ENTERTAINMENT ESSENTIALS - BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA
He's met Abbott and Costello, had the likes of Christopher Lee and Bela Lugosi don his pointy teeth and thick, black cape, and been the subject of parody in everything from Roman Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers to cult kids show Count Duckula. So, when Francis Ford Coppola brought the century-old gothic legend of Count Dracula to the big screen in the early 90s, he did the only thing he could to make it fresh and new: he crafted an opulent romance in which the iconic bad guy is a lovesick good guy.
The Count of Bram Stoker's Dracula is one of the most unique interpretations of the character cinema has yet seen. He doesn't creep out of the shadows to claim his victims, he doesn't flap his cape around grandly in his cobweb-covered castle and he doesn't particularly 'vant to suck your blood'. No, what the dear old Count really wants is someone to love. The film begins with a 15th Century prologue. We find Vlad the Impaler returning from a bloody battle only to discover his wife has committed suicide having been misinformed that her husband had died
Feeling betrayed by God and desperate to save his beloved from eternal damnation, Vlad renounces his faith and embraces vampirism, vowing to return and avenge his wife. Skip forward four centuries and we’re in the late 1800s. London-based real estate agent Jonathan Harker has been called to Transylvania to discuss business with the now old and decrepit Count. When Dracula sees a picture of Harker’s fiancée, Mina Murray, however, Harker finds himself imprisoned in the old man’s mansion and Dracula bids to find a way to London to be reunited with the woman who he believes to be the reincarnation of his dead wife.
Considering Coppola’s film is otherwise more or less faithful to its source material, this diversion from the text could have been rather jarring. Stoker’s novel never entertained the notion of Mina and Dracula being lovers, and most cinematic incarnations have cut the former out of the adaptation altogether or at least reduced her significance. Yet, between the lines, Dracula has always been a sympathetic, romantic figure. Forever needing to kill to live and doomed to immortality, his is a story of the nature of existence, man‘s relationship with God and repressed passion, and the film’s brilliance is that it emphasises this neglected subtext by attaching it to an elaborate opera of sound and vision.
A film you can sense and smell, Coppola’s Dracula drips with grand colours and rich vitality, utilising every aspect of the medium to craft a sort of religious-horror-romance. Michael Ballhuas's lush velvet black and blood red cinematography pops from every inch of the screen, Wojciech Kilar's over-the-top score hums in the speakers with romantic strings and foreboding brass which sound like audio interpretations of heavan and hell, Eiko Ishioka's costumes have enough grandeur to make you believe they’ve been stolen from the gods of some lost opulent civilisation, and the decision to shoot everything on a soundstage and perform the effects in-camera creates a falseness which only adds to the film’s unnerving mood.
Aside from Keanu Reeves and Wynona Ryder as the rather stilted leads (hardly their faults really; the romantic leads in gothic horrors are rarely their most fascinating aspect), the acting is brilliantly bombastic too. In the second of a number of early-90s villainous roles, Gary Oldman is terrifically OTT as Dracula, exuding both the vulnerability and single-minded evil of the title character. Anthony Hopkins, Tom Waits and Sadie Frost also get in on the act, shouting, growling and writhing their way through the film, with Frost particularly impressive as the sexually liberated Lucy Westenra. In many ways they’re mime artists in a film which is arguably best viewed as a modern day silent movie.
Receiving favourable reviews and massive box-office, Dracula sadly marks the last time Coppola really achieved critical and commercial success. He followed it up with the saccharine Jack in 1996 before moving onto ho-hum John Grisham adaptation The Rainmaker in ‘97 and the critically-derided Youth Without Youth a decade later. Yet, even after all these setbacks, Coppola remains one of the most ambitious and unique directors still working. As Bram Stoker’s Dracula proves, he can craft new modes of storytelling from old stories and breath fresh life into clichéd legend.
It’s a skill which is all too absent in today’s filmmakers, and will hopefully return in full force in his next film, 2009’s family drama Tetro.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
TOP TEN MUSIC VIDEOS
The Writer selects his favourite music videos...
1. Radiohead ‘Street Spirit (Fade Out)’
I'm constantly amazed at how little attention this gets on Top Music Videos lists. If a good video is one that reflects and heightens the emotion of the song, then Jonathan Glazer's promo for Street Spirit is unquestionably the finest. Opting largely to avoid a linear recreation of the lyrics, Glazer shows us a visual interpretation of the actual music, playing with slow motion to craft a collection of unconnected, avant garde images. And it works far better than that rather pretentious explanation sounds. From the moment Thom Yorke falls backwards in slow motion with lightening flashing in the background, you know you're in for something special. There's savage dogs, massive dragonflies, unnervingly unconcerned little boys and Ed O'Brien falling off a chair from then on, but it's one of the final images that remains the best. As Yorke sings "immerse yourself in love" a flying/dancing nun lady, in one of the few direct lyrical references, does just that, running out of a trailer in super fast motion before slowing down when jumping up and scooping some air across herself. The perfect way to end four minutes of visual and audio bliss.
