Dracula (AKA, Bram Stoker's Dracula) (1992) is a critical and popular favorite by Francis Ford Coppola. It is rated 7.1 at IMDB, and won three Oscars. Dracula tries to seduce the reincarnation of his lost love, Winona Ryder, and fails. So much for plot. So what fills the 130 minutes of running time if it isn't plot? Pretentious but dark and overly artsy imagery. To giv eyou an idea, Ryder and her boyfriend kiss before he leaves for Transylvania. Peacock feathers are waved in front of the camera, then the eye of one of the feathers fades into a train tunnel, and the boyfriend is in Transylvania. Why the peacock feathers? I have no idea whatsoever, but then I saw nothing of merit in this entire snooze-fest, except breast exposure from Monica Bellucci, Sadie Frost, Michaela Bercu and Florina Kendrick, full frontal from Honey Lauren and Judi Diamond, and clear see through breasts from Winona Ryder.

I have to believe the reviews and ratings were based on a lifetime achievement award for Coppola rather than an honest look at this film. Ed Wood's worst effort was more entertaining than this one. I suppose it qualifies as a marginally acceptable Gothic horror, hence C-.

Eureka (1982 or 1983 or 1986 or something):

Scoop's comments in white.

I don't know if any movie ever had a better real-life story as its source material.

Harry Oakes was a young man from New England who followed the classic dream of riches. After graduating from the university and attending medical school for a couple of years, Harry dropped out to make his fortune as a gold prospector in the 1890s. He followed the possibilities around the globe: to the Klondike, to Australia and New Zealand, to Death Valley, and back to Alaska, living in poverty and hardship, narrowly avoiding death for twenty years. A lesser man might have given up. Almost any other college man would have given up after two decades of a miserable, hardscrabble existence among ruthless uneducated men and prostitutes. Harry was not any other man. He set his sights on achievement, and was not afraid to pay for it with his own death, if necessary.

His determination paid off. Following rumors and opportunities, he figured out a way to work an unworkable claim underneath a frozen lake in Canada. He raised enough money to do what was necessary, and found one of the largest mother lodes in North America in the caves under that lake. In 1917 he had arrived in the area with $2.65 to his name. In 1918 he was earning $60,000 per day.

He soon found out that there were drawbacks to achieving his dreams. His entire life had been based on aspiration, and he was lost without something to work towards. He was not psychologically suited to be idle. Nor was he socially prepared to join the life of the leisure class. Twenty years of survival existence, living alone or with roughnecks, had left him socially unpolished, distrustful, ill-mannered and irascible. And he was alone.

He then began a new stage of his life, gadding about the world in search of inspiration. On a cruise he met a cultured, attractive young woman. Mankind's most common bond, that between powerful men and beautiful women, occurred. When they married, Harry was 48, short and ugly, ill-tempered but rich. Eunice was 24, cultured and lovely. The match worked. Harry and his wife raised three sons and two daughters. Harry soon took his young family to the Bahamas, where the tax laws were most favorable to someone in his position. Within a fairly short time, his real estate holdings included more than half of the island of Nassau. Harry and Eunice became integrated into the Nassau social set, which centered around the Duke of Windsor, the former king of England. Harry was still cantankerous, but generous to excess, and he was much loved by the poor of the island.

Life on Nassau was anything but idyllic. Harry found two additional sources of grief.

1) His eighteen year old daughter met and married an idler, a handsome member of the European titled set, a "Count" whose only known interests were partying, womanizing, and yachting. Harry's daughter could not have picked a man more dissimilar to her father, the ultimate rough and ready self-made man, so the two men despised each other, as evidenced by loud public rows.

2) Some very powerful men in Miami wanted to turn Nassau into a Caribbean Vegas, complete with slick hotels and lavish casinos. Harry and the former English king opposed their development plans. These were not the kind of men who take "no" for an answer. The Miami group was headed by the notorious mobsters, Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano, the childhood friends who had assembled the modern mob, the most cohesive organized crime enterprise in American history.

