Praise of Folly

Erasmian Oscars

Erasmus won't be watching Hollywood's festival this year. He found himself uncharacterisitcally bored by this year's prestige films, and didn't spend many of his precious spare moments watching them. If Erasmus got to pick a field of films, he'd have to go with several uncited by the Academy. In fact, he's rather worried to see that they appear mostly unreviewed by him. Well, Erasmus will try to remedy that.

Erasmus's best movies of 2005, those he believes will be rewatched in 2015 and 2025, were:

• King Kong, a classic fairy tale gorgeously realized
• The Great Raid, excellent history, better film, superlative story
• The 40-Year-Old Virgin, sweet, smart, subtly subversive comedy
• Layer Cake, the best, most intelligent crime movie in some time
• Wedding Crashers, another ostensibly trite comedy with a genuine core
• Sin City, an empty, nihilistic void at the core, but the artistry astonished

Erasmus will expound further, but the first two receive ave, the next three strongly placent, and the last is seriously problematic but æsthetically, if immorally compelling.

Overall, MMV non placuit.

The Seven-Percent Saline Solution

Erasmus is amused by the further Holmesian evolution in Dr. Gregory House. Just as Holmes would stimulate himself with cocaine when the world was too boring, it seems Dr. House's quest for pain-killers gets stronger when he's bored, as his boss proved with a faux-morphine shot. Well done.

Pull quote: Blade II

In alluding to Blade II below, Erasmus was reminded of a quote from a review by Erasmus's favorite film critic, Stephanus Prædator:

If you're going to make a movie about vampires fighting with automatic weapons in crowded Eastern European go-go joints, this is the way to do it.

Yeah, baby. Read the rest here, if you care to. Although, as he concludes, you're likely only to care to if you fall into a few, narrow groups.

Well, anyway: This movie is for a variety of segmented audiences: children whose souls have been leeched by MTV, folks with IQs under 100 and geniuses with IQs over 150. You normal people stay away: You won't get it, you won't like it, and you'll feel violated by it.

Film geeks will love his opening, though...

And buy Prædator's new book here.

Orcus: Mutatio

While Erasmus is waxing hemophagically, he should mention that he caught Underworld: Evolution the other week. This film is a sequel to Underworld, which introduced us to an undead protagonist played by Kate Beckinsale, she of the raven tresses, the intelligent eyes, the crispy enunciated posh accent, the alabaster caryatid figure...

Excuse Erasmus. He was caught in a bit of a reverie. Suffice it to say that Erasmus has enjoyed Miss Beckinsale (now Mrs. Len Wiseman) for many years. She’s a gifted actress and a lovely woman. So, when, three years ago, previews showed Miss B starring in Mr. W’s Underworld as a black-leather-clad vampire assassin, Erasmus allowed that she could chew on his jugular vein any time.

Alas, Underworld was a rather dull, talky vampire-politics film, with an underwhelming climax. The latter was obviously attributable to the meager special-effects budget, but the former was Erasmus’s real problem with the movie. In it, we are introduced to a world in which vampires and werewolves (too-cutely dubbed “Lycans” from “lycanthropes”) have been at war for some centuries. Events ensue, and Miss Beckinsale’s character, a werewolf-hunter (too-cutely dubbed “death-dealer”) finds herself caught amidst treachery from all sides, while trying to save an innocent caught at the center. It doesn’t hurt that said innocent is a hunky guy for whom she falls. Erasmus didn’t rate the movie, but the visuals aside, non placet.

Erasmus was more than a little surprised to see that a studio had backed a sequel, until he read that DVD sales had surpassed the theater grosses. Apparently, while not great, it was good enough to attract a solid audience. However, when Underworld: Evolution, said sequel, arrived in theaters without critics’ screenings, Erasmus assumed the worst. However, there’s not much out there in pop-culture land, and Mrs. E does like action flicks.

A further surprise ensued. It did not stink. Indeed, Erasmus quite enjoyed the flick. It did not suffer from the glacial pacing of the first one, toned down the politics, upped the action quotient, and added a soupçon of sensuality. (Perhaps, lector, thou mayest argue that Erasmus’s mind was clouded by Mrs. W’s nude scene, carefully shot by Mr. W. And, lector, thou mayest be right.) One still requires a healthy ability to suspend disbelief, particularly with the backstory, but past that, it's good escapist fun.

In the second movie, Selene, the assassin, finds herself trying to protect Hunky Boyfriend (Scott Speedman, who’s really playing The Girl from most adventure movies: he’s not got a lot to do, except assist Selene in the final battle) from both the vampires and lycanthropes who have designs on him; particularly menacing is the specter of the two brothers who were apparently the Ur-vampire and Ur-werewolf. And, interestingly, a third force comes to play: a group of humans who appear to not only be aware of the shadow war between vampires and werewolves, but who have a ship-borne base from which they apparently try and marginalize it.

