Bram Stoker's Dracula - re:View

[Music] well mike we're going to talk about a francis ford coppola movie that's right jay 1992's dracula and coincidentally we happen to have a bottle of coppola wine now a lot of you may not know this but francis ford coppola has his own winery in northern california and this is a beautiful bottle of pinot noir vintage 2015. let's crack this baby open sure let's do it have a sip absolutely and just so we're clear we've mentioned this in the past we don't do paid sponsorships uh this isn't a sponsorship here we uh uh we just really wanted to try out the coppola wine well i've had it before of course oh okay okay good for you um but if you're interested in picking up your own coppola wine here's the website address and if you go to the website they have all these different varieties they really they know what they're doing there at the coppola winery [Music] this looks great yeah oh oh what a lovely bouquet [Music] i'm thinking raspberries uh tea leaves and maybe some uh some rose petals yeah so just so you know you could pick up this lovely wine and many more at the familycoppola.com [Music] if you're 21 and older of course of course yes yes well cheers jake cheers [Music] oh jesus oh that's disgusting oh where'd you get this at the grocery store oh more like an ass bouquet oh it's the worst [ __ ] thing i've ever tasted oh oh god oh god i think i'm gonna puke we're gonna have to edit this out we're gonna cut this all out cut this all out can you cut this out just just uh we do we don't want to show that label all right yeah bill bill can you cut this out we'll move the wine glasses but can you cut all this out rescind the contract tell francis we're out tell them we're out we don't need us 50 bucks hello and welcome to another review today we're talking about the 1992 film bram stroker's dracula stokers oh oh everyone always says strokers but we're talking about this movie oddly enough it was just kind of a spur of the moment idea because uh some like 10 year old youtube video just got recently sucked up into the algorithm and it was supposedly uh francis ford coppola and gary oldman arguing right on the set of dracula if you if it's if you could give me a position as it were position is where you come right in where you would come in you know right you coming right where is just the top of the stairs you're as equally below him as you were above him i'm waiting for keanu what i'm doing is waiting for keanu because i can start what are you waiting to get for gyan never does anything you just walk right out of the thing i i may have watched the video where tom cruise screams at everybody about coronavirus and maybe that algorithm triggered it oh he's going to be screaming again soon here can't wait for that audio to leak yeah anyway so i think watching that video may have triggered it and then i watched it and then i think you saw it i sent it to you i said look jay uh gary oldman kind of got mad walked away there's never disagreements on movie sets so that's just a scandalous piece of video it's like gary you got to come in and you got to stop at the top of the stairs and look around and then gary old and say why don't they walk down the stairs you got to stop at the top of the stairs gary and he's like uh whatever and he walked away he was just heading to the crap craft service table or something and then that was like a shocking argument i guess yeah yeah but hey we all know about clickbait that's true that's that's the title but that's the funny thing is it's like a 10 year old video that just recently for whatever reason got sucked up into youtube's mysterious algorithm and we watched it and we said hey dracula love it dead and loving it i love it let's not talk about dracula dead loving it this movie kind of inspired there was a revival in the 90s of after this came out then there was the mary shelley's frankenstein trying to do these like classy big budget uh kind of reimaginings of these old uh old horror properties the anne rice novels yeah yeah that was on the rise of uh what was that movie the uh interview with the vampire subsequent sequels uh this this there's so many things i love about this movie and there's you know there's a couple things i don't but um this is a this is a filmmaker's movie yes if you're into the the art of filmmaking and especially uh practical effects in camera trickery that this movie's all about that right and and from what i understand francis ford coppola made this because american zoa trope his film company was going into bankruptcy the last few movies he had done uh were kind of duds that did not do very well and his his company was not in good shape and so he i mean these were done for commercial reasons he needed to make some money so he made godfather three in 1990 and then followed it up immediately with this as an attempt to to kind of bring some life back to his company and bring in some money for a change yes i read that effort was successful despite being not a critical box office smash hit yeah i don't really know what the reception to this movie was i didn't really pay attention to it at the time everyone is of course makes fun of godfather 3 which i've still never seen but i think it's one of those movies that now people are like yeah in comparison to the first two it's not very good but as its own thing like it's not the worst but there is a connection in that uh the most famous aspect of godfather three is that his daughter sophia coppola gives one of the worst performances of all time but that part was originally supposed to be played by winona ryder who had to drop out but but they kept in touch and she gave francis ford coppola the script to dracula it was like hey how about this so that was the one-two punch godfather three and this and then francis ford coppola i guess he just said [ __ ] it i'm going to make weird [ __ ] now i kind of like i don't know because he comes from that sort of the the new film school group of uh like him and brian de palma and george lucas of course and uh kind of like in in his older years francis where couple is actually doing what george lucas has always said he's going to do which is make these weird little personal