Review | What We Do in the Shadows

It's always a risk watching a comedy film based on the trailer. However much you might laugh at the trailer, it's very possible that those clips were the only good parts of the film and the rest of it is an unfunny slog. So even though I was able to buy the DVD of this film for £4, which isn't much lost if it turned out to suck, I still had a feeling of trepidation when I sat down to watch it yesterday. What if it just wasn't that funny?

Fortunately, that wasn't the case. What We Do in the Shadows is hilarious. It's from the creators behind Flight of the Concords, and is a mockumentary detailing the daily lives of four vampires who share a house in Wellington, New Zealand. There's the 800+-year-old Vladislav, who looks disturbingly similar to Gary Oldman's Dracula in Francis Ford Coppola's film and possesses a truly medieval torture chamber and attitude; the Romantic-with-a-capital-R Viago, who has beautiful sideburns and very tight trousers; the "bad boy" of the group, Deacon, who looks more like a rock star than any of the others and fled to New Zealand because post-WWII it was bad news if you were a Nazi vampire; and Petyr, who is 8000 years old and practically mummified.

Let me introduce you to my crew.

Oh wait, I forgot one - Nick. If that doesn't sound much like a vampire name, it's because rather than being a pre-20th Century European bloodsucker, he's an ordinary twentysomething Kiwi bloke who's accidentally turned into a vampire by an encounter with Petyr. He takes it upon himself to introduce his new vampire friends to the wonders of modern life - including eBay, Skype, and karate. They take to them enthusiastically, on the whole, even though Deacon becomes jealous of Nick because he's stealing his spotlight and his fashion sense.

These vampires walk the line between old-fashioned blood-drinking creatures of the night and more modern, deconstructed portrayals. There's been some interesting, creative portrayals of vampires in TV and film over the last few years - Being Human, Let the Right One In, Only Lovers Left Alive, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, Byzantium - and while the vampires of What We Do in the Shadows don't bring anything particularly new to the table, they're also tons of fun. A lot of the scenes in the trailer become even funnier in context, and there are plenty of side-splitting moments that didn't make it into the trailer. There is, I think, a time and a place for serious meditations on vampires as a symbol of death and immortality; sometimes you just want a fun fantasy about melodramatic immortal creatures who worry about what to wear to the Unholy Masquerade, and bemoan the fact that they can't eat fish and chips without spewing blood.

While vampires are the focus of the film, there's also a local werewolf gang which plays a small but substantial role in the plot. Mostly they're your typical werewolves, although their leader has some puritanical opinions regarding swearing which he imposes on the rest of the group - they have to be reminded a few times that they're "werewolves, not swearwolves".

The trailer is fairly accurate with regards to the tone and feel of the film, so I recommend you watch it:

If it seems to your taste, I promise the actual film is even better!

A Little Love, A Little Chaos

Today is my last day at home before I head back to university. The weather has continued throughout April - blue skies, sun, and heat every day. It hasn't rained for weeks. So yesterday was a good day to hang out with my best friend Danielle one final time, and we spent a lot of it down at the old bowling green (now essentially a park) in my town, with Coke and burgers and the sun. However, we also went to see A Little Chaos, because Danielle has an enormous crush on Alan Rickman, so I might as well write about it.

As far as period dramas go, I've seen better. I feel like something set at the French court should have been more unashamedly sleazy; a lot of pro reviewers have called A Little Chaos too sedate for the setting it's portraying, and I'd agree with that. It's also much too slow, with a beginning that goes on for ever (we know Le Notre is going to hire Sabine de Barra to do the landscape feature in Versailles, it really doesn't need to be dragged out) and a middle that could have been cut down a bit. It's not bloated so much as slow, which is at least something, because I still get angry sometimes about all the pointless, pointless filler in the Hobbit films.

