#Shoreh Aghdashloo

[adamwatchesmovies]

Renfield (2023)

If those who would most enjoy Renfield go into it with low expectations, they’ll find an imperfect film that (mostly) caters to their tastes. This movie has such a great premise and such a good cast. If only the screenplay and story were better. I liked it more than I didn’t but while watching, I kept wondering “I should love this… why don’t I?”

Like in the novel by Bram Stoker, R. M. Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) is transformed into Dracula’s familiar when he meets the Count (Nicholas Cage) in the early 20th century. Unlike in the novel, Dracula and Renfield survive and defeat Van Helsing, along with every subsequent would-be vampire slayer they encounter. In modern day, Renfield has grown tired of the abuse Dracula throws his way. While searching for fresh victims for his master, Renfield crosses paths with Teddy Lobo (Ben Schwartz), the son of the notoritious Lobo crime family. The bloody aftermath catches the attention of police officer Rebecca Quincy (Awkwafina), who holds a grudge against the Lobos and is looking for an ally against them.

Even without doing any research, I could’ve told you from his performance alone, that Nicolas Cage is a massive fan of 1931’s Dracula. It’s pretty clear Robert Kirkman (who pitched the story but did not write the screenplay) and director Chris McKay are too. The film begins by showing us new versions of the most well-known scenes from the 1931 film, with the sets either recreated with immaculate attention to detail or the new actors digitally added in. For anyone who loves the Universal Monsters, it’s a delight to see new performers re-interpret the material. Remember the first time you saw the Spanish version of “Dracula”? It’s that exciting. Cage, in particular, is such a good fill-in for Bela Lugosi. Hoult doesn’t quite look like Dwight Frye and may not bring the same intensity to the role, but he turns out to be a wholly different kind of servant to this prince of darkness anyway, so it won’t bother you at all.

After the dynamite intro, we dig into the story. It’s a fun idea to show Renfield, now 90 years into his servitude, getting fed up with his situation. There are some good laughs as Dracula physically and emotionally abuses Renfield while he slowly builds the courage he needs to face this vampire he could never hope to defeat on his own. This Count doesn’t insta-die when exposed to sunlight, is super strong, immortal, able to fly, can transform into a swarm of bats, hypnotize people, turn into mist and recover from practically any injury given enough time and blood.

The problem with Renfield is that we don’t explore the vampire-familiar dynamic enough. The Lobos and Officer Quincy plot, with Renfield stuck in the middle, eats up about 60% of the film. While the scenes of Quincy and Renfield teaming up against a bunch of Lobos goons means there’s plenty of comedic gore, that's not what you came to see. Then, when we finally get back to Dracula, he announces he’s going to take over the world! With Renfield gaining superhuman strength and agility whenever he eats bugs, this horror-comedy (and I use the word horror in theory here, as none of this picture is even remotely frightening) starts to feel an awful lot like a superhero film. A superhero film that isn’t taking itself seriously but come on. I came here for a vampire movie with a fun anti-romance twist. Give me that!

Since I mentioned the gore, I want to praise the special effects. There are many shots of people get their arms torn off or getting ripped apart, gutted or dispatched in other hideous ways. In any other movie, you might ask “wait, how did they even manage to stand upright if they were that easy to turn to shreds?”. Here, it’s all part of the fun. The most impressive SFX are in the scenes showing Dracula in various states of injury. Be it a scorched skeleton that can talk or a gooey blood sucker with half his skull showing and all sorts of bits barely hanging on, it’s all mega gross and well done. I’m pretty sure most actors hate having to sit in chairs while tons of makeup are applied to them, but I’d wager that after seeing the results, Cage was like “oh yeah, I’m totally willing to do with 4-5 more times.”

In the end, I’m going to rate Renfield right down the middle. More than once, I was loving it. I felt like this movie had been made specifically for me. Far too often, however, it let me down. I know it probably doesn’t make any sense, but it’s a disappointment that I’m nonetheless glad I saw and have some affection for. (September 10, 2023)

[glimeres]

2024 - Shoreh Aghdashloo and Tony Shalhoub in Shayan Lofti's What Became Of Us at the Atlantic Theater Company

[snacco]

started watching arcane with some friends and nobody warned me shoreh aghdashloo would be there so now I'm

[trvllngjwllr]

Film Review: Renfield (2023)

Hollywood has long been a fan of monster movies and Universal Pictures is attempting to tap into its catalogue by bringing the character of Dracula to the screen once again. This time around with his long suffering familiar and assistant Renfield to cater to all his needs. Even though some of their recent modern offerings such as Van Helsing (2004) and The Mummy (2017) were more miss than hit.…

[howardhawkshollywoodannex]

House of Sand and Fog (2003) was filmed in San Francisco, Pacifica, and other locations south of SF in San Mateo County. The actual house is in Malibu.

