Editor's note: There's so much that's beautiful, funny, smart and informative on the Internet. Problem is, there's also a bunch of garbage. Here's the best of the web right now:
1. 2-year-old gets psyched at Penguins game. Ty Avolia defines the Pittsburgh Penguins' motto "Buckle up, Baby." At 2 years old, Ty is both the team's biggest fan and his smallest. His priceless reaction to a playoff goal has gone viral — and for good reason.
2. Cats who look like celebrities. Props to Buzzfeed for finding this rad French language Tumblr aptly titled Men and Kittens. Turns out sexy male celebs strike poses similar to cats quite often. Zac Efron, Liam Hemsworth, Will Smith and even George Clooney all have feline doppelgangers. And now you know.
3. Watch the first trailer for Richard Linklater's 12-year movie Boyhood. Richard Linklater is going where no filmmaker has gone before with his latest coming-of-age drama, Boyhood. Though it's not a documentary, Linklater used the same actor to play the main character, who ages from 6 to 18 on screen.
4. Boss comes under fire for bizarre office rules. The comment thread on this story about strange office edicts is pure gold. "We have to use sippy cups because someone knocked a cup of coffee onto their computer back in 2004," writes one disgruntled office worker.
5. This video about the octopus is hilarious. YouTube user ZeFrank has been posting true fact videos for more than a year. But his take on the octopus — or, as he puts it, "the floppy, floppy spider of the sea" — is earning him comedy street cred. The Morgan Freeman-esque voice adds even more entertainment.
The story of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster is now over 200 years old, with Mary Shelley’s book having been adapted or referenced in close to 500 films. Less common is the character of The Bride of Frankenstein, which existed in the original text but has more often than not been excised in adaptations. Writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal has tried to rectify that by giving the character a big showcase in her new film, The Bride!.
Gyllenhaal has reimagined the story as one in which a woman named Ida (Jessie Buckley) becomes possessed by the spirit of Shelley (also Buckley). At the same time, the already-existing Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale) approaches Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening), who specializes in reanimation, with the request to make him a wife. When Ida falls to her death in an “accident” involving her boyfriend (John Magaro), the ideal corpse becomes available.
After Ida’s resurrection, she and the monster become restless being studied by Dr. Euphronius and decide to break out to experience the world. The world, naturally, is not exactly welcoming to them, and soon the couple are on the run for causing mayhem, including a few murders. In hot pursuit are detective Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and his assistant, Myrna Mallow (Penélope Cruz), as well as other authorities.
It’s clear that Gyllenhaal wanted to merge the Frankenstein story with Bonnie & Clyde, especially since she sets the film in the mid-1930s. And that wouldn’t have been a bad idea if having the monster and The Bride going on a crime spree was truly the focus of the movie. But most of the time there’s less intentionality in their misdeeds and more confusion, leading to a muddled plot with no clear direction or end goal in mind.
One of the biggest problems is that Gyllenhaal starts the energy of the film at an 11, giving her and everyone else nowhere to go but down. She dabbles in multiple different tones, at times going the straight drama route and other times making what seems like full-on camp. At one point, she even has the monster and the Bride in a dance sequence set to “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” which would be hilarious as an homage to Young Frankenstein if the film weren’t so disjointed.
Most baffling of all is what Gyllenhaal wants from The Bride character. She morphs multiple times over the course of the film, from close to unintelligible at the beginning to rough-and-tumble at the end. There are hints at the lack of control she has over her autonomy, including Shelley’s possession of her and the monster lying to her about her past, but any commentary that Gyllenhaal might be trying to make gets lost amid the oddity of the film as a whole.
Both Buckley and Bale are all-in for their performances, which definitely fall in the “love it or hate it” dichotomy. Each scene is pitched so high that there’s little nuance to either of them, and neither is on par with their previous Oscar-caliber roles. The high-powered supporting cast of Bening, Sarsgaard, Cruz, and Jake Gyllenhaal is watchable based on previous roles, but none of them elevate this particular movie.
Whatever intentions Maggie Gyllenhaal had in making The Bride! are only halfway legible in a film that can never find its tonal footing. There has rarely been subtlety in movies featuring Frankenstein’s monster and related characters, but this one makes all the others seem like stuffy dramas in comparison.
