How Had I Never Seen..."Bram Stoker's Dracula"

By Michael Cusumano

“You haven’t seen Bram Stoker’s Dracula?” my girlfriend gasped, stopping her laundry folding dead.

This caught my attention as it upset the established dynamic of our relationship. I am the one who interrupts every conversation with some version of “What? You’re telling me you’ve never seen [insert name of film no one has ever watched outside a film studies program]?!"

She then reflected on how gorgeous Coppola’s vampire opus is and chastised herself for not owning it. This again was a reversal of the natural order. I wake up with night sweats at the thought that there is a great movie somewhere I don’t own. She owns approximately seven DVD’s she acquired by accident in the early 00’s which she stores in a dusty case next to "Jagged Little Pill" and her old Microsoft startup discs.

I immediately turned off what I was watching and popped on the Coppola film...

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The New Classics: The Babadook

Hello, everyone. Michael Cusumano here to close out the second season of The New Classics. Since I'm wrapping it up so close to Halloween I feel like it's my duty to honor one of the 21st Century's new horror icons.

At first glance Mr. Babadook appears to be a character engineered to anchor a horror franchise. His distinctive silhouette, with his spidery claws and wardrobe right out of Dr. Caligari’s cabinet, seems ready-made for branding. It’s only once you’ve been through the psychological wringer of Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook that you realize how ill-suited the character is to such a role. The Babadook is a single serving tormentor, tailored specifically to the psychological scars of Essie Davis’s Amelia. He could no more pick up and move to a different victim than Mrs. Bates could torture someone other than poor Norman.

Scene: The Book Returns...

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The New Classics: Frances Ha

By Michael Cusumano  

Scene: Paris
Frances is a dancer by trade, but I think it’s fair to say that throughout Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha her real art is poor decision making. In that regard, her impromptu trip to Paris is her masterpiece. 

The spontaneous journey to France is the quintessential youthful indulgence. “Oh to be so young and free that I could drop everything and jet off to Europe.” Unfortunately for Frances, Baumbach’s films delight in subverting such self-consciously grand gestures. In Kicking and Screaming a character engages in the classic end-of-movie race to the airport only to find he can’t get a last minute ticket. When the cashier offers him a ticket for the following day he deflates and declines. The moment will have passed by then. Frances doesn’t merely run to the airport, she flies to the other side of the Atlantic. As such, her antics earn her an even more brutal dismantling...

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The New Classics: The Wolf of Wall Street

By Michael Cusumano  

Scene: Quaaludes
It’s difficult not to lapse into hagiography when talking about Scorsese so I will simply say this and attempt to reign in the fawning as best I can: As much as anyone in the medium’s history he understands that the power of film isn’t in the text. It’s not in constructing an argument like an essay or a speech. It's in the images. 

Like all of Scorsese’s period pieces, The Wolf of Wall Street covers mountains of information in its headlong dash through the years, but what makes these films great are the moments when they distill all that material into a memorable frame. The technical gambling know-how makes you buy into the world of Casino, but it’s an overhead shot of a reckless Sharon Stone making it rain chips at the craps table that leaves a mark on the audience...

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The New Classics: Amélie

By Michael Cusumano 

I worked at The Ritz art house theaters in Philadelphia when Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie was released in 2001. My location was the smallest in the chain so we’d never get the hotly anticipated indie titles. However, when it came time to program Amélie somebody goofed and decided it would be a good fit for my location. We couldn’t pack the mobs in tight enough. Jeunet’s giddy Parisian carousel sold out screenings for nine months straight. I watched a lot of theaters empty out in my years at the movies, but there was something about the beaming smiles on Amélie’s crowds as they stumbled out of the darkness that stands out in the memory. 

Since then the knock against Amélie is not that its highs aren’t real, but that they are sugar highs. Empty calories. Like a five-course meal sculpted entirely from marzipan. I get it. It’s easy to imagine skimming across the surface charms of Jeunet’s Paris like one of Amélie’s skipping stones without ever engaging the intellect. I can only reply that Amélie engages my intellect...

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