It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
^ Back to Top
The MI6 Community is unofficial and in no way associated or linked with EON Productions, MGM, Sony Pictures, Activision or Ian Fleming Publications. Any views expressed on this website are of the individual members and do not necessarily reflect those of the Community owners. Any video or images displayed in topics on MI6 Community are embedded by users from third party sites and as such MI6 Community and its owners take no responsibility for this material.
James Bond News • James Bond Articles • James Bond Magazine
Comments
And what do you mean by 'uneven as a writer'.....that you like some of his books but not all of them? Pretty much goes for everybody who's ever read his stuff i should think...
Myself, i'm just pleased someone so well repected and successful in the world of horror appreciates the clever and original take on a subject that would have seemed exhausted of ideas.
I happen to often agree with King: he praises deservingly Elmore Leonard, George Pelecanos and Deon Meyer. We seem to love the same writers, at least when it comes to crime fiction. But his opinion of Dracula has to be assessed on its own merit. Given at how much he complained about Kubrick's treatment of The Shining (great horror movie imo), I wonder how he can praise the Beeb's Drac. Pot kettle black I guess.
Evaluating King as a writer of popular literature, I find there are some who are far more consistently good than Stephen King (the authors mentioned above for instance). But hey he has many fans.
Well King has a right to criticize adaptations of his own work at the same time praising an adaptation of someone else's. That's just his opinion.
Who knows, had he been alive Bram Stoker might have enjoyed this newest version of his novel...😉
Well, if Stoker could have received the royalties for all the adaptations of his most famous novel, he'd enjoy all of them! Although I suspect that, as a fairly conservative civil servant, maybe a closet Catholic, he'd been appalled by the vulgar farce that was Coppola's Dracula. I do suspect he'd be horrified by this one too, and find the depiction of his characters and his time utterly ludicrous.
King is entitled to his opinion. He happens to be wrong on both Dracula and The Shining. For the latter, I can sort of understand : that's his work, after all. For Dracula, he truly has no excuse.
I've loved most of the books of his that I've read. Disagree with him on The Shining, on balance I probably preferred the film, but to be fair I think his criticisms were valid. It just comes down to subjective preference.
Glad he liked Dracula too.
But talking with inconsistencies, Gatiss and Moffatt have beaten Coppola in the way they extended the vampire's powers and weaknessesses as they go... Then to contradict themselves later on. Crucifixes don't work, unless they do, you can kill a vampire with a stake, until he tries to commit suicide, etc.
And what with the way the characters make Sherlockian deductions out of thin air? Harker finds a secret passage with ridiculous ease. It can be justified with Sherlock Holmes as he was written as an exceptional man with borderline godly powers of deduction, but Harker is just an ordinary man.
The crucifix was more of a psychological thing wasn't it? Like the sunlight. That was just in his mind. That's why it suddenly "worked" and then didn't again. The stakes and tainted blood were always the only things we know of that could actually kill him.
Stakes working from someone else but not via suicide is a bit flimsy but I think that's allowable. You can justify it by saying it's more to do with willpower than a biological weakness imo. It didn't work when he did it because the vampire part of him didn't want it to and was resistant to it. Flimsy? Sure. But it's a fantasy show about a magic vampire at the end of the day. Personally I didn't think twice about it once they explained it, I bought it in the same way I bought all the other magic stuff.
What's important is that they never contradicted their own rules they set up. Crucifix and sunlight never really worked, he just imagined they did. Stakes never worked via suicide, he just didn't find out until he tried it. Might be different to the source but it was all consistent with the world they set up.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1521977208
They were changing the rules of their universe when it was convenient for the plot. And I disagree with you about it being OK since it's a vampire story. I remember one critic of Coppola's Dracula who remarked that when you have a universe where supernatural exists, you must set strict boundaries on how and when it manifests itself. Otherwise you have a gigantic deus ex machin instead of a story.
Great scene.
Absolute classic, love the accents too! :-bd
Komm...her!
"Sacrilege!"
I remember the audience laughing after Langella smashed the mirror. Great scene, though. My favorite line is "I'm often told I have a light footstep."
What are the general opinions on here about this one?
My opinion of it has grown more favorable over the years, and definitely became more positive when it was finally released here in the States in a remastered hi-def version.
The mixture of Dracula and espionage is a bit odd, but it works in the film. It's rather intriguing to have members of MI5, teamed with a Scotland Yard inspector, secretly investigating the chief of MI5 -- who's working for Dracula!
It's an odd mixture of styles, but one that I can appreciate very much. I also liked the rather mysterious atmosphere here, emphasised by some effective music and very fine cinematography.
I would add to all that, that this one never feels as cheap as some of its predecessors like Scars of Dracula for instance.
Just love the scene where Dracula sits behind a desk as the director of a multinational business conglomerate speaking English with a Romanian accent. Priceless stuff.
Also, I actually like to cast my scripts when I'm writing them so I can better imagine the situation so if anyone wants to see my casting choices here they are:
https://www.imdb.com/list/ls093987869/
It's not a good film by any stretch to F the imagination but it's not nearly as bad as people say. I quite enjoyed it myself, because at least they tried. Dracula has a proper grandiose scheme, he's not merely killing off a few teenagers for revenge or some flimsy reasons. The film got criticised for being too much like a poor man's Bond movie with a scheme that is borderline Blofeldesque. While this is fair criticism I always thought this is what logically we'd get to bring Dracula in a modern setting.
Absolutely agree-- Dracula was a train wreck that got worse with each episode (two was Dracula as Sherlock, with one heckuva cliffhanger, and; episode three was a WTF?!?!?! all the way through).
You can add idiotic dialogue.
Boy Gatiss and Moffatt writing Bond would be a true horror.
Yes, I don't think they'd be a good fit at all.
I just don't understand. Gatiss made such a good adaptation of MR James' The Tractare Middoth. How could he turn Dracula into such a joke? Awful, awful dialogues, anachronistic period piece, then a jump into a modern era that turns said anachronistic period piece into something meaningless.
I think I expressed on this forum my theory about it.