[ofthebrownajah]

As much as I despise Cadsuane introducing her early is a good idea. That way she won't come off as a Moiraine replacement if they develop her more early on. I also remember how much Moiraine hates her in New Spring so this could be fun

[firstelevens]

for the made up movies game, here’s a cast: Timothy Dalton, Isabela Merced, Shoreh Aghdashloo, Jacob Anderson, and Hunter Schafer

song: "Eat Your Young" by Hozier

If there's something to be gained There's money to be made, whatever's still to come

synopsis:

London in 1986 is a hotbed of tensions and growing distrust in institutions. Residents clash with police officers in the streets, economic recession has left its mark across the country, and the city’s highest authority seems to be the crime families who spent the better part of the 1950s carving out their territories.

Perhaps the city’s most famous made man is Alistair Curran (Dalton), a businessman who ostensibly made his money developing the London suburbs, although his wealth and influence are too great to have come from anywhere except trafficking weapons and drugs. Curran’s real occupation is an open secret, but he remains functionally untouchable by the law: half the people in his territory live in fear of him; the other half benefit from his apparently sincere commitment to charitable causes.

When Curran funds and opens a trade school projected to majorly improve job prospects for vulnerable members of the local community, the London Herald sends cub reporter Penelope Reyes (Merced) to write a human interest story on the subject. To the editors’ great shock, the promise of good publicity even earns Penelope a sit-down with Curran, an opportunity rarely afforded to anyone. An even bigger surprise is that she’s invited back to the Curran estate a week later, offered the chance to interview Curran for the profile that her bosses have been trying to secure for months.

Warned though she is of his suspected criminal activities, Penelope accepts the invitation and goes to the estate. She makes it back to London in the evening, even earlier than expected, and manages to catch dinner with her flatmate, who’s just about to leave for work.

Dinner that night is the last anyone ever sees of Penelope Reyes, but the case is open and shut. She got too close to Curran, asked too many questions, and was dealt with. Her disappearance is written off as a tragedy, and life goes on.

Forty years later, Violet Curran (Schaefer) is the scion of the Curran dynasty, and has been working tirelessly to legitimize the family’s business interests. When Finn Worthington (Anderson), the Herald’s recently-fired chief investigative journalist, gets a call from Violet, he thinks she’s looking for a puff piece and got the wrong reporter. Instead, Violet begs him to look into the Reyes case, insisting that on his deathbed, her grandfather told her that he hadn’t wished Penelope harm, and that he feared his reputation was what stopped her actual killer from being caught.

Finn is prepared to write the words off as a dying man trying to salvage his family’s image of him, and tells Violet that he isn’t interested. Then she triples her asking price, and he’s still not interested. Then she mentions that her grandmother (Aghdashloo), Curran’s fourth wife, is adamantly against Penelope’s death being investigated, and if there’s one thing that Finn knows how to sniff out, it’s the beginning of a good story.

Together, Finn and Violet dig into her family’s past, finding thread after thread that leads inextricably to the present in ways neither of them could have expected, until it becomes clear that the open and shut disappearance of Penelope Reyes was never that open and shut at all.

[moviemunchies]

It’s the Year of the Dragon, so let’s talk about a dragon movie!

In Damsel, Millie Bobby Brown stars as Elodie, a young noblewoman from a land suffering severe famine. Her family receives aid in a bride price for her marriage to Prince Henry of the fabulously wealthy island Kingdom of Aurea. It seems a dream-come-true until, right after the wedding ceremony, Elodie is ritually sacrificed to the dragon that lives on the island in the mountain cave near the castle.

It turns out that every generation, Aurea sacrifices three maidens to the dragon, and she’ll leave the kingdom alone. Now Elodie has to find a way to escape the maze-like caverns, using her wits and whatever she can find, while being hunted by a sadistic dragon that delights in taunting her prey.

I should start with: subjectively, I kind of love this movie. Shoreh Aghdashloo tends to always be great in her roles, and she makes a fantastic dragon here. I would watch a dozen movies of her playing an evil dragon, because having her voice a character who relishes in wrecking stuff and people? This is great. I love the dragon’s design, too. Thank Tiamat, we finally get a movie dragon that’s not a wyvern. We spend so much of the movie only seeing bits and pieces of her, until we get to the third act and we finally see the full dragon and it is glorious. Playing with her prey like a great cat who spits flaming liquid. Excellent. Fantastic. Beautiful.

