The Blood Countess review – Isabelle Huppert reigns supreme in a surreal vampire fantasia

Vienna turns into a playground of camp, cruelty and aristocratic disdain in a blackly comic take on the Báthory legend – with Huppert gloriously suited to the title role From the dark heart of central Europe comes a midnight-movie romp through the moonlit urban glades of Euro-goth and camp from German director Ulrike Ottinger. As for the star … well, it’s the part she was born to play. Isabelle Huppert is Countess Elizabeth Báthory, 16th-century Hungarian noblewoman and serial killer, legendary for having the blood of hundreds of young girls on her hands and indeed her body, in an attempt to attain eternal youth. The “blood countess” has been variously played in the past by Ingrid Pitt, Delphine Seyrig, Paloma Picasso, Julie Delpy and many more, but surely none were as qualified as Huppert who importantly does not modify her habitual hauteur one iota for the role. Her natural aristocratic mien and cool hint of elegant contempt were never so well matched with a part. She gives us the ...

Wanna be like who? Meet the man who ranked every Disney song

When musicologist Robert Komaniecki decided to score the cartoon tunes using complex objective criteria (and some ‘vibes’), he found some startling winners. He shows us his workings

When Robert Komaniecki started ranking Disney songs, he thought he knew how it would pan out. “I was born in 1990 and so in my mind, those are the best Disney musicals,” he says of the renaissance period that produced Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin. “I think a lot of my fellow millennials reading this list reacted in a similar way. They were like, ‘You have songs from The Little Mermaid below a song from Frozen? That’s unthinkable!’”

But Komaniecki is a music theorist, and his list removed nostalgia from the equation, instead assigning songs rankings out of 500, scored on lyrics, music, vocals, plot integration and subjective enjoyment (“vibes, basically”). By the time he posted his findings to X, counting down in daily batches of five to fierce debate from followers, he had meticulously analysed and ranked 115 songs.

Continue reading...

from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/vRp8kND
via IFTTT

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Miracle Club review – Maggie Smith can’t save this rocky road trip to Lourdes

BREAKING: Interstellar back in cinemas due to public demand; Dune: Part Two to also re-release on March 14 in IMAX

‘I lost a friend of almost 40 years’: Nancy Meyers pays tribute to Diane Keaton