2. Fiona Apple ‘Across The Universe’
There Will Be Blood director Paul Thomas Anderson doesn't just make awesome films, you know. Having a few mates in the music biz has allowed him to try his hand at video-making and, as this promo for Fiona Apple's gorgeous cover of The Beatles' Across The Universe proves, he‘s pretty good. Made for 1998's Pleasantville and homing in on that film's themes of repression and violence, it features Apple floating her way through a 1950s diner which is being ripped apart by hoodlums. Glass, debris and even the occasional pie fly by but "nothing's gonna change" Apple's world as she continues her tour of the eatery completely oblivious to the carnage. It's sweetness is added to because Apple and Anderson were dating at the time, and you can really tell. Apple's never seemed quite so smiley and Anderson has never made one of his leading ladies look quite as lovely as his now-ex does here.
3. Weezer ‘Buddy Holly’
Fourteen years on, I'm still not entirely convinced that Spike Jonze doesn't own a time machine. How else could he have made this promo for Buddy Holly quite as brilliant as it is? The superimposition of Weezer into Al's Diner from Happy Days is too perfect, too seamless to have been done with the technology of the time, and shows exactly why the director has gone on to make such technically innovative films with such verve and accomplishment. It also shows that someone on the production team is one a hell of a geek. Every clip from the classic show has been perfectly selected and you have to look very, very closely at the changing clothes and hair styles to see that they have been taken from different episodes rather than one lost show in which River Cuomo and co came to town.
4. Pulp ‘This Is Hardcore’
Thanks to Common People and the accompanying Sadie Frost-starring video, Pulp are a band who have lamentably been consumed by the big black void of Britpop. However, This is Hardcore shows a darker side to the band, one that sets them aside from the Blurs and Oasises of the mid-90s. The promo seems like a pointless pastiche at first, the 40s film noir setting perfectly recreated but ringing ever so hollow. However, the use of ‘behind-the-scenes footage’, ‘deleted scenes’ and ‘screen-tests’ from this fake film add an element of reality to the piece, meaning the scenes of slaughtered femme fatales, fighting PIs and corrupted young women seem unnervingly authentic. There’s also a lot of random imagery thrown in for good measure and one moment is especially unsettling as a young starlet tries to grab an apple dangling in front of her face with her mouth. Weird, but utterly hypnotic.
5. REM ‘Everybody Hurts’
I'm a sucker for a video in which a great amount of people suddenly come together to sing, dance or do something similarly communal, and this is one of pop music's finest examples. Directed by Ridley Scott's son Jake, it takes place on a congested motorway, cutting from one frustrated motorist to the next, each one revealing a problem in subtitles, some comedic, some serious, some both, such as the car in which a boy begs his father to stop singing along to the radio before the camera pans back to his younger brother contemplating the nature of death in the back seat. It's all beautifully peaceful and incredibly engrossing, until the song kicks into gear and each person files out of their car and walks down the road. The closing news report is a nice touch, also. So often used as a gimmick now, it adds a dash of realism to help the intimacy of the song really hit home.
6. Johnny Cash ‘Hurt’
Is there anything else that can be said about Johnny Cash's cover of Nine Inch Nails' Hurt? Probably not, but let's give it a bash anyway. Music videos are not normally known for their subtlety, but this one makes a virtue of it. Clips of Cash's life and career are cut into scenes of him singing the song in his house. The imagery is perfectly selected (the scene of his wife watching from the stairs with a mixture of pride and sadness is especially affecting), while Cash's 'performance' feels too real and honest to be included in anything as trivial as a music video. But credit should also be given to the editor, who speeds the imagery up as the song grows more intense, flashing images quicker and quicker, before ending on a long held take of Cash closing the lid on his piano for one last time. A fitting send-off indeed.
7. Bjork ‘It's Oh So Quiet’
Now what was I saying about videos with people dancing in them? Bjork's It's Oh So Quiet once more features Spike Jonze's love of pop culture, as the director this time turns his hand to the Technicolor musicals of the 1940s. In the vid, he follows Bjork from a dirty bathroom through a garage and out into the street where she's joined in her merry escapades by dancing deliverymen, jigging postboxes and cartwheeling business drones. Jonze attempted a similar thing when he got Christopher Walken to flip flop about in his video for Fatboy Slim's Weapon of Choice, but this remains the finest example of the musical's influence upon pop videos.