Erasmus liked a lot of things about the movie, particularly the setting in Hungary. Erasmus is a Hungarophile, and liked seeing the country and hearing the language again. Even better were the Hunnically-clad medieval vampire soldiers in the movie’s long set-up flashback.

In sum, Evolution is as big a step forward as Blade II was to its predecessor (though Wiseman lacks Guillermo del Toro’s genius for the Gothic and sheer mayhem—no criticism of Wiseman, this. Del Toro’s as good as it gets.)

Underworld: Evolution, surprisingly, placet.

Two notes: Selene is probably the best name for a distaff vampire Erasmus has ever heard. It also reminds him of the two very memorable literary characters, Selena Jardine in the late Sarah Caudwell’s brilliant and hilarious mysteries (start here), and Selena Keller in Claire Berlinski’s terrific Loose Lips.

Second, firearms aficionadi will be interested to note that Heckler & Koch is apparently the official armorer of the supernatural underworld. Vampires seem to prefer the elegance of the classic 9mm MP5A3 with retractable stock, while the humans prefer the next-generation UMP and G36. Werewolves decline to use firearms, it seems. Probably because their fur keeps getting caught in the action...

De historicō

Erasmus has spent several pleasant evenings in the company of Elizabeth Kostova’s first novel, The Historian. Erasmus doesn't care to give away any of the book's twists and turns, but it gives away little to say that it broadly concerns historians, Vlad III Ţepeş of Wallachia and his alter ego courtesy of Bram Stoker, Count Dracula the vampire.

As an enthusiast of Balkan history, vampire myths, and Stoker’s novel, Erasmus could not resist picking up the book, and was not displeased. Ms. Kostova’s research was very good. Her writing is quite good, and the story’s twists and turns are quite satisfying. Erasmus found it a thoroughly entertaining, literate, page-turner. (And moreover, her characters visit Budapest and Istanbul, two of Erasmus's favorite cities.) He looks forward to Ms. Kostova’s future works.

By way of criticism, Erasmus will note that in an obvious homage to Stoker, Ms. Kostova has written The Historian as an epistolary novel. While this is clever, the form was already rather antiquated when Stoker took it up in 1897. Dracula's dynamism overcomes the form’s inherent artificiality (and indeed was a bit of a techno-thriller as well for the day, featuring all sorts of high-tech Victoriana like typewriters, telegraphs, dictation cylinders, et cetera). The Historian is generally successful, but one’s suspension of disbelief is slightly tested by the premise’s requirements of huge caches of letters and diaries which make up the book's 642 pages.

Moreover, the first historian and narratrix we meet begins the story when she was 17 or so in Amsterdam in the early 1970s. This frame narrative then proceeds to disappear for huge sections of the book as we learn about the book’s real protagonists, her father and the mother she never knew. Her parents’ story and her own reconnect at the climax, though the frame narrative adds little dramatic heft to the scene which is, alas, slightly disappointing and less dramatic than one would have wished.

Erasmus’s main complaint about the book is the same as he had about another very enjoyable literary entertainment, Matt Bondurant’s Third Translation: dreadful editing. Ms. Kostova should complain loudly to her publishers. Erasmus was poked in the eye by errors in the book’s Romanian, Hungarian, and Turkish, and at least twice the text strongly suggests the main language of the Ottoman Empire was Arabic rather than Ottoman Turkish. Moreover, various characters receive books labeled DRAKULYA, which is an obviously semi-Anglicized version of the Romanian Drăculea (perhaps English by way of Russian or Bulgarian?). Why this bizarre orthography appears rather than the Romanian, or a German or Slavic "Drakulja" is never explained. Along the same lines, Ms. Kostova's editors introduced (or let stand) the Bulgarian Tsarigrad when the Slavonic Tsargrad was more appropriate in some instances.

But Erasmus quibbles. Obviously.

Vampire novels of late have been dominated by either gothic-lite romances or talky political squabbles, both the legacies of Anne Rice, whose Interview With the Vampire and its undistinguished sequels completely revitalized the form. Erasmus also suspects the very popular vampire-politics role-playing game Vampire: The Masquerade compounded these tendencies among writers familiar with it. The Historian is a fine addition to the vampire genre, and a welcome return to the tradition of Stoker. Her villain, and Erasmus won't reveal who he is, is far more akin to Count Dracula than Lestat and kith.

Her accomplishments are all the more impressive as The Historian is Ms. Kostova's first novel. In consequence, Erasmus must say, Ave.

P.S. Erasmus's review is not at all affected by Ms. Kostova's apparent knowledge of his occult work, Sicarii fortunæ. (See page 217 of the Little, Brown edition.)