#81  
Old 04-10-2006, 11:04 AM
von chaney von chaney is offline
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totally.

this film drips with atmoshere at times. i loved the scene where lucy is staked in her coffin.

and what a pleasant change to see a film where van helsing goes to the castle to decapitate the 3 bride vampires.

my only major hang-up is reeves and ryder, never really took to them, but other than that i think its a pretty decent film.
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  #82  
Old 04-11-2006, 11:38 AM
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hollywoodgothiq hollywoodgothiq is offline
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This really should be a new thread, but anyway...

As far as plot, the Coppola DRACULA is about as far away from Stoker as one could imagine. Yes, it includes a great number of incidents from the novel, but so what?

The whole "reincarnation of lost love" plot has nothing to do with Stoker. It's borrowed from the Dan Curtis TV version of DRACULA, which in turn was recycling a plot from Curtis's soap opera DARK SHADOWS (wherein Maggie Evans was the reincarnation of Barnabas Collins' beloved Josette). Along the way BLACULA used the same idea, but if you really want to trace the idea to its filmic origin, you have to go back to the 1932 version of THE MUMMY.

In any case, inserting this plot into the middle of DRACULA makes nonsense of the story: the Count comes to England to reunite with his lost love Mina, but before he gets to her, he stops for a dalliance with Lucy! And yet we're supposed to buy into his great romantic love for Mina, but doesn't seem the least bit perturbed that her great romantic "lover" has been sharing bodily fluids with her best friend!

Absolutely idiotic, and clearly geared for dumb teenage audience that would enjoy treacly Harlequin romances.
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  #83  
Old 04-11-2006, 07:45 PM
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Well it's certainly as close to the book as the 1931 Dracula...much closer, actually.

It has some romance mixed in...but at least it keeps the ORIGINAL Harker story, for Christ's sake.

And at least they go into some more depth of his stay at the castle, the ending, etc.
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  #84  
Old 04-11-2006, 07:46 PM
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alkytrio666 alkytrio666 is offline
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P.S. Don't get me wrong through all of this- I LOVE the 1931 Dracula.

But I love it as a movie, not as a book adaption.
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  #85  
Old 04-12-2006, 10:02 AM
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hollywoodgothiq hollywoodgothiq is offline
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This may be a semantic difference rather than a substantial one, but the Coppola DRACULA is not closer to the plot of Stoker's novel.

The plot of the book (stated rather baldly) is that the Count invades England to spread the taint of vampirism. The key word is "invades."

The 1931 DRACULA tells this story, filtered through the play.

The plot of the Coppola film is: Dracula goes to England to find the reincarnation of his lost love. This plot is dressed up with a lot of incidents borrowed from the novel, as was Fred Saberhagen's riff on stoker, THE DRACULA TAPE. This is why I said before that Coppola's film is really an adaptation of Saberhagen's novel, not Stoker's. (This idea is not original to me.) As if to underline the point, Saberhagen gets co-credit on the official movie-tie in novelization of BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA -- a book that shouldn't even exist if the Coppola film were, as claimed, a completely faithful filmization of its source.

As for keeping the original Harker story, it is nice to see Jonathan (and not Renfield) travel to Transylvania, but the film does not keep the Harker story in any meaningful sense. The book's story (among other things) is about how this young Englishman is psychologically devastated by his experience in Castle Dracula, but under the tutelage of Professor Van Helsing, he overcomes this setback and destroys the monster -- a symbolic rte of passage into manhood, underlined by the fact that he goes on to father a child by Mina.

In the Coppola film, Harker gets his knife into Dracula but doesn't destroy him. That's left to Mina, turning the ending into a silly attempt at romantic tragedy. Like everything else in the film, it retains elements from the book but undermines them in service of its Harlequin romance approach to vampirism.
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  #86  
Old 04-27-2006, 05:01 AM
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yeah . . .

but wouldn't it be cool if dracula fought freddy krueger and in the final battle they both jumped into Transformers Robots and battled it out in the middle of Tokyo. . .



wow, that'd be cool
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  #87  
Old 05-06-2006, 02:04 AM
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i prefer the classic dracula
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  #88  
Old 05-06-2006, 12:22 PM
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Dracula should never speak, it messes it up when he speaks, and you should be able to ascertain what he is thinking through his body language. You know, like a mime does it. And he should only be played by a marionette type puppet, made of fiberglass, with green skin, like avocado green...he should sort of wobble a bit, and when he wants to leave the puppeteer can just YANK! him, you know, out the window and into the night.
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