The Raven
When I went to pick up my comic book subscription today, Kin, the manager, offered me and
fairestcat tickets to see The Raven tonight, the new John Cusack movie.
Now, John Cusack is an actor whose name I hear fairly often, and whose face is familiar, but the only movie I could ever recall seeing him in was Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which didn't thrill me. Looking over his list of movies on IMDb, I see that it's the only one of his movies that I have seen. Until this one.
Which didn't thrill me, either.
It's a story in which Edgar Allan Poe's girlfriend is kidnappped by a serial killer, and he has to find the killer before he kills her.
It doesn't pass the Bechdel test. It's a world without women - I can think of only three with speaking roles in the whole movie, and two of them only have a line or two - and the primary woman, Poe's fiancee, gets to do the traditional screaming, begging, panicking in he dark, and being locked in tiny spaces. A refrigerator woman, more or less.
The character I liked best was Luke Evans as Inspector Fields. He had a lot of style and panache. The story was moody - but insubstantial: there were only four suspects, and one by one each seemed unlikely until the rather predictable culprit was revealed. The story felt like an Edgar Allan Poe story, except that Edgar Allan Poe stories don't have to provide the kind of plotting and coherence of a full-length movie, and it all ran a little thin by the end. I was, in fact, left in the end thinking a little less of Poe's works than I had before the movie; made me realize how little substance they actually have.
Best thing about the movie (besides Luke Evans) was the setting: Baltimore in 1849. I love historical settings. I also like foggy scenes, of which there were plenty. Was Baltimore ever really that misty?
I also liked the very first scene, in which a drunken Poe is refused drink in a tavern, because he has no money left, since he has not been writing. It made me think of numerous scenes of Wolverine in taverns, though it seems Wolverine can always pay for his drink.
Fangirlishly, I was thrilled to get an Avengers plastic drinking cup with a figure of Thor on it. And a ticket to the midnight showing of The Avengers next week.