Word: auteurs
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European filmmakers often view Hollywood as an artistic Alcatraz where slaves to convention are blinkered from the ferment of the outside world. In the '60s, as a prodigy auteur with the smartest, most restless camera style in the business, Bertolucci was a charter member of the first generation of directors who were bred to break the rules of narrative film. Before the Revolution (1964) and The Conformist (1970) swooned with infatuation for radical politics and complex storytelling. With Last Tango in Paris (1972), Bertolucci looked to have conquered Hollywood on his own terms. Its desperate, soft-core...
...performers are tops, from Jack Nicholson as the sour, imposing anchorman who strides through a newsroom decimated by layoffs muttering, "and all because they couldn't program Wednesday nights," to the three principals. Actor-Auteur Albert Brooks (who cast Jim Brooks -- no relation -- in his own second film, Modern Romance) is the all-time appealing schlemiel, notably in a laugh-nightmare when he anchors the network news and sweats his career down the tubes. (Says one appalled technician: "This is more than Nixon ever sweated.") Hurt is neat too, never standing safely outside his character, always allowing Tom to find...
...transformed into a dusty plain in primeval India -- resonates with such ritual images, haunting metaphors, aphoristic dialogue and spiritual searching. The event, viewable in a marathon day or in three installments, is The Mahabharata, the most ambitious production yet by Peter Brook, 62, the visionary elder statesman among stage auteur directors. A French version originated in Avignon in 1985, then played to sold-out houses in Paris in 1986. The English-language premiere transfers this week from the Los Angeles Festival, where it played in a cavernous studio, to a twelve-week run in a more intimate theater...
...industry where faceless collaborations are the rule, Cosby is an auteur involved in nearly every aspect of his series, from editing scripts to selecting theme music. The Huxtable family is modeled closely on Cosby's own, and many of the episodes are drawn from ideas he suggests. While filming his movie, for example, Cosby heard Ray Charles' recording of It's Not Easy Being Green. He asked the show's writers to build an episode around the song. Result: in one of this fall's segments, a sulking Rudy goes into her room for a wordless sequence set to Charles...
...establishing motives and motifs, Dante goes productively crazy. Is Tuck to be stuck in a rabbit? Then there will be hares everywhere: mechanical bunnies in Tuck's apartment; a project leader named Ozzie, for Oswald the Rabbit; a cameo turn by Chuck Jones, the cartoon auteur who developed Bugs Bunny. Is the plot conflict as pure as an archetypal Western shoot-out? Then one bad guy, the Cowboy (Robert Picardo), will twirl his hair dryer like a six-shooter while he sings I'm an Old Cowhand; and another, the thug-chauffeur Igoe (Vernon Wells), will shoot a man through...