willem dafoe | the m0vie blog

New Podcast! Vampire Videos – “Shadow of the Vampire (2000)”

Posted on October 18, 2022 by Darren

I was thrilled to be invited to join the great Dan Owen and Hugh McStay for an episode of their new podcast, Vampire Videos.

It was a thrill to get to talk about, and revisit, Shadow of the Vampire. It was the first time I had watched the meta horror commentary in decades, so it was fascinating to return to it with new eyes and a deeper understanding of the film’s historical context. It’s a movie that ties together the history of the vampire and origins of cinema as a medium, constructing a pitch black horror comedy about the paradox of the movie camera as an instrument that both steals life and grants immortality.

You can listen directly to the episode below or by clicking here.

Filed under: Movies, Podcasts! | Tagged: comedy, Filmmaking, horror, Movies, Nosferatu, podcast, shadow of the vampire, vampire videos, willem dafoe | Leave a comment »

304. Speed 2: Cruise Control (-#97)

Posted on September 24, 2022 by Darren

Hosted by Andrew Quinn and Darren Mooney, and this week with special guests Jason Coyle and Richard Drumm, The 250 is a weekly trip through some of the best (and worst) movies ever made, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users. New episodes are released Saturdays at 6pm GMT.

So this week, Jan de Bont’s Speed 2: Cruise Control.

SWAT team member Alex Shaw decides to take his girlfriend Annie on a luxurious ocean cruise, planning to propose to her. Fate has other plans, in the form of mysterious terrorist John Geiger, who has a score to settle and a score to pull, hijacking the liner and setting it on a collision course for disaster. Soon enough, it isn’t just Alex and Annie’s relationship that finds itself careening out of control.

At time of recording, it was ranked 97th on the list of the worst movies of all time on the Internet Movie Database.

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Filed under: The Bottom 100 | Tagged: 1997, award, blockbusters, failure, Fox, jan de bont, jason patric, Keanu Reeves, podcast, sandra bullock, Speed, speed 2, speed 2: cruise control, success, The Bottom 100, titanic, water, water tanks, willem dafoe | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On Willem Dafoe as the Stealth MVP of “Spider-Man: No Way Home”…

Posted on December 20, 2021 by Darren

I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. This weekend marks the release of Spider-Man: No Way Home, so it seemed like a good idea to take a look at the movie. In particular, its best and most interesting performance.

No Way Home marks the return of several classic villains from early franchise iterations. Among them is Willem Dafoe, returning as Norman Osborn from Spider-Man and Spider-Man II. It’s a wonderful reminder of how Dafoe codified a lot of the modern comic book movie supervillain, establishing a template that has rarely been equalled in terms of quality across the ensuing decades. However, it’s to the credit of No Way Home that the film manages to use the character of Norman Osborn in a way that enriches and explores the villain.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: green goblin, in the frame, peter parker, power, responsibility, spider man, spider-man: no way home, the escapist, willem dafoe | Leave a comment »

252. Platoon (#222)

Posted on September 18, 2021 by Darren

Hosted by Andrew Quinn and Darren Mooney, with special guest Joe Griffin, The 250 is a (mostly) weekly trip through some of the best (and worst) movies ever made, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users. New episodes are released every Saturday at 6pm GMT.

This time, Oliver Stone’s Platoon.

In late 1967, Chris Taylor volunteers for service in Vietnam. Arriving in country, Taylor quickly discovers that the war is not what he expected. As the platoon descends into civil war, Taylor finds himself torn between the two sergeants: the monstrous Barnes and the philosophical Elias. Taylor discovers that he might not just be fighting for his life, but for his very soul.

At time of recording, it was ranked 222nd on the list of the best movies of all time on the Internet Movie Database.

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Filed under: The 250 | Tagged: afghanistan, awards, dale dye, history, joe griffin, legacy, memory, Method Acting, oliver stone, Oscars, Platoon, podcast, propaganda, The 250, tom berenger, vietnam, Vietnam War, war, willem dafoe | Leave a comment »

Non-Review Review: A Most Wanted Man

Posted on September 9, 2014 by Darren

For better or worse, A Most Wanted Man is going to be overshadowed by the passing of its lead actor. Philip Seymour Hoffman was a giant, a performer with a wonderful gift for bringing flawed and real characters to life, and A Most Wanted Man serves as his last leading role in a major motion picture. It is impossible to talk about A Most Wanted Man without talking about Philip Seymour Hoffman’s performance, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

It is a great performance, one that reminds the audience of why they loved Hoffman in the first place – Günther Bachmann is the sort of flawed human being that Hoffman played so well, given a great deal of depth by the late actor.

What’s on the table?