I really like dragons, okay?

Objectively, though, there are some problems with the way this movie was written.

The biggest is that the movie tries to make the dragon ultimately sympathetic to the viewer. And you’re probably going to guess how long before the Reveal, as there’s pretty much only one way writers try to make murderous dragons sympathetic. Which is, uh… look, I don’t know that it works. The gist of it is (minor spoilers, I guess) that the dragon thinks she’s killing maidens of the Aurean royal line. The attempt to make her sympathetic leans not on her realizing she’s been cruel and callous to innocent women who didn’t deserve it, but instead realizing she hasn’t been cruel and callous to the innocent women who still didn’t deserve it, but were descended from someone who did. Ultimately, the movie seems to be okay if the dragon was horribly killing women if they had the wrong bloodline, I guess?

I don’t think it’s what was intended, because the Aurean family is just… garbage, man, with Prince Henry as the only one with a shred of decency, and that is a small shred. It feels clumsy, is all.

Maybe it’d be overlooked if the Aureans got more development, but they don’t. I’m not saying I need them to have sympathetic motivations; Lord knows they don’t need those at all. They can be terrible people, of course, and I think that’s all that the makers of the film wanted them to be. I would have liked to have seen more of them, though. Even if I don’t need them to be relatable, I’d like a better grasp on why they think this is an okay thing to do.

Elodie’s stepmother–she also needed some work. Angela Bassett performs fantastically here with what she’s got, and so we get some good groundwork, I just think there could have been more done with this character.

The movie clearly wants us to think it’s a happy ending, and I don’t know that it is. I think there’s a throwaway line about how Elodie secured supplies to take home to help with the famine, but I notice discussions I’ve seen of the movie don’t mention it, so maybe I’m mistaken. Other factors make me really question how happy that ending’s meant to be, though.

Also, those glow worms were really convenient. Not a huge problem, as they’re established early on, I just think maybe the way they work is a little too easy.

Even with its issues, however, I think the movie’s first half is legitimately fantastic. It’s thrilling, it’s cool, it’s got a killer dragon, and it’s got someone trying to survive in a cave. Performances all-around are great and fun to watch.

So maybe it doesn’t hold together as well as it could–still, it’s not a bad dragon movie, and if you want to see awesome dragon action, the movie works for that.

[Also apparently there’s a novelization which takes the story in a completely different direction? I’ll be checking that out of my local library soon.]

[gobbie-boom]

Runa (work in progress! ✌️)

| Xbr'aal | 20s | Warrior of Light |

A kind but generally solemn young woman who has felt an innate call to defend the star and its people from a young age; it was only years into her work as a renowned and fearsome mercenary that she would discover her true millenia-old connection Hydaelyn.

Runa was born and raised in a small village in Yak T'el, the fifth of eight children and the second oldest of quintuplets. In her teens, she joined a group of Mamool Ja mercenaries in travelling to Eorzea, where she took up the Hrothgar name "Runa" to better fit in and continued mercenary work until crossing paths with a certain Miqo'te.

Notable Relationships (ARR+ SPOILERS)

⭐️ Hydaelyn - The Ancients Phobos and Venat were lovers, and thousands of years later, this manifests in Runa as an innate devotion to the star itself.

🙏🏼 Minfilia - Minfilia and Runa quickly became close once introduced, as if they were old lovers reunited. The guilt of Minfilia's death weighs heavy on Runa's shoulders; she feels she failed some promise made long ago, although the two only knew each other for a few months.

💎 Ryne - Like Minfilia, Ryne and Runa became friends immediately, although this time they have a "little sister/big sister" relationship instead. Runa is fiercely protective of her even after she proves herself capable of defending herself, and still visits often.

🦁 Wuk Lamat - Charmed by the Third Promise's enthusiasm, Runa readily agreed to help her claim the title of Dawnservant. They grew close during their adventure together, and afterwards, Runa makes her home in Tuliyollal again to stay close with her partner. Lamaty'i holds a particularly special place in Runa's heart: for the first time, Runa's romantic affection isn't guided by a love from millenia ago, and instead formed naturally and by her own choice.

🌅 Scions of the Seventh Dawn -

Voice Claim: Shoreh Aghdashloo (pitch/timbre)

[oldstorynewart]

Of Fiery Friends and Faltering Fairy Tales

"What's your favorite fairy tale?"