movies where he's not concerned about uh box office or the commercial appeal of it as exemplified and twixt one of the worst things i've ever seen i've never seen twigs but hey you know let him do his thing he's earned it and and i will never blame george lucas for not fulfilling his promise of making personal films because [ __ ] if i if i was 78 years old and had 100 billion dollars i i wouldn't go through the big [ __ ] pain in the ass of making movies anymore i would just lay on a hammock drinking bloody mary's all afternoon and then have my personal chef make me dinner to repeat the process the next day tell me about dracula if i had a complaint about it though it's that it is a horror film and at no point is it ever scary it's too big it's too kind of bombastic and like operatic and over the top it never takes any like moments to get quiet and creepy that is the longest way to say keanu reeves i've ever heard that's a whole other topic the bomb bombastic bombasticity bombasticity yes bombasticness webster mr bombastic help me out uh that's what i love about it oh i do too i'm just saying as a horror film it is not scary but it is it's big no it's a love story uh which is not in the book that's one of the deviations no so it's interesting to talk about i it's like i don't know to me this is like the definitive adaptation of dracula i haven't seen all of them there's been a million of them but i've seen a fair amount and this is the one that it has some deviations but it does follow pretty closely to the book especially the uh the narrative device of all the different we get journal entries and captains logs and all that stuff oh well we'll get into the details but just the overall big picture like watching this like again rewatched it i rewatched it a couple months ago actually just i was like ah i blew a nice blu-ray yeah i [ __ ] love this movie i'm gonna watch this on blu-ray because i haven't seen it in you know a long time since before then but um i kept picturing like the 90s movie trailer oh and uh he's loved before but now he's back to try to find love again is this an actual trailer no it's like that no the trailer is quality as anthony hopkins doing the voice over and the taylor voice guy but i pictured it like as a wacky romantic comedy because that's what it is it's a love story it's a it's a epic love story and it's dracula as a a sympathetic kind of protagonist that you're not sure if you hate him or like him and that's just that's the unique take on this yeah is um and i think that's also kind of works the awful casting choice of of canna reeves i've seen many strange things already bloody wolves chasing me through some blue inferno well that's i guess one of the the uh selling points or one of the ways that he tried to get a studio interested in doing the movie was we're gonna have a hot young casts you know all these uh uh young hip actors and so that's how you end up with i mean we know a writer gave him the script but then also keanu reeves and both of them keanu reeves gets a lot of [ __ ] for this movie winona ryder is not much better we're going to write a script now uh i don't buy her at all both of them come across like they're doing like a high school production his bad english accent oh it's terrible well keanu had said he's like i just came off working on three movies i was [ __ ] tired and i didn't want to do this also i think he's bad at adr um i think i i watch the movie and i'm i'm i'm picturing him in a booth like looping the lines in music those animals he's doing his best to make it match and that deadens his performance and this is a theory yeah but um he keanu reeves is keanu reeves he's a likeable actor nobody dislikes keanu reeves even even when he gives a terrible performance and his performance in every movie is always the same he's always keanu reeves he never transcends beyond who he is sure but you know he got to where he is from his looks i don't mean to objectify a man but you know he was it was a handsome man and that's how he got his roles and he's not a great actor i have offended you with my ignorance count he's a serviceable actor he's great in the in the right roles yeah they wanted johnny depp in his part no and the studio said we want someone handsomer wow yeah take that 90s johnny depp too that's surprising they're like they're like well maybe there's other i guess 92 was kind of before johnny depp really took off right but yeah uh oh he's terrible but the real thing they should have done is is look for good actors for the part right instead of going with hot young talent that we're going to put in so we can sell it this movie to the kids right well then you have you know billy campbell aka the rocketeer aka the outrageous ocona what about drunk ever do that from alcohol that is not possible for me sir biddy um and then you have carrie elways as lord arthur homewood and then billy billy campbell's playing like an american like a texan and these characters are all in the book yeah and that the it's pretty faithful to the book i think this is the only adaptation to have because there's like three characters it's uh what's her name lucy's like kind of suitors yeah and i think every other movie adaptation condenses them down to one character because that's what you would do for a movie right to condense everything but this movie's like [ __ ] it we're throwing it all in yeah and and their performances feel like stage play i feel like a blundering novice and then you have gary oldman on and and sir anthony hopkins that are just light years beyond the young cast in terms of acting where they are really given it a hundred percent and they're doing quality work and everybody else feels like they're on the stage at your local community college theater yeah she was in great pain then we cut off a head and drove a stick to her heart and burned it and then she found peace doctor please um but that segues us into i think what i like about the movie is that in hindsight watching it and this is probably why it didn't connect to a lot of audiences it is a blend of uh camp uh 70s exploitation and and retro 1920s uh throwback yeah film yeah like the the 1922 nosferatu with max schreck yeah all