Word: whaled
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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...
...years later, the Crimson (1-3-0, 0-3-0 ECAC) has already dropped three in as many ECAC games and will return to the Yale Whale this Saturday desperately needing what even its great title team could not secure...
...McKellen, we'll have you know--and he will too--is not an old man, though you wouldn't guess that from his two new movies. He plays the frail, 67-year-old movie director James Whale in Gods and Monsters, and a Nazi near 80 in Apt Pupil. "People must think I'm in my 70s," he says with a sigh. "My danger is being typecast older than I am." But that, ladies and gentlemen, is Acting. Sir Ian is a lithe 59, two years junior to Redford, Nicholson, Hoffman. He doesn't care to be cast forever...
...poured into a screen character. In Apt Pupil he is, in director Bryan Singer's phrase, "an old, alcoholic, sitcom-watching Nazi" hiding in California anonymity 40 years after the war and amused to perform a facsimile of his old mischief on a curious teenager (Brad Renfro). As Whale in Bill Condon's film, McKellen is sunset charm incarnate, a gay man melting inside his decaying body for the gross, cheerful fellow (Brendan Fraser) who works in the garden. It's Chekhov in lavender...
...brusque German one, but what makes him a great shot for film eminence is how suavely he listens. Listens with his eyes, attentive to nuances of lust or fear that may not even be there. Reacts with a prim wryness that hints at the Nazi's superiority, at Whale's indulgence. These lovely scenes give the audience a chance to study McKellen in wary repose. It's a face worth studying. A movie face, as Hollywood should soon understand...