Word: emperors
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...Christmas season is a traditional time for parents to take their children to the movie theater for a little animated fun. This year Walt Disney has reissued its classic Cinderella, and Filmation is coming out with a sequel to Carlo Collodi's classic tale called Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night. Both represent an increasingly rare breed: animated movies made...
...have a long tradition of thrift comparable to the Puritan ethic, which for centuries conferred upon Europeans (and, subsequently, Americans) a sense of moral rectitude for every penny saved. A dedication to saving became ingrained in the Japanese psyche only in the late 19th century, when the government, under Emperor Meiji, began cajoling the people into saving to supply capital for industrial modernization and, later...
Still, it is imagistically, not intellectually, that The Last Emperor asserts what will probably be a lasting claim on memory. Bertolucci has restored to the Forbidden City all the life it once sustained: a detachment of troops clattering through the night to seize a baby from his crib and place him on the throne; the Emperor's English tutor (Peter O'Toole) flapping through the streets on his bicycle; an Emperor and his bride (the lovely, fragile Joan Chen) overwhelmed by their huge wedding chamber; the great courtyard filled with wailing eunuchs, dismissed by their ruler; a tennis court...
...imposing on his story Pu Yi's conscious collaboration with the Japanese -- a great black hole, morally and politically obscure, that threatens to swallow up the movie. Yet the director's eye remains preternaturally alert. He almost redeems the film's long middle passage with a scene showing the Emperor crooning Am I Blue? for his courtiers in exile. And the film's concluding sequence, so clear, so inevitable, should not be spoiled by discussion. Very simply, Bertolucci has found an elegance of design and execution that few of his contemporaries could even dream of. One can almost...
...Last Emperor, Bernardo Bertolucci roams through Beijing' s Forbidden City and creates a ravishing, brooding antiepic...