One word, PhilosophicalFrog: Stander. One of the greatest docudramas ever.

But the original one had the cool Lovecraftian slant to it where you get hints of these huge mountainous creatures stomping around in the Mist. And the desolated atmosphere was great...I dunno, been quite a few years since I read that story too.

Watched Nosferatu. My experience with old ass black and white silent films is pretty limited (in the last 6 years or so I've only seen the Artist, and that doesn't count.) I wasn't expecting it to look so strange. It's not the really crisp black and white of stuff like The Twilight Zone, that's for sure. It's the visual equivalent of raw black metal. I wouldn't say I really enjoyed this, as my ADD was kicking in pretty severely with nothing to latch on to except imagery and the occasional moment of brilliant music (most of it is pretty dull.) But I will mention that the guy who played the vampire actually looked creepy as hell, and when he was actually on screen the movie was enjoyable. What with the unforgettable image of his shadow on the wall, and his strange and awkward gait.

One of my favourite films of all time... The aptly-named Max Schreck's Nosferatu is one of the few horror characters who genuinely scares me at some deep level (possibly because my mother watched this as a child and I grew up with her telling me how terrifying it is); truly, truly excellent.

Just watched Prometheus for the first time last night. The visuals/production design as well as my general curiosity kept me going (particularly seeing as Alien is one of my favorite films of all time), but in terms of plot it was pretty retarded. A lot of wasted potential there. Far too many plot holes + shit that seemed to be in there purely just as meaningless filler. Lazy writing. Heavy (read: painfully spelled-out) metaphors with no substantial backup, some mediocre acting, a few fucking laughable lines ("...I guess that's part of why I'm a human....and you're a robot..."). Ah, but what could we expect, really? At least it was real pretty...? All the alien artwork/architecture was kickass.

Yep, Shadow of the Vampire was very good. Easily one of the best modern vampire movies, if you ask me. Concerning Max Schreck, apparently he was a pretty strange guy in real life. According to someone he knew him, he basically lived in his own world and spent lots of time 'walking in dark forests'. Black metal before there was black metal!

I actually prefer Klaus Kinski's Nosferatu - obviously he's going for a significantly different slant on the character, but I find him more compelling.

He's certainly more powerful, I think, purely in terms of what the vampire can do - in a way, Orlok is almost pathetic at times, in this horrifying vermin-like way, whereas Kinski's Dracula seems like a more forceful villain; to me, that actually makes Schreck's character more monstrous - he really gets under my skin and seems even less human. Just my take, though. I do have to say that I prefer the ending of Kinski's version; it's an interesting route that's not often taken by adaptations of the Dracula narrative.

Well I got around to seeing Skyfall. It's pretty much only good for the intro sequence, which is cool as, then a pretty good start until you actually meet the main villain, after that it gets stupid as hell. You've got a Dark Knight level clusterfuck of "That was all a plan!" bullshit writing, to the point of Silver planning to drop a fucking train on his pursuer at a specific time and a specific, completely out of the way location using a bomb he planted months beforehand. Then you've got the new Q, who is one of the worst character's ever created, he's young, he's hip and he can hack magic, the hacking on here is so bad it seriously shows hacking as a goddamn GUI video game, like that 80's movie. Then you've got the dumbassed conclusion, where the bad guy just goes weird as hell, who despite always wanting to kill M, suddenly has to have some kind of murder suicide gesture despite trying to shoot her right in face 24 hours before, and damn how stupid do the heroes have to be to walk using torches while being within viewing range of the building the bad guys are actively shooting at after escaping the scene safely through a hidden tunnel the bad guys don't even know exists, and just blew up the only entrance too, so they would NEVER know they used it. In fact the whole genesis of the film suddenly sucking is triggered by Bond getting himself captured for no reason at all (and getting his current vagina deadened the process), after he'd snuck onto a boat without detection, and was on his way to the bad guys island where he could have gone completely secretly and not gotten captured as his first plan.

Haha, I didn't see those comments about Kinski. I certainly agree that Kinski and Herzog flesh out the character more than, either, the novel or Murnau's film; in my view, though, while that's an improvement on the dramatic potential of the book, it makes him less creepy to me, as I find things whose internal states I can imagine or attempt to understand less terrifying than things that look humanoid but seem to lack any resemblance to human mentalities. Orlok is an utterly 'other' creature, something with a familiar shape but with a mind that is clearly so different, ancient and warped that it seems there is no way of really communicating with it or understanding it; he's a blank slate in the way that something completely alien would be. That's just my take, of course. I've said it before, but I always find it very interesting to see how differently people react to films.

Kinski's performance, Ganz's performance, the astounding photography, and Popol Vuh's score all make that film a damned masterpiece.

As great as the film is, and let's face it, it's near perfect... the soundtrack is even better! Definitely worth getting on its own.

Honestly, I generally prefer his documentaries; Into the Abyss and Encounters at the End of the World floored me (that sad little (seemingly) suicidal penguin still haunts me).

Have you seen Bad Lieutenant Port of Call: New Orleans? Amazing movie.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QG_VaTDn9Uk

I thought the original Bad Lieutenant was decent, Harvey Keitel's acting was fantastic, but it could have been a lot better with a few changes:

On the subject of Herzog's fictional cinema, though, I'd say that Woyzeck is among my favourites - another stunning Kinski performance; the way his visions are done, and the ending, are pretty damn incredible, and I find that the age of the film just adds to the distorted atmosphere.