"I don t drink...wine."- The Dracula Thread

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  • edited January 2020 Posts: 12,837
    Ludovico wrote: »
    CraterGuns wrote: »
    Minion wrote: »
    Saw the first episode, and thought it was dreadful. Mark Gatiss wanted to write a terrifying horror story, and Steven Moffat wanted it to be quippy like his work on Doctor Who, and the two together create a frustratingly tone-deaf failure. The first 15-minutes were nice when it was somewhat adhering to the novel, but there came a point I wondered why they even bothered to call it Dracula in the first place.
    Sadly, I agree with you 100%.

    +2

    Gatiss' Dracula reminds me of his take on Moriarty and the Master. Extroverted, wisecracking, hyper, slightly mad. .. It's like he can only write one sort of villain. And why bother make a period piece then transporting it in modern time if you make the dialogues and attitude of the characters so modern to begin with? That's just clumsy.

    I agree that they went for that sort of scenery chewing panto villain thing this time around (which I loved personally, the actor just owned the screen, thought while watching it he could be a shout for the next Bond before googling him finding out he's almost as old as Craig) but I think the one type of villain comment is a little unfair.

    Sherlock for example had Toby Jones' weasley, slimy, chirpy northern serial killer and Lars Mikkleson's chilling creepy Murdoch figure. Doctor Who had that war mongering cult leader woman with the eyepatch in the Matt Smith run, the weird monotone cyborg from Peter Capaldi's first episode, Jenna Coleman's icy terrorist in the double episode, David Suchet's weird sheltered little boy landlord, etc. And that's just some of the original human villains Moffatt came up with. They also wrote all the old returning ones really well and differentiated between them. And he created the weeping angels which are a brilliant force of nature type monster.

    They can write more than one villain is the point I'm trying to make. I do agree that you can class the Master, Moriarty and now Dracula into the same sort of archetype. But that's definitely not the only sort of bad guy they can do imo.
  • Posts: 14,800
    I don't know enough about their work, but it looks exactly like the villains I mentioned. And it's as far away as Dracula as it can be (or as Moriarty for that matter). Dracula is not a chatterbox or a wisecracker). Making him talk so much and on that tone does not add to the menace, it makes him annoying at best. Sure, he's more threatening than Gary Oldman, but that's not difficult.
  • MinionMinion Don't Hassle the Bond
    edited January 2020 Posts: 1,165
    Minion wrote: »
    Saw the first episode, and thought it was dreadful. Mark Gatiss wanted to write a terrifying horror story, and Steven Moffat wanted it to be quippy like his work on Doctor Who, and the two together create a frustratingly tone-deaf failure. The first 15-minutes were nice when it was somewhat adhering to the novel, but there came a point I wondered why they even bothered to call it Dracula in the first place.

    Disagree on the tone. I think it was probably exactly what they were going for. Even the episodes of Doctor Who they wrote that were heralded as the scary ones are full of gags. They both started as comedy writers, I reckon that's just their style. It's a tricky balance but in general I think they pull it off, because I think the one liners never defuse the sense of danger and tension in their shows. And when things get really bleak they tend to reign it in and get serious.

    I can see why people are annoyed about it not being faithful of the novel because it does claim to be based on it in the credits but, to be fair, Dracula is a big pop culture figure. Asking why they bothered to call it Dracula is like asking why Roger Moore's Bond was still called James Bond. It might have Ian Fleming's 007 in the credits but it wasn't, it was a new spin on an old pop culture legend. Same with this. I think with such iconic long lasting characters you have to be prepared for radically different takes on it.
    To each his own, however I don't think Dracula cackling like a demented Jerry Lewis was appropriate for a serious scene in which he's slaughtering an abbey of nuns. Stuff like that and Agatha's nonsensical one-liners were a clumsy attempt at levity to excuse content which should be treated with a modicum of severity. The only scene I felt it worked was Dracula's creepy exclamations of, "There is no baaaaby," but everything else was poorly timed or in even poorer taste.
  • edited January 2020 Posts: 12,837
    Fair enough. Their style does seem to be a bit marmite to be fair, you either love it or hate it. But as someone who loves it (well, I love it when the stories are good, not going to attempt to defend Sherlock's last series for instance), and as someone who doesn't have any connection to the original source material, I really liked all three episodes.

    Another little thing I thought was very, very clever: how they used him absorbing knowledge/culture/etc from the blood of his victims to explain how he got the fear of the cross/religion. Not sure if that was in the original source but I thought that was a genius little touch, made perfect sense that he'd fear religion since he's been drinking the blood of God fearing peasants since what were essentially the dark ages, and a nice subversion of the standard "the power of christ can beat him" idea that they seemed to have been setting up.
  • Posts: 14,800
    Apart of a little bit of the plot and narrative, there's very little of the source in it. Less than Coppola's Dracula and that's saying something.