the in-camera effects in camera effects the the um the iris wipes the the all the all the old-school film trickery and then a lot of like especially the orgy scene oh yeah you get you get like a 70s like like 70s film vibes from that and so it's like he's putting in all these he's not trying to make a contemporary film he's he's making many references and nods to to cinema yeah yeah not just like the history of dracula and previous dracula movies but yeah right i mean there's that whole scene where there's like the the the movie screen in the background that's my favorite scene and it's yeah the whole movie is sort of just like a celebration of the history of filmmaking and all these techniques yeah there's even i i think when they introduce london and uh dracula has arrived oh yeah when he first sees uh winona ryder they use an actual hand crank camera yeah there's a there's an old timey and he said francis foreign said he wanted to do more of that he seemed to have a grudge against the cinematographer there's a couple points in the commentary where he kind of was like yeah i wanted to do more of this but cinematographer just didn't want to well and the studio maybe the studio he wanted like like no sets he wanted very stripped down um like very bare bones locations where it was almost like a stage play i'm glad he didn't go that route because i love the big over the top now you need proper sets the prop i think the proper balance of give and take happened because yeah you don't want them you're trying to make a commercial commercially available accessible film and you don't want to go too artsy i made the most vulgar entertaining exciting action full sensoramic uh gimbap new thrill every five minutes have it everything sex violence humor and i think that's probably what turned a lot of people off is they're like what's going on it's it's so stylized yeah when you see i mean the the the opening prologue which is sort of a nod to vlad the impaler who of course dracula's based on right when we're seeing the battlefield and it's literally just like shadow puppets just little cardboard guys in the background it's a mixture of both he wanted to do a hundred percent shadow puppets oh okay there are a couple shots that are like flashed in there but but there are you know 2d actors you know silhouetted like being impaled and stuff yeah all the shadow puppet stuff shows up in the cinematograph scene you you catch a glimpse of it you see the little fight going yeah oh yeah yeah that seems so awesome it's so unnerving when the wolf comes in and then the the the gentlemen with the cigars are watching films they even show the i think it's that classic train yeah when everyone jumps out of the way the train's coming um but then and then when things start getting like oddly erotic then it cuts and there's like not hardcore porno but it's like more disturbing than early early on it was jokey yeah there's like a guy and he's like thinking of like a younger attractive lady on his lap and then she disappears and it's replaced with his wife and he goes it's more like vaudeville goofy but then it's like that it becomes like creepy like like pervert porn in the background and you see it and and it's just like it like dracula dracula's presence just kind of alters reality and yeah perceptions of reality and um there's so much just really exemplified in the first half of the movie in his case oh yeah which is i i feel like the first half of the movie is stronger than the second half i like the whole movie but all the stuff with his castle um oh yeah i love all that stuff yeah and and that that's the stuff that really pops keanu out what devil or which was ever so great as a killer whose blood flows in these veins because i mean like you have scenes gary oldman acting opposite uh keanu reeves they're the only ones in the scenes and it's just like oof i don't know i don't know what his direction was but he's literally like he looks like like bill s preston time travel reacting to some of the most [ __ ] up things you could possibly see dracula shatters the mirror in front of him i guess i guess that happens in transylvania and he looks out the window dracula hears the wolves he's gonna go eat some wolves and he looks out the window and he's crawling down the wall defying laws of physics yeah and he's like [Laughter] i i early on dracula feeds him dinner and then you know dracula's saying the story of his bloodline the order of the dracula and he's like we thought who said sure he's all was lost just given a great performance and then yeah keanu reeves is like he's like oh i guess so then he takes the sword out and and encounters i'm sorry if if i offen offended you cut i have offended you with my ignorance count keanu reeves probably a classy dude oh yeah i got nothing against the guy that's a nice guy but it's just miscast which i think that's what this movie is probably most known for which is a shame because everything else about it is so great but l anyway oh dracula keanu reeves that's like the first thing people think of and then that that i don't know you got you got the most amazing monster costumes in this movie and then they can't get gray spray paint in their hair right they went to the costume shop and got the uh yeah the spray that we used for our george lucas costume right yeah yeah i mean in the book his hair goes white sure and and so it's like well yeah you could cut that out because it's distracting yeah and it's unexplained same with the the blue flames oh yeah apparently it's uh that was the only optical effect in the film everything else was in camera everything else was in camera okay um but the blue flames were like oh every now and then dracula will have weird a weird blue flame that will indicate where treasure might be buried and then so his his like like uh servants or as gypsy men or whatever they were described as um uh who are loyal to the death to dracula for some reason they they're seen putting rocks where the blue flames are so this is all in the book it's in the book yeah yeah and so during the day they could go back and try and dig up the treasure but in the movie it's just like it's just a blue flame for one scene yeah and