In 1943, Harry was found murdered, beaten to death, his body burned to a crisp.

Killed by the mob? Killed by his son-in-law?

Harry's son-in-law was arrested and tried, but even Harry's daughter, who knew him better than anyone, thought him incapable of such an action. The evidence against him was circumstantial, the investigation was bungled (some say deliberately, to cover up mob involvement), and the Count was set free.

Court TV did an elaborate and detailed report on the background behind the Oakes murder trial.

The murder remains unsolved to this day. Harry's daughter, now known as Nancy Tritton, is still alive as far as I know. "The fabulously rich and difficult Nancy Oakes", as one critic called her, seems to have spent her entire life replaying the same mistakes over and over again. She had her marriage to the Count annulled in 1949, and some years later married another seedy aristocrat, this time a German Baron. Having made herself a countess and a baroness as well as an heiress, she soon separated from the German and married another famous playboy, the fun-loving Patrick Tritton, upon whom is based Dickey Umfraville, a character in Anthony Powell's "A Dance to the Music of Time". That marriage failed as well, and her matrimonial inclinations seem to have stopped there.

The Oakes family estate still seems to hold vast amounts of wealth and property in the area of Lake Ontario. HOCO Enterprises (formerly Welland Securities) is today one of the largest owners of real estate property on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. "HOCO" is the acronym for the Harry Oakes Company.

What a story, right?

In concept, tt seemed like a no-brainer that should have proceeded directly to the Oscar Night stage, and the casting was perfect. Joe Pesci played Meyer Lansky, and Mickey Rourke played the soft-spoken but lethal Luciano. Gene Hackman played crusty old Harry Oakes, and the parts of his spoiled daughter and her handsome, amoral Count were played by Theresa Russell and Rutger Hauer.

Although the script changed everyone's names, (would you want Lucky Luciano's friends mad at you?), the story was Harry's, almost down to the last detail. There were only two changes of any significance.

1. For some reason, the part of Harry's wife was re-imagined. Instead of the beautiful and cultured young woman who met Harry after his ascent into wealth, the script chose to make her a bored alcoholic.

2. Instead of staying with the Nancy Oakes character for six years after the trial, the Count made love to her once more, discussed their infinite future with her, then rowed out to his yacht and sailed off. That was an excellent embellishment, in my estimation, allowing the director and his team to layer in a heavy dose of romanticism, and to come up with a brilliant closing image (see movie house page), which capped off some exquisitely imagined photography throughout the film.

I know what you must be thinking. "With a great story like this, magnificent cinematography, and a perfect cast, why have I never heard of this movie, and why is it rated a bottom-scraping 5.4 at IMDb?".

For you experts, the answer is "Nick Roeg". For the rest of you, the short answer is "because it isn't that good", but those words will just prompt you to ask "why?", so let's get to the meat of it.

• The first problem is that the stories of Harry Oakes and Nancy Oakes are too much for one movie. They are really two separate stories that intersected briefly, when Nancy's husband was accused of killing Harry. Since the Count was exonerated, that intersection was of minimal importance. By combining the two stories into one, the screenwriter and director painted themselves into a cinematic corner. There they were painting a portrait of Harry Oakes, absorbing the audience into his Citizen Kane existence, when Harry was suddenly dead, and the movie still had a lot of running time left. That drained all the energy from the film, not just because we were into Harry's story and it was suddenly over, but because Gene Hackman was the only actor in the film who truly had the gift to breathe life into the pretentious dialogue and make it sound like human speech instead of human speeches. Once Hackman was gone, the damned movie seemed like one of those hollow European art films where people deliver sonorous speeches while looking out of the window. The post-murder story of Nancy Oakes was an anti-climax in the story of Harry Oakes. It was particularly irritating since nobody knows to this day who really killed Harry Oakes, either in real life or in the script, so everything after the murder was essentially hogwash except for the one great romantic moment pictured above.

