DARK SHADOWS FORUMS
Members' Mausoleum => Calendar Events / Announcements Archive => Calendar Events / Announcements '24 I => Calendar Events / Announcements '07 I => Topic started by: Philippe Cordier on February 08, 2007, 06:03:17 AM
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I was enjoying last Sunday's BBC-produced Victorian mystery on PBS, and after the credits ran I was glad I hadn't turned off the TV, because what followed was a preview for this coming Sunday, February 11's "Masterpiece Theater." Two lovely young women in an exquisite Victorian bed chamber - then a shot of vampire bites on the neck of one of the women. At first I exclaimed, "Carmilla"! Coincidence of coincidences, because I was in the midst of re-reading LeFanu's novella "Carmilla," a story I hadn't read since I was 11 years old. However, it turned out not to be "Carmilla" after all, but a new production of "Dracula."
The count himself appeared very young, slouched on a divan, perhaps, looking very much the Byronic hero, and also rather "Goth."
You can see a trailer here:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/dracula/index.html
I'd also recommend going to the Internet Movie Database to read the comments there. The production aired in England over the holidays, and it didn't get very good reviews. The consensus is that it has little to do with the book, although it does a great job creating an authentic atmosphere. Opinion is divided on the actor playing the count. I will say that he gave a compelling performance as the creepy Monks in the BBC production of "Oliver Twist" a couple of years ago. So, he may not look like Stoker's count, but that hasn't stopped other movie versions. At any rate, it should be of interest to vampire aficionados.
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Other than featuring vampires named Dracula, the 1931 Lugosi and 1958 Chris Lee Draculas had little to do with the book, but they were still wonderful films in their own right!
I look forward to this new Dracula as I would to any old fashioned Gothic chiller!
Anyone see the 2 part Jane Eyre that just aired on Masterpiece Theatre?
A perfect production for DS fans:
dark, gothic, spooky, and VERY romantic!!
David
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Anyone see the 2 part Jane Eyre that just aired on Masterpiece Theatre?
A perfect production for DS fans:
dark, gothic, spooky, and VERY romantic!!
Sorry to disagree, but I thought the production was awful. Toby Stevens was an abysmal choice to play Edward Rochester, in my opinion. The man is supposed to be a brooding melancholy soul.....not a hyperactive twit. But maybe the second half was better......I didin't bother to find out.
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Hoping not to go too much off-topic, I'll make a quick tie-in with DS. Remember how the early part of the 1897 storyline drew a lot of inspiration from "Jane Eyre"? For that matter, the whole governess situation that DS began with had many echoes from the novel. ;D
I agree with David that DS viewers should find "Jane Eyre" of special interest. From what I read about the recent BBC production that aired a couple of weeks ago, though, people who hadn't read the book loved it (for example, the San Francisco Chronicle reviewer, I think it was, thought it was great but showed he wasn't very familiar with the original novel's ideas); many of those who know the book, on the other hand, had big reservations. I only turned it on for a few minutes, and at first was taken in by the beautiful settings, the filming, the costumes (probably too beautiful). And I think this actress may have been right for the part had it been written true to the book (though she was probably too pretty). And I usually hate to say that anyone is "wrong" for a part, but Toby Stephens (besides being way too pretty) was not Charlotte Bronte's character at all ... If I could let go of my impressions from the book, I might have been able to sit back and enjoy it (especially if I had thought more about DS).
That will be the challenge for me with the new "Dracula". As a great admirer of Stoker's novel, every production has disappointed me to some degree, although some more than others. (I rank Dan Curtis' version as one of the better ones.) Some of the early Barnabas scenes on DS reminded me of the Stoker novel.
David makes a good point about previous versions of "Dracula" not adhering much to the novel. I'll do my best to take his advice :
I look forward to this new Dracula as I would to any old fashioned Gothic chiller!
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sorry to sound shallow, but Toby Stevens' incredible beauty is one of the things I liked about this Jane Eyre!
But the castle set, the costumes, the dreary countryside all added many Gothic delights to the proceedings.
Dark Shadows' 1795 story could have been shot on the same sets!
Anyone ever see Franco Zeferelli's 1996 Jane Eyre?
I was shocked that the maker of the definitive Romeo & Juliet would make such a dull, flat film!
David
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Dracula looks interesting enough to make me want to tune in. Thanks for posting this, Vlad!
G.
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I've seen some ads for Dracula because I always watch "Are You Being Served?" before bed. It looks pretty good. I don't care much about the bad reviews, I'm sure it will be better than some of the 10 movies for $11 DVD's I've been buying lately.
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I'm looking forward to seeing it. What's not to love about a gothic vampire story with great costumes and pretty people ^-^
Teresa
PS-Good to hear from you Vlad, hope all is well!
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Anyone see the 2 part Jane Eyre that just aired on Masterpiece Theatre?
A perfect production for DS fans:
dark, gothic, spooky, and VERY romantic!!
Sorry to disagree, but I thought the production was awful. Toby Stevens was an abysmal choice to play Edward Rochester, in my opinion. The man is supposed to be a brooding melancholy soul.....not a hyperactive twit. But maybe the second half was better......I didin't bother to find out.
