Word: films
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...himself at 3 a.m. on Sunset Boulevard. American movies have lost the love of grandeur, of finding the heroic scale of historical figures. Chen Kaige to the rescue! China's longest-reigning angry young filmmaker has an eye for rapturous compositions on a huge and telling tapestry. His new film mixes DeMille and Dostoyevsky: the cast-of-thousands splendor of a biblical epic and the gnarled psychology of Chen's own Farewell My Concubine. And all in less time than a Stephen King prison drama...
...film may confuse those unfamiliar with Chinese history, but never mind. Just pay heed to the glorious moviemaking. There is one scene that haunts the heart: an ethereally beautiful blind girl (Xun Zhou) kills herself after the assassin has eradicated the rest of her family. Few directors can create such indelible imagery; Chen does it in nearly every frame...
...that director (and final-draft writer) James Mangold has botched the job. It's just that he made something rather conventional out of a memoir that was spare, terse and elliptically funny. And naturally, the film's attitude toward its patients is the only acceptable one these days: that they may be saner than their keepers--especially since this is the '60s, when the outside world is so crazy...
...austerity of Carter's prison life does not offer many opportunities for electrifying moviemaking, but The Hurricane is nevertheless a thoughtful and even inspiring film. That's not just because of the way it celebrates Carter's self-discipline, but because the director, Norman Jewison, enforces the contrast between his stoicism and the efforts of the unlikely team of '60s activists that eventually came to his rescue...
...billion Estimated 1999 U.S. gross for adult-film industry, same as last year...