Word: antonioni
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...early class was devoted to a parable about the life of Lei Feng, a young soldier who died in 1962 and is revered as a revolutionary hero. Another centered about the People's Daily attack on Italian Filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni, whose documentary film on China has been under attack for its portrayal of some of the cruder aspects of Chinese life. There is so little interest in another class, devoted to the Communist party line on Chinese affairs, that only three or four students regularly attend it. When students presented a petition-signed not only by Westerners, but also...
...could almost be filed and used over and over, simply rotating the names of who or what is being put down. To quote from the master, Time wrote that Zabriskie Point was the lowest elevation in the U.S., and that the film Zabriskie Point occupied a similar location in Antonioni's career; or that in the gangland 1920s, pineapple was a euphemism for bomb, which applies to the pineapple epic The Hawaiians. I can recall one of mine (which I'm not at all proud of): I wrote that The April Fools was surely meant to be seen on April...
Marco Ferreri's "The Grande Bouffe" trips over prize-winning foreign films of the sixties, tickles us with memories of Fellini and Resnais and Bunuel, of Antonioni and claustrophobic chamber works by Bergman. But the movie's greatest debt is not to the preceding era's prestigious portraits of European decadence but to the laws of the universe--the ways of the world--as the porno movie sees them. Ferreri's is a porn epic in the grand manner, a mordant, chilling, hilarious dirty movie that, for sheer audacious lubricity, out-tangoes "Last Tango in Paris" and almost gives...
...flicks and, in desperate moments, mouth-to-mouth sessions with a girl reporter. Craig also broods about his past (he has been an s.o.b. to a lot of little people) and agonizes over his future. His soul-searching is sup ported by a pulpy cast that includes his own Antonioni-bred daughter, his Irish agent, an embittered ex-screenwriter, an aging movie mogul, several leering French waiters and - since this is Cannes - a falling-down-drunk film critic...
Since Kael is so loyal a defender of youth vis-a-vis "the riot movie fad" it seems treacherous to fault her on the subject. Nevertheless, while she treats upper-class enervation as a given, when Antonioni's activist youths (Zabriskie Point) are zombies it means he is alienated. The assumption blights her reasoning. Especially since she insists the America is a better place to live than Antonioni makes it out to be - which puts her on the side of straight liberal anti-radical youth...