Cool News
Francis Ford Coppola already prepping his next movie? To film this year?!?!
Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. Wow... this is cool news. It was huge that Francis Ford Coppola finally went back behind the camera last year to film YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH, an independently financed (thanks to Mr. Coppola's vineyards) flick about an older man who gets struck by lightning and suddenly returns to his younger days, in WW2. That one stars Tim Roth.
He's editing that and says it'll be released second half of 2007, although it hasn't screened for any distributors yet. Sounds great... but there's more!
He just announced today that he's going into production on a flick called TETRO. Set in Buenos Aires, the film will follow the trials of an immigrant family (presumably Italian). Matt Dillon, strangely enough, is topping the bill.
Coppola said he's self-financing this film just like he did YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH, which he said was the dream back in his early days... that he wrote and produced (and creatively controlled) his own stuff.
However it's happening, I'm just glad to get Coppola films in the works again!
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thats all
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You need a cynical one eyed bastard in a WW2 pic...not to mention in an immigrant family too! This is not a fight we can win!!!
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More Coppola is great news! I wish Roman would direct something else. Poppa's showin' him up.
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I'm glad someone gave some Captain Panaka love!
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Lamely lame lame lame.
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Metropolis went down.
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Even if his best work is behind him I'l see anything Coppola does lately. hell I thought The Rainmaker was a great flick. Alot more grounded than what most people seem to make out of Grishams books.
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the outsiders was on tv the other day, dillon rules . . .
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I think he's made some cash too - just lost a lot when he tried to make his own studio...
He should have learned the lesson - always make movies with OTHER people's money! -
When film people say a project 'went down' or 'fell over' that means it's dead. Not the same as the more 'common' use of the term. I actually really like Dracula although I wish the studios had the guts to let him do it almost without sets and letting the costumes take centre. Bit too 'experimental' I guess.
Are you sure about the feud or is that just hearsay? It seems a bit odd that they'd produce films together (post thx, ag & sw they did Kagemusha, Mishima, Captain Eo, Tucker) if they really were a-feudin'. -
Damn you Michael Bay
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Feb 14, 2007 6:50:50 AM CST
Whew, I thought it was "The Godfather vs. Goodfellas"
by jackpumpkinhead
Or "Godfather IV: In da 'hood" (Both of which exist in the "mind" of some studio executive, I'll bet)
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Kewl!
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don't you watch kid notorious?
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BringSexyBack re: Frankenstein: Its not overacting when the novel's tone calls for melodrama. Branagh (and the rest of the cast) were simply performing in the spirit of the novel. "Gothic" originally has closer ties to overswelling every emotion ala the later silent German Expressionism would do.
MetalWater re: Dracula: You say you wanted it to be "a great intellectually and emotionally transforming film", yet at the same time you say it was "too much of a classical film piece"? I think the latter definitely means the former criteria were met. Personally I think its one of the greatest films ever crafted, with scores more to say than 90% of films out there.
As for his future endeavours, I WANT MEGALOPOLIS! -
Copola really has to work hard to outdo the miscasting of his Dracula movie. I mean Keanu and Winona? What was he thinking?
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"It is NOT...what I WANTED!!"
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Francis should stop and just let Sophia pwn him.
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Just saying.
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"...made after the jaw-droppingly brilliant APOCALYPSE NOW that was anything more than average?" Coppola Rossa is a damn fine table wine. I'm not a big fan of Merlot, but his Diamond label is pretty darned good. He seems to really know his reds, while his whites tend toward the dry side. Anyway, gotta give the man his due for what he's done.
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The genre has the worst fans in the world, and all they'll do is nitpick. Do whatever the hell you want.
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Either way, after Godfather you earned it, my big Italian friend.
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Robin Williams sucks.
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45 additional minutes of Sofia!
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if he needs more money, why doesn't he just make stylish, cutting edge, brilliant, original, porno's? Then he'd be a billionaire.
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And that guy is mighty talented.
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"Hey, Vinnie - what's our re-entry trajectory?""Fuggedaboudit. Youse expect me to keep track of dat? What am I?""Hey, don't go bustin' my balls. Nick, tell him to quit bustin' my balls!""Quit bustin' his balls, Vinnie."