• The second problem - I think I mentioned the rhetorical dialogue a couple of times. This film really called for a no-bullshit director who could tell the story in an interesting way and allow the situations to present their own meanings. I think Clint Eastwood would have been perfect, inasmuch as he was extraordinarily successful with a similarly long and rambling story in The Outlaw Josey Wales. Instead of Clint, we got artsy-fartsy Nick Roeg, a confused story teller with no good sense of a strong campfire tale. The characters kept trying to intellectualize with philosophical musings and long speeches, all of which served to try to reveal points which were already evident (or should have been) in the plot and visuals.

The film is separated into three acts, like a classical tragedy. In Act One, Harry is in the Yukon prospecting, and this all leads to his strike. In Act Two, Harry and his family are trying to find some meaning to their lives in the Bahamas, and this all leads to his death. Act Three is the trial, and it really leads nowhere, except to an unexpected "not guilty" and an inconclusive ending.

In the trial scene, with the down-to-earth Hackman already dead and buried, we are left with Hauer and Russell exchanging lofty, philosophical, poetic, dreamy thoughts about their life together, supposedly while she was on the witness stand and he was acting as his own lawyer. (Very realistic court procedure. The judge and lawyers just sat patiently as they made goo-goo eyes at one another.) The director brought this act out of left field and tried to turn this part of the film into something like Murder in the Cathedral. Except for the ricly imagined final minute, all of act three could have been handled better with a word slide telling us the result of the trial.

The first part of the film was also strange, actually surrealistic, but was so brilliantly filmed that the surrealism worked. It is a nearly wordless portrayal of a frostbitten Harry striking gold underneath the frozen lake, climaxing with Harry being swept away by a river of gold generated by an explosion. This Act One constitutes one of the most impressively filmed and imagined sequences in film history, and is nearly perfect except when Harry and his future wife are speaking. When director Nick Roeg could concentrate on images and poetry, he was brilliant, as he was through most of this sequence. It was in the natural interaction of people and the simple logic of storytelling that Roeg was overmatched. Roeg was a classic example of the Peter Principle, a brilliant cinematographer who worked his way up to a directing job, and settled in there, at his level of incompetence.

Actually, the second part of Eureka also suffered from a multitude of oddball digressions. The Count was into some kind of native pagan rituals as well as Kabbalah, and this generates plenty of pseudo-mystical baloney and hifalutin' conversations which serve little purpose.

This should have been a brilliant movie, but wasn't. Instead of a disjointed three act play, it could have been a focused story about their life in the Bahamas, and their inability to make it work for them despite infinite riches. The surreal portion in the Klondike, trimmed of some dialogue, would have made a beautiful prologue.

Ultimately, it should have been Harry's story, and it should have ended with Harry's death, a sad commentary on a man who achieved everything he dreamt of for the first forty years of his life, then could never find a way to enjoy it, because the process of achieving his dream changed the man who dreamt it in the first place. And the director should have let us see that point for ourselves inside of the story, instead of having the characters deliver soliloquies about it.

Based on this description, this is a C (Tuna agrees). It is a great movie, and it is a poor movie. Above all, it is a film which always tries to soar into stratospheric heights, sometimes finding an air current and floating majestically through the clouds for we earthbound to admire, and sometimes crashing clumsily and painfully to earth. If you study films, you must see it, if only for what it hoped to be and might have been, if not for what it actually is.

By the way, Roeg, now 76, is still at it. He will have a new film out in 2004, Adina, "a philosophical horror film that explores love, sex and death across the universe." Well, I guess he's changed his ways. Nothing pretentious about that.

• Theresa Russell (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12)
• voodoo orgy chicks (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)

.wmv film clips

• Lord of the Rings's Miranda Otto in Julie Walking Home (2002) . (.wmv file, .jpg preview)

MISCELLANEOUS REQUEST FOR HELP from Celebrity Sleuth:

If any of you guys have movies or stills of the Grammy red carpet action, please read this.

