Ken and Robin Consume Media: This Dracula is a Dracula, This Other Dracula is a Rasputin

October 31st, 2017 | Robin

Ken and Robin Consume Media is brought to you by the discriminating and good-looking backers of the Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff Patreon. Each week we provide capsule reviews of the books, movies, TV seasons and more we cram into our hyper-analytical sensoriums. Join the Patreon to help pick the items we’ll talk about in greater depth on our new podcast segment, Tell Me More.

Recommended

Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art (Nonfiction, Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo, 2009) Account of the activities of John Drewe, who sold dozens of fake modernist works into the art market by infiltrating British archives and adding doctored documents to lend them credibility. Ably distills a narrative made all the more complex by its central figure, a pathological liar who prospered not on credible untruths, but through a thick and ever-shifting cloud of BS, all delivered with unshakable self-belief.—RDL

Stranger Things Season 2 (Television, US, Netflix, The Duffer Brothers, 2017) As Chief Hopper keeps Eleven under wraps, and thus separated from a mournful Mike, a vastly powerful shadow entity from the Upside Down gets its psychic hooks into Will. Sophomore seasons are hard, so it’s not surprising to see the giddy perfection of season one settle into the solid, if a tad diffuse, storytelling of this follow-up. Points for maintaining its affection for its characters, and for a supernatural genre tale where the protagonists actually share information with one another.—RDL

Good

Have a Nice Day (Film, China, Jian Liu, 2017) When driver Xiao impulsively steals a bag with a million yuan at knife-point from a courier for “Uncle Liu” it sets off an early-Tarantino-ish tour through the grifters and criminals and weirdos connected to Xiao, Liu, or the bag. Animated in strong line and color against detailed unmoving backgrounds depicting a grottily anonymous Chinese city, and scored with (not enough) pop music, it’s its own beast even if that beast is a shaggy dog. –KH

The Throne (Film, South Korea, Lee Joon-Ik, 2015) Having ordered him nailed in a box to die of exposure, an 18th century king (Song Kang-ho) recalls a life spent undercutting his son, who he deems insufficiently scholarly to rule. Stately melodrama assumes a close knowledge of Joseon era royal court law and custom; viewers steeped in Korean history may rate it a bump higher.—RDL

Okay

Dracula (Play, Timothy F. Griffin and Sean Graney, 2017) Arch farce and Clifford Odets-style social theater are both tough to stage, much less in the same play … and neither are what one might leap to as “how to best adapt Dracula.” Unsurprisingly, the result is kind of a mess. Breon Azell’s Dracula is at least excellent in a broad, unleashed-id role; Erin Barlow’s Alice Renfield relishes all the good lines as an ironic madwoman. (Playing through Nov. 5 at the Mercury Theater in Chicago.)—KH

R-Point (Film, South Korea, Su Young Gong & Kong Su-chang, 2004) South Korean platoon fighting in the Vietnam War seek the whereabouts of missing soldiers last seen at a haunted temple. Lacks the pacing or directorial assurance to realize the coolness of its weird war premise.—RDL

Rasputin the Mad Monk (Film, UK, Don Sharp, 1966) Wine-guzzling, sexually predatory Russian monk (Christopher Lee) uses his decidedly supernatural powers of healing and hypnosis to gain power as a favorite of Czarina Alexandra. In structure and style, this Hammer oddity is a Dracula flick reskinned with period drama trappings. TCM recently showed a print of this Cinemascope pic compressed to Academy ratio, making the already imposing Lee look about nine feet tall.—RDL

Not Recommended

Death Rides a Horse (Film, Italy, Guilio Petroni, 1967) Sharpshooter on a white horse (John Philip Law) hunts the gang that killed his family when he was a child, but an ex-con on a black horse (Lee van Cleef) wants them too. As crisp as Petroni’s comic-panel visual compositions might be, what really lingers in the mind here are the intermittent blasts of gratuitous and stunningly blatant, lefty, white-savior racism. This is what you get when your 60s Italian Marxist screenwriters try to inject social commentary into your cartoony spaghetti western.—RDL