Word: auteuring
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Whispers in doorways. Long, longing looks. Desire at war with propriety. This enthralling, enigmatic, romantic drama from Asia's most influential auteur (Chungking Express) is an essay in appetite and inhibition. In 1962 Hong Kong, two neighbors (Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-wai) learn that their spouses are having an affair with each other. Slowly they are drawn into their own web of resentment, guilt and lust. Do the cuckolds have their own affair? That is for the viewer to judge. What's beyond dispute is the artful evocation of a world of glamour and deceit, humidity and heartbreak...
There are a few jokes in this little scene in Kitano's first American film as actor-auteur. One is that the old man is himself Japanese-American, baffled by the demeanor of a compatriot from the far side of the Pacific. Another is that the line echoes the title of a Beat Takeshi TV show, You Japanese Are Strange. But the third is on Kitano's loyal worldwide audience. Because his pictures?passion action movies, lurid and pensive?are pretty darned scrutable...
...known in nearly as many countries as the rubberized Hollywood star. Takeshi pages pock the Worldwide Web, in Spanish, French, English, Dutch, German, Italian, Polish. His international admirers, seeing him churn out nine films in 11 years as actor-auteur?and perhaps catching him as an actor in art films (Nagisa Oshima's Gohatto), nihilist teen epics (Kinji Fukasaku's Battle Royale) and a Hollywood thriller (the Keanu Reeves Johnny Mnemonic)?may not know that films are a kind of hobby for Kitano. How could he have time to do anything else? But of course he does...
Lurking in every art form was technology that might change everything. Napster and similar inventions terrified the music industry with death by a thousand clicks. Video software allowed anyone to be an auteur. A novel titled Riding the Bullet, by a plucky little outsider named Stephen King, showed that the e-book could democratize publishing. Or at least win a bigger cut for filthy-rich authors. New millennium art may not know where it's going yet, but wherever that may be, it'll charge for the trip. --James Poniewozik...
...Europe, and has remained a cult favorite for the last half-century. The reason is simple: Lewis pulled out all the stops, letting his visuals convey a feeling of uninhibited youth - what critic Myron Meisel labeled "the dizziness of irresponsibility." "Gun Crazy" also found Lewis collaborating with another misunderstood auteur - blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo wrote the script, submitting it under the name of Millard Kaufman, a fellow screenwriter who agreed to front for Trumbo...