then uh mina mina has the power once she's infected with dracula blood she has the power to make the blue flames come up and it's like and i i was almost like happy with the fact that it wasn't explained because it's you're you're taken into this world that you don't understand yeah and we don't need an explanation so before we talk about the details in the film because the film for me works i think one of my favorite things and we don't have to talk about this in detail my favorite things is the score oh yeah [ __ ] love i had the soundtrack i would just listen to the soundtrack sure i love this music so much it and it's so appropriate it compliments the movie in that it's all so big everything is big but then the the the love parts the love scores the meena's theme and you know all that's it's great it's great it's it's so funny because movies nowadays a lot of them i listen and i they're so generic i don't even notice the score and this it's so perfect um and then the costumes too they got a japanese guy to do the costumes who had never seen dracula and didn't know what it was so that's why he's perfect like when he jumps out of the crate at the very end of the movie he's wearing kind of like a geisha robe yeah and same same with his classic um the red robe yeah with the butt hair yes it's like geisha over here um and it's like that let's say like it complements the rest of the movie where it's such a combination of all these different styles and different things it's so that don't clash they end up working together because it's an unreal world yeah and and it's not the cliche dracula look yeah as described in the book you know he's you know he has a white mustache and he's old and he wears black and you know obviously you have bella lugosi dracula with the widow's peak and this when when you first see dracula you're like oh my god what is he wearing that's so awesome and it's so different so that that that seems to be the the goal in the movie starting from nosferatu and on and all the different dracula adaptations throughout the 70s and uh well that's that's what's interesting is when there's been something like this that there's been so many different versions of it and you try and make something that's super accurate to the book a couple embellishments here and there but then the things that you do add like the love story aspect and the idea of mina being like the reincarnation of his old love like that that's not from the books but that has been in a previous adaptation of dracula is in the i think like a 70s one with jack palin's where it's just like it's been adapted so many times that all these things like leak into your your mind when you're trying to write a new adaptation of it yeah all these different versions all kind of leak into it well when when bram stoker wrote the book in 1897 or whatever i don't even know the the thinking of movies and you know audience appeal and all that was not in their heads right it was just like i'm telling this story you can tell by the way it's written the fact that it is like a piece together series of journals and yeah yeah i mean it's it was a totally different time and you don't think of oh well we have to have a love story after this and that's just the modern twist on it yeah so we have mina she's our final girl yeah uh we have lucy um she's she's she's searching for a husband one might say she's a woman of loose morals please let me touch it it's so big lucy morals yeah the the victorian era uh i guess you would say so because she's she's they're looking at the pervert book she's reading i don't know if it's the kamasutra or whatever she's the perfect perfect vampire rests for him to to seduce and infect that's why it was funny in re-watching this i hadn't seen it in a long time and i always remembered the lucy character being played by cheryl and fenn from twin peaks and it's not and i was like why was i thinking that was sherlin fenn and i realized it's because sherlin fenn was in a movie where she [ __ ] a wolf man that looks just like the wolf man from this movie it would be called meridian like a low budget like full moon movie i probably shouldn't be watching so many movies where people [ __ ] wolf men but right it happens usually that's a that's a one and done thing it doesn't usually reoccur too often but mina is his prize she is winona writer plays the original elizabetha at the very beginning that's his true love i don't remember the opening of the the dracula novel i don't think the prologue in this none of that's in the book the prologue one of the explicit uh comparisons to vlad the impaler vlad the impaler was was like a horrific monster uh i mean he might have been fighting for territory or you know in wars or whatever but what he did to people impaled them and the gruesome i mean just awful yeah and this he does that but it's treated as just him fighting in battle yeah but but he does it for the church uh he's he's a man of god and and um he survives his battle but the uh the opposing armies shoot a little letter into the into his castle that says you know he had died in battle which causes mina to commit suicide to to jump out the window and turn into a doll right she's falling down don't make fun of those visuals i love all of them i i'm making fun of them with love they're great but it that transition because she falls out of frame and then the camera dollies down and that's without having to do any cuts or visual effects there's your doll falling down it's it's wonderful it's all great yeah it's it's it's it's beautiful but it doesn't look realistic which is again going back to why this maybe didn't connect with a lot of people if you're if you're a fan of movies and the construction of movies especially older ones because there's a lot of matte paintings there's there's miniatures which are super obvious miniatures the train um the the lucy's castle um there's so many of those kind of vintage effects a vintage way of doing things i love the shot when uh jonathan harker is going to dracula's castle and you see his diary in the foreground and the train going by in the background and it's clearly a miniature but the fact that the the train casts a shadow across