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would be fantastic. It's understandable that it would be hard to follow up three of the GREATEST FILMS EVER MADE (Godfather 1 & 11, Apocalypse Now). I mean, tell me the baptism scene in the Godfather isn't the greatest fucking movie scene of all fucking time.Well, you're wrong, 'cause it is.
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oops. Not paying a damn bit of attention to what I'm doing.
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Word on the street is that he had to do some uncredited directing on that.
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MetalWater, Francis Ford Coppola doesn't even LIKE genre films like the ones you mentioned, so why would he make one? Not to mention that he is almost 70 years old. Doesn't every great director have about a 7 or 8 year run where they direct most of their classic films? Seems like that is always the case.
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I thought there were 8 more Godfather movies that I'd somehow missed! I particularly would have liked to have seen "Godfather 7: Weekend at Tessio's" starring Abe Vigoda.
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4 great movies 30 years ago. Then what. Jack? Dracula? The Grisham movie? Come on.
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Hack? Seriously? I mean, I'll give you has been. The guy definitely should stick to wine making these days. But the man who gave us Apocalypse Now and Godfather i & II can be forgiven a few slow pitches after bringiung that kind of heat. Hell, I even forgive him for Godfather III...which doesn't exist, by the way. It really doesn't.
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BSB, Peggy Sue got Maried is a pretty gay romcom, isn't it?
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http://tinyurl.com/33vj2e
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How many times do we have to tell you that Panaka was not the one eyed officer? If you don't know this, you need to pay attention to the hundreds of people who've already pointed this out. If you DO know this, well... it just makes your stupid, troll-like posts even stupider. What a lame "bit".
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he has had his handful of great classic films, and those that aren't groundbreaking classics are still pretty good. Coppola's non Great films are HORRIBLE!!! Making me think that he owes a big debt to, his crew, Bob Evans, Luck and I'm betting the drug culture of the 70's.
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All Coppola did was a huge re-edit of that film. As a boardmember of MGM he was called in to try to rescue the project after both Walter Hill and Jack Sholder left. It was given a further re-edit after Coppola so you can't really blame him for that movie.
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Just less napalm and gunfire than his Big Classics (tm).
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Ok, I get it. He made The Godfather, and The Godfather Part II, The Conversation and Apocolypse Now. But how many shitty movies does this dude have to make before people say, "Ya know, maybe it's just a fluke this guy made a few of the best movies of all time." Here's a few movies to consider: Peggy Sue Got Married, why does this film exist? The Outsiders, a movie about a couple of boys who hide in a cabin for awhile. The Rainmaker, the most boring JohN grisham adaptation ever. His part in making Supernova, a terrible sci-fi movie just made to show people having sex in an anti-gravity room. His piece in New York STories is one of the stupidest, self-serving short films I've ever seen that made me want to kill myself. And Jack, where the man essentially made up a fake disease. Progeria kids do NOT develop like that. So please, some one explain it to me how this motherf*cker can make so many terrible films and be so highly regarded? He needs to stick to sipping wine in napa valley.
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..."power" in the Nixon era with the GODFATHER movies and THE CONVERSATION (I absolutely love that movie), which also touched on privacy.I'm hoping he will have something interesting - and personal - to say about today's "wars and rumors of war."
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Some really good performances, though. All in all, I found it hard to sit through. Better than "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein" by a MILE - which had so little to do with the book it might as well have been called "Me and My Monster."
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"He made The Godfather, and The Godfather Part II, The Conversation and Apocolypse Now."
What's remarkable is that he made all those movies in a row. That may beat any four-run Hitchcock or Spielberg or Kubrick ever had. -
change the animation on the home page. It's getting fucking ridiculous.
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or Uwe Boll, either way.
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And I agree, Rainmaker gets no love. It is a great film, very emotional, very well acted. It's no Godfather II, but then again-what is?
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How about as faithful as you could possibly get, even attempting to capture the feverish tone in the form of expressionistic visuals and acting style? The gothic novel is one of my areas of specialized study, and I marvel at how faithful it is. Perhaps even more faithful to what Mary Shelley intended than what completely ended up on the page. Same situation with the Dracula film.
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...despite a completely miscast Keanu Reeves. Hopkins was entertaining as hell and the visual style of the whole thing was pretty impressive. The story is what it is. You can't so much blame Coppola for adding some context to the Count's life (and using the historical figure as a loose template). It's not a great film, but it's hardly a cinematic abortion.
