Pepperlandgirl:
Yeah, but I might disagree back. I mentioned le Fanu’s work, but his Carmilla doesn’t have all the features we associate with the vampire – look in particular at the ones I noted. See Wolf’s Annotated Dracula or The Essential Dracula for details.
Rewatched last night out of curiosity. Din’t take notes.
When I first saw it, I hadn’t seen many silent films; some Keystone Kops at Shakey’s 35 years ago. Now I see Coppola’s *Dracula *as a love letter to the earliest days of cinema. I seem to remember reading that he did a lot of the FX “in camera,” like Murnau or Griffith would have done. I have not bothered to follow up on that.
The costumes, though very nineties in their pomoness, took the fashions of early silents as a starting point, I think: they kept reminding me of Chaplin’s A Woman of Paris and Dreyer’s Michael. Oh, and I hated the red “nightgown” Lucy wore when she humped the werewolf. (Yes I know it was Vlad; he didn’t only appear as a bat.) Strumpet red with a CORSET? to BED? Coppola shoulda vetoed that one.
Some of you mave have heard me say that I have no tolerance for people who insist a filmmaker remain blindly faithful to his source material; a *real *artist must reshape the work to fit his understanding, or his goals, or it won’t be art: it’s just paint-by-numbers. I have even less tolerance for anyone suggesting such rigidity with source material that’s, what, a hundred years old, and that’s been translated–to the screen alone–in a thousand different variations. The only way to approach a work like Dracula as a modern fillmmaker is to make something new of it. Coppola’s detour with Mina/Lizabeta works very well, plotwise. Not so sure thematically. At least, Dracula’s big moment, when he sacrifices his future with Mina so that she may live, isn’t big enough: it turns the entire original on its ear, but it does so a little too incidentally. Ditto the Romeo and Juliet scene where he regains his soul.
As bad as Keanu’s accent was, as worse as Winona’s, Tom Waits made me groan and giggle at the same time. He sounded like when we were little kids, making up silly accents.* Mawstuoah, win wail Oy gogh hewm?* Unless Coppola was going overboard in his attempt to duplicate early cinema (where do most Americans know an English accent from? Movies.)–Tom Waits is Gwyneth Paltrow compared to Bette Davis in Of Human Bondage–he really has no excuse for the obvious lack of a dialect coach in the budget. Unless the dialect coach was Dick Van Dyke.
Why does Hopkins play the priest at the beginning, in flashback? I can see the Mina/Lizabeta connection, but Van Helsing and the priest don’t parallel for me.
If Drac can walk about in the daylight, why is it so crucial that they get to him before the sun sets, at the end?
That was my girl Diamanda Galas shrieking on the soundtrack.
It’s good to know that snow will burn, and keep burning, in a perfect circle, if you need protection for horny hungry naked vampire babes.
Why was there a little lapdog–looked like a Jack Russell Terrier–running alongside the cart as it hurtled headlong up the hairpun turns during the final frantic chase?
Billy Campbell is seriously hot. Seriously
Apologies, I missed your reference to le Fanu on the first read.
Originally posted by lissener:
I agree that it’s impossible to remain 100% faithful to the source material and make a good film, and that it’s unreasonable to expect filmmakers to try.
What really bothered me is that this film was marketed as a *return * to the novel. Omissions, additions, and alterations made to plot and characters in earlier films were to be eliminated. This was, as they said in the title, “Bram Stoker’s Dracula.”
IMHO, keeping characters usually cut, hinting at the novel’s epistolary structure, and even remaining reasonably close to the plot, are not sufficient to qualify this as “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” if at the same time the filmmakers, as **lissener ** points out, then casually turn the two principal characters 180-degrees around from the author’s intention.
This really ruined the movie for me, Ms. Bellucci notwithstanding. If you want to reinterpret the characters for modern audiences or to follow an artistic vision, that’s fine. Just don’t call it “Bram Stoker’s Dracula”
What do you think he should have called it to set it apart from the other thousands of Dracula movies and to clarify that it wouldn’t be the “traditional” cinematic interp of the movie?
“Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula”
Okay, seriously - why not just call it Dracula? Any concerns Coppola may have had about his film being mistaken for a “traditional” cinematic treatment could have been handled as part of the film’s promotion. You know, a trailer with a voice-over along the lines of “Forget what you may have seen. Acclaimed director Francis Ford Coppola returns to Stoker’s gothic masterpiece and gives us a fresh look at this immortal character. Dracula. Opening this Christmas.” (Okay, that really sucked, but you get the idea.)
You forgot another homage : Road runner cartoons. Every time there was a mountain scene, I kept expecting to see the Road runner and the Coyote to appear.
Surely he could have come up with something that didn’t wrongly imply that it would be a straightforward adaptation of the novel (something which I doubt would make a very good movie anyway). I actually like Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula as a title, although if I were to choose one myself I’d probably be silly and name it Dracula in Love. Given a few minutes I think I could come up with dozens of alternate titles, most likely not especially good, but that at least wouldn’t be misleading.
Incidentally, the IMDB tells me that there was already a TV movie titled (in the US) Bram Stoker’s Dracula, starring Jack Palance. So Coppola’s use of the same title doesn’t even set the movie apart from all other Dracula adaptations.
According to Roger Ebert, another studio owned the rights to plain ol’ Dracula as a title. I’m not sure how this could be, as I’d expect that the character and story must be public domain and titles cannot be copyrighted, but this kind of Hollywood legal business is beyond me.
I went to see Coppola’s BSD three times in the theatre, watch it occasionally on video but am awaiting a special features DVD.
Plusses- the closest one to the book (the next closest being the Louis Jourdan one); Tom Waits’ Renfield; Anthony Hopkins’ Van Helsing (REALLY faithful to the book); the Vlad-Dracula origin (excepting the “lost love” angle); the atmosphere & eroticism & Christianity; the presence (tho not the portrayals) of Quincey Morris & Arthur Holmwood; topless vamp-babes; Ryder’s Mina & Frost’s Lucy; the soundtrack.
Minuses- the “lost love” romance with Mina; Dracula as tragic lover- in the book he’s not even a seducer, he’s a rapist; the mangling of the character-portrayals of Morris & Holmwood
Now to be fair, I don’t think Keanu’s Harker was too bad. At least the character was close to the book.
It’s not a question of copyright; it’s a question of marketability and confusion and competition. A 1974 movie starring Jack Palance is less likely to compete for space in the market than the possibility of a more current film. So to CY own A, you avoid any overlap with the recent project, but you’re not afraid of “competing” with a 20-year old B-movie.
In any case, if you ask me the Coppola version included Stoker’s name in the credits to indicate that Coppola meant to remain closer to the spirit of the original novel than the spinoffs had strayed by then. He dug a little deeper into the eroticism that NO ONE denies was pretty thinly veiled in the Victorian context of Stoker’s book. Coppola just removed a few of the veils.
Besides, who says Coppola had anything to do with the title? Michael Apted was set to direct, and he has a track record of directing an adaptation of one book with the title of a completely separate book.
Oh, plus, the 20-year-old Jack Palance movie was a 20-year-old made-for-TV Jack Palance movie.