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Frankenstein is the monster (movie) Guillermo del Toro was born to bring to life

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Frankenstein is the monster (movie) Guillermo del Toro was born to bring to life

Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein in Frankenstein.

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Guillermo del Toro has made several monster movies of a particular bent — soulful, swoony, feverish films about grotesque-looking creatures who prove themselves more deeply human than the humans who reject them. Hellboy (2004) was a half-demon with a full heart. The Amphibian Man in The Shape of Water (2017) was an emo f-boy with gill slits. Even the titular marionette in Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022) was such a mensch that he earned the right to trade in his knotty pine physiognomy for a flesh bag.

Soulful, swoony, feverish, with a narrative that stacks the emotional deck in favor of the hideous outcast — I mean, that’s pretty much the jacket copy you’d find on any volume of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, right?

Which is why this seems like the perfect match between story and muse; certainly del Toro’s been talking about making his own version of the tale for decades, calling it his “lifelong dream.”

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That dream is now realized, and while the resulting film captures the tone and spirit of the original novel in all its breathless zeal and hie-me-to-yon-fainting-couch deliriousness, the many narrative tweaks del Toro has made — some of which work, some of which don’t — ensure that you’d never mistake his Frankenstein for anyone else’s.

A monster matriculates

Boris Karloff in his role as the monster of Frankenstein.

Boris Karloff in his role as the monster of Frankenstein.

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It’s light-years away, for example, from James Whale’s iconic 1931 version, which surgically implanted Boris Karloff’s lumbering, flat-topped, bolt-necked monster into the culture. Because while Whale was faithful to the bones (heh) of the novel, Karloff’s Creature never grew, intellectually or aesthetically. Maybe Whale was worried doing so would rob the monster of its primal power to clomp its way into his audience’s nightmares.

The book’s Creature, on the other hand, puts itself through a kind of hilarious autodidactical speed run, devouring Plutarch’s Lives and The Sorrows of Young Werther and, famously, Paradise Lost. Which is why you get the following disconnect:

Book Creature: “I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.”

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Karloff’s Creature: “FIRE BAD.”

There’s a lot more of book Creature in del Toro’s Frankenstein, which is good, because his monster inhabits the (literally, in this case) sculpted frame and brooding gaze of Jacob Elordi. For roughly half of his time onscreen, Elordi’s more or less in “FIRE BAD” mode, stumbling around in yellowish strips of cloth that, intentionally or not (but let’s face it, probably intentionally) evoke the gold lamé speedo sported by his Rocky Horror Picture Show analog.

Jacob Elordi as The Creature in Frankenstein.

Jacob Elordi as The Creature in Frankenstein.

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But before long the Creature installs that all-important upgrade: He secretly observes the daily life of a loving family, befriends their kindly blind patriarch (David Bradley) and avails himself of their reading matter. Elordi makes his Creature 2.0 just as compelling as the launch version; now outfitted with the full complement of human-emotion DLC (rage, yes — but also gratitude, empathy, sorrow and regret), he sets out to confront Victor (Oscar Isaac), his preening, arrogant brat of a creator.

This is all straight from Shelley’s novel, of course — it’s just inflected by del Toro’s maximalist, heart-affixed-firmly-to-the-sleeve sensibility, which extends to absolutely everything onscreen. The production design goes gratifyingly hard, featuring drawing rooms so huge their walls vanish into shadow, landscapes so vast they swallow the characters — and the buildings they occupy.

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Victor’s lonely tower — the site of the Creature’s birth — is a gargoyle-festooned ruin atop a cliff so open to the elements that its rooms and staircases are piled with leaves and other bits of decaying organic matter. Its tiled floors feature yawning pits like frozen whirlpools, foreboding but strangely beautiful.

Spare parts

But del Toro’s spin on the material goes beyond its look and feel – he’s made several changes to the story that leave you wondering what narrative work they are actually doing, besides adding needless complications to justify the film’s two-and-half-hour running time.

He devotes a lot of attention — far more than the book does — to the life of young Frankenstein (heh), played by Christian Convery. Charles Dance adds yet another “stern father” performance to an IMDB page teeming with them, as Victor’s demanding dad, and their frosty, lightly sadistic relationship is clearly meant to foreshadow the one Victor will have with his Creature. I couldn’t help but be reminded of Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and its mystifying determination to explain to us that Wonka only became the candymaker he did because his father was … a dentist.

The film also introduces Christoph Waltz as Harlander, a mysterious figure who acts as Victor’s financial patron. The character ostensibly exists to contrast Victor’s scientific zeal to the greedy drive of capitalism, but I can’t shake the conviction that he could easily lift out of the film without leaving a hole.

