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MOVIES FOR CHRISTMAS Bring a Classic Vampire, a Teenage Girl Boxing and Bob Dylan

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Christmas day and big movies come out to tempt you. You've seen Wicked and the other big titles so here's  A Complete Unknown, Nosferatu and The Fire Inside, all very worthy. Two others getting big notices right now, The Brutalist and Better Man don't arrive in Canada until mid January and a third, Babygirl, wasn't available to me to preview. 

These were ...

A Complete Unknown: 3 stars 

Nosferatu: 3 ½

The Fire Inside: 4

A COMPLETE UNKNOWN: Come on in for a tremendous performance by Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan. He captures his aura, sings like him and at times even looks just like him. Also shows his drive and ambition, flavored with quite a bit of his bluntness which the director James Mangold doesn’t see as rudeness, but truth telling. 

Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures

This film doesn’t add anything new to what we already know, but it does a great job of re-creating the time and his impact. From 1961 when he arrived in New York and amazed the folk music scene with original songs full of poetry and images to just four years later when he shocked many of those people by going electric at the Newport Folk Festival. That show gets a rousing re-creation here, a touch too wild I’d say. I was there and don’t remember the crowd being as loud and angry and one bit you hear actually happened in a British concert (as per a bootleg record). 

People fresh to the story might not get what the fuss was about. That’s because the film doesn’t get across why some fans felt betrayed. It doesn’t show the mass adoration they were into and that Dylan was breaking free of when he opened with “ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s Farm no more” and encored with “It’s all Over Now Baby Blue.” 

The film speeds through his career rise too fast and omits the planning done to go electric. 

Searchlight

It spends much of its time on Dylan’s relations with his girlfriend Suze Rotolo (here called Sylvie Russo and played by Elle Fanning) and with Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) who sang too pretty for his liking but represented success. His striving for some of that is well-shown as are record company people and other musicians. Edward Norton is excellent as Pete Seeger. But Dylan is as enigmatic as ever. (In theaters) 3 out of 5   

NOSFERATU: It takes some courage to remake a film as iconic as Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror. The 1922 German production left us stark images of a cadaverous vampire loosely based on Bram Stoker's Dracula and a creepy sense of dread. It looks antique these days but with its strong German Expressionism it can still chill. Werner Herzog remade it in 1979 and now Robert Eggers has again. 

Courtesy of Focus Features

He's dabbled in classic movie genres before, witchcraft, Vikings, isolation-caused madness, and has re-tooled this with a modern psychosexual slant. 

Count Orlok, played by Bill Skarsgård, appears to a young woman (Lily-Rose Depp) in her dreams, and has for years. She's obsessed with these visions; thinks they're premonitions and  suffers fits and disturbances. 

Focus Features

Her safe and steady husband (Nicholas Hoult) can calm her down but when he's sent to Transylvania to negotiate a real estate deal with a certain Count he brings him back with him to Germany. The Count brings along rats that cause plague. He also comes on to the young wife whose erotic visions start up again. Two friends (Emma Corrin and Aaron Taylor-Johnson) can't help her and a professor (Willem Dafoe) recognizes that a vampire is around but also can't help drive him away. That would require something extreme. The film is an extreme gothic tale anyway. The Count is repulsive, like a drooling animal. The film starts like one of those Hammer studio films from England and then gets much darker, and artful. Horror fans will enjoy it. (In theaters) 3 ½ out of 5 

THE FIRE INSIDE: An inspirational story is always good for Christmas time and this fits very well. It’s set in a world we don’t get to very often – young women’s boxing—and brings us one of the greatest in the sport, Claressa Shields. She was only 17 when she set her sights on competing at the Olympics and the film explains why. She was poor, lived in a rundown part of Flint, Michigan and wanted to win to get known and get endorsement deals to help pay for food for her and her mom. Ryan Destiny plays her with an endearing personality and enthusiasm. 

She almost sets herself back when asked why she took up boxing and answered “I like to beat people up”. That’s not really the character she projects. 

Courtesy of WB and Amazon MGM

Her coach (played by Brian Tyree Henry) believes in her and pushes her to excel. He sends her to a China for a Olympic qualifying match, which she did, but just barely, and on to the Olympics where she won gold. There was a second Olympics but also another competition in parallel. She found that men were getting endorsement deals, women were not. “Does what I do even count?” she wonders. “Money is recognition,” she says. Sponsors, she’s told, aren’t interested because they feel “people don’t like seeing women get punched in the face.” The film addresses the whole wider issue of secondary status for women athletes and shows how Claressa dealt with it. 

The film is well-written by Academy-award winner Barry Jenkins (he directed Mufasa The Lion King which is playing right now) and was directed by Rachel Morrison whose background is in cinematography. The boxing scenes are terrific. They and all the striving will have you cheering. (In theaters) 4 out of 5 

 

 

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