2-18-10 Movie Review: Wolfman

At least three noncommercial movie showings between tonight and Friday night. Tonight at 6 the series of black movies connected to the Gordon Parks exhibit in the Ulrich Museum on the WSU campus, as well as one of the Tallgrass' Third Thursday showings, is C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America, the fake documentary from 2004 in which the South wins the Civil War, and Lincoln puts on blackface and flees to Canada. New Times rates C.S.A. "easily the nerviest film about race, religion, and U.S., imperialism ever made." The showing will be in the CAC Theatre, NOT McKnight -- the CAC Theatre, 6 tonight, The Confederate States of American with director Kevin Willmott of the University of Kansas, KMUW's own Carla Eckels moderating a discussion group, and Jean Griffith, Randal Jelks, Rueben Eckels, and Rupert Pate making up the group -- and you, if you want to.

Tonight at 7, the Orpheum is showing Pretty in Pink, what some people think is the best of the John Hughes "youth movies" of the Eighties, starring Molly Ringwald, Harry Dean Stanton, James Spader, Gina Gershon, and Andrew "Dice" Clay, among others.

And Friday at 7:30, the Murdock Theatre at 536 N. Broadway continues its French series with the superclassic Grand Illusion, Jean Renoir's 1937 story of a German prisoner of war camp in World War I, starring Erich von Stroheim and top French actors of the thirties, with Pierre Fresnay and Jean Gabin the best remembered now.

It's not an atrocity story, sort of a grandfather of Stalag 17 and, on a ridiculously lower level, Hogan's Heroes. 7:30, Murdock Theatre, Friday.

And commercially we have The Wolfman.

It's quite a bit like the Don Chaney version, even to the point that Benicio Del Toro seems, especially in his first couple of appearances, to be made up to look somewhat like Chaney, though the roles are not all that much alike. The 1941 Wolfman, if my ever-unreliable memory can be trusted for once, was almost evenly divided between the horrific story of the wolf man and the tragic story of the Chaney character, an innocent, even heroic, victim of the bite of a wolfman, who was trying desperately to find a cure for his lycanthropism, or, failing that, to keep himself from doing harm when transformed on full moon nights. The Del Toro version places more emphasis on the horror elements and a certain amount of social criticism, especially in terms of academia, medical science, and vigilantes, who range from the quite legitimate desire to destroy werewolves to lynch-mobbing without a lot of concern for the public good.

The opening poem, which was also in the 1941 version, suggests that werewolves can only appear on moonlit nights, but at least one scene violates that old rule with a suggestion of the Incredible Hulk, and at least one scene suggests that the transformation into something wolflike can be deliberate. No harm done by revisionism like that.

But one gets the impression that the sun never rises in Victorian England; on the few occasions where there is sunlight in the streets, everybody, not just the wolf people, scurries into shadowy buildings and darkened hallways within; it isn't just the ghastly open wounds and splashes of blood that might make The Wolfman hard for you to watch; the darkness makes it literally hard to see. And the ominous mutters and whispers don't make it easy to hear, and the lugubrious musical score makes it less than a delight to listen to. But there's a lot of good stuff here, especially in the use of the preacher. But the tone is unvaryingly dismal, none of the characters is particularly interesting, and it's hard to make the transformations impressive in the days of CGI, so Wolfman doesn't much try.