Word: gated
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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HEAVEN'S GATE Directed and Written by Michael Cimino...
Perhaps critics owed Michael Cimino that much when, last November, they sat in a Manhattan theater for the first screening of Heaven's Gate. The critics had praised Cimino's pictorial and political extravagances in The Deer Hunter; here he was describing another romantic triangle tested in time of war. It had taken him two years and $36 million to make his 3-hr. 40-min. western, so they'd better eat all of it. They didn't: the critics were outraged by the expenditure of all that time, talent, money and solemnity on a story...
Justice was swift in the Old West; vengeance is mined in the New Hollywood. United Artists, which had rashly built the film's publicity campaign on the hope of rave reviews, withdrew Heaven's Gate in the wake of devastating pans. And the rash spread. Within days, all Hollywood was being held responsible for one director's profligacy, one studio's negligence. Every big-budget movie was the target of japery: Robert Evans' Popeye became "Evans' Gate," Warren Beatty's forthcoming Reds was "Warren's Gate...
...exquisite cinematography of Vilmos Zsigmond enhances Heaven's Gate's bright moments. Cimino's most striking images of the Old West, shots of gunmen riding across the plain or through smoky streets, their long dustcoats flapping in the wind, have a haunting glow to them, a strange old photograph quality...
...Sack Cheri lobby. Posters of the movies alone presage man burning in eternal hell. Caveman, with a cartoon Barbara Bach performing oral sex on a dinosaur's tail; Superman II (just when you thought it was safe to go back in the air...?); Heaven's Gate (now weakly billed as "the most controversial film of the year!"--if I threw up and then demanded a paying audience that would be controversial...