Word: hollywood
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...spoken admiringly of Shakespeare's business sense, and he has it too; he also possesses Olivier's keen ambition, the entrepreneurial magnetism that attracts the brightest lights of Britain and Hollywood to his projects. What's lacking in this merchant of culture is Olivier's danger, the preening beauty and sweet delirium that makes an actor a star. Those are precisely the qualities that keep this admirable Hamlet--and Hamlet--from being a thrilling...
...from the 1995 Italian hit Il Postino, last year's foreign-language earnings amounted to less than 1% of the total U.S. box office. This is down from 4% to 5% in the 1960s, when foreign-language films were the intellectual rage du jour and an inspiration for smart Hollywood directors. Today, with an adventurous spirit and a full tank of gas, you might track down a small gem like Patrice Leconte's Ridicule, a period comedy with rapier wit, or Claude Chabrol's La Ceremonie, a sardonic thriller about the death of the bourgeoisie with fearless star turns...
...answers let's flash back, like some labyrinthine Alain Resnais epic, to the glory days of foreign-language films--the '50s and '60s. Back then Hollywood was Doris Day and Jerry Lewis on the low side, Tennessee Williams and biblical spectacles on high. Meanwhile, artists in other countries were leading film to a robust maturity: Ingmar Bergman in Sweden, Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard in France, Akira Kurosawa in Japan, Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni in Italy, Luis Bunuel in Spain. As each director found a constituency, U.S. distributors would pick up his earlier films, as well as other...
...What Hollywood couldn't ignore it would try to co-opt. The year was 1967, the films Bonnie and Clyde (whose script was originally offered to Godard) and The Graduate (with its jazzy ransacking of the European film lexicon), and soon American directors had the auteur status that had been the exclusive province of foreigners. Then U.S. films got gamier, porno went legit, and the raincoat brigade didn't have to take its sex in Swedish...
...working, but in the U.S. their work was shown sporadically at best. The last films Fellini and Satyajit Ray made never opened here; neither have the most recent films by Godard, Resnais, Antonioni and Kurosawa. The Netherlands' Paul Verhoeven (Spetters) joined a century-long exodus of European talent to Hollywood (where he made Robocop and Showgirls). Denmark's Lars von Trier (Breaking the Waves) stayed in Europe but made films in English. That leaves a new generation of world masters--Greece's Theo Angelopoulos, Taiwan's Hou Hsiao-hsien, Iran's Abbas Kiarostami--that is largely unknown to Americans...