the diary which doesn't make any sense realistically but that whole shot looks great to be able to get the shadow onto a little book like this wasn't gonna work so gene my father decided well what you're gonna have to do is you're gonna have to recreate the book 20 feet away and then use the same train put one light up make a shadow of the smoke and make it go across the book like all these and same with like there's a shot where the map is superimposed over keanu reeve's face oh yeah they just projected it onto his face yeah they did they did tricks like that our rear screen projection out the window of the train yeah that that shot with the eyes and the distance that was all like in camera yeah with layers of things going on there was a like a movie screen and then we projected on that sky a plate of dracula's eyes when you see that in the in the theater what you're seeing there all was done together the background and the foreground was done together and there are shots where they do uh like multiple exposures where you film one element of it and then you literally reel back the footage and do another pass so it and then it's like then it's done the effect is done yeah there's nothing to do after the fact we got it in camera yeah but then you have the tricks the piano's shaving in the mirror dracula's coming up behind him and then it's like okay well there's a hole in the wall that's keanu the back of the head is a look-alike interestingly on the commentary francis ford coppola points that moment out and he's like this was an interesting effect i don't remember how we did it you can just figure it out francis you made the movie well i think one of the more famous things from this movie is tracking the shadow [Music] yeah the shadow moves across and it like knocks over physical objects i think it kills flowers at one point yep which clearly would be a time lapse was it just a hand probably probably a robot hand that's that's not a thing so the flowers have to actually decay and time lapse yeah you want an actor standing there with their hand that's really a fake hand just slowly and then they just have it like very slowly moving we shot over the course of like three days or something yeah i don't know about that specifically but filming one frame every minute yeah beautiful and i always assumed all the shadow stuff uh feels i felt like it would be inspired by like the original nosferatu or the old german expressionism stuff uh apparently an inspiration for it too is another movie called vampire vampire with a y where it's not just shadow work but it's the the shadows uh moving out of step with what they're shadows of which is directly what they do in this [Music] but uh uh getting back to the opening dracula you know feels betrayed by god because you know it's a romeo juliet kind of situation but he stabs the cross with his sword and vows allegiance to evil the cross starts vomiting blood and it turns into a sam raimi movie yeah um and so you know then over time he's just he's a vampire he's got a feed on babies oh the town's babies that's another uh that's from the book too oh yeah the feeding on babies the children disappearing from the villages but that that becomes another theme of the movie too is this cl he's this this old you know hundreds of years old being kind of like from an older older world and that sort of clash with more for the time kind of contemporary technology there's lots of that in the movie the you know the insane asylum and uh telegraphs and all that stuff the movie theater and so it's sort of him entering this new age that he doesn't he's not familiar with he's trying to find his true love and uh which the whole love story thing is interesting because that's you keep bringing that up as being like the driving force of the movie when that's not in the book at all no there's a twist on it it's yeah and that's what that's the thing is like if you're there's been so many versions of dracula if you're gonna make a new one what can you do to make it distinct and stand out and one is make it very close to the book which this does aside from the love story angle and and then two i think is also just make it super horny this is a this is a horny ass movie speaking of babies again uh the scene where keanu reeves gets uh seduced by the three brides uh the one in the middle monica belushi who ten years later would co-star with keanu reeves in the matrix sequence right right as persephone was that her name yeah she's the the lady next to the guy oh these actors crossed paths at some point and then i don't know 10 12 years later anthony hopkins and uh and gary oldman uh team up again in hannibal and literally face off [Music] because mason burger's face gets chopped off yeah saying winona ryder you know she's in this big famous vampire movie and then she goes on to be in another vampire movie reality bites [Music] okay i got jokes i got jokes all day i got jokes forever i mean you have a lot of plot stuff to deal with a lot of there's van helsing there's the three men there's which i remember in the book all that stuff being a bit of a slog yeah all the characters well the jonathan harker stuff is like the first half of the book yeah it's in bed another two weeks and i'm still stuck in the castle and but yeah i gotta [ __ ] these women again these demonic [ __ ] concubines of the devil but uh there's three important scenes with mina and gary oldman mina and dracula that are enough to satisfy that that love story which is the the there's first there's the meat cute on the streets of london yeah with the famous see me see me that's the uh you have to be hungarian double jointed how do you do that you must be double jointed and you must be hungarian how many times can we reference ed wood in our lives but uh no there's he buys the newspaper from the little boy and the reflection of the glass you don't you you don't see them there's a sweet sweet touches and then there's the scene where they they have dinner and they drink the absinthe went on a rider sucking on the sugar cube it gets all erotic you know and and they bond but the final scene is the turning scene she's she's it's crescendoed into the turning scene which is wonderfully