Word: frankenstein
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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What's sadly ironic about this is that Gods and Monsters deals with the final days of James Whale. Whale was the director of Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein, films that were immensely popular in their day and can now be found on film school syllabi. Moreover, as Gods and Monsters illustrates in a couple of touching scenes, they can still be enjoyed today: These were and are, above all else, movies...
There are, thankfully, some notable exceptions in Gods and Monsters, namely Whale's dreams and flashbacks. The former have him in his own movies, playing the Doctor Frankenstein to Boone's Monster and vice versa. Shot in retrospective monochrome, the film here manages to capture the beauty of Whale's movies without distracting the viewer from the matter at hand--Whale and Boone's increasingly complex relationship. Similarly, the flashbacks to the war, and to Whale's wistful memories of "love in the foxholes," are masterfully done. Alas, these all have the ulterior motive of emphasizing the film's already...
...Story 2 and a project dubbed Monsters, Inc., about the creatures living beneath a child's bed. DreamWorks is hoping for Antz-size success with Shrek, set for 2000 and featuring an ogre who pines for a beauty (some things never change). Universal is working on a Frankenstein project with CGI pioneer Industrial Light & Magic. Warner Bros. is readying The Iron Giant, about a machine that befriends a boy in 1950s Maine. And although both of Disney's '99 releases, Tarzan and Fantasia 2000, use traditional animation, each will contain elements created largely by computer...
...stunted man of thought, the malefic man of action--played by Ian McKellen, the prime Shakespearean actor of our time. Now, with leading roles in two ambitious thrillers, Sir Ian, 59, must face the inconvenience of movie stardom. In Gods and Monsters, he is James Whale, the director of Frankenstein, who in his last days seeks a young man to ease his roiling soul. In the Stephen King tale Apt Pupil, he plays an aged Nazi, living incognito in California, who is forced into an uneasy alliance with a curious teenager. McKellen is the soul of pained grace...
...dramas, all about artists in extremis, are traditional in another sense. They locate the not so divine decadence--all that is theatrical, naughty, self-destructive--in gay sex. Bill Condon's Gods and Monsters stars Ian McKellen in a parable about '30s Hollywood director James Whale (Frankenstein, Show Boat). Like Billy, he is consumed with sexual longing, but here it is the ultimate form of masochism: a desire to be killed. The erotic charge sizzles in Lisa Cholodenko's High Art, a pensive throwback to the drug-and-sex angst of the '70s. It tosses Ally Sheedy into heavy, fraught...