Tribute acts are a strange little corner of the music world. Out in the barrens (such as where I live) where major musical artists rarely travel, they are indeed a suitable and cheap alternative to experiencing the real thing. And especially for older folks, fans of artists either very aged or deceased, there’s a nostalgic pleasure to seeing people dressing up in 60s or 70s clothes and singing the songs of their youth. But this is not a steady or particularly lucrative demographic, and there is something unavoidably cheesy about tribute acts, especially of the boomer music variety. They tend to embody the has-been nature of the subjects incredibly starkly. And they’re typically not really thought of as musical artists in their own right, relying on songs by other people (that are often easy enough for a competent musician to learn) rather than taking a risk on anything new or personal. A movie at the scale and style of Craig Brewer’s Song Sung Blue would be more likely to feature ...
Dracula has been adapted so many times and so many different ways that new interpretations are not only inevitable but necessary. And it is possible to re-theme the story, which does involve the title character pursuing a specific woman, as a romance. Both the 1979 film by John Badham and the 1992 film by Francis Ford Coppola leaned into a theme of Mina Harker being the reincarnation of Dracula’s long-lost lover and casting his interests in her therefore as a human impulse of romantic reunion. It is a tenuous pretense to make work, the predatory nature of the Dracula character not something that translates easily to authentic notions of love -and to even attempt it one must be confident in their portrait of the vampire -resting in the aforementioned cases on the sexual charisma of a figure like Gary Oldman or especially Frank Langella. Dracula , the 2025 French film going for an even greater scope of romantic melodrama, casts Caleb Landry Jones -a character actor known for his uns...