A subplot involving Mia Goth’s Elizabeth represents another significant alteration that’s puzzling at first — why make Elizabeth the fiancée of Victor’s brother William (Felix Kammerer) instead of just making her Victor’s fiancée, as she is in the book?

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The answer lies in the largest and most essential change that del Toro is making to the story here, which is to turn Victor into even more of a jerk — and, by extension, to cast the Creature as even more sympathetic.

It’s there in Isaac’s bluff, snotty, snooty take on Victor, who’s forever declaring his genius to anyone in earshot. It’s there in his snarling disgust at Elordi’s poor, chained up Creature. And it’s there in Victor’s not-remotely-sly attempts to seduce his own brother’s fiancée.

Elizabeth, for her part, is totally on board with del Toro’s efforts to get us on the Creature’s side; Goth shows us a young woman smart and self-possessed enough to recognize that underneath all the sutures and skin grafts, it’s still Jacob Freaking Elordi we’re talking about, here, people.

Del Toro doesn’t stop there — he also elides book-Creature’s most unsavory aspects and actions to highlight his version’s wet-eyed soulfulness and further cement its status as a blameless thing grievously wronged by the world in general, and by Victor in particular. It’s a marked adjustment from the novel, yes — but one that seems inevitable, given del Toro’s body of work, and his resolute need to portray the outsider as hero.

He’s never been subtle about this, and he’s not here either: At one point a character regards Victor. “You are the monster,” they tell him.

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I cannot hope to convey, reader, just how wildly unnecessary that line is, given literally everything about the film we’ve been watching up to that point. It’s del Toro gilding a lily that he’s already spent more than two hours painstakingly crafting out of pure, 24-carat gold.

And yet it works, for him, and for his movie. Del Toro couldn’t possibly do anything less, and, given how perfectly suited he is to tell this story in this particular way, you wouldn’t want him to.

This piece also appeared in NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what’s making us happy.

Listen to Pop Culture Happy Hour on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

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In ‘No Other Choice,’ a loyal worker gets the ax — and starts chopping

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In ‘No Other Choice,’ a loyal worker gets the ax — and starts chopping

Lee Byung-hun stars in No Other Choice.

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In an old Kids in the Hall comedy sketch called “Crazy Love,” two bros throatily proclaim their “love of all women” and declare their incredulity that anyone could possibly take issue with it:

Bro 1: It is in our very makeup; we cannot change who we are!

Bro 2: No! To change would mean … (beat) … to make an effort.

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I thought about that particular exchange a lot, watching Park Chan-wook’s latest movie, a niftily nasty piece of work called No Other Choice. The film isn’t about the toxic lecherousness of boy-men, the way that KITH sketch is. But it is very much about men, and that last bit: the annoyed astonishment of learning that you’re expected to change something about yourself that you consider essential, and the extreme lengths you’ll go to avoid doing that hard work.

Many critics have noted No Other Choice‘s satirical, up-the-minute universality, given that it involves a faceless company screwing over a hardworking, loyal employee. As the film opens, Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) has been working at a paper factory for 25 years; he’s got the perfect job, the perfect house, the perfect family — you see where this is going, right? (If you don’t, even after the end of the first scene, when Man-su calls his family over for a group hug while sighing, “I’ve got it all,” then I envy your blithe disinterest in how movies work. Never change, you beautiful blissful Pollyanna, you.)

He gets canned, and can’t seem to find another job in his beloved paper industry, despite going on a series of dehumanizing interviews. His resourceful wife Miri (Son Ye-jin) proves a hell of a lot more adaptable than he does, making practical changes to the family’s expenses to weather Man-su’s situation. But when foreclosure threatens, he resolves to eliminate the other candidates (Lee Sung-min, Cha Seung-won) for the job he wants at another paper factory — and, while he’s at it, maybe even the jerk (Park Hee-soon) to whom he’d be reporting.

So yes, No Other Choice is a scathing spoof of corporate culture. But the director’s true satirical eye is trained on the interpersonal — specifically the intractability of the male ego.

Again and again, the women in the film (both Son Ye-jin as Miri and the hilarious Yeom Hye-ran, who plays the wife of one of Man-su’s potential victims) entreat their husbands to think about doing something, anything else with their lives. But these men have come to equate their years of service with a pot-committed core identity as men and breadwinners; they cling to their old lives and seek only to claw their way back into them. Man-su, for example, unthinkingly channels the energy that he could devote to personal and professional growth into planning and executing a series of ludicrously sloppy murders.