    I think that regardless of the faithfulness to the source material they needed to go all in: either make a bona fide parody or proper horror. They achieved neither. Same with setting actually : you either make a proper period piece or not. If you have your story set in two very different centuries and there's no tonal or cultural differences between the two, when your 19th century characters are modern and your nun ludicrously modern, you end up with an accidental farce. And it doesn't make your story modern or up to date or relevant to today's sensibilities. It turns it into a bloody mess and a cynical, cheap attempt to cash in a beloved horror icon.
  • edited January 2020 Posts: 12,837
    Ludovico wrote: »
    Apart of a little bit of the plot and narrative, there's very little of the source in it. Less than Coppola's Dracula and that's saying something.

    I think that regardless of the faithfulness to the source material they needed to go all in: either make a bona fide parody or proper horror. They achieved neither. Same with setting actually : you either make a proper period piece or not. If you have your story set in two very different centuries and there's no tonal or cultural differences between the two, when your 19th century characters are modern and your nun ludicrously modern, you end up with an accidental farce. And it doesn't make your story modern or up to date or relevant to today's sensibilities. It turns it into a bloody mess and a cynical, cheap attempt to cash in a beloved horror icon.

    See I disagree on both those points. I think you can have humour while still being horror. Some of the best horror films have been fun and self aware. I guess it depends what kind of horror you're going for to be fair, obviously if you want to do something properly psychologically disturbing you can't include loads of gags as they did with this. But I think for what this was (fun gory slasher style horror) you can have jokes and self awareness without becoming a full on parody.

    The third episode was definitely the weakest but I didn't mind the change in setting either. If they're already deviating from the source, may as well go all out and deliver a properly mental twist like that, that's the way I see it.

    Glad they kept it a surprise too. What could have been the best twist/cliffhanger of Moffat's Doctor Who, the John Simm reveal in Peter Capaldi's last one, was spoilt by the BBC advertising it in advance. At least they've learned from their mistakes on that front.
  • edited January 2020 Posts: 14,800
    You can have humour and horror. Full on comedy and horror is far more difficult to achieve. Dante did it, Da Ponte and Mozart did it in Don Giovanni, Polanski did it in his own vampire movie. But BBC pseudo Drac was just cheap and tacky. The Count ended up annoying, not menacing. And I would have accepted a more comic villain if the character was more suitable for it. Like the Phantom of the Opera.
  • MajorDSmytheMajorDSmythe "I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it."Moderator
    Posts: 13,882
    It did feel as time as if Leslie Neilson from Dracula Dead And Loving It, has wanted into one of the serious Dracula films.
  • edited January 2020 Posts: 12,837
    Ludovico wrote: »
    You can have humour and horror. Full on comedy and horror is far more difficult to achieve. Dante did it, Da Ponte and Mozart did it in Don Giovanni, Polanski did it in his own vampire movie. But BBC pseudo Drac was just cheap and tacky. The Count ended up annoying, not menacing. And I would have accepted a more comic villain if the character was more suitable for it. Like the Phantom of the Opera.

    Guess I just didn't see it as a full on comedy. There were one liners, moments of pitch black comedy (like Robbie Williams blaring as the still conscious dead girl was cremated*), and Dracula himself was a big, colourful villain, but I still saw the story at its heart a fairly straight/serious one. Silva in SF for example was also a camp, colourful villain, but that's probably one of the more serious Bond films. I guess this wasn't as straight faced as that but you get my point. I wouldn't class it as a comedy.

    I thought he was still menacing underneath the charisma and flourishes. That jump scare on the boat for example really got me. And he did plenty of horrific stuff to remind us of how dangerous he was underneath the panto bad guy act. A bad guy that delights and enjoys being evil is still a bad guy.

    *Did that remind anyone else of Doctor Who? That Peter Capaldi episode. "Don't cremate me". I bet if you went back and watched everything Moffat wrote you could tell a lot about what interests/scares him.
  • Posts: 14,800
    Silva didn't say he killed Mozart as a throwaway line. Silva was an evil geek, not a centuries old warlord and aristocrat who was born in medieval times. And no Catholic nun in Skyfall asked Bond very seriously if he had sexual intercourse with Silva. A Catholic nun for crying out loud! In 19th century Europe! You can be comical and sinister. The Phantom of the Opera was. Because he was a showman and a jester as well as a mobster. That was in character. For Dracula, it is ridiculously out of character.
  • LeonardPineLeonardPine The Bar on the Beach
    Posts: 3,985
    Absolutely loved the Dracula series. A clever reinterpretation of a book that's been done to death if you'll excuse the pun. The black humour was delicious and I was seriously impressed with Claes Bang and the wonderful Dolly Wells. Their scenes together are a joy.

