Bram Stoker's Dracula

Bram Stoker's Dracula, directed by Francis Ford Coppola has a lot of critics, mostly for the idea of Winnona Ryder and Keanu Reeves as Victorian Londoners.

But aside from that, it's a snazzy little movie. It's artsy but accessible- the costumes by Eiko Ishioka won one of the three Ocars awarded to the film.

It's a standard Dracula as romance story, with Gary Oldman as the vampire, fallen for Mina, as played by Ryder. Reeves plays Harker with what could be imagined a Victorian uptightness- it just seems wooden to me. That's ok, though, since Anthony Hopkins, as Van Helsing, and singer Tom Waits, as Renfield.

I think it's one of my favorite Dracula productions, simply because it's such a lush movie to watch- it makes for an excellent bedtime movie.

As enjoyable as the movie was, I've got a warmer spot in my heart for the short story Coppola's Dracula. It's part of Kim Newman's Anno Dracula cycle- where the events in Stoker's novel play out differently to the degree that Dracula ends up married to Queen Victoria- lifting characters left and right from movies, literature and history. In Coppola's Dracula, Francis Ford Coppola is filming Dracula in a world where he never made Apocalypse Now, but still suffered through the same hellish conditions he dealt with for Apocalypse Now with the added wrinkles of it being in Romania, instead of the Philippines, and there are vampires to deal with. There's more to it than that, just click the above link, you'll see.