8. Chemical Brothers ‘Let Forever Be’
More people dancing. Or rather, one person, multiplied, dancing. Directed by Michel Gondry, this is perhaps the most technically audacious video on this list. The promo features an attractive ginger lady. And that's about all I can tell you. She wakes up, multiplies, grows a large head, dances, gets back into bed, dances, does her job, dances, gets scared in a shopping mall, dances and dances a little bit more as she goes through what Gondry would probably call an ordinary day. What does it all mean? God knows. Does it look awesome? Hell yeah! For more Gondry weirdness check out his promo for Radiohead's Knives Out. Thom Yorke dressed as a mouse!? What more could you need?
9. Smashing Pumpkins ‘Tonight, Tonight’
As you'll be able to tell from this list, I'm a fan of technically innovative videos made by film directors who like to riff on popular culture. This is another one. Directed by Little Miss Sunshine creators Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris and inspired by George Mellis' early silent film A Trip To The Moon, it features a young couple doing just that: taking a trip to the moon and beating away some curious lunar creatures along the way. The video perfectly echoes the gentleness of the song, but it's the technique behind it that makes it so special. This really does look like something from the turn of the century and is still a delight to look at some ten years after its creation.
10. Joy Division ‘Atmosphere’
Control director Anton Corbijn was criticised by some for this 1988 video for Atmosphere. Coming eight years after the death of Ian Curtis, it was accused of accelerating the cult that had grown around the Joy Division singer, and watching it back today Corbin probably does go a little over the top with the Curtis imagery. However, there's also something beautifully hypnotic about it. The stark black and white, the monochrome druids and the moment where one of them falls over while trying to carry a spire are strangely beautiful and a fitting tribute to Curtis’ legacy.
The Writer selects his favourite music videos...
1. Radiohead ‘Street Spirit (Fade Out)’
I'm constantly amazed at how little attention this gets on Top Music Videos lists. If a good video is one that reflects and heightens the emotion of the song, then Jonathan Glazer's promo for Street Spirit is unquestionably the finest. Opting largely to avoid a linear recreation of the lyrics, Glazer shows us a visual interpretation of the actual music, playing with slow motion to craft a collection of unconnected, avant garde images. And it works far better than that rather pretentious explanation sounds. From the moment Thom Yorke falls backwards in slow motion with lightening flashing in the background, you know you're in for something special. There's savage dogs, massive dragonflies, unnervingly unconcerned little boys and Ed O'Brien falling off a chair from then on, but it's one of the final images that remains the best. As Yorke sings "immerse yourself in love" a flying/dancing nun lady, in one of the few direct lyrical references, does just that, running out of a trailer in super fast motion before slowing down when jumping up and scooping some air across herself. The perfect way to end four minutes of visual and audio bliss.
2. Fiona Apple ‘Across The Universe’
There Will Be Blood director Paul Thomas Anderson doesn't just make awesome films, you know. Having a few mates in the music biz has allowed him to try his hand at video-making and, as this promo for Fiona Apple's gorgeous cover of The Beatles' Across The Universe proves, he‘s pretty good. Made for 1998's Pleasantville and homing in on that film's themes of repression and violence, it features Apple floating her way through a 1950s diner which is being ripped apart by hoodlums. Glass, debris and even the occasional pie fly by but "nothing's gonna change" Apple's world as she continues her tour of the eatery completely oblivious to the carnage. It's sweetness is added to because Apple and Anderson were dating at the time, and you can really tell. Apple's never seemed quite so smiley and Anderson has never made one of his leading ladies look quite as lovely as his now-ex does here.
3. Weezer ‘Buddy Holly’
Fourteen years on, I'm still not entirely convinced that Spike Jonze doesn't own a time machine. How else could he have made this promo for Buddy Holly quite as brilliant as it is? The superimposition of Weezer into Al's Diner from Happy Days is too perfect, too seamless to have been done with the technology of the time, and shows exactly why the director has gone on to make such technically innovative films with such verve and accomplishment. It also shows that someone on the production team is one a hell of a geek. Every clip from the classic show has been perfectly selected and you have to look very, very closely at the changing clothes and hair styles to see that they have been taken from different episodes rather than one lost show in which River Cuomo and co came to town.
