Word: dunes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...CHAPTERHOUSE: DUNE, Herbert...
...uncontested box-office champ. Beverly Hills Cop, a defiantly ordinary action picture that Murphy ignites with his urchin charm, is by far the runaway hit of this holiday season. In its first 23 days Cop earned $64.5 million--more than the combined take of its three closest competitors (Dune, City Heat, and 2010). Trumpets a jubilant Frank Mancuso, who runs Paramount Pictures, the studio releasing Cop: "The picture is so dominant that it's hard to determine who's No. 2." In December, when 17 new releases were vying for attention, one of every three box-office dollars came from...
...with all movies, the gamble was partly economic, but not primarily so. In fact, at a time when the merely average movie, nowhere near as long (2 hr. 43 min.), complex or striking to look at, costs about $11 million, and in a year when competing pictures like Dune and The Cotton Club ran up tabs in the $50 million range, Passage, at around $16 million, seems like a bargain. Its budget is a tribute to an ascetic director's waste-not-want-not ability to visualize precisely what he wants on paper, then put it on film efficiently...
...host of Dune bugs might ask. Who decreed that fantasy films must be as simple and simple-minded as Porky's Goes to Arrakis? Nobody did; and one can admire the world Herbert and Lynch have created even as one feels like an illegal alien visiting it. At the very least, Dune provides a bizarre bestiary of characters. One such, the Navigator, is a giant walrus-like creature that rules the universe while floating inside a liquid cage. The Harkonnens are the comic villains of the piece. These red-haired nasties with a taste for drinking human blood...
...delivers his speeches as incantations from an old, old testament. The actors seem hypnotized by the spell Lynch has woven around them-especially the lustrous Francesca Annis, as Paul's mother, who whispers her lines with the urgency of erotic revelation. In those moments when Annis is onscreen, Dune finds the emotional center that has eluded it in its parade of rococo decor and austere special effects. She reminds us of what movies can achieve when they have a heart as well as a mind...