    I really like the twist on familiar elements and the series feels like 3 separate films in a way.

    Production is really impressive. I found the effects and sets top notch.

    So many clever ideas and cracking dialogue, I wouldn't mind Gattis and Moffat having a bash at Bond. Would certainly be interesting...

    But as for this, if you like Vampire films but with a whole new slant, I seriously recommend this series. 👍
  • Ludovico wrote: »
    Silva didn't say he killed Mozart as a throwaway line. Silva was an evil geek, not a centuries old warlord and aristocrat who was born in medieval times. And no Catholic nun in Skyfall asked Bond very seriously if he had sexual intercourse with Silva. A Catholic nun for crying out loud! In 19th century Europe! You can be comical and sinister. The Phantom of the Opera was. Because he was a showman and a jester as well as a mobster. That was in character. For Dracula, it is ridiculously out of character.

    Out of character for the original version maybe. But this was clearly a new take. Riffing on all the old iconography. As I've said, they probably should have made that clearer in the marketing though, and not put based on the novel in the credits.

    And to be fair about the nun point, she was very clearly not meant to be your usual Catholic nun. Her faith seemed to have lapsed, she was fascinated by creepy gothic stuff, and the other nuns seemed pretty horrified in a "how could she dare say that" way at a lot of the stuff coming out of her mouth.

    And the warlord point, the last episode made pretty clear that he was meant to be nothing like the others of his time period. The bit where she susses out who she really was I think explains the showman side nicely. He was a coward who's afraid of death and suddenly he's this all powerful being, the complete opposite of what he felt like before, so he goes mad with that power, properly enjoys it. And why couldn't he have killed mozart? He's been around for a while. No reason why he couldn't have got around a bit.

    It's fine not to like all this stuff because it's not like the book to be fair, but in the context of the show itself, I think it all makes perfect sense.
  • MinionMinion Don't Hassle the Bond
    edited January 2020 Posts: 1,165
    Ludovico wrote: »
    You can have humour and horror. Full on comedy and horror is far more difficult to achieve. Dante did it, Da Ponte and Mozart did it in Don Giovanni, Polanski did it in his own vampire movie. But BBC pseudo Drac was just cheap and tacky. The Count ended up annoying, not menacing. And I would have accepted a more comic villain if the character was more suitable for it. Like the Phantom of the Opera.
    Whats that old saying? You can't have your cake and eat it too?

    I don't think anyone is saying horror can't be funny - more often than not a little humor goes a long ways - but this was in an Army of Darkness or Freddy's Dead territory of camp that clashed with the rest of the universe which adhered to foreboding Gothic terror. There's dark humor that could be mined from that, but "Hay laaaaaaaadies!" didn't fit the bill.

    But please don't get me wrong, I'm glad you got something from BBC's Dracula, @thelivingroyale.
  • Posts: 15,785
    I'll see it when it eventually comes to Blu-ray or DVD in the States. I'm not going to sign up for Netflix just to watch it.
    However, mixed reviews or not I have a feeling I may love it!
  • edited January 2020 Posts: 12,837
    Minion wrote: »
    Ludovico wrote: »
    You can have humour and horror. Full on comedy and horror is far more difficult to achieve. Dante did it, Da Ponte and Mozart did it in Don Giovanni, Polanski did it in his own vampire movie. But BBC pseudo Drac was just cheap and tacky. The Count ended up annoying, not menacing. And I would have accepted a more comic villain if the character was more suitable for it. Like the Phantom of the Opera.
    Whats that old saying? You can't have your cake and eat it too?

    I don't think anyone is saying horror can't be funny - more often than not a little humor goes a long ways - but this was in an Army of Darkness or Freddy's Dead territory of camp that clashed with the rest of the universe which adhered to foreboding Gothic terror. There's dark humor that could be mined from that, but "Hay laaaaaaaadies!" didn't fit the bill.

    But please don't get me wrong, I'm glad you got something from BBC's Dracula, @thelivingroyale.

    I do seem to be in the minority to be fair. I dunno. I didn’t go into it with particularly high expectations, because it looked cool and I do really admire Moffat in general but he has let me down before (still can’t get over how awful Sherlock’s last episode was). But I really thought it was one of his better efforts.

