I saw that version of The Hobbit as a kid when it first aired on TV. I remember it being kind of a big deal at the time. I loved it, though I didn’t read the book until many years later. The Peter Jackson movies were terrible in comparison, although the first one was decent.
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I listened to the Jim Carry version of A Christmas Carol the other night… is it weird that I think it weird that Jim Carry as Scrooge sounds nothing like Jim Carry as the Grinch? I’m used to characters with the same actor having similar, if not identical voices.
As for Tolkien adaptations, I only have vague recollections of animated versions of the Hobbit and Return of the King that aired on Cartoon Network back in the 90s that became the artstyle I imagined everything in when I listened to the audiobooks of Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit in middle school. Though about all I can remember from either is the latter including a song that includes the line “Frodo of the 9 fingers and the ring of doom”.
Just watched An Elephant Sitting Still (dir. Hu Bo) which was exquisitely slow, grey, and precise. Sad and violent, but with its violence always obscured by framing or focus, with lots of careful shots of faces.
Also rewatched one of my all time faves, Julia Ducournau’s Raw. Just as fun as I remembered!
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The scene in that that made me feel faint is when she’s tipping blood out of her friend’s fingers to drink it.
-Wade
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Pretty soon I’ll be watching the 2024 Nosferatu. This makes me want to rewatch the 1922 original first. I saw it on TV in the 1990s and I remember the score that version had, both the good and the bad. We usually like things the way we first encounter them, especially if we liked them on that first encounter.
In the internet age, every person and their dog has rescored the film (just look at this page - List of scores for Nosferatu - Blu-ray Forum) and it took me about half an hour to find the score I remembered and wanted to hear. It wasn’t even on that page; I found it in a Reddit topic where someone else was also looking for it.
This score is attached to a really lo-res Youtube version of the film. Nosferatu has since been restored multiple times in multiple ways, and all the restorations have different runtimes.
My problem now is – do I want to watch this crappy print so I can hear this score? Or will I throw down with a new score to watch a better print (e.g. I like the sound of this Peter Zillmer one).
Or will I take the score I like and attempt to find a nice print with a similar runtime, and sync the two up in Final Cut Pro? I’m the type to do that. There are a few prints that are only a minute longer or shorter than the one with the old music, so I’m hoping there may be just three or four points in the film where I can drag the soundtrack right or left to resync it at such times.
-Wade
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The first version of Nosferatu I watched had a terrible electronic score that felt tacked-on and not like it was written for the movie or anything, so I just ended up making a playlist of spooky ambient music and muting the movie.
Haven’t seen the new version yet. Need to re-watch the Herzog version, as I remember liking it quite a bit.
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Yes, I love Herzog’s version as well.
-Wade
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Fun fact: Bram Stoker’s wife died in 1937. If she had written Dracula, the character wouldn’t be in public domain in time for Konami to include him in Castlevania in 1986.
For the 50 year period after the death of the author to lapse, it would have to wait until 1987. Which apparently is the North American relase date.
(Konami also wouldn’t have been able to freely use Nosferatu because Nosferatu itself was under copyright until 2019 … even though the film itself infringed on copyright. )
In my previous job, I saw parties claiming royalties on films like Nosferatu after being involved in what they considered to be restoration like changes. Were they legit? I don’t think anyone knew or knows in each case.
-Wade
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I saw Eggers’ Nosferatu. Summarily, as a Dracula know-all, this film almost never surprised me, and was a mostly cerebral experience of me having conversations with myself for at least half of it about what had changed and what the value of the changes was. It was close to be being boring. My friend, who knows some Dracula movies but doesn’t have that big history with Dracula in general, enjoyed it a lot. I didn’t appreciate the 2 hour 18 running time.
I might begin by asking: If this is a version of Nosferatu, what is Nosferatu? Nosferatu is a (originally unlicensed) German version of Dracula with a smaller cast, a conspicuously rattish monster villain (not a combo monster / man who could traffic in society) and a particular ending dependant upon the heroine. These elements have been emphasised because they’ve been done twice before, making Nosferatu a kind of subavenue of Dracula.
If you then take that, make questionable changes to the fundaments, and add back a lot of the core Dracula stuff, but still call it Nosferatu, what are you doing and why? I couldn’t answer these questions satisfactorily to enjoy this film. Maybe if I’d just come to it as a version of Dracula, rather than a version of Nosferatu, I’d have been less disappointed. I’m sure I will be if I see it sometime in the future.
Spoiler discussion:
Summary
This flim is the first non-German-national Nosferatu. The monster retains the rattish appearance but now has a noble characterisation, though he still can’t appear anywhere with people because he’s too appalling.
The heroine is doomed from the start via a weird occult connection to the monster, which considerably devalues her final sacrifice. She is also a mountain of neurosis and possession all the time, which makes it hard to see any dimensions to her. In fact I basically found her annoying, whereas Aaron-Taylor Johnson, in the traditionally thankless role of ‘that guy who denies what’s happening the longest’, was sympathetic and rational as a friend.
Many specific scenes or flourishes recall Coppola’s ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, though with a heavy hand rather than exuberance. The sequence of the death of the crew at sea – eerie and swift in the other Nosferatus – felt tiresome and too long, especially since someone made a whole film devoted to only that part of the Dracula story last year (Last Voyage of the Demeter).
When the Van Helsing character was introduced, off-screen, I was mildly excited. Who will be in that role? Then, it turned out to be Willem Dafoe, another surprise-drainer, as he’s been prolific playing European eccentrics lately, and also played Nosferatu in the film about the making of Nosferatu, Shadow of the Vampire! I suppose that was part of the point of casting him, but I was sorely grasping for any surprises.
