Delicious, with a hint of sour Keanu.

In BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA, Gary Oldman shows us what acting IS and Keanu Reeves shows us what acting ISN’T.

We all know the concept of Dracula; it is in our – ahem – bloodstreams, but in cinema, we rarely see Dracula’s origins. Director Francis Ford Coppolla opens the movie with the event that made warrior Vlad the Impaler/Count Dracule the blood-drinking psychopath he would become.

In 1492, Count Dracule’s wife (Winona Ryder), believing him to be dead in the Turkish wars, commits suicide. The Bishop pronounces her soul damned. Upon his return, Dracule (Oldman) renounces God and stabs a holy statue with his sword. Apparently, all you need to retrieve that elusive blood-from-a-stone is to stab it, for it gushes blood – which Dracule drinks lustily, then swears an oath that with all the powers of darkness he will return from the dead to avenge his wife. (Can’t figure who he wants revenge on, since she took her own life.) Which is also educative, as we see how easy it is to come back from the dead: if you vow something supernatural with a Gary Oldman level of psychodrama – it’s gonna happen!

Suddenly – Keanu, as Jonathan Harker. (Uh, what’s with the accent?) In “modern times” – 1800’s England – we meet the peripheral hero of Stoker’s novel embodied in Theodore Logan Esquire, play-acting in a posh accent like he’s attending a little girl’s tea party for dolls.

Bram Stoker’s Poffula

Harker leaves his virginal lover, Mina (Winona Ryder in another role, different dress) and travels to Transylvania to meet The Count (Gary Oldman in the same role, different dress) to strike a real estate deal for property in England. The Count is deliciously cordial and ominous at the same time, his shadow moving independently of his actions.

The Count sees a picture of Mina that Harker carries and is besot with remembered love, ageless as oceans. He believes Mina is the incarnation of his lost wife and sets his black soul on reclaiming her. (This “eternal love” aspect was inserted into Stoker’s story, for the better I believe, as it adds depth to the tragic hero). After entrapping Harker in his castle (at the mercy of his three vampiric wives), The Count journeys to England to seek out Mina and cause havoc with his drinking of blood, sleeping in coffins and out-acting everyone with one wing tied behind his back.

In London, while Renfield (Tom Waits) heralds Dracula’s glory from within the walls of a sanitarium, Mina playfully frolics with her best friend Lucy (Sadie Frost), unaware that plans are afoot to taint Lucy’s blood with disease, whilst destroying her virginity and independent thought – yes, marriage. The three men courting the libertine Lucy are Cary Elwes, Richard E. Grant and Bill Campbell. When Lucy becomes deathly pale and blood-sick long before any of the men put their tallywackers inside her, it is suspected that only a superstitious old curmudgeon can diagnose her disease, so of course they call in Dr. Abraham Van Helsing (Anthony Hopkins).

Van Helsing is also a vampire expert and realizes that the man-sized wolf prowling the property, the intermittent liquid nitrogen fog and the BITE-MARKS ON LUCY’S NECK means only one thing: there’s someone on set who is overacting even more than him…

Unfortunately for the production, Coppolla did opt to go a little cheap, shooting everything on stage sets, and though the indoor sets are as lush as blood-drenched wine, the medieval cello theme lending acres of trepidation to the shadowy palette, the fake outdoor sets are quite distracting.

Oldman sells not only the horror that his bat man brings, but the tragedy of his own immortality and love lost. When he tracks down Mina amidst a throng of cityfolk, it is as if they are the only two people on the street, as he tells her, “I have crossed oceans of time to find you,” which makes her swoon in pre-orgasm.

Works every time…

Beyond the tactile horror of blood-drinking and stake-thumping, this Dracula is a romantic tragedy, which is not the norm with Dracula stories. Only Oldman could sell it this way. And sell it he does, in every incarnation of The Count: from his warrior Vlad the Impaler, to the Continental Count with the big hair; he sells it as the uber-romantic tousle-locked Euro bounder, and as the knuckle-twisted, fur-covered man bat.

Gary Oldman’s thespian talents are on such display in BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA that it is simply unfair to dismiss these roles as cheesy overacting, because though he does camp it overboard, his emotional spectrum runs deeper than the worm-infested soil he snuggles in at moonset. He is, so to speak, the hammer behind the nails in the coffin.

Gary Oldman is immortal.

END

Buried within The Message from Vega – The Message from Sagan.

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND needed updating. CONTACT is that update. Though it may never attain the lofty heights of commercialism that CLOSE ENCOUNTERS enjoyed, CONTACT is, in fact, a more intelligent vision of extra-terrestrial communication with our outer-spiral-arm planet.

Poffy Sagan

Jodie Foster is SETI maverick, Ellie Arroway, who discovers extraterrestrial alien signals that instruct mankind to build a machine to take us to the stars. Woven into this storyline are all the adversities that not only affect the world and its myriad misapprehensions and fears, but also factors that affect Dr. Arroway as a female in a man’s world (with Jodie Foster’s perfect features and sensual, leonine mane not helping any), or an atheist in a theist’s world (Arroway butts heads – and butts – with not only a preacher but the whole inculcated space committee on religion and gods).

