Word: gated
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...supposed to be a disaster movie. It was supposed to be a western. But when the New York critics saw Michael Cimino's $36 million Heaven's Gate at its first screening last Tuesday, they deemed it "an unqualified disaster." Executives at United Artists, who had bankrolled Cimino's eulogy to the Old West but never, until that moment, seen it in its final form, were scurrying to anxious meetings, acting out the rearranging-of-the-deck-chairs scene from The Titanic. Cimino must have wished he were in Airport-any airport. After all, his previous film...
Even before Cimino's spectacular immolation, the evidence on the screen portended commercial disaster. Heaven's Gate is a serious western, a genre that has not spawned a popular hit in more than a decade. The film's stars-Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken and French Actress Isabelle Huppert-have never provoked stampedes to the box office, and they light no sparks here. The film moves at a glacial pace toward degradation and death: when the cavalry rides to the rescue, it saves the bad guys. The movie's narrative is as incoherent, its plot points...
...fiddle music in a cow-town grange hall. In Cimino's Wyoming, it is never high noon; everything happens in misty morning or dusty dusk, so the oblique, ruminative sunlight can memorialize every moment. Some viewers with educated eyes found scenes of beauty in Heaven 's Gate. Others wished they'd brought their Murine...
...ceremony is one thing," he says, "but the real life is more." He looks at the wedding party happily posing just inside the gate. The soldiers and the peddler have just reached the pyramid. "What happens in there has nothing to do with what happens outside," he concludes...
Several peddlers of cold drinks and ice cream have set up shop, evidently without licenses, outside the huge gate. Their goods are sold from boxes tied to pedicabs and hand carts. Two uniformed soldiers walk slowly from the pyramid entrance across the plaza to the gate; as they approach, the peddlers pack their goods frantically and begin to run--actually run--down the wall outside, to another corner perhaps, to sell goods out of sight of the soldiers. One is not fast enough, or doesn't notice the soldiers until it is too late for him. He is taken...