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I agree that that was a good run of great films.
But then Spielberg, Hitchcock and Kubrik went on to still make incredible films wheras Coppolla did not. He went onto make, in my opinion, terrible films. An interesting thing, In terms of history, is if he had stopped after those four he'd probably go down as a legend, like Charles Laughton did after only making Night of The Hunter or James Dean after only making three films. But he didn't stop. Instead he started taking dumps and charging people 8 bucks to go see them smeared on celluloid. -
Seriously. James Caan, James Earl Jones, Larry Fishburne, Dean Stockwell, and a good performance from DB Sweeney.
"Ashes to ashes and dust to dust, let's bury this guy and get back on the bus." -
If Francis needs help coming up with porn idea's, here's a couple for ya, buddy. "Acrotchtolick Now" and "Bram's Strokin' Dracula". Make these and you'll have all the money you need for future projects.
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as far as I'm concerned anyway. I don't know if the subject matter sounds that interesting but as long as he's making movies again, I'm all for it. I'm happy about the self-financing thing too. If more people jump on that bandwagon we could be headed into a great period of filmmaking.
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Two Paesans, A Lucciola and A Pizza Place
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But, what the fuck was going on in the final 3rd act? They went all "Bride of Frankenstein" and had the creature and Victor fighting over a re-animated Elizabeth (at least her head on Justine's body). *sigh*It was a poor, poor choice to try and wring some far-fetched "romance" angle out of a story that is not about some necrophiliac love triangle.I will be with you in spirit in the theater when "The Castle of Otranto" or "The Monk" ever gets made into film.
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"Hey, Carlo - where's Joey's body? I'm gonna bring him back from the dead as a hitman nobody can kill.""Paulie won't like that.""Yeah, well, Paulie ain't never gonna find out about it, now is he?""He prolly already knows everything.""Who's the stool pigeon?!?!?"Paulie enters."Godfather, I seek your blessing to bring Joey back from the dead.""A zombie. In my house? You gonna bring a zombie into my family? Your mother, God rest her soul, would be ashamed! Do it...but quietly."
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Willard comes back to the states where he is asked to jounrey down sewer under Ventura Blvd to penetrate Scientology headquarters and kill its maniacal cult leader, Tom Cruise (of 'The Outsiders').
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Yes, I should have added "Except for pushing the boundary a little further in having Victor finish the female creation". But that part never bothered me because I believe its an adaptive change that Shelley herself may have approved of, because as a film it needs that extra punctuation of climax by that point, and it only hits home the story's themes even further than having Victor start the female creation and then stop out of hesitation. There'd be no movie climax otherwise. The novel didn't need it because they're not structured along such confining narrative lines, but it seems a natural extension of Shelley's text when molding it into a faithful visual adaptation. That's one of the main points I was alluding to when I said it is often more faithful to Shelley's creation than she was in a novel format.
Doctor_Sin, I'm glad to hear you're a fan of the genre as well, and yes, I do dream of big-budget The Castle of Otranto and The Monk adaptions; I'm particularly fond of the notion of getting to a point where I can do them myself! -
I heard he'd been filming that for years...
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"Hey, Tony, where's Uncle Giuseppe?""Over dere." (points at table)"Where?"Dere!" (points down to tabletop)"Hey - why's he so tiny? And why'd you leave him alone with the Godfather's lunch?""Shaddap. Don't say nothin' and ain't nothin' gonna happen."The Godfather enters."Enjoy your lunch, Godfather.""Why's Uncle Giuseppe crawling around on my cannoli?""Tony - get the Godfather a fresh cannoli...and get Uncle Giuseppe a spoon - he's stuck in the alfredo sauce."
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times are good. I can't wait for Alexandra Maria Lara + Roth and this philosopher's thoughts...
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FFC is only one of the all time greats ever.Well said, indeed.
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Screenplay for Patton...Screenplay for The Great Gatsby...Produced American Graffiti...Co-produced Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi...Directed Tucker...Directed The Cotton Club (fuck its poor BO performance - I like it)...Executive Producer on Sleepy Hollow...The man has fingers in lots of good projects - no slouch. But, can he slip into the Director's seat comfortably or will we experience another Lucas?
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pile it on!