    Even the last episode, which was fairly ropey, I really liked. Dracula simply calling his lawyer to get out. The cremation scene. It’s definitely a very out there show but I loved it. When it got to the club scene I just thought about how mental it was that this was the same show as episode one and it made me realise again how lucky we are to have Moffat. Love him or hate him you can’t say his work isn’t memorable or ambitious. Just look at how dramatically Doctor Who went downhill once he left. His run was hit and miss, but it was never boring or out of ideas, which is what the show seems to have become without him imo. I wanted him to go at one point but now he’s actually gone I ended up stopping watching pretty much immediately. Think I and a lot of other fans of that show took him for granted.

    I don’t understand some of the criticism of Dracula either. I completely get why you two don’t like it, don’t get me wrong. But I don’t get the people who loved the first episode or two and then hated the last. Shock change in setting aside, I don’t think it was that much worse. Thought it was a fairly consistent show in comparison to the last couple of series of Sherlock (which veered from brilliant to terrible from week to week).
  • MinionMinion Don't Hassle the Bond
    edited January 2020 Posts: 1,165
    I can definitely agree with your assessment of Moffat. Hit or miss as he is, his imagination could never be accused of being safe or bland.
  • Posts: 14,800
    @thelivingroyale Out of character as per the way Dracula is conceived, in the broadest sense. He's a warlord for crying out loud. I can't believe I'm going to say something positive about Coppola''s cheesy Dracula, but at least he was very early on depicted as a nobleman and a warrior. At least he got that right.

    And the issue with Sister Agatha is that she was so darn anachronistic, just like everyone in the period piece setting. A common characteristic of BBC productions.
  • LeonardPineLeonardPine The Bar on the Beach
    Posts: 3,985
    Absolutely loved the Dracula series. A clever reinterpretation of a book that's been done to death if you'll excuse the pun. The black humour was delicious and I was seriously impressed with
    ToTheRight wrote: »
    I'll see it when it eventually comes to Blu-ray or DVD in the States. I'm not going to sign up for Netflix just to watch it.
    However, mixed reviews or not I have a feeling I may love it!

    Hope you do! I thought it was very impressive 😁
  • Posts: 14,800
    Boy if that's clever I wonder what's dumb.
  • LeonardPineLeonardPine The Bar on the Beach
    Posts: 3,985
    Ludovico wrote: »
    Boy if that's clever I wonder what's dumb.

    I think it's clever in the way it delves into Vampire lore from a completely different angle. Thankfully the makers wanted to do something very different and original with the Dracula story, which I think they achieved without abandoning it completely.

    I think the series shows the makers had great fun creating a whole new take on Dracula, and it's infectious for the viewer. Especially this one who loved every minute of it 👍👹
  • ThunderfingerThunderfinger Das Boot Hill
    Posts: 45,489
    I am going to give this a watch at some point, but not quite yet.
  • edited January 2020 Posts: 14,800
    Ludovico wrote: »
    Boy if that's clever I wonder what's dumb.

    I think it's clever in the way it delves into Vampire lore from a completely different angle. Thankfully the makers wanted to do something very different and original with the Dracula story, which I think they achieved without abandoning it completely.

    I think the series shows the makers had great fun creating a whole new take on Dracula, and it's infectious for the viewer. Especially this one who loved every minute of it 👍👹

    But there's nothing original in this take, surely! A modernised Dracula has been done before. Period pieces with modern dialogues and references is now almost stapled at the BBC. Self referential humour in horror is also extremely common. Wisecracking villains too. "I don't drink... Wine." (here used twice) is not exactly new, neither is the photo of Mina as trigger of Drac's lust, neither is bringing Dracula to the world (here a completely redundant twist, as Victorian England is depicted as contemporary), neither is borrowing Lugosi's accent, etc. And what abysmal lines!" Did you have intercourse with Count Dracula?" I see self indulgence, not cleverness.
  • LeonardPineLeonardPine The Bar on the Beach
    Posts: 3,985
    Ludovico wrote: »
    Ludovico wrote: »
    Boy if that's clever I wonder what's dumb.

    I think it's clever in the way it delves into Vampire lore from a completely different angle. Thankfully the makers wanted to do something very different and original with the Dracula story, which I think they achieved without abandoning it completely.

