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Bram Stoker's Dracula

Bram Stoker's Dracula

List Price: $14.94
Your Price: $11.21
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Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Coppola no more
Review: Can not give a full review as ejected this film after 30 mins.
keanu Reeves is cringeworthy in his role and destroyed the film.
How can a man create the godfather series abd then make this dung???

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Terrific!
Review: Let me get this right off my chest: this movie really isn't that scary, but it isn't supposed to be! This new version of Dracula featuring some of Hollywood's best young talent, and directed by the legendary Francis Ford Copolla is an awesome movie. The most faithful film to the book yet, this film is an incredible, artistic moviemaking masterpiece! The movie stars Gary Oldman, Keanu Reeves, and Winona Ryder. It also atars Anthony Hopkins, who does a great job in the film. Gary Oldman is fantastic as Dracula, and he is a believable, spooky character. Keanu Reeves is actually pretty good in the film, but he doesn't show up much in the role of Jonathan Harker. Winona is compelling as the distressed Mina, but every now and then she tended to bore me. It is still a great acting effort! The sound in Dracula won an Academy Award, and for good reason! The music is compelling and a bit overdone, with sweeping movie strings and broad percussion. But the sound is exceptional, and it made my ears happy.
Visually, Dracula is astounding, and it was acknowledged by the Academy in this category as well. The costumes are incredible, and the set design is the best in the last ten years. It captures your eye at a fast pace, and really the whole movie is fast-paced, stunning, and a great thriller. Buyer beware, this is not another pathetic slasher film, but I don't care because I am not much into those films anyway. Dracula is depressing, beautiful, full of energy, and bursting with compassion. It is a must-see, five star effort in filmmaking!

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Do'nt buy or be ready to disapointed
Review: Just a short commentary:

This movie is boring, wasn't able to scare me and is a waste of time.
Some actors like Reeves, Hopkins and Waits did a fine job.
But spend your money on something more interesting.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: One of the BEST!!!!!!
Review: This is a very good film on the hole. The only thing that is bad about it is Keanu Reeves accent, it very very bad. But everything else is great. This is one of the best Dracula films of all time!!!!!!!!!!

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: True to the letter, but NOT the spirit of Stoker
Review: It begins well. By connecting Dracula the vampire with the historic Vlad Dracula (1431-1476), also known as Vlad Tepes ("Vlad the Impaler"), the film promises quite a lot. The special effects in the opening are not so much bad as they are stylized; Coppola's stated intent was to invoke the techniques of classic silent cinema. I bought it.

But then Keannu Reeves showed up and everything went south in a hurry. It's not his fault; he is an actor of limited range. His Neo in The Matrix works. His Jonathon Harker doesn't - even for a moment. Neither does Winona Ryder's Mina. Her presence is too slight to hold the screen. Gary Oldman is a fine actor, but in the presence of an overly indulgent director (as he had here), tends to go over the top. His Dracula should have felt quite sated on all the scenery he mercilessly feasted upon. And, finally, the much-praised Anthony Hopkins - another fine actor - chose to phone in his Van Helsing as though he were impersonating the character for a group of attentive children.

Bram Stoker's Dracula's fatal flaw, though, is its screenplay. The "reimagining" of the relationship between Dracula and Mina as star-crossed lovers seeking each other across the barriers of time and death is just silly. Not that the whole concept of the Vampire isn't, mind you, but that's a level of silliness we're willing to buy into when we watch a Dracula film in the first place. Stoker's Dracula was a thoroughly malignant character. Vastly intelligent and noble though he was, let's not forget he was based on a sadistic 15th century Wallachian prince who got his jollies impaling thousands of people on pikes - usually through the most painful orifice you can think of! This film turns him into a weepy, sentimental type whose villainous actions are pardonable because they are fueled by his search for True Love. Ick! Does anybody who knows anything about the real Vlad Tepes (who the film has defintely established as our hero) really believe this possible?

