It all boils down to this: how do you like your Gothic excess?
And it looks better on Blu-ray than it ever has.
Video:
This has always been a slightly grainy film, by Coppola's design, apparently. Along with the mist and the haze it's a device that helps plunge viewers into the deep end of the vampire pool. But when you see one particular scene in the film--a visual segue where peacock feathers appear in close-up and fan across the screen--you see the kind of clarity we've all grown used to with the new HD technology. It really pops out at you, the detail is so astounding. The whole film isn't that way, though, and again it's for effect. It's just not one of those you're going to pop in to wow people with your new Blu-ray system. "Bram Stoker's Dracula" is presented in 1080p High Definition (1.85:1 aspect ratio).
Audio:
The featured audio is an English PCM 5.1 uncompressed track that has the rich fullness of an organ playing the kind of Gothic tunes that feed flicks like this. The bass is resonant and there's good spread across the center and front main speakers. Additional sound options are English, Hungarian, French, Czech Dolby Digital 5.1, Polish VO 5.1, and Russian 4.0, with scads of subtitles: English, English SDH, Arabic, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Skpanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Romanian, Icelandic, Bulgarian.
Extras:
The bonus features from the Collector's Edition DVD are repeated here: more than 30 minutes of deleted scenes, a number of them featuring Tom Waits as R.M. Renfield, Dracula's manservant. There's also a trailer, but the real treats are the documentaries, Coppola's substantial introduction to the film, and Coppola's commentary track.
I could have listened to Coppola talk all day, and thankfully he's everywhere, even captured live in vintage clips that show him at work. The best of the documentaries was "The Blood is the Life: The Making of Dracula" which offered 28 minutes of behind-the-scenes narration. Here's where we see Coppola as a much-younger man directing traffic on the set, or in stills with his children. On "In-Camera: The Naïve Visual Effects of Dracula," son Roman Coppola appears now to talk about the old-fashioned movie tricks they used, and Coppola senior appears as he looks now. It's a fascinating 19 minutes that you'll wish was longer. Same with "Method and Madness: Visualizing Dracula" (12 minutes) and "The Costumes are the Sets: The Design of Eiko Ishioka" (14 minutes). The film won Oscars for costume design, make-up, and sound effects, so it's appropriate to have bonus features like this.
Too often, a director's "introduction" to a film is a tacked-on minute that says something simplistic: "I liked it and I hope you do too." But Coppola is all about substance, and his long introduction (playable with subtitles) is as good as the full commentary, which offers insight after insight and reinforces what he was trying to do in relation to Stoker's novel. It's one of the best commentaries I've listened to.
Bottom Line:
The bonus features on this disc made me more appreciative of what Coppola was doing, but I still can't say that I find "Bram Stoker's Dracula" as successful as my colleague John J. Puccio expressed in his laudatory review. It all boils down to this: how do you like your Gothic excess?
Video:
This has always been a slightly grainy film, by Coppola's design, apparently. Along with the mist and the haze it's a device that helps plunge viewers into the deep end of the vampire pool. But when you see one particular scene in the film--a visual segue where peacock feathers appear in close-up and fan across the screen--you see the kind of clarity we've all grown used to with the new HD technology. It really pops out at you, the detail is so astounding. The whole film isn't that way, though, and again it's for effect. It's just not one of those you're going to pop in to wow people with your new Blu-ray system. "Bram Stoker's Dracula" is presented in 1080p High Definition (1.85:1 aspect ratio).
Audio:
The featured audio is an English PCM 5.1 uncompressed track that has the rich fullness of an organ playing the kind of Gothic tunes that feed flicks like this. The bass is resonant and there's good spread across the center and front main speakers. Additional sound options are English, Hungarian, French, Czech Dolby Digital 5.1, Polish VO 5.1, and Russian 4.0, with scads of subtitles: English, English SDH, Arabic, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Skpanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Romanian, Icelandic, Bulgarian.
Extras:
The bonus features from the Collector's Edition DVD are repeated here: more than 30 minutes of deleted scenes, a number of them featuring Tom Waits as R.M. Renfield, Dracula's manservant. There's also a trailer, but the real treats are the documentaries, Coppola's substantial introduction to the film, and Coppola's commentary track.
I could have listened to Coppola talk all day, and thankfully he's everywhere, even captured live in vintage clips that show him at work. The best of the documentaries was "The Blood is the Life: The Making of Dracula" which offered 28 minutes of behind-the-scenes narration. Here's where we see Coppola as a much-younger man directing traffic on the set, or in stills with his children. On "In-Camera: The Naïve Visual Effects of Dracula," son Roman Coppola appears now to talk about the old-fashioned movie tricks they used, and Coppola senior appears as he looks now. It's a fascinating 19 minutes that you'll wish was longer. Same with "Method and Madness: Visualizing Dracula" (12 minutes) and "The Costumes are the Sets: The Design of Eiko Ishioka" (14 minutes). The film won Oscars for costume design, make-up, and sound effects, so it's appropriate to have bonus features like this.
Too often, a director's "introduction" to a film is a tacked-on minute that says something simplistic: "I liked it and I hope you do too." But Coppola is all about substance, and his long introduction (playable with subtitles) is as good as the full commentary, which offers insight after insight and reinforces what he was trying to do in relation to Stoker's novel. It's one of the best commentaries I've listened to.
Bottom Line:
The bonus features on this disc made me more appreciative of what Coppola was doing, but I still can't say that I find "Bram Stoker's Dracula" as successful as my colleague John J. Puccio expressed in his laudatory review. It all boils down to this: how do you like your Gothic excess?
Average user rating (1-5):
[release]21832[/release]