Word: cimino
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Michael Cimino screwed up. Professional hubris. With his cast and crew, out in Kalispell, Mont., for six months of shooting, Cimino became the compulsive perfectionist. Every detail had to be just so. Every scene had to be BIG. Hey, he was a genius. He was making an epic Western. He was hot. He had an unlimited budget. But a painfully limited talent, $35 million worth of hubris. When the film opened in New York last November it received universally poor reviews. The New York Times called it "an unqualified disaster." The film's distributor, United Artists, withdrew it from...
...plot concerns the "Johnson County Wars." In the late 19th century, rich cattle barons hire an army of well-trained assassins to rid the Wyoming territory of poor immigrants who steal their cattle in order to survive. Cimino wanted to make a bold statement about the injustice of the American aristocracy, he wanted to show the corruption of the Frontier Spirit. Not a bad idea. And crawling through Heaven's Gate's quagmire of chaotic, irrelevant scenes, unexplained connections between events, unclear alliances between people, and awful dialogue, you can find traces of that original idea...
Heaven's Gate is not "an unqualified disaster." Cimino has discovered that cameras move, so, unlike The Deer Hunter, his new movie isn't almost entirely composed of long and medium shots with the camera staring. There are some exhilirating, sweeping pans of the vast homestead and interesting tracking through the streets of Casper, Wyo. In two parallel scenes--a waltz in Harvard Yard (it's actually Oxford) at the beginning of the film and a party at the Heaven's Gate Skating Arena in Wyoming--Cimino's camera moves with a lovely, fluid grace, catching...
...exquisite cinematography of Vilmos Zsigmond enhances Heaven's Gate's bright moments. Cimino's most striking images of the Old West, shots of gunmen riding across the plain or through smoky streets, their long dustcoats flapping in the wind, have a haunting glow to them, a strange old photograph quality...
...film's performances were hurt by the re-editing. Brad Dourif, for instance, seems to be an important character, though he has only about a dozen lines and lots of close-ups; he's always standing around, looking important, but never really doing anything. Throughout the entire film, Cimino cuts away from key scenes before they seem even half over. It's like a two-and-a-half-hour-long coming attraction. We get only fragments of performances from fine actors like Christopher Walken, Isabelle Huppert, John Hurt, and Sam Waterston. And then there's Kris Kristofferson as James Averill...