Despite this bizarre shift in the Dracula-Mina dynamic, the film then works very hard to include everything - absolutely everything - from the book, by compressing it to the point where anyone who went to the bathroom in its thatrical run might well have missed the equivalent of 150 pages of the novel. Lucy didn't actually need three suitors, dramatically speaking. By including them, what we get is two too many characters with nothing to do but stand around and look chivalrous. That's why the process of turning a novel into a screenplay is called "adaptation". It would have been better to take a lesson from other tellings of the story: chuck what you don't really need, then polish and pace what's essential until it works dramatically.

The art-direction and cinematography in Bram Stoker's Dracula is first-rate, without ever being really appropriate. There is a distincly Japanese flavor to the design work that, while striking, is completely at odds with the period and place. And Coppola's camera style, so disciplined and unerring in films like The Godfather and Apocalypse Now!, is ludicrously overwrought here. The film looks like a two-hour music video - and a mediocre one at that.

The definitive film version of Dracula has yet to be made. It is a classic novel, without quite acending to the status of classic literature. As such, it requires fairly liberal adaptation, but an equal measure of respect for Bram Stoker's integrity in its telling. He was in top form with Dracula, and spun a crackling good yarn. His best work deserves better film-making.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: An opulent and sensual feast
Review: This version of Dracula is by far the most extravagant of all its incarnations, and its visual decadence is really what the makes the film. The Count Dracula (Gary Oldman), after battling Muslim invaders, returns home to find his true love (Winona Ryder) dead, a suicide in reaction to false reports that the count himself was dead. Four hundred years later, in late 19th century London, his love has been reincarnated in the form of Mina, a young girl engaged to the man who has been sent to investigate him (Keanu Reeves). Once Dracula realizes that Mina is the living form of his true love, he sets out to claim her, and chaos and violence ensues. The actually story is really too complicated to fully explain here, and the script is really only a framework for the dazzling visual aspects of the film.
The limited space here cannot contain descriptions of the artistic direction and cinematography of the movie and do them justice.

As far as the acting, Ryder is the one to watch. Although Anthony Hopkins does well as the doctor who believes in Dracula's existence, it is Ryder's Mina who is the most complex. (I can't believe she wasn't nominated for an Oscar.)She is the only one who makes you care about her character as the others only seem like attractive props. Oldman is scary but I think that his makeup did most of the acting for him. And Keanu Reeves is, well, Keanu Reeves.

It is interesting to note that while the most intense chemistry should have taken place between Oldman and Ryder, it is the tension between Ryder and Reeves that is the most believable. Their wedding scene is more erotically charged than the final reunion of Dracula and his bride, when the opposite should have been true. It's a long movie and the characters, except for Mina, aren't very likeable. But every frame of this movie is a work of Gothic art, which may not satisfy all audiences.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Love never dies!
Review: I only gave this film 4 stars, because after you see it so many times you notice alot of things that could have been corrected had the spent a little more time on it. Over all, this film is amazing. I would recommend it above any other Dracula movie out there. It's based on the original Dracula story written by Bram Stoker. They changed the plot quite a bit, but for the better.
The cast alone could have made this movie great even if the plot lacked. With names like Gary Oldman, Anthony Hopkins, and Winona Ryder how can this movie fail? Gary Oldman is astonishing. If Dracula looked and acted as Gary Oldman did who could refuse him? Anthony Hopkins is the only person I could ever see playing Van Helsing. He fit the character perfectly. Eccentric, a bit psychotic, wise, and charming, who better to play that role? Winona Ryder did a good job playing Mina, but I wouldn't say it was the perfect role for her. The only complaint I could have about the cast is Keanu Reeves. What were they thinking with that? No matter how hard he tries he will never shake the surfer persona he took at the beginning of his career. They could have found many more that would have suited the role of Harker much better. Besides that, he did a bad job with the english accent. It sounded fake and not well rehersed.
The film was well adapted to the book, despite the fact that it completely changed the plot. They turned it from a story of sheer malice and revenge to an epic love story. Dracula's wife threw herself into the river after receiving false news of his death. This is true in accounts of history, but isn't directly mentioned in the book(if memory serves me right), but it's a strong point in the movie. In the movie, Dracula searches for centuries to find his lost wife. Finally that comes when Harker comes to Transylvania to finish the transaction between Dracula and the firm Harker represents. He finds that Mina, Haker's finace, is reincarnate of his beloved Elizebeta who flung herself into the river. From then Dracula's plot to win his love back begins. The entirety of the movie is based on the struggle of choosing between the power of eternal love or the bonds of religion and the decisions between right and wrong. The movie brings Dracula from this horrible, murdering monster which he's always portrayed to a man with a heart struggling between life and love. He risks everything to be with his one true love. Heart warming, right? As the cover says, love never dies.
Francis Ford Coppola does an amazing job with the imagery of this film. The special effects are amazing for the time. And the costumes are utterly astounding. The images in this movie are hardly forgetable.
On top of all that the sound track is amazing. During the ending credits they play a song by Annie Lennox. 'Love song for a vampire' is such an amazing song. After seeing the ending of the movie it will make you at least come close to tears.
Again, I would higly recommend this movie to anyone who likes the story of Dracula. Even to those who like love stories, just as long as you don't mind a bit of gore.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Mixed Results
Review: Francis Coppola's 1992 "Dracula" has varying qualities of acting and special effects that leave the audience feeling somewhat empty at the end. The film often seems rushed and cliche without any depth.