From science maven Carl Sagan‘s optimistic novel of the same name, the movie is based on the ideology of the Drake Equation (the speculative theory postulating multitudes of Life-harboring planets in this galaxy, given the sheer quantity of possibly habitable worlds), defined in the movie by the almost-too-cute syllogism: “If we are alone in the Universe, it sure seems like an awful waste of space.”

The Drake Equation is weighed against the Fermi Paradox, which argues that if there are alien civilizations, why haven’t we detected them yet? This movie’s plot – obviously – negates that paradox.

Whereas CLOSE ENCOUNTERS’ method of alien contact played on the age-worn industrial-era concept of aliens physically visiting Earth, an infinitely more efficient manner is effected in CONTACT by means of radio waves. SETI astronomers, headed by Ellie Arroway, stumble upon distinctly intelligent radio signals originating near the star Vega. In decoding The Message, they are astonished to find it is not merely a rudimentary greeting, but rather a technologically-superior detailed schematic for a Machine, to transport US to THEM.

Considering the economics of space travel – not referring to money, but expending energy – The Message defines the most judicious method for establishing contact, whilst discerning whether a recipient civilization is ready and/or worthy to step up to an interstellar level of commerce. The concept of “aliens” has matured in this film, from simple benign or malignant humanoids (treating Earth as the retarded child of the galaxy), to ambiguous “intelligences,” regarding us as near-equals, in placing the ball in our court.

This maturity is due in great part to the inexhaustible efforts of the late Dr. Sagan, whose quest to bestow a sense of cerebral wonder in a generation jaded by laser-wielding aliens and detestably non-scientific science fiction found a culminating point in this movie.

With aliens being so apparently existent, there comes the inevitable contention of Religion vs. Science, and though Sagan clarifies his position in the novel, the movie must necessarily leave the issue ambiguous to appeal to its demographic of (real or imagined) “christians” – the bulk of Earth’s popcorn-plucking populace. The film ultimately preaches to the converted on BOTH sides. No Atheist or Christian will be jumping their razor-wire fences on the grounds of this movie.

The Machine. The journey to the future begins with the logo on the Atom’s head.

As with all major-studio releases, the screen story tampers with the novel’s finer details, slotting it squarely within motion picture dramatic parameters – most notably modifying the overweight evangelist of the book, Palmer Joss, to that of Hollywood man-toy, Matthew McConaughey, to give Ellie that seemingly necessary love-interest. Thankfully, the broad strokes retain enough of Sagan’s driving pursuit of knowledge, elevating it above mere alien-invasion fare. And/or butting butts fare.

Yet we do not lack for effects – stunning, thought-provoking effects, rather than whizbang jaw-droppers. The challenging opening sequence sees a camera panning backwards through space away from Earth, beyond the edge of the Milky Way, outracing a jumble of radio static, which gets progressively “older,” the farther out we go (as indicated by familiar tunes, news snippets and cultural signpost sounds – i.e. the farther out in space you get, the farther back in time you hear; in essence, time-traveling backwards – faster than light, no less, if you are outpacing radio waves!).

The visualization of The Machine (that The Message instructed to build) is a marvel of utility and “alien” design, seamlessly integrated into the landscape of Cape Canaveral. Most impressive was the tragic sequence which destroyed the first Machine – so artfully contrived, with views from the scores of “media” cameras covering the event – that the viewer never thinks to question where the reality ends and the green-screen babble begins.

An astounding camera trick with a running girl in a mirror (Jena Malone as young Ellie) will leave directorial aficionados in mortal brain pain trying to decipher its ingenuity.

One can only hope that viewers can delve through the flummery (which must necessarily blossom during the latter stages of the movie, as The Machine traverses worm-holes) to the REAL message from Sagan: that the questioning and scientific mind is infinitely more precious to our species and creates more impetus for launching Mankind to the stars than the stagnating minds of the pseudo-science shamsters, which includes fanatical christian contingents.

One of the best arguments against religionistas – played out in the movie by the ever-psycho Jake Busey – is that no scientist has yet strapped himself with explosives and taken innocent lives in his quest to force an opinionated Physics viewpoint on other people, whom he believes he will “save” by blowing them up…

The incomparable David Morse is Ellie’s encouraging father, while William Fichtner poignantly plays a blind astronomer colleague. A stoic Tom Skerritt is simultaneously Ellie’s supervisor and adversary, although thankfully is not painted as villainous, even though cast as the obvious antagonist; an intelligent rendering, keeping his interests “scientific” rather than petty. Although he does prevaricate to score his Machine seat, he is noble enough to admit to Ellie, “I wish we lived in a world which rewarded honesty like yours,” to which Ellie replies, “I thought the world is what we make of it.”

Carl Sagan died before production was completed on CONTACT, making it one of his last gifts to a blinkered world. The film’s dedication read simply: “For Carl.” I wept.

Without him, the Universe seems like an awful waste of space.

END