PIST-OFF

I got to hand it to the people that made this. Having borrowed from silent film, warner brothers cartoons, and video games, the premise would seem to lend itself to short feature or even sketch length. But to their credit the filmmakers took this wackadoo idea and ran it the length of a full length feature...... 108 minutes. That is longer than most comedies. I can't say it entirely works for the whole time.... it even takes a bit just to get into it. But they took the less easy choice and created an audacious absurdist comedy unlike anything you've ever seen before. Once you get rolling with the general weirdness of it all that 108 actually moves by at a pretty decent clip. Bravo on these guys.

I do think the run time is a little long but otherwise i think this is a movie with a surprising amount of small details about the passage of time and the relations between generations. Setting the movie in cities with less stereotypical film settings helps out alot.

The cast is mostly honest and forthright enough with the material they're given... no one would mistake this for oscar material but all in the same it transcends that for a real human level story. Relationships are fraught with loving difficulty. Solutions are made on the fly.

Again and again i found myself surprised at how much i liked this.

I love just about everything robert eggers has done. As someone who reads a fair amount of history picking up on little historical details that he gets right and many wouldn't even notice is always a fun thing. I looked forward to seeing this movie. In this instance eggers seems to have taken bits and pieces of the big four vampire movies.... murnau, browning, herzog, and coppola and reworked them into something every bit as atmospheric and moody as those. This movie is dark, both in the literal and metaphoric sense....

the cast rounds out with some fine performances especially lily rose depp and it's doubly interesting to see dafoe in here after he already had played a version of Schrek playing Nosferatu in 2000's shadow of the vampire. I can't quite at this time give it more than seven stars because i'm not sure about it rewatch value. I can't often see myself plopping down to watch this after work some night. That may be more a reflection of my luke warm attitude towards horror as a genre though.