Scoop:

Just back from the Grammys

I promise to send you all a FULL REPORT -- like those field reports you get from the Film Festivals but featuring real, live PEOPLE -- as soon as I possibly can. We actually got onto the red (well, green for Heineken) carpet this year...and met and mingled with tons of celebs!! Lots to fill your Fun Housers in on.

But in the meantime, I have something of a urgent personal request...since I know from their collages that many seem to cap the arrivals and especially Joan Rivers' E! special prior to the ceremony, I would be THRILLED if any of your members or contributors taped Joan's pre-Grammy arrivals show and could provide a copy.

The selfish reason I ask is that, apparently, Mrs. Sleuth and I were seen on Joan's show "about half a dozen times" right behind the celebs she was interviewing--according to my best friend. Somehow he happened to spot us -- even though of course he wasn't expecting it or looking! But, alas, he wasn't taping it at the time...and of course we were there, so we couldn't capture it either. He said we were very clear and recognizable (to people that know us), so it would be a "kick" to have a copy.

So if any of your FH people still have a copy I'd greatly appreciate if they could mail it to you...for passing on to me.  We are looking especially for the footage of Alicia Keys, the Osbournes, Reuben Studdard and Matthew Perry. Sorry to ask for something so mundane, but I figure you guys are the best bet on having taped and retained it.

Thanks...and I'll tell you all about it in a few days,

Sleuth

OTHER CRAP:

• Hail to the Chef : a salute to America's fattest President.
• Astronomy Pic o' the Day, February 17 - Galaxy Cluster Lenses Farthest Known Galaxy
• If you are interested in celebrity nudity, you must familiarize yourself with The Case Files of the Fake Detective
• Diamond star thrills astronomers
• The Cinema and full-frontal male nudity.
• About everything there is to know about Battle of Hastings, 1066, the defining moment in the history of Briton.
• The Lord of The Rings- The journey is about as good a four minutes of cinema as you will ever see in one place.
• Janet Jackson and her Satanic cult. I think this site is satirical, but who can tell in this post-ironic world?
• Here is another working source for the Paris Hilton Full Sex Tape
• FUN STUFF: Here's that swingin' hepcat, John Kerry, playin' a rockin' bass guitar for the Electras in 1961.
• A scientifically accurate map of the internet.
• Oops! Turns out the Sun's story wasn't quite right. Never mind. When the "Kerry girl" did "tell all", it turned out there was nothing to tell. Her parents also said they admire Kerry and will vote for him.
• SPORTSbyBROOKS says: GOLFWEEK has a sneak of the next big Tiger Woods TV commercial, featuring Woods 'doing a perfect imitation of Bill Murray's Carl Spackler character in 'Caddyshack.''
• Lyrics.com - get the lyrics to your favorite songs.
• Cheerleader Update: The Pro Bowl cheerleaders.
• Voter here for FHM's 100 Sexiest Women of 2004.
• Playboy.com partners up with Suicide Girls.
• FallonFey.com has updated their section on "Jokes that Weekend Updates cut after Dress Rehearsal"
• FallonFey.com - has now posted the Weekend Update from the Drew Barrymore show from Saturday night, 2-14-04. Tina Fey gets the quote of the day, "Because of friction between the U.S. and Brazil, it was announced that a float at this year's Carnivale will be a 12-foot sculpture of Uncle Sam with his pants down and his genitals in plain sight -- or as Bill Clinton calls it, business casual."
• A-Rod is a Yankee. Selig approves A-Rod deal to Yankees for Soriano and a player to be named later. Soriano must be thrilled, eh? Despite receiving no further benefit from his services, the Rangers will continue to pay A-Rod another $67 million dollars over the next 22 years. By the end of the deal, they will have paid A-Rod a total of $140 million dollars to play on three last place teams. His services will have cost them $47 million per year. Oh, those slick Texas businessmen! Oh, yeah, and Soriano becomes a free agent after the 2005 season, so they'll probably lose him as well, given their likely next two last place finishes. Let's hope the "player to be named later" has supernatural powers. The good news? The rangers are only two pitchers away from contention. The bad news? Those pitchers are Christy Mathewson and God. And even with Christy and God in the rotation, you figure those guys would go 30-10 and 40-0, but the other three Rangers starters would go 20-62, so they still would not take the division. Hell, they might not even win enough to edge the Red Sox for the Wild Card.
• MSN to ban pop-ups and pop-unders on global sites. It's about damned time. Now if they'd just build MSIE so that it didn't support the mofos in the first place, I might love them.
• ColorMatch Remix, VERY useful site of you do any web page design or photo editing. Use three sliders to create a precise color, and it gives you the value in RGB hex and RGB decimal values. It also gives you many colors that can work in the same pallette, pre-defined themes, export controls, etc.
• Vibrator that connects to a USB port, and is controlled by ... um ... keystrokes.
• Ultimate Secure Home located in Durango Colorado. Hurry up and act now before Dick Cheney sweeps this up.
• The 101 dumbest business decisions of 2003.
• Birthday praise for N. Korea's Kim: North Korean publications describe Kim Jong Il as a Renaissance man who has flown fighter aircraft, written operas, and managed to shoot 11 holes-in-one in his first try at golf. It sure takes him a long time to play, however, because he has to walk up and see how every green breaks before he tees off. I want to know how he fucked up the other seven holes. Must have been a strong wind that day. If North Korea ever falls, those writers have a career lined up at Weekly World News.
• SimilarMinds.com > Free Personality Tests and Community Take personality tests, then find people with similar or compatible scores. I tried to get involved, but the only person with a similar personality was Kim Jong Il, and he's too busy to answer my e-mails, what with the birthday celebrations and all.
• Peter Andre has been given an award for his outstandingly bad contribution to music.
• The Hobbit Teaser Trailer 2006 is now online. Note - this is NOT the real deal. It is a spectacular hoax concocted with footage from Fellowship of the Ring and Dragonslayer. But it's still cool.
• David Bowie says his worst-ever vice was the crap music he turned out in the mid-80s, except of course, for the music he turned out before and after that, oh, and his acting career.
• Adventures in filmmaking hell with Elizabeth Hurley.
• Here's the latest available edition of the salacious internet gossip site, The A List.
• Donald Trump in a feud with a former Penthouse Pet about whether they ever dated. The Donald is trying to explain away why there are pictures of them together! Trump also says she is just not his taste, even though she's a dead ringer for his ex-wife Ivana at that age, and also resembles his ex-wife Marla.
• This is the model whom Donald Trump may or may not have dated, your opinion hinging on whether you are capable of rational thought.
• As of noon Eastern Time Monday, this link to the Paris Hilton tape was still working.
• Europe's most powerful computer turned on. Sadly, it's a Commodore 64.
• A GOLFER born a man will create a world first by playing in Australia's women's open next month. She has a significant handicap. Two lost balls will cost her four strokes.
• Weekly World News says: Princeton archaeologists have found Middle Earth in New Jersey. "Hey, Sauron, ya wancher fuckin' ring? I got yer ring right here (grabs crotch)."
• GALLUP now shows a sudden reversal in the policy concerns of the American public. Unemployment returns to #1 status as the most important issue with the American public.
• Forget about the real presidential election. The really important question is "Who was the best movie president?"
• One week into production on the Will Ferrell soccer comedy Kicking & Screaming, Universal is switching directors. Jesse Dylan, who helmed the studio's American Wedding, will take over for Marco Schnabel.
• Whoa. Check out this picture of Beyonce at the NBA All-Star Game. Stay tuned. There have to be some better ones. No way that kept her covered 100% of the time.

Other Crap archives. May also include newer material than the ones above, since it's sorta in real time.

Click here to submit a URL for inclusion in Other Crap

MOVIE REVIEWS:

Here are the latest movie reviews available at scoopy.com.