shot it's it's it's beautiful there's the music uh and then and then you know of course his ultimate demise where he kind of feels sorry for dracula sure uh that's that's a lovely scene except for the part where she kisses him as a bloody monster that's a great monster suit though that was that was a that was a risk yeah because i i think in the theater everyone you're not supposed to say you that's true love she doesn't care that he's a monster with bloody mouth she'll smooch him but yeah like his his demise at the end of the movie when they defeat him at the very end is uh an example of them kind of taking things from the book it's similar like peter jackson with lord of the rings where it's like we're gonna take these things that are in the book but we're just gonna make them we're gonna make them much much [Music] bigger because the the book they just they find his uh his coffin they open it and they just kind of like stab him and cut his throat and then he turns to ash immediately and here it's like he bursts out and it's like a big epic fight scene but do you buy gary oldman as an irresistible love interest count that connects with mina i do sure absolutely because that's what the movie hinges because he's uh yeah i mean it's it's partially his performance but they i mean you have that contrast from the beginning where yeah within like all old and old age makeup is great in this too it's very detailed it's very like layered you can see like the yeah the veins under the skin and like spots on it and but that contrast between that and then him when he's young which i guess is a nod to the book he has a little mustache so and just because gary oldman's one of the best actors so he sells you on it i think yeah yeah i i think the weaker part of that dynamic is winona ryder i i don't think she can similar to lesser than keanu reeves but when you have scenes with just the two of them i think he's just acting circles around her well of course he is but i think she's still good in it i don't hate winona ryder by the way i know the last time we talked about her is probably stranger things which i thought she sucked on in general i have nothing against her i just i think she's outshined by a lot of the other actors in this movie have you got a nine and a half um i i can't say enough good things about this movie what do you how do you feel about its accessibility um 2021. i i mean the fact that all the effects are done in camera i think makes it hold up where you don't have a bunch of dated optical effects and [ __ ] yeah i think if you know the back story and the intention sure if you watch it cold and just go oh my god that looks bad look at all those background warriors in the opening scene they look like shadow puppets right oh that that matte painting looks fake or that looks like a miniature train but yeah if you look at it from the perspective there was only one optical effect everything else done they took the time to blend all these elements while they were filming but that's so that's what i think makes it hold up better than especially a lot of effects heavy movies from the early 90s oh yeah i mean no nothing beats an in-camera effect even if it looks bad i'll take it over cgi something or other from 1992. oh yeah [Music] unless we're talking about a t-rex sure we're talking about a water bottle floating around the event horizon let's film your water bottle put it on a string put it on a string but i think the fact that the movie is a period piece too that lends to the style it all everything works together right except for keanu reeves it's almost uh a fairy tale well it works it's a lot of the effect shots a lot of like the second unit the second unit director was roman coppola francis ford coppola's son who went on to work on a bunch of wes anderson movies and that was also like if you look at like uh grand budapest hotel where you have intentional miniatures i mean it's similar to this where it's like yeah it doesn't look real but it works for the story it works it works for the kind of movie it is yeah it wouldn't work in the matrix a bunch of little puppets in the background of the matrix yeah well i think it's a testament i mean it does follow the book pretty closely and it's a testament to the fact that before this there was so many adaptations of dracula and after this version i think there's like a bbc tv movie and that's kind of it but there was i mean from the 30s to the 70s into the 80s there were so many different adaptations of it and then this one came out and they're like well how do you top that again it's like peter jackson it'd be like somebody now trying to do another adaptation of the lord of the rings books it's like you can't go any bigger than that yeah i think the only other way to go would be more of like a like a minimalist like 824 type movie like really small and atmospheric and creepy i know robert eggers who did the witch was attached to do an adaptation of nosferatu which is always always weird to me because the original nosferatu is is just an adaptation of dracula but then there was a remake of that by werner herzog in the 70s uh and then so then to do another remake of nosferatu or well nosferatu is just dracula i guess the only difference is the look of the vampire yeah imdb lists a nosferatu with anna taylor joy yeah that was robert edgar's i think that fell apart i don't think it's actually happening now i mean there's just tons of material about vampires and the lore and all that and tvs and movies and whatever but um yeah you're right an actual film about the character of dracula digging deep digging deeper into him than just the stereotypical bella lugosi i am dracula and i'm here to suck your blood this this is what pushed that further yeah and made him into a tragic character as opposed to just a blood-sucking vampire monster yeah and um and and pulled off the the love story element uh technically it's a great film uh visually sound design sets uh production design everything's great about it most of the acting you got two of the best actors of all time in it yeah keanu reeves of course being one of them right it ages like a fine wine can we cut that and i never drink wine [Music]