Oh i liked the production better than the William Hurt one for sure or George C Scott's version . .but then again I like Toby Stevens alot. .and his mum. . Maggie Smith.
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I didn't know Toby Stevens was Maggie Smith's son!
She's a GREAT actress!
what a theatrical pedigree he has!
David
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It was certainly different. But I'm not one of those people who thinks it's sacrelidge to do some tinkering with a classic story, so I thought it was different in a good way - especially if you've seen many different versions of Dracula. I particularly liked what they did with the Mina character. And the entire production definitely oozed atmosphere. In fact, the look of the production was incredibly well done.
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A little spoilage in this...
I did like the atmosphere, and pervasive sense of foreboding. In general, though, I was underwhelmed; just another fairly drastic re-imagining of Dracula -- although I did rather like the idea of the count being an intensely evil, remorseless creature that sees humans as nothing but prey. None of the casting seemed particularly inspired, though Tom Burke as Dr. Jack was fair enough and David Suchet as Van Helsing worked out pretty well. Mina was OK.
The story seemed rushed to me -- no doubt to fit it into a 90-minute time slot. I'd much rather have seen a truer adaption, featuring some of the classic elements from the book that they excised in order to make way for the Holmwood-with-syphillis subplot, which struck me as rather needless. I think the writers said, "Well, we gotta do SOMETHING to make this one different from all the others; let's try this." Well...I'm not sure they quite hit on all cylinders.
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I was pretty underwhelmed. Mina was a very interesting character and the little love triangle thing was more interesting than the vampire plot. I didn't care for the count at all, he didn't make any impression on me whatsoever. I also didn't care at all for the mildly blurry picture quality that they used on quite a few ocasisons. The gothic atmosphere was only so-so as well.
After an hour I got bored and put on an episode of Dark Shadows.
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For the most part, I enjoyed it. The two stars of the production were the photography and Marc Warren's performance. I liked Warren simply because he played the part with a different twist. Since so little of the dialogue or story from the book was used, it made it easier to accept Dracula being very different from how he was described in the book.
Mina seemed to have been inspired by the portrayal of Mina in the comic book series, The League of extraordinary gentlemen (not to be confused with the disastrous film of the same title). I actually thought certain scenes may have owed a debt to Dark Shadows. Mina and Lucy's meeting with Dracula on the Whitby cliffs, for one. (I don't think they actually filmed in Whitby. For my money, Dan Curtis' use of Whitby locations was really quite imaginative in his version of this tale.)
G.
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There is a novel, entitled "Moon Rising" which explores a fictional love affair between Bram Stoker and a young woman he meets in Whitby while working on his novel. The author is Ann Victoria Roberts and the book was published by St. Martin's Press in 2001.
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I tried watching it, on and off, and it just did not grab me. I eventually turned to "American Dad."
Gerard
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I didn't know Toby Stevens was Maggie Smith's son!
His father was Maggie's 1st husband, Sir Robert Stephens. But they divorced when the two sons were quite young and both her sons have said her 2nd husband, Beverly Cross (to whom she was actually engaged prior to marrying Stephens) was more their "dad".
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I thought it was pretty weird - didn't care for it. I really don't see why they needed to invent the syphillis story. It didn't make much sense to me and it seems that if they want to incorporate that into a vampire story, they could write their own instead of pretending it's Dracula. I'd say it's the worst version of the story I've encountered.
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I agree with MB that the program had a good visual style, and the music helped create tension. The castle on the hill, though, immediately reminded me of the fake model "Collinwood" used in the opening credits of the 1991 DS revival series.
I'm glad I was forewarned that this wasn't a close adaptation of the novel. As a new interpretation, it had some good moments and interesting backstory to some of the characters.
Overall, I didn't care much for the way Dracula was portrayed. He was very creepy at the beginning, something along the lines of "Nosferatu," rather than following Stoker's descriptions. I thought both the early scenes and the youthful Dracula might have owed something to the Coppola version (in my view, the worst version). They also seemed to borrow the twisted idea from that movie that staking Lucy was a substitute for having sex with her.
I managed to miss the sex scene between Dracula and Lucy so will have to watch my tape of it sometime.
The part about the occult worshippers owed its inspiration to one of the Christopher Lee/Hammer "Dracula" movies, I forget which one.
The movie really lost me the first time Dracula ripped off someone's head, and I was hoping it wouldn't happen again, but it did. That seemed more like something a horror movie monster would do, not Stoker's warrior count.
And I actually thought the last scene with the aged Dracula hiding among the street people was kind of lame.
Nevertheless, as a stand-alone movie, I enjoyed it over all, but I wouldn't rate it as a good version of the novel. I wish they would have given it some other title than "Dracula," which was so misleading. And the trailer had the best scenes.
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Hi Vlad, Dracula was first associated with the Black Mass in Hammer's 1969 classic "Taste the Blood of Dracula" (now available in a truly gorgeous DVD which *radically* altered my opinion of this film--the photog is simply stunning). They repeated this theme in subsequent films, notably "Dracula A. D. 1972" and "The Satanic Rites of Dracula."
