And behold, Jesus mud-wrestled the creature amidst the uterine juices of damnation.
And lo, it was icky.

Frankenstein’s Mobster.

MARY SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN has the reputation for following its infamous source material closely – Mary Shelley’s groundbreaking 1818 novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. The fact that it follows the book only barely, and the fact that people yet put on airs when lauding the movie as authentic shows how much people actually read.

Kenneth Branagh directs and stars in this fevered, overwrought encomium to mad scientists and the monsters they create. Young scientist Victor Frankenstein (Branagh), inspired by boundary-pushing life-preservation experiments in 19^th century Geneva, contrives a method to create the spark of life in dead flesh. After experimenting with animals, bringing them back from death, Frankenstein constructs a man from body parts scavenged in science labs and graveyards – and reanimates him. Then, like every good Reality TV parent, Frankenstein abandons the creature. The reanimated man (played by Robert De Niro, in what looks like extremely painful makeup) is shunned by his creator, and embarks on a killing spree as a cry for help. At least, that’s what the creature says…

Frankenstein keeps the “monster” a secret from his betrothed Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter), and best friend Clerval (Tom Hulce). (I feel so sorry for Hulce in this role. At the time, he was cultivating a reputation of accepting only noteworthy acting gigs, which were rare. After his magnificent turn as a titan himself in 1984’s AMADEUS, this period piece, with its caliber of talent and majestic intent, seemed like a natural progression for him. Alas, his talents are muted by the material and the lackluster filmmaking.) Ian Holm is dad, on his gigantic English estate; Richard Briers is the old blind man with whom the monster finds a moment’s respite, and John Cleese makes an excellent serious cameo as an outlaw professor.

Historical Fact: early dildos just looked like monkey paws.

An element of the film that fakes us into believing it is loyal to the novel is the opening sequence featuring Aidan Quinn as Captain Walton, helming a foundering ship through arctic ice and coming upon Frankenstein pursuing his creature. The whole tale is then told in flashback by Frankenstein. This device is also used to frame the novel, but the novel goes deeper, telling it from the point of view of Walton relating Frankenstein’s tale, who, in turn, devotes a large chunk of dialogue to relating his creature’s tale, so the book seems like three flashbacks in one.

Another significant inclusion from the book: THE CREATURE SPEAKS! We have been so inundated with the avalanche of Frankenstein media (starting with the original 1931 film FRANKENSTEIN, starring Boris Karloff as the Monster) that portrays the creature as a big dumb galoot that we forget the creature was endued with a functioning brain and was quite articulate. (We can’t help thinking of Marty Feldman in Mel Brooks’s YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN, choosing a brain for the creature, marked “Abby Normal”…)

Of all the deviations from the book, there are two that benefit the film; first, John Cleese’s brain in the creature (Cleese is Professor Waldman, killed by a fanatic, whose head is cut into by Frankenstein for his intellect); second, instead of reanimating a nameless grab of body parts at the creature’s insistence of a female mate, Frankenstein reanimates his own lover – the murdered Elizabeth!

The Cleese-brain plot point is wasted, as the creature is struck on the head by a falling beam when birthed, effectively negating all those potentially interesting avenues involving a professor’s brain driving the leviathan. However, the reanimated-Elizabeth plotline is undoubtedly ominous and actually “scary.” In a weeping fervor, Frankenstein lops off the head of his original female (in this story, she is a relative of Frankenstein’s that the creature murdered; in the novel, a clutch of body-parts) and stitches on dead Elizabeth’s head (obviously following the handbook on Medical Procedures Made Simple.) When she comes to, Bonham Carter gives a disturbing performance as someone slowly discovering they are reanimated.

As Superman was the first true cinematic superhero, Frankenstein created the first cinematic Monster. In this telling, we sidle up pretty close to Shelley’s original vision of the creature itself – an intelligent being shunned and lonely, seeking revenge for the forced life thrust upon it – but even one of the world’s greatest actors cannot make us feel any compassion toward this poorly fleshed-out, tragic beast.

