Click image for larger and more disgusting.First Day Issue / Tierra de los Sueños / TdSPosta
Vampyr3000 / Vleeptron New Smile Project Phase 3
Soon -- maybe a month from now -- I will have Tom Cruise's Smile, and the damn thing will actually chew solid food just like I used to be able to!
But now ... well, about 2 weeks ago, this is what my mouth looked like. Vampyr 3000, all surgical steel and titanium.
I could tell it was so geeky horrible that I asked the dentist if he could take a photo of my mouth while these crazy things were in them. He thought that was a nifty request and ran to get his digital camera. He just sent me the photo via e-mail.
Technically these 4 tall black metal posts are called Pickup Impression Copings. While they were screwed into my jawbone, they made 4 marks in a soft gooey template, which will be the model for my lower teeth. They'll snap into four gold buttons. This procedure lines up the snaps on my gumline with the buttons on the denture.
By the year 3000, this is what Vampires, and other people who like to put on a jewelry and metal show in their mouth, will look like. Behold Vampyr 3000!
The face is Max Schreck, the actor who played Nosfaratu in the 1922 F.W. Murnau silent movie "Nosferatu," aka Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (translated as Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror; also known as Nosferatu: A Symphony of Terror.)
Why is the entire entertainment industry so whacky about vampires?
In the early days of Vampires -- the Bram Stoker novel, the silent movies, Bela Legosi -- Vampires were either late middle-aged or incredibly old. Old guys drooling all over innocent young virgins, and sucking their blood, turning them into their Undead Love Slaves for Eternity.
Now all the vampires are teenage high school California pumped hunk Todds. Fascinating. Teenage high school vampires. Color me thrilled.
My guess is that High School Romance is aleady so confused and miserable and doomed that some producer decided Vampires would make a great metaphor for 16-year-old high school love -- finally an explanation of why everything's so painful, doomed, unsuccessful and miserable at that age.
That would indeed be Hell: To have to live forever as a high school student.
5 comments:
before i read your whole post, i saw the image with this post and was scrolling down to ask you whether that was nosferatu's image you have used and you wrote the whole post about it!
anyway you can download the whole thing for free on the internet archive.
When I got to Berlin for the first time I wanted to see 2 things: Brecht's State Theater in the former East -- still thriving and important in the Euro theater world -- and the UFA studio.
UFA still exists, sort of, but not even a shadow of its 1930s glory days, it's just a commercial TV production studio. without even a museum about the work of Murnau, Lang et al. UFA is just a memory -- though an eternally preserved memory on film. Thanks for the link! Ya can't see "Nosferatu" too many times!
(My fave UFA flick is "The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari." I went to a Halloween party as Viktor the Somnambulist, slinking around in black leotards with a pastey white face -- and somebody guessed who I was!)
Werner Herzog's 1979 "Nosferatu the Vampyre," with Klaus Kinski as Nosferatu/Dracula, is a real ripping yarn, make your hair stand on end. Herzog filled the medieval streets of Delft with about 10,000 rats, but after filming was apparently only able to retrieve 8,000 of them, Delfters (?) do not remember Herzog fondly.
I personally think Frank Langella was the best, most convincing Dracula. He actually made vampires make sense, or I didn't care for 2 hours that vampires don't make sense.
The portrait of the aging junkie Bela Legosi in the last year of his life in Tim Burton's "Ed Wood" is ... well, ya got to see this flick, it's just screwy beyond description.
Now THIS is possibly the screwiest homage to Murnau and Schreck EVER, really worth renting:
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In 2000, director E. Elias Merhige released "Shadow of the Vampire," a fictionalization of the making of Nosferatu. Murnau is portrayed by John Malkovich. In the film, Murnau is so dedicated to making the film genuine that he actually hires a real vampire (Willem Dafoe) to play Count Orlok.
Okay so people don't usually accuse me of being dainty or fastidious or stuff like that, but I can't let this thread pass without recommending you look up the Wikipedia bio of Murnau and read the gossip about how he died.
I've seen a long sequence from Murnau's first big-budget Hollywood silent film "Sunrise," and it's every bit as fascinating and spectacular as they say.
Another "greatest film of all time" -- never fully restored, but much of it still exists -- is fellow German emigree Erich von Stroheim's "Greed," from the novel "McTeague" by Frank Norris. Find the best print of it you can get your eyeballs on.
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Wikipedia
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Sunrise (1927), a movie often cited by film scholars as one of the greatest films of all time.[1] Filmed in the Fox Movietone sound-on-film system (music and sound effects only), Sunrise was not a financial success, but received several Oscars at the very first Academy Awards ceremony in 1929. In winning the Academy Award for Unique and Artistic Production it shared what is now the Best Picture award with the movie Wings.
since we're going on about german cinema then, one of my favourite films and also apparently one of hitler's by lang called "kreimhelds revenge". more info on wiki for it too, pretty awesome series it was.
OK I am back from Oz, had lots of fun. I actually wanted to show "Shadow of the Vampire" to my friends there but unfortunetly we didn't find the time. Anyway, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari can also be downloaded right here http://www.archive.org/details/DasKabinettdesDoktorCaligariTheCabinetofDrCaligari
because this is in the public domain according to US Copyright Laws. I for one am sick of this vampire craze, but it has to be mentioned that horror movies usually are popular when the economic situation is not too good. Stephanie Meyers, Charlaine Harris et al can go and get stuffed IMHO or should be punished for bad literature and unimaginative plots.
I would also like to recommend Nosferatu by Murnau. But it on DVD, you will get lots of extras. And while we are talking about german silent fimls, a COMPLETE (I repeat:COMPLETE) version of Metroplis has been found and is scheduled for release this year.
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