Word: hollywood
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Chan, the sweet-souled masochist of Hong Kong action comedies, made four Hollywood-based movies after Rush Hour 2, plus three starring roles in Hong Kong films, but they didn't do much business, and one, Around the World in 80 Days, cost $110 million to produce and took in far less than half that. After 53 years on this planet, 30 as the hardest working star on any continent, with virtually every bone in his body broken while performing his daredevil stunts, Chan may have worn out not his welcome so much as himself...
...Agatha Christie novel. Stories end; life goes on. "I can feel the weariness of certain mechanisms that are resorted to in conventional films," he told a journalist. "I think those mechanisms are false." The old formulas had become as stylized as kabuki, as stale as week-old breadsticks. Hollywood stuck to boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl, but Antonioni didn't see why he had to. How about, in L'Avventura, boy-loses-girl, boy-finds-another-girl-and- gives-up-searching-for-the-first-girl? (In fact, the film has not only a twist ending that...
...Antonioni might be an art-film director, but he was no fool. He knew that making films in English would help him reach a wider audience; hence Blowup, Zabriskie Point (1970) and The Passenger (1975). He spoke Hollywood's language without ever going Hollywood. Death Valley, the location for Zabriskie Point, was as close as he got to La-la Land...
...gentleman from Ferrara wouldn't consider it among his signal accomplishments, but with a couple of seconds in Blowup, he changed Hollywood history. The movie was produced by Carlo Ponti and was to be distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the stately old lion of American film studios. But the industry ratings board wouldn't give the picture a seal because, during a photo-shoot romp, the model Jane Birkin allowed the briefest display of pubic hair. Instead of trimming the scene to the board's specifications, MGM honored Antonioni's version of the film, invented a subsidiary, Premier Productions...
...with its one climactic sequence of nearly unrivaled technical virtuosity. He didn't fall out of critical or popular favor so much as he gracefully receded from view, like Thomas at the end of Blowup. By the late '70s the movie environment had changed, and not for the better. Hollywood was reluctant to finance the chancy projects of a double-domed European of Social Security age, when kids in L.A. could bring in hundreds of millions with their clever toy movies...