Hit Me With Your Best Shot: 'The Conversation'

by Nathaniel R

a wonderful 'establishing shot' not of a building but of a man (Gene Hackman), his targets (in photographs), and the tools of his trade.

Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (1974)  is nothing if not elusive. So many of the images in this paranoid mystery are obstructed. Coppola and the cinematographer Bill Butler are continually adjusting focus and searching for the subject and his targets. The protagonist, an 'unreliable narrator' type albeit without the narration, is Harry Caul (Gene Hackman, brilliant) and he's often hiding in the corner of frames, or with his back turned to us. The film begins with a full circle, as Harry is spying on a man and a woman as they walk around a city park. For what reason we do not yet know and might never know. Though we see his targets frequently, there are constant visual interruptions from trees and people and their own movements. We understand this to be Harry's view, figuratively if not literally, since people can't move like a crane shot or zoom in for a closeup...

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An Offer Elle Couldn't Refuse

by Jason Adams

Have you been keeping up with the movie about the making of The Godfather? It was announced last September that Jake Gyllenhaal will be playing the infamous producer Robert Evans while Oscar Isaac will be director Francis Ford Coppola in Francis and the Godfather, with Barry Levinson directing the thing. My ears, eyes, and everythings perked right up, and so I have been paying close attention ever since and now there's more casting news...

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Horror Costuming: Bram Stoker's Dracula

by Cláudio Alves

For the past few weeks, I've been exploring the greatness of costume design in the realm of horror cinema. None of the movies we discussed, not even those somewhat embraced in the awards circuit, got many golden laurels for their feats of costuming. That's, unfortunately, what usually happens to cinematic excellence that happens to manifest outside the boundaries of prestige drama. However, there are always a few exceptions that prove the rule. Such is the case of Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula. The picture won three Academy Awards, including the prize for Best Costume Design.

The creations of the late Eiko Ishioka are some of the weirdest and most spellbinding costumes ever made for cinema and, as far as I'm concerned, she's the greatest recipient of my favorite Oscar. Michael has recently explored his first foray into the dark marvels of Dracula, and Jason has previously explored Eiko's Oscar win. Nonetheless, I couldn't let Halloween go by without revisiting this most wondrous of big-screen wardrobes. Join me on this deep dive into the nightmarish fantasy of Eiko Ishioka's Dracula…

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How Had I Never Seen..."Bram Stoker's Dracula"

By Michael Cusumano

“You haven’t seen Bram Stoker’s Dracula?” my girlfriend gasped, stopping her laundry folding dead.

This caught my attention as it upset the established dynamic of our relationship. I am the one who interrupts every conversation with some version of “What? You’re telling me you’ve never seen [insert name of film no one has ever watched outside a film studies program]?!"

She then reflected on how gorgeous Coppola’s vampire opus is and chastised herself for not owning it. This again was a reversal of the natural order. I wake up with night sweats at the thought that there is a great movie somewhere I don’t own. She owns approximately seven DVD’s she acquired by accident in the early 00’s which she stores in a dusty case next to "Jagged Little Pill" and her old Microsoft startup discs.

I immediately turned off what I was watching and popped on the Coppola film...

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Horror Actressing: Sadie Frost in "Bram Stoker's Dracula"

by Jason Adams

Are you wearing the dress or is the dress wearing you? That is the question, the one every fashionista asks -- it's not just comfort but confidence; the former might assist with the latter but if you've got enough of the latter you can overcome any obstacle, good taste be damned. Like how exactly does one give a performance for the ages encased inside a neck ruffle that could be captured on the cameras of satellites orbiting the Earth? Don't ask me, ask Sadie Frost, who yanked those satellites out of the skies and stared 'em down into submission with her take on the character of "Lucy" in Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 re-imagining of the classic vampire tale.

Nobody save Gary Oldman with his prosthetics parade was asked to do more inside of Eiko Ishioka's Oscar-winning kabuki-inspired outfits than Frost was...

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