I truly think the problem lies in Shelley’s original work, for her Victor Frankenstein is a confused character whose emotions turn on a dime when it comes to desire to create a living being and then revulsion once that being is created. And so Branagh tries to portray that fickleness in the movie, but this is not a natural human reaction, so it misses the dramatic mark: When his new man-creature is birthed (in a scene that dwells too long on both Branagh and a naked De Niro entwined like female wrestlers in sensual amniotic slime), the creature is inadvertently chained and knocked unconscious. What does Franky do? Leave the creature hanging there and starts contemplating his navel. Are you a scientist, man?! Start doing tests, examining the creature’s metabolism, heart rate, skin regeneration, reflexes, etc.! What’s with all this philosophical mooning?

“We shall ride so hard that I will explode in my pantaloons from your mannequin buttocks rubbing urgently against me.”

Shelley creates a great allusion in the subtitle of her book, The Modern Prometheus, but chooses to go the route of simple-minded murder than the more interesting plot of society being exposed to this scientific wonder. As Prometheus stole forbidden knowledge of the gods and bequeathed it to Man, Victor Frankenstein treads that crucible, so we can excuse a modicum of self-examination and fear, but cannot we also revel in the unbounded excellence of the experiment’s success?

We must recall Mary Shelley was 18 when she penned this tale. Though her writing style is grandiose and exhibits a vocabulary which puts modern 18-year-olds to shame, her knowledge of scientific practices and story devices like characterization and motivation was virtually nil. She did a great job capturing the essence of a disturbing idea that probes at a primal fear of mankind – which is why the tale is so universally embraced – however she blithely set forth her characters’ actions, sprinkled liberally with flowery language, and hoped to disguise the fact there was hardly any substance behind their deeds.

The creature is also quite shallow, birthed with the intellect of an infant, soon turning to murder for no reason other than to jealously bait his creator. (And why do we perfunctorily call the creature a “monster” anyway? The “monster” epithet could probably be applied after he starts killing people, but we are conditioned to think of him as that from the outset!) And De Niro doesn’t help, seemingly just reading his lines and waiting for the knockoff bell to take off this goddam makeup. His leaden performance leads us to believe someone made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.

Shelley’s novel never mentions the process by which the living person is created, because – she was not a scientist, but every Frankenstein movie has utilized electricity/lightning to reanimate the creature. A creative new device here is – electric eels!

In the final telling, MARY SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN has merits and demerits that cancel each other out. At least it’s sincere in trying to be authentic. But in its adherence to Shelley’s dated, drab approach, it becomes as inauthentic as all the other Frankensteins ever loosed into cinema. What do I mean by this? Well, as an example, the creature never raises his voice; he speaks calmly and articulately, because that was the ethos of the day – intelligent conversation, not Running and Screaming. The “terror” has not been updated to today’s “entertainment” standards.

The filmmakers also fail to convey the true intended horror of Frankenstein’s tale – the forbidden “tampering in God’s domain.” Although there is no religiosity in Shelley’s work, that unholy element was the unspoken heretical dread of creating life from nothing back in the 1800s. It was a trespass unforgivable. No one is getting that message now. Partly because we have become inured to the Frankenstein story over decades, partly because spiritual outrage is a thing of the past, and partly because the acting is so mediocre.

Next: THE GODFATHER PART IV, starring Abby Normal.

END

Jumping The Snark.

Hayden Christensen has learned a lot from being a Jedi.

In JUMPER, he’s learned how to teleport. He’s learned how to rob banks by teleporting directly into their vaults. He’s also learned how to pick up women by playing the exotic erotic. Unfortunately, he still hasn’t learned how to act.

Well, that’s not exactly true. He’s progressed from not being able to act his way out of a paper bag, to making a small rip in it.

Hayden is David Rice, a “jumper” (a sexy, Y-Gen euphemism for “teleporter”), who lives the good life in a swank London apartment, teleporting hither and thither at his whim: lunch in Paris, dinner in Tokyo, and breakfast on the head of the Sphinx (totally pissing off Zahi Awass).