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I won't get in it with you over Frankie because I haven't read it since college and college is nearly two decades ago for me at this point. But in what way did the changes made in Dracula stay true to the spirit of the book? I pull down Dracula every now and then to marvel at how, at the time, Stoker managed to modernize the whole milieu of the whitened sepulchre, the amazing, cinematic set pieces he created and the fact that, for a man who was not by any standard definition a great writer, he was able to so effectively create such an effective and pervasive atmosphere of corruption and loss. And the goofy romance and stylized backstory in the movie was in no way in keeping with anything Stoker portrayed or hinted at in the novel. And the actual tone of the novel was lost completely. Hell, Hammer's Horror of Dracula got it closer to right. It was pretty, though. But really.
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I'm excited to see Coppola get on the horse again. He's only made three of my top twenty, four of my top two hundred, and I'm pretty fond of Tucker, The Rainmaker, and Dementia 13, too. I've never gotten over my disappointment in The Outsiders, but I suspect it was a matter of my expectations going in being way too high.
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Alfred-The Wrong Man, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho.
Stan-Strangelove, 2001, Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon -
the guy peaked in the late 1970's, when I still running around in diapers. Since then he's done a few mildly entertaining movies like Peggy Sue Got Married, which is a chick version of Back to the Future, Dracula, a snooze fest with great visuals and sets, and Jack, a flick that could have been a Lifetime movie of the week.
The Rainmaker was okay, but was the least entertaining of all the Grisham books-to-films. The best Grisham adaptation was The Client. -
"You know somethin' Bobby?"
"What, Frankie?"
"Dat last hit, when I got popped and sent up the river? An' I told ya dey made me see dem docs and shrinks and stuff?"
"Yeah."
"I tell ya - now I can't listen ta Dean Martin without pukin'. Dat music used ta be my 'going out on a job' music!"
"No shit!?!?"
"Can't stand dat shit now. Sinatra neither. My old lady's all freaked about that one." -
Dracula was one of the most cinematic experiences I have ever had.
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Only this time it's set in the 1930's.
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There hasn't been enough Coppola in the past decade to wash away the stench of "Jack". I wish this will be another 1974-like year for Francis, in which he wrote/produced/directed The Godfather Part II and The Conversation AND adapted The Great Gatsby. But the one that Coppola tried to make, that sci-fi flick, would've been cool too.
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And his 'Lucas' nametag?
You're pretty excited about all this, aren't you? -
so much negativity. Fuck off!!!
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the year the movie is set! how ballsy is that? but then no matter who you were back then you could only make a 'nam film, even this one, homemade, and it would probably be "commie propaganda" to distribute it. can you imagine Apocalypse Now opening a year after Wayne's Green Berets? oh and Brooks had his best year in 74 too w/ Frank/Saddles duo, plus Chinatown, and my favorite horror Captain Kronos Vampire Hunter
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I like how he is going back to his old days. But I only saw his epic flicks (Godfathers, Apocalypse Now). How was Rumble Fish and his other flicks during his early years? Just as long as he does go back to making flicks like Jack
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Hey, he could do another horror flick, like Frankenstein with the CGI version of Karloff's monster, or how about a dracula's daughter?
Heck, give him a superhero script to do. Would of been interesting had he got the FLASH or HULK 2.
Would love to see a Sci-Fi film directed by FFC!
How about doing a Harry Turtledove Novel starting with "The Guns of the South"?
I haven't read a Harry Turtledove novel yet but bet it would be cool to see! -
Sounds too much like a bad Nintendo video game.
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The atmosphere and mood is what I feel Coppola captured best from the novel. While I think the romance storyline is simply screenwriter James Hart reading between the lines of subtext in Stoker's work, and its certainly a love-it-or-hate-it affair (for me it strengthens the book's themes), the biggest accomplishment for me is how the film perfectly captured the vibe that I get every single time I read the book. Part of this has to do with the theatrical-soundstage settings, partly due to the Victorian-era film effects, having very young cast members contrasted with older cast members (in keeping with one of the book's themes of the new generation surpassing the old one), the music, the stylized nature of EVERYTHING, et cetera.I have written very lengthy papers over this and could go on and on, but the way I look at it is thusly: Really the only thing that is majorly different from the novel is the romance angle (which has roots in the Stoker subtext), and notice that's not an outright change, but merely an addition to the story. If Coppola had changed something in the story (ala past Dracula screenwriters having Lucy be in Mina's position, or a female Van Helsing, et cetera), then I'd have been very upset. But all Jim Hart did was add a new element that I feel adds depth. Stoker's novel is still all there, but then you get an added bonus of something that provides even more cinematic narrative drive.
