TV/Movies Megathread

[Barrister]

No love for 1931 Bela Lugosi's Dracula?

[garbon]

Pose.

So I enjoyed it. But the writing is thickly laid on and some of the acting is....

All very fair.

[The Larch]

So is it good or bad?

It is very enjoyable and a bit of a new take on a classic story. It doesn't follow the book strictly but takes some of its threads and characters and translates them into its own take of the tale. Skip it if you're a purist.

I've never managed to read the book because I get to scared about 100 pages in so all of my Dracula knowledge is from the films - which vary in how they interpret it. Obviously the best is Bram Stoker's Dracula

But having said that I think it's worth watching the new version just for the section on the ship which was superb.

CineMassacre on YouTube did an excellent in depth video a while ago comparing the most notable Dracula movies as to how closely they follow the literary original. Might be worth a watch and saves you the reading.

Here it is, it's quite long but very worth the watch. There's a shorter, 10 minute version as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9D74m628gQ

I'm going to make a quick tally to see how many points this version would score. 

Edit: So by my count it racks around 30-32 points, depending on how you rate some of the categories. It'd put it around the middle of the pack

[The Larch]

T&A?

Not really. There's lots of implied stuff but not much is shown. IIRC there's only one nude scene, and you can't really see much on it.

[crazy canuck]

What do you mean, you can see his ass for extended periods of time 

[The Larch]

What do you mean, you can see his ass for extended periods of time

I doubt that Yi was asking about Dracula's ass. 

[The Larch]

No love for 1931 Bela Lugosi's Dracula?

I guess it suffers the bane of any classic movie. Even if it's the iconic take on the story and the one that fixes the aesthetic of the character, it has not really been seen by a broad audience nowadays, and its a bit jarring to present day audiences due to the huge difference on film-making between now and then.

Funnily enough, I'd say that Murnau's Nosferatu is better known, and it's an even older film.

[celedhring]

Lugosi's Dracula isn't really a great film. It's pretty stiff, has a lot of bad dialogue and does not have particularly groundbreaking filmmaking. It suffers from most of the problems of early talkie films. The Spanish version is more highly regarded.

Nosferatu is a classic.

[Savonarola]

No love for 1931 Bela Lugosi's Dracula?

That Dracula is based on a stage play; and after about the first fifteen minutes feels hopelessly stage bound.  Todd Browning never really got sound and for the most part directed exploitation movies in the sound era (including the magnificent "Freaks".)  Spanish language "Drácula" (as Celedhring noted) is better directed; but it has the problem that the films Dracula is just some guy in a cape, while Bela Lugosi is Dracula.  The silent film "Nosferatu" (1922) is much closer to the book than those two (which is amusing since Murnau didn't have the rights to the book; so he calls Dracula and the Harkers by different names.)  My personal favorite Dracula movie, for sheer weirdness, is Carl Theodore Dreyer's "Vampyr."

[Valmy]

Lugosi's Dracula isn't really a great film. It's pretty stiff, has a lot of bad dialogue and does not have particularly groundbreaking filmmaking. It suffers from most of the problems of early talkie films. The Spanish version is more highly regarded.

Nosferatu is a classic.

I just love how they shot the same film with the same sets and same script just in Spanish with Spanish actors...oh and with a much more talented director. Was that common back then? Because it just seems so weird.

[Savonarola]

I just love how they shot the same film with the same sets and same script just in Spanish with Spanish actors...oh and with a much more talented director. Was that common back then? Because it just seems so weird.

It was in the very early thirties before they figured out how to do dubbing or subtitles.  For other weirdness Anna Christie (1930) has the same leading lady in both the English and German versions (Greta Garbo) but otherwise a completely different cast and costuming.  Laurel and Hardy would shoot their films three times, in English, French and Spanish phonetically sounding out the last two languages.

[viper37]

Bad Blood.  Semi-historical mob story set in Montreal.  The Bikers and at least one cop speak with French accents but everyone else speaks Canadian English.  A couple cuties, a little bit of strip club PG-13 skin.  The co-lead is a Hollywood cast-off, the same dude who played the coach in Goon.  I'll keep going, at least for a while.

it's not so bad.  There are two seasons, the second one was better.

[celedhring]

Lugosi's Dracula isn't really a great film. It's pretty stiff, has a lot of bad dialogue and does not have particularly groundbreaking filmmaking. It suffers from most of the problems of early talkie films. The Spanish version is more highly regarded.

Nosferatu is a classic.

I just love how they shot the same film with the same sets and same script just in Spanish with Spanish actors...oh and with a much more talented director. Was that common back then? Because it just seems so weird.

Yeah, as Sav says in the early 30s dubbing/subtitles were still difficult to do. There was also the fact that Hollywood thought that people would be more readily accept foreign productions if shot in their language. But by the mid-30s nobody was doing it anymore.

So you see how crude technology was in the very beginning, let's not forget that the music soundtrack was often played live instead of recorded and then mixed into the film's live track. And there were cases of actors/actresses with ungainly or just heavily accented voices that would mouth the words and have somebody else talk into the mic, live.

If you want to add to the weirdness, since most cinemas in the US weren't still equipped for sound, a lot of films had silent and talkie versions. Sometimes it was just a few sound scenes inserted on the silent version, but other times they shot two completely different versions concurrently. Hitchcock's Blackmail is a notorious example.

[viper37]

Witcher, episode 1.
I really like it!   This gives me the exact feeling for the Witcher 3 game, the best so far

[celedhring]

Witcher, episode 1.
I really like it!   This gives me the exact feeling for the Witcher 3 game, the best so far

Cavill really channels videogame Geralt, that low & raspy voice felt a bit forced at first, but he grows into it.