The sexualization of Lucy's staking is in the original book, in a very sick and twisted way. Bram Stoker seems to have had some serious issues around his own sexuality. Granted, in the book they did not stage Lucy's staking in the over-the-top way that it was done in this new movie. That truly was gratuitous to the point of being laughable.
Although I enjoyed watching it, there were a number of sequences where I had no idea how the actors got through their scenes without falling about in helpless laughter at the idiocy of the proceedings.
I look forward to seeing Marc Warren in future work of a better calibre. He's in an episode of the new Dr. Who series I haven't had time to watch yet.
G.
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I really don't see why they needed to invent the syphillis story. It didn't make much sense to me
I think they brought in the syphilis angle because some biographers have speculated that Stoker might have had it, though there's no evidence. (Nice how biographers like to speculate.)
I liked Warren simply because he played the part with a different twist. Since so little of the dialogue or story from the book was used, it made it easier to accept Dracula being very different from how he was described in the book.
Which is not to say that Marc Warren wasn't an interesting casting choice, and I'd be interested in seeing more of his work. He has quite a list of credits, mostly for British television.
I actually thought certain scenes may have owed a debt to Dark Shadows. Mina and Lucy's meeting with Dracula on the Whitby cliffs, for one. (I don't think they actually filmed in Whitby. For my money, Dan Curtis' use of Whitby locations was really quite imaginative in his version of this tale.)
I don't remember Dan Curtis using Whitby locations. Are you sure you're not thinking of the earlier BBC version with Louis Jourdan? They did use location filming in Whitby for that one.
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I thought it was pretty weird - didn't care for it. I really don't see why they needed to invent the syphillis story. It didn't make much sense to me and it seems that if they want to incorporate that into a vampire story, they could write their own instead of pretending it's Dracula. I'd say it's the worst version of the story I've encountered.
I've understood that scholarly types think the whole story is about syphillis really---not due to Stoker per say but hypersensitivity (or paranoia) in Victorian society at the time--
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I've understood that scholarly types think the whole story is about syphillis really---not due to Stoker per say but hypersensitivity (or paranoia) in Victorian society at the time--
Same here. I'm not a Victorianist, but I have friends who are. (I'm not a doctor, but I play one on tv. ;D ) I've heard the story discussed in this context before.
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Mina seemed to have been inspired by the portrayal of Mina in the comic book series, The League of extraordinary gentlemen (not to be confused with the disastrous film of the same title).
I see I am not the only one who weeps at Mina's character depiction in TLOEG movie vs. the comic. I did enjoy the movie as a seperate entity, I thought Nemo was the shit, but it couldn't hold a candle to the original.
I was intrigued by the comic's [spoiler]depiction of Dracula's bite as appearing that he had tried to gnaw her neck off as an animal would, compared to the standard two bite puncture wound effect.[/spoiler]
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Well honestly Arashi, I haven't even seen the movie of the League--everything I have read about it makes me want to vomit, so why lacerate myself with the actual experience. I asked my roommate whether Stuart Townsend removed his clothing because, if he had (particularly if he had displayed full frontal nudity), there might have been SOME incentive to see it, but, no dice. I gather the movie was geared towards thirteen year old mall rats with videogame fetishes.
I also found it fascinating how in the comic books
[spoiler]Mina's neck wounds had not healed after the vampire's destruction. It made me wonder whether Alan Moore had considered doing a Dracula story somewhere down the line. It WAS one of the great moments of sheer shock when Mina's unveiling occurred--in circumstances that were already shocking to the max! Of course, if one recalls the description of Dracula's TUSKS in the original novel, it isn't surprising that the marks he would leave would be hideous, mauling scars, rather than the discreet little holes of the classic films... In the novel, did one of the characters describe the throat marks as being "two little wounds, white with red centers"--this line is given to van Helsing in the original Lugosi film.[/spoiler]
I do go on, don't I?
G.
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geared towards thirteen year old mall rats with videogame fetishes.
Isn't almost everything mainstream geared to that demographic? Thoughtful films that actually challenge their audience almost have to be seeked out in secret back alley theaters/video stores like the porn films of yore. :D Though it's not really a laughing matter. But I digress...
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I also found it fascinating how in the comic books
[spoiler]Mina's neck wounds had not healed after the vampire's destruction. It made me wonder whether Alan Moore had considered doing a Dracula story somewhere down the line. It WAS one of the great moments of sheer shock when Mina's unveiling occurred--in circumstances that were already shocking to the max! Of course, if one recalls the description of Dracula's TUSKS in the original novel, it isn't surprising that the marks he would leave would be hideous, mauling scars, rather than the discreet little holes of the classic films... In the novel, did one of the characters describe the throat marks as being "two little wounds, white with red centers"--this line is given to van Helsing in the original Lugosi film.[/spoiler]
[spoiler]I took it that at the end of the second series that Allan Quartermain had hunted Dracula down and destroyed him as Mina's neck wounds suddenly disappeared. But perhaps there was some other reason? There's a 3rd league series in the works, apparently due for release this October.[/spoiler]