Smoke from Far-Flung Castles
Dracula (1992)
directed by Francis Ford Coppola
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
Time's gift to Bram Stoker's Dracula, like light from the morning sun, is a final, settled sense of effortlessness. What must have been an altogether too self-conscious artistic injunction in 1992 - a movie comprised of only in-camera effects - endures now, by night, as a unified vision of physical excess: rear-projection shots layered lovingly in threes, long wigs like seventeen muddy Carpathian rivers, breasts from here to Transylvania. Only Keanu is left in the cold, as out of place now as he always was, and never more tellingly than as the impotent bone thrown to Monica Bellucci's castle-bound vampire brides. The rest is a classic - a modern The Thief of Bagdad, and, like Douglas Fairbanks' Arabian dream, a testament to the mountains studios will happily move just to entertain you and me of an evening.
directed by Francis Ford Coppola
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
Time's gift to Bram Stoker's Dracula, like light from the morning sun, is a final, settled sense of effortlessness. What must have been an altogether too self-conscious artistic injunction in 1992 - a movie comprised of only in-camera effects - endures now, by night, as a unified vision of physical excess: rear-projection shots layered lovingly in threes, long wigs like seventeen muddy Carpathian rivers, breasts from here to Transylvania. Only Keanu is left in the cold, as out of place now as he always was, and never more tellingly than as the impotent bone thrown to Monica Bellucci's castle-bound vampire brides. The rest is a classic - a modern The Thief of Bagdad, and, like Douglas Fairbanks' Arabian dream, a testament to the mountains studios will happily move just to entertain you and me of an evening.
posted by NPK at 8:34 AM
<< Home