The CriticNear Dark
September 19th 2007 22:38
Near Dark
“Love Peggy Lee and her version of “Fever”....I've heard numerous cover versions but none come close....the song is used to sublime effect in Kathryn Bigelow's Vampire flick Near Dark.”
So, I said,
“Hi JD,
re: Kathryn Bigelow's Vampire flick Near Dark, I have to see a vampire movie cool enough to use Miss Lee's song... ...”
Well, I finally got a copy of Near Dark.
I don't want to spoil the film for you, so I'll pretty much just quote from the director's commentary on the dvd. It gives you a feel for the film.
Ms. Bigelow says that originally she wanted to make a western. But, at the time the horror genre was much more sale- able. So, what she and co-writer Eric Red did was graft a modern western onto a vampire movie. But, I don't think the word vampire is used anywhere in the movie. This isn't a film about fangs...
Oliver Stone was a friend of the director, and she asked him to read it and give her an opinion. He called the screenplay “script haiku”, that it was poetic, and you saw the images from the screenplay.
The movie was filmed in studio and on location in the small town of Coolidge, Arizona (outside of Phoenix). She called the scenery “bleak and phenomenally dramatic at the same time. “
She and co-writer Eric Red wanted to “try to create something very romantic, and sensual and ironic and also able to work within a couple of genre's at the same time so that we were, so to speak, thinking outside of the box and that offered us a lot of opportunity...”
The main characters are introduced quickly, with honest and mysterious May being central.
Jenny Wright as May
I don't think May ever lies in this movie. As the director says: “She happens to live in an alternate universe than he does. And, that she possess' phenomenal capacities and talents and abilities that a normal person doesn't possess, and he's about to realize both the good side of that and, of course, the down side of being attracted to somebody so beautiful and potentially so dangerous.”
Ms. Bigelow's intent was to express the irony and duality of these two people meeting. Caleb can't alter who May is, or stop what she does to survive.
On the night they meet May wants to be the young country girl she used to be. She's a girl from Sweetwater, Texas, out for a ride in a pick-up truck with a young country boy. He looks at her and sees beauty. They're just glad to be together. Things just kind of go from there....
The movie's score was done by Tangerine Dream. Ms. Bigelow says “Tangerine Dream did the soundtrack and I was really pleased with what they came up with. I went to Berlin and spent several weeks there working with them on the soundtrack and I think there was a provocative haunting mercurial quality that just permeated everything that they did that gave it a patina, gave the film a patina that really transformed it.”
It is a spare and interesting film, and I recommend seeing it. As for the song "Fever”, performed by the Cramps, in a scene that might have inspired a young Quinton Tarentino, mmmm, I think I preferred the song that I believe also plays during that set piece, "Naughty, Naughty......”)
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