Dracula

I'm currently reading Bram Stoker's Dracula. While I suppose it's not a good idea to watch the film before reading the book, I did watch Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 take on the Dracula story yesterday night. The film was far more blatant in its sexuality than the book, but I still thought that Anthony Hopkin's turn as Dr. Abraham Van Helsing was well-done. Equally brilliant was Gary Oldman as the count himself ("I understand you to be a man of good . . . taste".) I laughed out loud at the dialogue between Dr. Seward and Dr. Van Helsing:
Doctor Jack Seward: "You want to autopsy Lucy?"
Van Helsing: "No no no, not exactly. I just want to cut off her head and take out her heart. "
Perhaps some will think of me as no better than Vlad the Impaler, but Anthony Hopkins delivered that line perfectly.

The book is still far better and I don't recommend the movie.

Why is Keanu Reeves the same befuddled character in every movie?
You waan fi know Keanu's best line? "I have offended you with my ignorance. I am sorry."

Even though I haven't finished the book yet, I did come across an interesting quote which relates to the limits of empirical science and, yes, also (unintentionally?) the danger of rejecting that same science. Dr. Van Helsing (a Dutchman!) is confronting Dr. Seward's inability to account for the strange blood loss of Lucy Westenra:

"`You are a clever man, friend John; you reason well, and your wit is bold; but you are too prejudiced. You do not let your eyes see nor your ears hear, and that which is outside your daily life is not of account to you. Do you not think that there are things old and new which must not be contemplate by men's eyes, because they know - or think they know - some things which other men have told them. Ah, it is the fault of our science that it want to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain. But yet we see around us every day the growth of new beliefs, which think themselves new; and which yet but the old, which pretend to be young - like the fine ladies at the opera. I suppose you do not believe in corporeal transference. No? Nor in materialisation. No? Nor in the reading of thought. No? Nor in hypnotism -'

`Yes,' I said. `Charcot (the teacher of Freud) has proved that pretty well.' He smiled as he went on: `Then you are satisfied as to it. Yes? And of course then you understand how it act, and can follow the mind of the great Charcot- alas that he is no more! - into the very soul of the patient that he influence. No? Then, friend John, am I to take it that you simply accept fact, and are satisfied to let from premise to conclusion be blank? No? Then tell me - for I am student of the brain - how you accept the hypnotism and reject the thought-reading. Let me tell you, my friend, that there are things done today in electrical science which would have been deemed unholy by the very men who discovered electricity - who would themselves not so long before been burned as wizards. There are mysteries in life. Why was it that Methuselah lived nine hundred years, and "Old Parr" (Thomas Parr, said to have lived between 1483 and 1635) one hundred and sixty-nine and yet that poor Lucy, with four men's blood in her poor veins (from transfusions), could not live even one day! For, had she live one more day, we cold have save her. Do you know all the mystery of life and death? Do you know the altogether of comparative anatomy, and can say wherefore the qualities of brutes are in some men, and not in others? Can you tell me why, when other spiders dies small and soon, that one great spider lived for centuries in the tower of the old Spanish church and grew and grew, till, on descending, he could drink the oil of all the church lamps? Can you tell me why in the Pampas, ay and elsewhere, there are bats that come at night and open the veins of cattle and horses and suck dry their veins; how in some islands of the Western seas there are bats which hang on the trees all day, that those who have seen have describe as like giant nuts or pods, and that when the sailors sleep on deck, because that it is hot, flit down on them, and then - and then in the morning are found dead men, white as even Miss Lucy was?'"

Oh, and a word of advice. If you are going to read Bram Stroker's Dracula, and you're a sensitive fellow like me, you might want to read the book while you're wide awake. I had a fairly strange dream after falling asleep reading Dracula. I'd elaborate, but I don't really remember the dream's plot (if dreams can have plots), I just remember seeing the count and he's not the nicest guy.