4. Pulp ‘This Is Hardcore’
Thanks to Common People and the accompanying Sadie Frost-starring video, Pulp are a band who have lamentably been consumed by the big black void of Britpop. However, This is Hardcore shows a darker side to the band, one that sets them aside from the Blurs and Oasises of the mid-90s. The promo seems like a pointless pastiche at first, the 40s film noir setting perfectly recreated but ringing ever so hollow. However, the use of ‘behind-the-scenes footage’, ‘deleted scenes’ and ‘screen-tests’ from this fake film add an element of reality to the piece, meaning the scenes of slaughtered femme fatales, fighting PIs and corrupted young women seem unnervingly authentic. There’s also a lot of random imagery thrown in for good measure and one moment is especially unsettling as a young starlet tries to grab an apple dangling in front of her face with her mouth. Weird, but utterly hypnotic.
5. REM ‘Everybody Hurts’
I'm a sucker for a video in which a great amount of people suddenly come together to sing, dance or do something similarly communal, and this is one of pop music's finest examples. Directed by Ridley Scott's son Jake, it takes place on a congested motorway, cutting from one frustrated motorist to the next, each one revealing a problem in subtitles, some comedic, some serious, some both, such as the car in which a boy begs his father to stop singing along to the radio before the camera pans back to his younger brother contemplating the nature of death in the back seat. It's all beautifully peaceful and incredibly engrossing, until the song kicks into gear and each person files out of their car and walks down the road. The closing news report is a nice touch, also. So often used as a gimmick now, it adds a dash of realism to help the intimacy of the song really hit home.
6. Johnny Cash ‘Hurt’
Is there anything else that can be said about Johnny Cash's cover of Nine Inch Nails' Hurt? Probably not, but let's give it a bash anyway. Music videos are not normally known for their subtlety, but this one makes a virtue of it. Clips of Cash's life and career are cut into scenes of him singing the song in his house. The imagery is perfectly selected (the scene of his wife watching from the stairs with a mixture of pride and sadness is especially affecting), while Cash's 'performance' feels too real and honest to be included in anything as trivial as a music video. But credit should also be given to the editor, who speeds the imagery up as the song grows more intense, flashing images quicker and quicker, before ending on a long held take of Cash closing the lid on his piano for one last time. A fitting send-off indeed.
7. Bjork ‘It's Oh So Quiet’
Now what was I saying about videos with people dancing in them? Bjork's It's Oh So Quiet once more features Spike Jonze's love of pop culture, as the director this time turns his hand to the Technicolor musicals of the 1940s. In the vid, he follows Bjork from a dirty bathroom through a garage and out into the street where she's joined in her merry escapades by dancing deliverymen, jigging postboxes and cartwheeling business drones. Jonze attempted a similar thing when he got Christopher Walken to flip flop about in his video for Fatboy Slim's Weapon of Choice, but this remains the finest example of the musical's influence upon pop videos.
8. Chemical Brothers ‘Let Forever Be’
More people dancing. Or rather, one person, multiplied, dancing. Directed by Michel Gondry, this is perhaps the most technically audacious video on this list. The promo features an attractive ginger lady. And that's about all I can tell you. She wakes up, multiplies, grows a large head, dances, gets back into bed, dances, does her job, dances, gets scared in a shopping mall, dances and dances a little bit more as she goes through what Gondry would probably call an ordinary day. What does it all mean? God knows. Does it look awesome? Hell yeah! For more Gondry weirdness check out his promo for Radiohead's Knives Out. Thom Yorke dressed as a mouse!? What more could you need?
9. Smashing Pumpkins ‘Tonight, Tonight’
As you'll be able to tell from this list, I'm a fan of technically innovative videos made by film directors who like to riff on popular culture. This is another one. Directed by Little Miss Sunshine creators Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris and inspired by George Mellis' early silent film A Trip To The Moon, it features a young couple doing just that: taking a trip to the moon and beating away some curious lunar creatures along the way. The video perfectly echoes the gentleness of the song, but it's the technique behind it that makes it so special. This really does look like something from the turn of the century and is still a delight to look at some ten years after its creation.
10. Joy Division ‘Atmosphere’
Control director Anton Corbijn was criticised by some for this 1988 video for Atmosphere. Coming eight years after the death of Ian Curtis, it was accused of accelerating the cult that had grown around the Joy Division singer, and watching it back today Corbin probably does go a little over the top with the Curtis imagery. However, there's also something beautifully hypnotic about it. The stark black and white, the monochrome druids and the moment where one of them falls over while trying to carry a spire are strangely beautiful and a fitting tribute to Curtis’ legacy.
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