    I think the series shows the makers had great fun creating a whole new take on Dracula, and it's infectious for the viewer. Especially this one who loved every minute of it 👍👹

    But there's nothing original in this take, surely! A modernised Dracula has been done before. Period pieces with modern dialogues and references is now almost stapled at the BBC. Self referential humour in horror is also extremely common. Wisecracking villains too. "I don't drink... Wine." (here used twice) is not exactly new, neither is the photo of Mina as trigger of Drac's lust, neither is bringing Dracula to the world (here a completely redundant twist, as Victorian England is depicted as contemporary), neither is borrowing Lugosi's accent, etc. And what abysmal lines!" Did you have intercourse with Count Dracula?" I see self indulgence, not cleverness.

    Well i thought the fact that Dracula takes on characteristics of whoevers blood he drinks was a cool idea. As was his reaction to cancerous blood. I also found the circumstances in which Lucy returns from the dead to be very well done. Her final scenes were riveting and the make up effects quite excellent.

    I think the series pays respectful homage to past Dracula's, while still managing to be entirely its own thing. No mean feat if you ask me.
  • Posts: 14,800
    It could have been cool, had it not been drowned in a series of questionable decisions (to say the least) and appalling ideas. In the end, like Dracula's added powers and characteristics, it comes off as gimmicky. With the amount of homage they give, it's not longer paying homage, it's proper creative vampirism. And it's certainly not its own thing.
  • LeonardPineLeonardPine The Bar on the Beach
    Posts: 3,985
    Well obviously the series put your back up quite a bit for some reason. Or did you want just another stuffy period adaptation of the book?

    Trouble is the novel has been done so many times with films and TV series that what else is left to do with it that's interesting?

    Moffatt and Gattiss have managed that in my opinion and seem to have a real passion for the subject matter. Proving if you can be imaginative and forward looking then there's life in the old Count yet.

  • Posts: 14,800
    Actually, none of the adaptations has been faithful to the source material. And you are making a gigantic presumption saying that a period drama would be stuffy de facto. Dracula as a novel is actually very modern and relevant. In a day and age when Prince Andrew is suspected of being a pedophile, surely the story of a nobleman that is effectively a sexual predator is very much contemporary. So is one about the emancipation of the middle class, toxic masculinity, the fear of the Foreigner, the fear of invasion from an Eastern European force, etc.

    Keep the source material, take off all the stuff that has been added over the years, take off the "homages" and self references, and you got something pretty solid.
  • LeonardPineLeonardPine The Bar on the Beach
    Posts: 3,985
    Ludovico wrote: »
    Actually, none of the adaptations has been faithful to the source material. And you are making a gigantic presumption saying that a period drama would be stuffy de facto. Dracula as a novel is actually very modern and relevant. In a day and age when Prince Andrew is suspected of being a pedophile, surely the story of a nobleman that is effectively a sexual predator is very much contemporary. So is one about the emancipation of the middle class, toxic masculinity, the fear of the Foreigner, the fear of invasion from an Eastern European force, etc.

    Keep the source material, take off all the stuff that has been added over the years, take off the "homages" and self references, and you got something pretty solid.

    I think Coppolla's version was pretty close from what i remember about the novel.

    Shame it was such a bloated, misjudged, mess. Turning Dracula into a lovesick depressive and ruining Oldman's not half bad performance. Loved the music score though!

    This new version i think balances modern sensibilities with the Dracula legacy with wonderful assuredness.

    You can at least see this was a labour of love from Gattiss and Moffatt.
  • Posts: 14,800
    Coppola's version was anything but close. Narratively sort of and he kept all the main characters,even a few secondary ones. In spirit, it was a complete betrayal. Not to mention the plot was a nameless mess, the dialogues taken from an Harlequin novel and the less said about the casting, the better. It was the version I hated the most, but now it has fierce competition. At least Gattiss and Moffat's Drac has British actors playing Brits, if nothing else.

    But I don't see the work of love I'm afraid. Not in the way they treated every single character they bothered to take from the source material. In The Tractate Middoth yes, there was plenty of love (and to love): it was faithful, sober, restrained and very efficient I thought. That Drac however is a mess.
  • LeonardPineLeonardPine The Bar on the Beach
    Posts: 3,985
    Stephen King recommends Dracula!

    "The BBC incarnation of DRACULA (Netflix) is smart, involving, and bloody terrific. Which is to say it's terrific and VERY bloody." Stephen King quote from his Facebook page.
  • Posts: 14,800
    Stephen King recommends Dracula!

    "The BBC incarnation of DRACULA (Netflix) is smart, involving, and bloody terrific. Which is to say it's terrific and VERY bloody." Stephen King quote from his Facebook page.

    Stephen King seems to be a decent guy and everything, but he's as uneven as a critique as he is uneven as a writer.
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