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Lucas WAS a brilliant director. So was Francis Ford Coppola. So was Quentin Tarantino. You get the idea. Most great directors burn white hot for just under a decade, then they turn out only good/decent/bad films for the rest of their career. There are exceptions, but even those don't quite reach their earlier brilliance.
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...but there was not even a hint of true or eternal love between Mina and Dracula in the book. Stoker's Count was human once, but he had become a being alien to humanity and its desires. He'd been born as an elemental force from a womb of horror and savage, selfish power. Again and again Stoker makes sure to portray Dracula as a creature that has become the Other, who shares almost nothing with the human race. Now I suppose you could argue that since this is based on the diaries, letters and recordings of his foes that it is biased testimony, but it's what the novel gives us. So the full-bodied romance of the movie is an added bonus from an Ann Rice sort of stance, but not from Stoker's. And as for the "Victorian" film style, that certainly has antecedents in the Lugosi Dracula but what on earth does it have to do with the novel. Think of the amazingly cinematic (in what could be a very modern way but what I've always thought would perhaps be best portrayed in a German expressionism fashion) set pieces in the book. The "plague" ship arriving at port, its crew dead. Just one of the most brilliant images in horror fiction. The wild, desperate chase to the final confrontation with Dracula, the near fetish treatment of the native soil, the observation of Renfield at the asylum. All underplayed to not played at all in the film. In many ways you're loading down Stoker's Dracula with a lot of the common assumptions made about early gothic literature in general, of the Otranto and Udolpho variety, but Stoker was a writer in the vein of say Le Fanu, and his themes drew heavily on the distant and all powerful nobility feeding off a prostrate peasantry and, ingeniously, the emerging "modern man" no longer willingly bending to the will of this aristocracy. And as for that romance, Mina wasn't even Dracula's first target, and when he seeks to control her it is portrayed specifically as his revenge on and strategy of placing a source of information among his foes. It was Lucy, who received her three marriage proposals on the same day, who Dracula first targets. You can like the Dracula movie Francis made all you want, like I said it's a pretty movie, but in terms of illuminating and expanding on what Stoker wrote, sorry. Stoker not only wasn't writing a classical gothic romance, he absolutely saw Dracula as a predator feeding on humanity, not a tragic figure.
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Ok, let's get a few things straight - first of all he didn't just make 4 great movies 30 years ago - he made 4 MASTERPIECES 30 years ago....to me those 4 can rank with any streak for an American director.
With a couple exceptions none of his movies "suck". Some disappoint, some fall short of their ambition but really only "Jack" and one or two others suck......Godfather 3 doesn't suck. It's a good flawed fim - heck the opera sequence alone is better than 99% of the crap you see......oh and "The Conversation" is his best film - yeah , ya heard me. -
Thanks for your input. I enjoyed reading your remarks, because its very rare to find intelligent conversation here on the AICN boards, and I know you seem to have put a lot of thought into this matter.I realize that the romance angle is the biggest target for people's argument that Coppola didn't do a faithful adaptation. Its just that I feel he did do so much that is culled straight from the book, far more than any other filmmaker has ever attempted, so to have a non-book subplot doesn't bother me too much, even if it does slightly change the characters of Dracula and Mina. I do admit to being a major Anne Rice fan as well, so perhaps that has coloured my interpretations over the years.I particularly like what you say about my interpretation also being coloured by earlier Gothic works like Otranto and Udolpho, because I have never put it in perspective that way, but it makes total sense. I have went out on a limb before to break-down Stoker's text in a way of justifying the Coppola changes, purely as an academic pursuit rather than as a way of "proving" that one interpretation is right (which can never be done), but in the end that's all it can be: an interpretation. And I do admit that the crutch this one stands on is the notion that Stoker only implied some of his themes, censoring himself against a very proper Victorian audience. As you say it also relies on what is not said in the book, which is something that only holds weight as an academic exercise. Thanks for the conversation!
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