Word: cimino
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...name means money out of the bank. His last film, Year of the Dragon, got mixed reviews and was a box-office flop; the one before, Heaven's Gate, wrote the book--and was the subject of one--on celluloid disasters. But that has not stopped Director Michael Cimino from undertaking yet another big-budget epic: The Sicilian, based on Mario Puzo's best-selling novel. Now being filmed in Italy, the movie centers on the short, bloody career of Italian Gangster Salvatore Giuliano, a real-life Robin Hood of the late '40s who dreamed of turning Sicily into...
Rourke, who after the ignominy of Michael Cimino's 1985 The Year of the Dragon has now played the two most offensive male leads in recent memory (get this man a new agent), is so empty that he cannot wipe off the stupid smile he has been holding since Diner. He is, in sum, no more than another accessory to a life style that is all glitz and no substance, all money and no meaning--he is, of course, an arbitrageur who lives in an apartment packed with high-tech goodies. We get a hint of his life when Basinger...
...could capture Catcher in the Rye on film, though one supposes that Frances Coppola or a Michael Cimino could spend a couple dozen million trying. Of course either would give us lot of grass--acres and acres of golden grass--with a Wagnerian soundtrack, but it would still feel so ... phony...
...While Cimino has introduced a potentially interesting subject--the existence of a Chinese Mafia organized along the lines of ancient clan triads--he complicates The Year of the Dragon by inserting superfluous storylines that detract from the film's central theme. In addition to being superfluous, most of these supplementary plotlines are poorly written and even more poorly acted. In one particularly forgetable scene between White and his R.N. wife, she chews him out for forgetting to come home early and make love during her ovulation period; according to her, he's "missed target practice...
While some have charged that the film portrays Chinese-Americans unfavorably, The Year of the Dragon is no more discriminatory to Chinese-Americans than was The Godfather to Italian-Americans. Although Cimino occasionally goes overboard with the Tai group's criminal image--dressing them all in white suits with black ties is a bit excessive--he scrupulously places certain Chinese-American characters in positions of trust and importance--a chief example is White's successful TV anchorwoman-girlfriend, for example...