It’s all satisfyingly pulpy stuff, loaded with showy, cinematic homages to old-school suspense cinematography and editing — cross-fades, reverse-angles and jump cuts that are deliberately and unapologetically Hitchcockian. That deliberateness turns out to be reassuring and crowd-pleasing; if you’re tired of tidy visual austerity, of films that look like TV, the lushness on display here will have you leaning back in your seat thinking, “This right here is cinema, goddammit.”

Narratively, the film is loaded with winking jokes and callbacks that reward repeat viewing. Count the number of times that various characters attempt to dodge personal responsibility by sprinkling the movie’s title into their dialogue. Wonder why one character invokes the peculiar image of a madwoman screaming in the woods and then, only a few scenes later, finds herself chasing someone through the woods, screaming. Marvel at Man-su’s family home, a beautifully ugly blend of traditional French-style architecture with lumpy Brutalist touches like exposed concrete balconies jutting out from every wall.

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There’s a lot that’s charming about No Other Choice, which might seem an odd thing to note about such a blistering anti-capitalist screed. But the director is careful to remind us at all turns where the responsibility truly lies; say what you will about systemic economic pressure, the blood stays resolutely on Man-su’s hands (and face, and shirt, and pants, and shoes). The film repeatedly offers him the ability to opt out of the system, to abandon his resolve that he must return to the life he once knew, exactly as he knew it.

Man-su could do that, but he won’t, because to change would mean to make an effort — and ultimately men would rather embark upon a bloody murder spree than go to therapy.

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Austin airport to nearly double in size over next decade

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Austin airport to nearly double in size over next decade

Austin-Bergstrom International Airport will nearly double in size over the next decade. 

The airport currently has 34 gates. With the expansion projects, it will increase by another 32 gates. 

What they’re saying:

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Southwest, Delta, United, American, Alaska, FedEx, and UPS have signed 10-year use-and lease agreements, which outline how they operate at the airport, including with the expansion. 

“This provides the financial foundation that will support our day-to-day operations and help us fund the expansion program that will reshape how millions of travelers experience AUS for decades to come,” Ghizlane Badawi, CEO of Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, said.

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Concourse B, which is in the design phase, will have 26 gates, estimated to open in the 2030s. Southwest Airlines will be the main tenant with 18 gates, United Airlines will have five gates, and three gates will be for common use. There will be a tunnel that connects to Concourse B.

“If you give us the gates, we will bring the planes,” Adam Decaire, senior VP of Network Planning & Network Operations Control at Southwest Airlines said.

“As part of growing the airport, you see that it’s not just us that’s bragging about the success we’re having. It’s the airlines that want to use this airport, and they see advantage in their business model of being part of this airport, and that’s why they’re growing the number of gates they’re using,” Mayor Kirk Watson said.

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Dig deeper:

The airport will also redevelop the existing Barbara Jordan Terminal, including the ticket counters, security checkpoints, and baggage claim. Concourse A will be home to Delta Air Lines with 15 gates. American Airlines will have nine gates, and Alaska Airlines will have one gate. There will be eight common-use gates.

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“Delta is making a long-term investment in Austin-Bergstrom that will transform travel for years to come,” Holden Shannon, senior VP for Corporate Real Estate at Delta Air Lines said.

The airport will also build Concourse M — six additional gates to increase capacity as early as 2027. There will be a shuttle between that and the Barbara Jordan Terminal. Concourse M will help with capacity during phases of construction. 

There will also be a new Arrivals and Departures Hall, with more concessions and amenities. They’re also working to bring rideshare pickup closer to the terminal.

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City officials say these projects will bring more jobs. 

The expansion is estimated to cost $5 billion — none of which comes from taxpayer dollars. This comes from airport revenue, possible proceeds, and FAA grants.

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“We’re seeing airlines really step up to ensure they are sharing in the infrastructure costs at no cost to Austin taxpayers, and so we’re very excited about that as well,” Council Member Vanessa Fuentes (District 2) said.

The Source: Information from interviews conducted by FOX 7 Austin’s Angela Shen

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After years of avoiding the ER, Noah Wyle feels ‘right at home’ in ‘The Pitt’

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After years of avoiding the ER, Noah Wyle feels ‘right at home’ in ‘The Pitt’

Wyle, who spent 11 seasons on ER, returns to the hospital in The Pitt. Now in Season 2, the HBO series has earned praise for its depiction of the medical field. Originally broadcast April 21, 2025.

Hear The Original Interview

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