There are lots of things that worked for me, though. Kate Winslet is wonderful as the widowed gardener Sabine de Barra. This film has a good cast in general, although I retain a special fondness for Stanley Tucci's flamboyant bisexual dandy, and Jennifer Ehle was enjoyable as his good-natured wife. The music was good, too - I'm tempted to get the soundtrack, which was just right for this film and really elevated some of the scenes. In terms of the plot, while I criticise the beginning and a lot of the middle, the last half hour was worth the price of admission alone. There's an absolutely marvellous scene when de Barra arrives at the court in Fontainebleau and she ends up being taken to a "secret space" where the women of the court gather; a few of them are familiar faces, such as Jennifer Ehle's character, but most are not. One of the women asks her about her marital status and she says she's widowed and had one child (who is dead now). It's something that's been hinted throughout the film, and we'll hear the full story later, because de Barra can't bear to tell it now - it's too painful. But that's OK - as we go round the circle of women, a lot of them admit that they've lost children (and a few husbands as well), and they're happy to say it out loud even though "the King doesn't allow death to be spoken of at court" (I have no idea if that's the actual line, but it's something like that). They reassure her that even though she might not be able to talk about it yet, some day she'll find the strength. It's an incredible, emotional scene that makes you feel it without being exploitative.

Anyway, it's not my favourite film but it was overall fun to watch, and what it lacked in plot and setting-appropriate sleaze it made up for in great acting, fun characters, and some genuinely touching scenes. Sadly I have no screencaps, because the costumes in this film were to die for.

Review | Ko To Tamo Peva

Down a dirt track that winds across the rolling green fields, under a chalky blue-and-grey sky, a dilapidated pink van rattles along, accompanied by a jaunty tune. Inside, several mismatched passengers are eager to reach Belgrade, even if it means travelling in a falling-down bus driven by a reckless young man who is perfectly willing to drive blindfolded to prove that he's as good a driver as he claims.

It's April 1941, and as the opening frames say, the scene is "somewhere in Serbia". The fact that the country is facing imminent German invasion is obvious, as complaints about the army appear in one of the very first scenes, where a motley group of travellers stand by the side of a field track waiting for the bus. Ko to tamo peva (released in English as Who's Singin' Over There?) is undeniably a WWII film - but it's also hysterically funny. The long, rickety, trying journey from rural Serbia to Belgrade is marked by many obstacles, including a broken bridge, an obstinate farmer who has ploughed over the road and insists on a payment of 100 dinars before he lets them pass, a funeral, and the driver's recruitment into the army.

The disastrous and chaotic journey is all in the name of comedy: the owner of the bus, Krstić, refuses to let a passenger on because "the stop is 200m downhill", despite the fact that they're driving in a wasteland with no sign of life anywhere; during a funeral the young married couple sneak off to the woods, and end up being spied on by the rest of the passengers, who only realise when a consumptive passenger's hacking cough becomes too loud to hide; the pompous Germanophile falls off a bridge and seemingly drowns, only to reappear some time (and several kilometres) later, and having stripped off his sodden overclothes, ends up chasing a hare across a field in his underwear.

This film is an absurd comedy in the best possible way, bringing together a very disparate group of people and seeing just how ridiculous their situation can get, in a sort of demented roadtrip movie. While these people are in a Europe that is being swallowed up by Nazi forces - indeed, the Nazi invasion of Belgrade ends the film - most of their concerns are far more pedestrian. The moustachioed singer wants to get to Belgrade in time for his audition, and later on makes it his mission to seduce the young bride away from her incompetent husband. The bride, for her part, dreams of going to the sea, although her husband seems far less enthusiastic. The old veteran, who considers his war history to be a source of great pride, wants to see his son, who has joined the Artillery, again. The oncoming war is a shadow over the whole film, but it is not the be all and end all; these people don't live in constant fear, and mostly just want to get on with their lives. It's a refreshing change from the sort of unrelenting grimness that permeates many American WWII films, and a reminder that just because something is set during a war, doesn't mean the war is all there is.

Ko to tamo peva is considered a classic in the ex-Yugoslavia, and one of the most quotable films to come out of the Balkans. It's not an undeserved title; this film is utterly hilarious, with many brilliant lines as well as physical comedy. Eastern European cinema is frequently associated in the West with depressing realist films that make quite sure to hammer home how much of a forsaken slump life is east of the former Iron Curtain. It's hard to get a balanced picture of Eastern European cinema when most of what gets released in the West tries to be relevant - which of course means bleak and miserable. But this 1980 Yugoslav film is brilliantly, absurdly funny, and an excellent antidote to the stereotype of Eastern European cinema in the West.

If you want to watch Ko to tamo peva, you can do so here, with English subtitles:
Ko to tamo peva