• Wham!  Boom!  AlterBadger!  Another week has passed, and yer old pal Andy has consumed more culture.  Dust off your monocle and polish your decanter of port, because it's time to begin.
• The last couple of weeks I've worked my way through Bram Stoker's classic horror novel "Dracula," and though at times I found myself bored, in the end I really liked it.  Okay, let's get the bad stuff out of the way first:  Dracula was written in 1897, putting us right at the tail end of the Victorian period.  So of course, all the female characters are weak-minded daffodils who must be protected by the strong, handsome men.  Mina Harker is surprisingly smart and bold in the face of danger, but we're also given constant reminders that she is not as smart as men.  Progress, but still appallingly sexist.  Another irritant is the portrayal of friendship:  you know those speeches in Shakespeare where the characters stand around extolling each other's noble virtues, calling each other the best of all men, and swearing undying love and fealty unto and beyond death?  There are pages of that shit in here.  Pages.  Stoker should have used that space to flesh the characters out a bit, but for the most part we learn nothing about them other than their nobility and their moral character, which the other characters then praise endlessly.  This is what makes Victorian novels such a chore to get through.  But set those elements aside, and you're left with something really wonderful.  The novel's structure is actually quite Modernist:  the narrative is told in the form of letters, journal entries, telegrams, newspaper clippings, etc., the result being that the narrator of any individual chapter never really knows everything that's going on.  This creates an effortless sense of mystery, and also does much to advance a feeling of general dread as you sympathetically feel the characters' powerlessness to stop Dracula's advance.  This splintered narrative is one of the few stories I've ever read that conveys, honestly and accurately, what it would actually be like to fight against an elusive and powerful entity like Dracula.  Van Helsing and Co.'s hunt for Dracula in the last quarter of the novel is thrilling, a sprawling battle pitting quick intelligence against the dread of certain doom, much better than has ever been depicted in a film adaptation (and that's a real shame, because this last section would make for great cinema).  Overall, the novel starts out strong, drags a bit in the second quarter, picks up in the third quarter, and ends with a desperate pursuit across frozen Romania.  While Stoker's Victorian mannerisms will continually grate on your nerves, the mood of encroaching terror achieves its desired effect, making Dracula an excellent thriller, not a great novel but nonetheless a classic of its genre.
• The recent German film Good Bye, Lenin! is something I never expected to see:  a comedy about the fall of the Berlin wall.  But then, there also exists an opera about Richard Nixon's 1970 visit to China, so anything's possible.  The basic plot of Good Bye, Lenin! is this:  Alex lives in Communist-controlled East Germany with his mother and sister.  After his father leaves them and heads west, his mother throws herself behind the Communist Party, committing herself to socialism.  Years later, she has a severe heart attack and lapses into a coma, and when she eventually wakes up the doctor warns Alex that any severe shock or surprise could kill her.  And that might be a problem, because while she slept the Berlin Wall was torn down, ending communism in Germany.  So begins an elaborate deception, as Alex struggles to hide the country's changes from his mother by wearing old clothes, pouring all of their food into jars with old communist-era labels, even filming fake news broadcasts.  There are, naturally, a lot of very funny moments as Alex works frantically to hide the truth.  Even more interesting is when the plot thread of Alex's absent father is reintroduced, and the two plotlines dovetail together nicely as Alex too struggles with figures from his past that have changed and moved on without him.  The set-up does feel a bit forced at times, and you'll often find yourself wondering why Alex keeps working so hard at something that seems relatively trivial.  But in time we see how Alex's deceptions are really designed to keep his mother in a place and a time where she feels safe, and where she was happy (Germany is called the Fatherland, Alex misses his absent father... need I go on?), a weird sense of nostalgia for a place they never liked but nonetheless was their home.  The end result is a funny and touching comedy/drama, with a very unique perspective on life under socialism and how a single place and time can come to mean so much.
• Another yearly tradition has arrived:  The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episode.  Treehouse of Horror is always my favorite part of the Simpsons season because it allows them to tell stories they couldn't possibly use in a normal episode.  Treehouse of Horror XXI follows the standard set-up, with an intro piece followed by three vignettes.  I loved this year's intro, and the first vignette has a great setup that provides a vehicle for some truly off-the-wall humor.  The second vignette was patterned after a psychological thriller, and this one felt a bit off, the story a little too heavy for the jokes that were being forced into it.  But in the third vignette they fulfill their obligation to make fun of Twilight, and it's awesome.  Another great Halloween special, and in case you missed its broadcast (you know I did) you can watch the episode for free on Hulu.
•  American Film Badger: Each week here I'll give my very brief opinion on one or two of AFI's Top 100 films, with the purpose of spotlighting all the great classic films that are out there but nobody watches anymore.  AFI did a Top 100 list in 1998 and in 2007, and they do have some differences so we'll cover them both, but number 1 on both lists is Citizen Kane.  Kane is a visually beautiful film, known for pioneering dozens of new techniques in cinematography and editing.  Plotwise, it utilizes Modernist elements of storytelling, using unreliable narrators and incomplete scenes to tell the life story of an ultimately unknowable man.  Unfortunately, this unique plot is conveyed with sledgehammer subtlety and a script that frequently veers into melodrama, a noble experiment that is not always successful.  The acting is also pretty terrible, which doesn't help.  Still, anyone interested in film ought to see it:  its technical artistry is genuinely stunning, and its Modernist storyline is unique to films of that era even if it's not always expertly done. 
• Rank-o-Rama! So, a lot of what dragged Dracula down for me were simply symptoms of the time period in which it was written.  Given that, what are some novels from the 19th Century that are still great today?  Honore Balzac's Pere Goriot would be number 1:  a French peasant viciously climbs the Parisian social ladder, and learns just what wealthy people are made of.  Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary:  Victorian sexual mores take their toll on a young couple, as the wife's extramarital affair begins to ruin them both.  Herman Melville's Moby Dick:  complex symbolism paired with the stark reality of life on the high seas.  Alexandre Dumas, Twenty Years After:  the second novel of the Three Musketeers series, an intricate political novel wrapped in an adventure story, with divided loyalties, fractured friendships, and bloody revolution.  Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment:  Raskolnikov wallows in the endless guilt of a single violent act, a dark and complex psychological novel.  And of course Huckleberry Finn.
• This week's reading:  Franz Kafka's 1917 novel The Trial, a book that was discovered after Kafka's death in a series of unnumbered chapters.  The book was pieced together by his literary executor in what we can only assume is close to the correct order.  My copy seems to be returning to its original state, because the fucking cover just fell off.