Shadow of the Vampire (2000)
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the masturbatory nature of this annoyed me quite a bit and made it difficult for me to enjoy anything else about it. i think there should be a decent amount of enjoyment in seeing defoe and malkovich ham it up so much, and izzards’ and elwes’ characters were supposed to carry this further. but the whole thing felt too clunky for their showiness to be anything but a lot of hand-waving to me. expositional dialogue and no clear sense of space in most scenes left me feeling very little atmosphere. they worked the hell out of that antique train though.
when shreck and murnau have their first scene alone and establish the ‘filmmaking is dangerous, predatory work!’ theme they lost me completely. i watched it last week and don’t remember the specifics of the scene though.