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: 9/11, a most wanted man, espionage, film, germany, John le Carré, Movie, non-review review, philip seymour hoffman, rachel mcadams, review, Robin Wright, thriller, willem dafoe | Leave a comment »

John Carter is Marred: Thoughts on Big-Budget Schadenfreude & Film Media Hypocrisy…

Posted on March 5, 2012 by Darren

Everybody is talking about Disney’s John Carter. And not in a good way. It seems that everybody is talking about the project’s huge budget and poor marketing, with many news outlets taking an obscene amount of pleasure in declaring Andrew Stanton’s live action project dead on arrival. Some have even started making comparisons to Waterworld, another science-fiction epic with a huge budget that failed to find an audience. In the interest of honesty, I haven’t seen the film yet; I am cautiously optimistic, but I can’t help but worry about the film. Still, I can’t help but feel like this is an example of an hypocritical “damned if do, damned if you don’t” logic from film writers and journalists all over the web, who seem to be salivating at the prospect of a huge studio being humbled by a blockbuster that might mess up the landing. The irony being that these are probably the same people who frequently deride the “safe” and “obvious” choices for blockbuster films, bemoaning the fact that directors like Guillermo Del Toro aren’t given the budget to make the films they want to make.

Does anybody "get" Carter?

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Filed under: Movies | Tagged: Andrew Stanton, disney, Edgar Rice Burroughs, guillermo del toro, hollywood, John Carter, oscar, Princess of Mars, Tars Tarkas, Taylor Kitsch, The Walt Disney Company, willem dafoe | 6 Comments »

Non-Review Review: Platoon

Posted on July 15, 2011 by Darren

I think now, looking back, we did not fight the enemy; we fought ourselves. The enemy was in us. The war is over for me now, but it will always be there, the rest of my days. As I’m sure Elias will be, fighting with Barnes for what Rhah called “possession of my soul.” There are times since, I’ve felt like a child, born of those two fathers.

– ~~Oliver Stone~~ Charlie Taylor meditates on Vietnam

I honestly think that Platoon might be my favourite war film ever made. It’s almost certainly my favourite Vietnam film ever made, despite my considerable respect for Apocalypse Now. However, though Stone’s classic is steeped in allegory and metaphor (see the above quote), I think that it works better as a personal account of the conflict, rather than Coppola’s attempt to capture the surreal nature of the war on celluloid. Stone actually served a tour over there, and I think that there’s a lot of his own personal perspective poured into the film, which makes it feel like quite a raw and powerful piece of cinema.

War is dirty business...

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: Charles Taylor, films, history, Jesus, Jesus Christ, military, Movies, non-review review, oliver stone, Platoon, review, tom berenger, vietnam, Vietnam War, willem dafoe | 4 Comments »

Non-Review Review: Wild at Heart

Posted on May 5, 2011 by Darren

I’ve always had a soft spot for David Lynch, if only because – much like David Cronenberg – you always got the sense that his artistic vision was pretty unfettered by concerns about broad appeal or studio policy or anything like that. There’s a wonderful sense of freedom, in how he works. There’s a great quote from the guys at Pixar that they don’t make movies for kids, they make movies for themselves – if other people happen to enjoy it, well… that’s great too. That sums up a lot of what I respect about Lynch. Wild at Heart isn’t perhaps one of those moments where Lynch’s interests manage to overlap with truly great cinema (as they do, I would argue, for Mullholland Drive, Blue Velvet and The Straight Story), but it isn’t so completely scattershot as to be impenetrable, either.

Dancing in the... highways?

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: Angelo Badalamenti, arts, david cronenberg, david lynch, elvis, elvis presley, film, Harry Dean Stanton, Movie, murder, music, nicolas cage, non-review review, review, Sound Files, Straight Story, wild at heart, willem dafoe | 7 Comments »

A Polar-ising Ad Campaign…

Posted on September 14, 2010 by Darren

I don’t know if our American readers are aware, but Willem Dafoe has been appointed as the voice of a BirdsEye advertising campaign. Basically, the advertisements see customers open the freezer to find a stuffed polar bear offering them advice. In Willem Dafoe’s voice. He praises BirdsEye and then warns threatens lets them know he’ll be watching. How this is not the stuff of nightmares, I will never know.

In fairness, Hollywood actors advertising overseas is a bit of a tradition (in fact, it’s the whole basis of Lost in Translation) and most are incredibly banal (Benecio Del Toro selling ice cream? Please!), but this one I thought was worth a mention just for the surrealness. Willem Dafoe scaring people into buying his brand of produce is well worth comment.

Filed under: Movies | Tagged: advertising, birdseye, Polar bear, willem dafoe | 12 Comments »

Non-Review Review: Daybreakers

Posted on June 25, 2010 by Darren

It’s great when film makers find something original enough to play with. Daybreakers takes an intriguing little snippet most of us have probably had and dismissed while watching a cheap vampire film – “what would happen if the vampires won and became the dominant species?” – and stretches it out to a two-hour film. It’s a movie that’s bristling with all sorts of witty ideas, but the problem is that it never really takes the opportunity to lift itself out of the “trashy B-movie” category of vampire and futuristic military films. While there are some great notions and concepts at play here, they aren’t executed with a hint of finesse, instead played with the sort of skill you traditionally find in a hackneyed slasher movie. Which is a damn shame, because when the movie hits the right buttons, it really works.