Execution-wise, you might really enjoy this if you haven’t seen many Dracula films, but this one didn’t waver much or in ways I thought were smart.
-Wade
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I dug into it some more, some more and found this:
“[After the silent 1947 MoMA print], all subsequent restorations and recorded scores retain their own individual copyrights …”
It also says:
Nosferatu was always subject to full copyright protection worldwide, with the major wrinkle that no one ever actually came forward to claim it. Therefore, it was mistakenly assumed to be in the public domain and always treated as such. One exception was the US, where it actually was public domain between 1922–1995 [for reasons not specific to the film itself].
Also, a separate part notes that Stoker’s widow, Florence Balcombe, obtained ownership over Nosferatu before destroying most copies, but it’s ambiguous whether that means copyright ownership.
So presumably any royalty claims based on copyright were legit.
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A thought occurs: How does copyright interact with fictional characters based on historical personages? I can’t seem to get a straight answer out of Google as to whether Vlad the Impaler’s association with vampires and the name Dracula predates or postdates Stoker’s novel, but how much of the concept of a Transylvanian nobleman named Dracula who is a vampire could Stoker really claim ownership of versus the character being a depiction of a historical figure with a larger than life mythology attached to him?
Anyone who would try to destroy an entire work, even an “illegal” one, deserves nothing.
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It all depends what you can point to as precedent, and what a rightsholder is willing to say with a straight face in court. For example, for quite a while Sherlock Holmes as a character was in the public domain (because Doyle’s earliest Holmes stories were), but the later works were still under copyright. During that time, Doyle’s estate would bring lawsuits against people who wrote Holmes stories, saying that features like “Sherlock Holmes experiencing sadness” only appeared in the later, still-copyrighted stories!
Most people wouldn’t be quite that lawsuit-happy—I imagine most courts would rule that “human beings experiencing sadness” is a universal enough occurrence that you cannot copyright it—but the Doyle estate has a lot of money and some very good lawyers, and if you have enough resources you can force just about anyone to back down, regardless of what your argument is.
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Heh, if I’d had to investigate I’d presumably have found the same website. At the time, no screening royalties had been matched to the claim. I saw the claim and mentally filed it in that future-itch mental bucket which included other things like a restoration of Metropolis.
-Wade
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Here’s an idea for an Ectocomp entry. Of course, I’ll sue for copyright if anyone uses it.
Furious at being accused of disgusting acts like biting people’s necks and drinking their blood, Vlad Tepes travels through time on a quest to impale all his defamers on giant poleaxes.
-Wade
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A thought occurs: How does copyright interact with fictional characters based on historical personages?
I think I glossed over the difference between the character and the story.
Similarities between the novel and the film plots were the main copyright issue. The details are not identical, but the original Nosferatu acknowledges being based on Dracula in the credits.
Orlok’s status as a Dracula stand in is just part of that, though it appears not many people dared to make fully derivative/parody characters until after Dracula’s copyright lapsed in 1962.
Maybe there’s an alternate universe where Jim Henson created The Count when he was still working at the local TV station in the 1950s but eventually got sued by Bram Stoker’s estate.
I think Count von Count would be a lot easier to defend in court than Count Orlok, because there are specific legal protections for parody—that’s why SNL has gotten away with so much over the decades, even when they’re mocking current media.
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Good point.
On closer inspection, it seems like parody wasn’t largely immune from copyright in the U.S. until a particular mid-1950s case decided that.
Maybe shyness around Dracula knockoffs was due to that development rather than anything to do with Dracula or Nosferatu in particular. Plus, characters would be parodying the Universal monster rather than anything else.
On the topic of out-of-copyright characters being reworked, I just watched Mad Heidi (2022).
This is a crowd-funded, R-rated exploitation version of Johanna Spyri’s 1880ish story Heidi.
There’s been a zeitgeisty threat hanging around over the past few years that lots of R-rated takes on out-of-copyright kiddie characters would be appearing soon. Winnie The Pooh: Blood & Honey (2023) did appear, and it was bloody awful.
Mad Heidi is easily the best one of these kinds of films I’ve seen so far, and also about the best ‘wacky’ crowdfunded film I’ve seen. (e.g. Compare to Iron Sky (2012) an equally broadly silly film about steampunk Nazis which ultimately couldn’t produce narrative legs that were any stronger than the initial idea on paper.) MH is still not brilliant; the screenplay has some clunk. But basically, it hits a particular tone that it seems to get right, and the direction is particularly good.
Mad Heidi’s plot has a broad similarity to the shape of Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds, and plenty of the violence and music is Tarantino-esque. Here, cheese-mad Swiss fascists are hunting the lactose-intolerant. The Jewish woman who escaped at the start of Tarantino’s film returned for vengeance. Here, it’s Heidi who returns for vengeance after being imprisoned and put through a grueling prison experience. And this was a disturbing sequence. It doesn’t matter if the cheese-based trappings are silly. It turns out that people being tortured in prison in any film is people being tortured in prison, if directed well.
Mad Heidi has great cinematography, solid production, location shooting, and committed performances by its leads – one of whom is Casper Van Dien, tapping his Star Troopers legacy – here he plays a ridiculous fascist Swiss President.
I’d have liked to see Heidi get to do more in her post trained ‘mad’ state, but she delivers killer one liners and she becomes outrageously fetching in her Heidi getup.
The trailer emphasies cheese all the way, literal and figurative, but I think it actually undersells the quality of the film.
Trailer has language, lots of silly gore.
EDIT: Oops. No point warning about gore if I don’t link to the gory version of the trailer…
-Wade
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