Channel: RedLetterMedia

Views: 958,456

Rating: 4.9510098 out of 5

Keywords: redlettermedia, red letter media, red, letter, media, plinkett, half in the bag, mike stoklasa, jay bauman, rich evans

Id: mESbAwiCaTw

Length: 43min 3sec (2583 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 08 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

That was the EXACT punchline I expected for the wine.

I knew it was coming.

You knew it was coming.

Yet it was still funny.

[u/[deleted]]

I've always felt cheated that Bram Stoker decided to include a Bowie knife and repeater wielding giga-Texan and then severely underutilized him

e: Jay mistaking one actress for another because hes mixed up different films werewolf sex scenes is extremely on brand

[u/WorkyAlty]

Not a single mention of Tom Waits as Renfeld. I'm not angry, I'm just disappointed.

[u/one98d]

I probably shouldn't be watching so many movies where people fuck wolf-men, but it happens.

~ Some sex pervert

[u/shust89]

The movie gave us a great pinball game and great Simpsons parody.

[u/CorndogNinja]

"...he looked like Bill S. Preston, Esquire"

Keanu Reeves played Ted "Theodore" Logan, you fffffffuck!

[u/Wordshopped]

What Mike said about bombast makes me think his love for this movie stems from the same place that fuels his recommendation for Vampire Assassin.

[u/MotherCanada]

"This is a horny ass movie. Speaking of babies again."

[u/JerryHathaway]

"I probably shouldn't be watching so many movies where people fuck wolfmen."