I had bought this Drac­ula DVD long back but didn’t try for some rea­sons. Coin­ci­den­tally, I was read­ing the arti­cle col­lec­tions of Sujatha [ 21-m Vil­limbu ]. I blindly fol­low the rec­om­men­da­tions of few friends — Cranx, Mad­han, Sujatha :). Sujatha was shar­ing his expe­ri­ences in the arti­cle “Naalai ula­gin mudivu”.

 ” ப‌த்தேகால் ரூபாய் என்றால் ஏதோ ம‌த்தியிலாவ‌து இருக்கும் என்று எண்ணினேன். திரையிலிருந்து இர‌ண்டாவ‌து வ‌ரிசையில் ஏற‌க்குறைய‌ என் மேலேயே ப‌ட‌ம் ஒடிக்கொண்டிருக்க‌ வான‌த்தைப் பார்ப்ப‌து போல் சினிமா பார்க்க‌ வேண்டியிருந்த்த‌து. அருமையான‌ ப‌ட‌ம்தான். ”

 I imme­di­ately searched for the DVD and started watch­ing it.

 Vam­pires are the peren­nial source for most of the hor­ror flicks in Hol­ly­wood. Drac­ula was orig­i­nally writ­ten as novel in 1897 by Bram Stoker. The vet­eran Hol­ly­wood direc­tor Fran­cis Ford Cop­pola had series of flops in his career [ before God­fa­ther III specif­i­cally ] too. Yes ! The same direc­tor who directed the clas­sic God­fa­ther trilogy.

He announced his next to be film as Drac­ula — an untold story. He felt that the story has more poten­tial for earn­ing more money then. In fact, his film swal­lowed as much as $50 mil­lion in pro­duc­tion cost. As expected, the film was received extremely well in box office as well as by crit­ics. Though they are more than 60 films came out in Dracula/Vampire series, this film was con­sid­ered as a mile­stone with the avail­able tech­nolo­gies of 1990s.

In fact, Cop­pola ini­tially declared that this film is going to be his exper­i­ment. It’s not an easy task to con­vert some­thing avail­able in a famous novel. How­ever, he has given the best visual por­trayal of the novel. The light­ing, mood, col­ors are amaz­ingly done well. We are liv­ing in a dif­fer­ent era where a com­plete film can be made in CG ani­ma­tion. In fact, Cop­pola inten­tion­ally avoided the com­puter gen­er­ated images and use the con­tem­po­rary cin­e­matog­ra­phy tech­niques and spe­cial effects.

The music part of the movie is a real good expe­ri­ence. 15 years back, Mysskin used to intro­duce the good music, films and books to us. Though I was not matured enough to his taste lev­els, I admired some of the works he rec­om­mended us [ Ramana malai, Brave­heart sound­track, San­toor instru­men­tal music by Pan­dit Shiv kumar Sharma ]. Of course, he was way beyond our lev­els get­ting into the clas­sics like Bhim­sen joshi and Hin­dus­tani music.

One day he gave us the sound­track of Drac­ula to lis­ten and at least, I couldn’t make the impact of it. I under­stood the impact of the score while watch­ing this movie actu­ally. The score was per­formed by Woj­ciech Kilar — he scored for the other nice film ’ The Pianist’ in 2002. No won­der you find the sim­i­lar­ity of Woj­ciech Kilar’s theme music and the theme music of Anjathey.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JXGI7rUKew - Drac­ula Theme

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=shiv+kumar+sharma&search_type=&aq=f - Check for Pt Shiv kumar Sharma’s San­toor music.

:)

Toto 

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