in Chicago. Labor Unions, socialists, and anarchists had organized a nationwide strike in support of an 8-hour workday. When the police arrived at the rally to disperse the crowds, someone threw dynamite at the policemen. Eight policemen and an unknown number of civilians were killed in the ensuing riot. Prior to this event, anarchist newspapers had been calling for the use of the newly invented dynamite to kill police. The Haymarket Riot made the public’s fears about anarchists a reality.

These anarchists were brought to my mind by the recent burning of a “Street of Dreams” subdivision in Seattle. It’s still way too early to know exactly what happened, but an eco group has claimed responsibility and the government is calling it an act of domestic terrorism. Anyway, an entire brand new deluxe subdivision was burned to the ground. Is it terrorism? A political statement? What were they hoping to accomplish?

I guess that these kinds of actions have been a part of western culture for a long time. The original Luddites were textile workers in England whose jobs were lost by the rise of industrialization. Before industrialization, textile production was literally a cottage industry. People made textiles, cloth, and fabrics in their homes. These displaced workers tried to sabotage the factories and machines that put them out of business. Even those American patriots who caused so much trouble for the British with the Boston Tea Party were making a political statement through violence, property damage, and loss. Both of these groups resorted to violence when other recourses weren’t available to them—much like the anarchists.

So I wonder. Are today’s eco-terrorists just the latest incarnation of this sentiment? When people can no longer stand what is happening around them, is it part of our cultural disposition to destroy the objects that represent the source of our unhappiness? Are the eco-terrorists today’s incarnation of the bomb throwing anarchist? I think they probably are just that.

Haiku 1

I'm going to post haikus every now and then on a somewhat regular basis. How's that for commitment. Anyway, here's the first one.



white cup black coffee
cold rain sliding into ice
ghosts of spring calling