Word: oldman
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula, to call it by its rightful name, powerfully reimagines this Victorian myth for the age of AIDS. Dracula (Gary Oldman) is a warrior-wooer impaled on the cross of his love; he must track his obsession until he is released from it. His misery gives him mesmeric mastery. The wretched Renfield (Tom Waits -- terrific) bays to do Dracula's bidding. Flowers wilt at the count's passage, and maidens burn at his touch. A young woman's tears turn to pearls in his hand...
Dracula the screen role is more seductive, protean, and undead than the legendary Transylvanian himself. In Francis Ford Coppola's resurrection (exhumation?) of the character, we see Dracula in his most romantic incarnation to date. Gary Oldman plays Dracula as a Byronic hero, a Slavic warrior prince who slaughters Turks in holy war. When his wife, Elisabetha, hears a false report of his death, she commits suicide, and the Church pronounces her soul damned. In a fit of rage and sorrow, the prince vows to join her in damnation and becomes a vampire. Essentially, the torture of his vampirism derives...
...character, Mina, an English schoolteacher and the nineteenth-century reincarnation of the Transylvanian princess. Dracula's glimpse of her photograph sets the stage for the love story which drives the film. Although a monster, Dracula is a rather compelling romantic hero--top hat, John Lennon glasses and all. Oldman successfully evokes the quirky, bordering on psychotic, vulnerability he brought to other peculiar roles in "Sid and Nancy" and "Track...
...actors became detectives too. "It's like being a journalist," Oldman said of his research into Oswald's character. "We all became assassination buffs. Marina ((Oswald's Russian-born widow)) had a tape that she let me see. It had a section leading up to the line, 'I'm just a patsy.' Oliver saw it, and he said, 'Let's restage that scene.' " Spacek spent time with Garrison's ex-wife Liz. "The sense I got from her," the actress says, "is of a woman living the life she wanted to live until her husband's obsession came through...
...denies its denizens any lyric power. The Irish used to be able to talk at least. But they mostly shout and mumble in this story of a young man (Sean Penn) who returns to the Kitchen to find himself in a fatal family dispute involving his best friend (Gary Oldman), his old girlfriend (ravishing Robin Wright) and her gang-boss brother (Ed Harris). In State of Grace, the Irish are Italians without style. As one of them says, "We drink. We shoot people. We're not tough; we're just crazy." The film wants to be tough...