Word: films
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Last Tango and overwhelmed 1900. Though the director's true subject has always been erotic passion, he has usually tried to obscure that fact by littering his movies with Marxist and Freudian bromides. There is no such posturing in Luna. Bertolucci deals directly with his real obsessions; his film is a lucid and uninhibited journey to the outer limits of human behavior...
...course of a summer singing tour through Italy, the wealthy mother and the spoiled boy carry on a tortured relationship that might well shock the cast of La Dolce Vita. Obscene screaming matches and violent brawls quickly give way to grueling sequences featuring heroin injection and masturbatory sex. The film's dramatic structure is built around the secrets the characters keep from each other: there is more than one Oedipal affair in Luna...
Luna's images are so hypnotic, erotic and beautifully shot (by Vittorio Storaro) that we enter the movie's unpleasant milieu easily and remain captivated throughout. While the film is full of golden Parma landscapes, the dominant visual fixture is the moon: it is the film's metaphor for characters whose mysterious dark sides only gradually reveal themselves. In Bertolucci's brilliant climax, set at an open-air opera rehearsal, his artis tic conceits all converge. As the camera constantly shifts its point of view, we see that Luna 's events form a different drama...
...faith: that Wells did not merely imagine the Time Machine but actually built it in his basement; that since it operates in the fourth dimension it can be in two different times and places simultaneously so both hero and villain can use it; and, most important, that a film involving history's most notorious sex criminal can turn out to be an entertainment of considerable wit, charm and, of all things, romantic sweetness...
...actually becoming a school of one. Following hints in his own work and examples out of Beckett, Borges and Nabokov, he evolved assumptions that increasingly governed his fiction. Among them: the number of stories to tell is finite and dwindling; print has been rendered passe by film and electronics; realism is an irrational goal for the writer (What is real? Whose reality is it?); art rehashes art. Barth's response was to exalt artifice and make telling the subject of the tale. Giles Goat-Boy (1966) was less a novel than a treatise on the archetypes of heroism; some...