I'm always a little conflicted when someone casts that question upon me. On the one hand it tells me I'm dealing with a wondrous spirit who still loves to be enchanted, while on the other I'm always a bit cautious. Fairy tales are tricky business – for they often contain overly conservative morals – and you never know when your conversationist is going to leave you in the woods for supporting the wrong worldview. This is why I love a good subversion of fairy tale tropes. Thankfully, the forest of fairy tale subversion films has been lusciously blooming for ages – think Shrek (2001), Stardust (2007), and Tangled (2010) – and because I adore all of these features I was very excited to see a new Netflix release with the tagline 'this is not a fairy tale'. The new Juan Carlos Fresnadillo feature Damsel (2024) achieves exactly what that tagline suggests, but maybe it should have been more careful what it wished for.

Upon the first half an hour, the movie features exposition plenty, and mostly everyone we meet reveals themselves to fit a classic fairy stereotype. There's the broke king who must marry off his daughter, there's the morally ambiguous stepmother, and there's our lead princess Elodie, played by Millie Bobbie Brown. The royal fellowship sails south in its entirety, for Elodie must wed a prince to settle her family's debt. As it turns out, prince Charming isn't such a good lad, and he tosses Elodie into a dragon's den.

Although I desperately wished to be captured by the movie's magic, I simply couldn't get behind it's burning unoriginality. At times I wished for a snow queen to come kiss my head so that I might forget having seen every scene before time and again. Sadly, destiny didn’t agree to that.

I must admit to the delight Damsel's dazzling dragon's den sequence – which takes up nearly half of the movie – brought me, ironically because it doesn't try to subvert any tropes. It sees Elodie trying to trudge her way out of the grasp of an angry serpentine (Shoreh Aghdashloo), and that's the whole plot for the next hour of runtime. Once the movie accepts it's better as standard monster horror, it absolutely excels. It's simple, suspenseful, and at times wonderfully campy.

Then Damsel draws to an end, or at least it seems that way, except it goes on because it suddenly remembers that once upon a time, it paid heed to a wretched royal drama plot. It aims to take hold of this once more, but this falters for reasons twofold. One, the movie simply seems incapable of handling fairy trope subversion, hence the setup never developed enough for it to resolve in a satisfactory way. Two, the film abandoned having-a-plot half an hour in, when said plot literally threw the main character off a cliff and walked away. In an attempt to wrap it up regardless, the tale continues with a very strange twist of events. Elodie befriends her intergenerational-genocidal captor, and the now Stockholm-syndrome-celebratory movie aims to set the skies aflame with a Targarianesque trope, which falls flat on its face completely. The ending is clearly meant to be euphoric, but for every problematic trope it questions (yes, Morally Ambiguous Stepmother is now Kindly Stepmother and Greedy King Father sacrifices himself to save his not-such-a-damsel of a daughter) it invents two new ones.

I guess the tagline does ring true, but not in the way the filmmakers might have hoped. Although I love a good fairy tale, as well as a good 'this-isn't-a-fairy-tale' fairy tale, Damsel is neither. It's like a witch's spell befell the film, and an oh-so-simple monster movie took on the false appearance of complex high fantasy. Upon my guess, Damsel’s solemn destiny is to forever gather dust on Netflix's shelves. Which is probably for the best, because here’s a proper cautionary tale: mention this as your favorite fairy tale, and it's bound to get you killed.

[tknarr]

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A post shared by Shohreh Aghdashloo (@saghdashloo)

Shoreh Aghdashloo dressed up for the Oscars.

[multiprises]

« Fuck yeah, Roci. »

Babylon’s Ashes, The Expanse, 6.06

Breck Eisner (D), Naran Shankar, Daniel Abraham & Ty Franck (S), 14/01/22

[ryuuza-art]

This week's Patreon and Ko-fi Membership sketch is of my favourite character from The Expanse, and absolute Queen, Chrisjen Avasarala, played in the TV series by the equally amazing Shoreh Aghdashloo. ❤

Full view and details for getting the original are up for Patrons and Ko-fi subscribers now!

http://patreon.com/ryuuza

http://ko-fi.com/ryuuza

[howardhawkshollywoodannex]

Jennifer Connelly and Shohreh Agdhdashloo in House of Sand and Fog (2003). This is Shoreh's second honorable mention, after The Exorcism of Emily Rose.

[lezziemanville]

Hey I need links for HD downloads for The Expanse. I own the show in iTunes but I need download files to make something for my wife’s birthday. Someone help!

My gorgeous wife is turning 69 and I know that’s a fun age. ;) She deserves only the best.

[tippitv]

My cold has temporarily given me a deep smoky voice