Word: brynners
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That's especially true since he is played by the marvelous Chow Yun-Fat, who interprets the role as if the cranky volatility of Yul Brynner and Rex Harrison never existed. He has all his hair, doesn't comically fracture his English and, though he occasionally loses his temper, never loses his quiet wit. There is about him a sort of watchful wariness, a thoughtful, insinuating manliness that avoids macho strutting in favor of bemused calculation. He is, in short, an absolute monarch for our postfeminist time. Cutting through the epic gesturings of Andy Tennant's direction, he provides reason...
Chow's next role is as the King of Siam, opposite Jodie Foster as Anna, in a new version of the story Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II musicalized in 1951 and filmed with Deborah Kerr and Yul Brynner five years later. So who needs another King and I movie? Kids, apparently. So here is an animated feature that expands and dumbs down the story. There's some kung fu, a Jafar-style villain with satanic powers, a cartoon menagerie (funny monkey, majestic leopard, etc.), and lame comedy with a crudely drawn, Buddha-shaped fall guy. It's all needless...
...successful will he be? A look at the ur-Hollywood pic, Cecil B. DeMille's "Ten Commandments", is straight from the Democrats' playbook. A young, strong, and less-nutty Chuck Heston leads his people from the cruel bondage of the Pharaoh Ramses (Yul Brynner). Of course there's the must-see Red Sea parting, and for fantasy time, plagues of frogs, boils and locusts that the Big Creep might enjoy visiting on the special prosecutor...
Based on a true-life fable that was the source for Fox's 1956 film with Ingrid Bergman and Yul Brynner, the new Anastasia leaps from factoid to fantasy and turns pre-Leninist Russia into a fairy-tale realm. "We lived in an enchanted world," says the Czar's mother Marie (voiced by Angela Lansbury) of a land that festered with hot heads and empty bellies. The film then pins the whole Revolution on the monk Rasputin (Christopher Lloyd). Furious at being ejected from the Czar's court, he vows revenge, unleashes the forces of revolt, dies and returns, madder...
...slip further, into the bright, white bald-headed life of THX-1138 (1970), George Lucas' art-house sci-fi first feature, expanded from a student film he did at USC. Robert Duvall stars with Donald Pleasance (an easy bit of casting); look for cameos by Yul Brynner and Chiang Kai-Shek. Imagine a world of naked sadism, prescription drugs and robot policemen ? where the only erotic words are "no one is watching," and everyone really is. Imagine a bleak, bleached future in which "sexual perversion" (in this case, just regular sex) was a punishable crime...