The teleportation sequences are excellent. A smidgen of physics theory is applied to the “jumps,” resulting in the “jump-scar” – a crackling, translucent, para-dimensional residue, like a fading window whenever a Jumper teleports – taking a moment to “close” between locales. Jumpers can bring objects through this rift, and this plot device is used to great effect when David follows fellow Jumper, Griffin (Jamie Bell, KING KONG 2005), to plot points and beyond.

JUMPER is a one-trick pony that wishes it knew just one more trick.

Written by David S. Goyer, Jim Uhls and Simon Kinberg (from the Steven Gould novel), and directed by Doug Liman (MR AND MRS SMITH, 2005), JUMPER quickly falls into chase movie format when it introduces suicide-blonde Samuel L. Jackson as one of the Paladins, a league of buzzkills trying to eradicate Jumpers.

And boy, does Jackson love beating up on Christensen with an electrified nightstick – revenge for that bitchbeating he took from Anakin in REVENGE OF THE SITH with that Jedi electrified nightstick.

The Paladins follow David and his high maintenance high school sweetheart, Millie (Rachel Bilson) to the Coliseum in Rome, where they are dispatched by David and Griffin, but David ends up getting arrested, for breaking into the arena. While he is being cuffed, the authorities simply ignore his small-ta-ta sweetie-pie as if she isn’t there – either that, or she’s bribed them by doling out bj’s by the mouthful.

There seems to be no end to Millie’s ungratefulness. Firstly, David, whom she hasn’t seen in years, turns up and takes her on an all-expenses-paid trip to Rome – and it takes her all the way to one hour into the hotel room to jump his bone, when any self-respecting trophy byoch would have dropped her panties five minutes into Mile High Club. Ingrate! Then when he’s about to take her home – after sacrificing himself so she wouldn’t have to spend any time in prison, she whines at him, “I told you, you didn’t have to tell me everything – I’ve changed my mind.” Well, I’ve changed my mind about your free trip home – how’s that grab your little tennis ball ta-tas, tart?

Paladin Jackson hunts David and Griffin until bigger and bigger things have to get Jumped to hold our interest. Until the big reveal – David’s mother (Diane Lane cameo) is a Paladin! (Big Chords.) That’s why she left the family unit when he was a baby bad actor.

David visits his mother in a final scene that is intended for some kind of closure – but it only serves to make us hate Diane Lane. You see, she’s a Paladin by choice: it takes an effort to go out of your way to find Jumpers and kill them; whereas Jumpers, like Mexican Beans, are born with that talent. It’s like being born with different color skin… you can see where this is leading. Paladins do not hunt Jumpers for robbing banks and taking advantage of our women – they hate Jumpers for their ability to jump, period. In other words, Paladins have the mind-set of racists! They irrationally fear and want to kill Jumpers solely for a physical trait that cannot be helped. Lane becoming a mother to a Jumper didn’t open her mind to her irrationality (much like Dick Cheney’s gay daughter doesn’t move his closed mind one iota towards acceptance). She left the family when he was five, in her words, “to save his life” – which means she had the opportunity to learn about the mind of a Jumper and instill values and ethics in that which she feared/hated, but instead of nurturing David, her twisted mind decides the “best option” is – no, not to simply LEAVE HIM ALIVE and raise him – to leave the family! I bet she votes Republican too.

Having narration in a movie is dicey at the best of times – unless you’re Morgan Freeman. Then it’s a thing of beauty, nuance and aural intoxication. Hayden Christensen is a long way from Morgan Freeman – and his narration is even further; that monotonal drone is like listening to mud dry.

Movie ends with hundreds of questions unanswered: is David’s girlfriend any more bearable now that she knows the truth?; where’s Griffin?; is David’s mum still on Griffin’s hit list?; is Sam Jackson’s blonde ‘do a result of all that electroshock therapy he took as Mace Windu?; will Hayden ever escape that paper bag?

Much to learn, you still have.

END