Gary Oldman and Anthony Hopkins are the anchors to the movie and keep it from falling into a trash-film category. Winona Ryder as Mina Murray plays her role reasonably well as the object of the Count's desires. Tom Waits also steals the show as the Count's deformed servant, Renfield. Keanu Reeves as Jonathan Harker kills the movie in every way: the man simply can't act as anyone but himself.

I am a big fan of both Hopkins and Oldman but this movie is simply too mediocre for me to buy. The special effects are extremely takcy with all the trappings of stage props: I've seen better gimmicks at a play. Worth renting once but hardly worth buying.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Nice Dracula adaptation, Superbit format gets mixed review
Review: First of all, I have enjoyed the film from my first viewing in the theater to my most recent viewing on the Superbit DVD. The film gives a rich, tragic subtext to the Dracula legend that most other films ignore in favor of gory special effects or cheap scare tactics. The cast is spectacular, featuring Gary Oldman as the fanged one, Winona Ryder as his lost love, Anthony Hopkins as Van Helsing, and Keanu Reeves as Jonathan Harker.

The only thing I was a bit disappointed in was the digital transfer of the film. Although I recognize that the film was released over a decade ago, Columbia apparently didn't take the time to digitally restore the film before the transfer, as there are still some visible pops and dust even on the Superbit edition. The 5.1 soundtrack, however, will blow you away. It was so crisp and clean, I had to turn down the sound significantly so that I did not wake up my baby. The soundtrack makes good use of all channels and covers the discriminating viewer who has a decent home theater system in excellent sound quality. Thus, the movie sounds great, but I could not discern a significant quality difference in the picture from other DVDs.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Not all THAT good....
Review: The biggest disaster in this film is having Mr. "excellent!" playing Harker. Keanu Reeves comes off as the buffoon he is with his horrible "accent", and he sounds like Bill (or is it Ted?) trying to pull off an English accent. Bad move. Throughout, he seems somewhat clueless as to what to do with himself, being devoid of any emotion. Even when he sees a younger Dracula in London, his reaction is rather lacking. He just comes across as stiff and uninteresting. He should have been cast as a tree, then he would've won an Oscar.
Gary Oldman's take on the "old" version of Dracula is not too impressive, either, though he's pretty smooth as the younger Dracula. I think it's mostly due to the unconvincing make-up job on him.
The special FX as well, though clearly experimental in some scenes, was helpful in damaging this film's credibility. For example, I understand how they were trying to make Dracula's shadow have a life of it's own (when Harker first arrives), but at certain times when the shadow and Gary Oldman were supposed to be in sync they were waaayyyy off. I can't believe that the director didn't see how poorly it looked. It is THAT bad.
And when the coachman reaches his ever-lengthening arm to help Harker into the coach (good idea), Keanu is clearly on some sort of platform which lifts him upward and inside (bad idea, because it's so obvious).
Originally, I was looking forward to seeing this, but it was a real letdown. I suppose if your standards are low and you aren't too analytical, you could enjoy this. Of course, Anthony Hopkins is the only actor here that really keeps this from being a total write-off.


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