• The yellow asterisks indicate that I wrote the review, and am deluded into thinking it includes humor.
• If there is a white asterisk, it means that there isn't any significant humor, but I inexplicably determined there might be something else of interest.
• A blue asterisk indicates the review is written by Tuna (or Junior or Brainscan, or somebody else besides me)
• If there is no asterisk, I wrote it, but am too ashamed to admit it.

Words from Scoop.

.avi's from Shiloh.

.wmv files made by Scoop from Shiloh's .avi's.

• SOMETHING NEW: Mia Kirshner in Sunday's episode of The L-Word. The L-Word cooled off the nudity after the first episode, but this gets it back on track. The lighting is a a bit funky, but ya have to feel forgiving when they show you Mia Kirshner strolling around topless for a while. I know it improves my mood. (.avi version, .wmv version)

• SOMETHING OLD, BUT RARELY SEEN: Cindy Crawford, taking a bath in The Simian Line. This 2000 film has never been made available on any home media format. (.avi version, .wmv version)

Perhaps these tips will help if you have trouble with the codecs for these movies:

Shiloh says:

FYI when I hypercam vids to make the file size smaller I use DivX MPEG-4 Fast-Motion for the video compressor, then I use virtualdub to compress the audio. The properties for the vids says the video codec:  DivX Decoder Filter & audio codec:  Morgan Stream Switcher which I'm not familiar with. When I compress the audio with virtualdub I use MPEG Layer-3.  A friend of mine told me about compressing the audio about (6) mos. ago. Like I said previously, only been capping for a year & a half & I'm no expert. Hopefully this info will help members with the proper codecs for my vids.

 

When I cap big brother's I use hypercam mostly & sdp & asfrecorder if the set up allows me. I stopped using camtasia cause the file sizes were always too big, could never figure out the process, over my head lol, plus it cost too much to buy in my opinion.

A reader says:

You mentioned that some users were having trouble with the videos on your site. There is a tool designed to determine what codec is needed for a video. http://www.headbands.com/gspot/ Hope this is useful to you or your users.

Scoop says:

I made the .wmv versions of each video. The codecs for these: Windows Video V8, Windows Audio 9. The upside of these is that you know the codecs, and they'll play in the Windows Media Player. The downside is that they are slightly larger, and slightly lower quality.

• Helena Bonham Carter and Olivia Williams both going topless in the recently released DVD of the UK movie "The Heart of Me".

Be sure to pay Graphic Response a visit at his website. www.graphic-barry.com.

Today Lana is joined by Dawn Dunlap and both are topless in several scenes from the 1985 flick "Barbarian Queen".

• Lana Clarkson (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25)

• Dawn Dunlap (1, 2, 3, 4)

Next up, a few .wmvs from The Ghost.

• Barbara Bach, taking a bath in scenes from "Force Ten From Navarone."

• Emily Procter, the "CSI Miami" star going topless in the movie "Breast Men".

• Erika Eleniak, jumping out of a cake and baring her big'uns in "Under Siege"

• Julie Warner, tolpess in scenes from "Doc Hollywood"

• Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, topless in the off beat movie "January Man" (1989)

• Jessica Böhrs, the young German actress and singer in the techno-pop act Novaspace goes topless.

• Molly Schade, hot tub toplessness in her one and only IMDb credit.

• Some topless unknowns

  
  A little bonus...

• Michelle Trachtenberg...A bigger and better look at the former "Buffy" co-star's impressive cleavage on the poster for her new movie "Eurotrip".

WHERE DID MIKE TYSON'S MONEY GO?
Why The Economy Turned Around - Mike Tyson can't remember how he managed to blow $300 million, but his bankruptcy paperwork provides some clues. Some expenses include: five houses, one of which had 38 bathrooms...a $375,000 bill for gardening at one house alone...110 luxury cars...tens of millions in divorce settlements and legal fees...visits to his favorite jewelry shop at up to $1.8 million a pop...$180,000 for two white Bengal tigers...and over $1 million in gifts for hangers-on who have scattered and Mike can't recall who they were. In 2003, he spent just $85 on Christmas gifts.