Word: hollywoodized
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...Wong Kar Wai, a film is not one big thing - not the Hollywood notion of movies as snowballing sagas of a world in jeopardy and the heroes who save it - but many little things, an accretion of textured images and vagrant impulses. He's a master miniaturist, a creator of wistful anecdotes featuring, over and over, the same sort of people: fatalistic men and moody women who, for a poignant, painful, precious few moments, connect. He cocoons these beautiful losers in his distinct visual-emotional style. The mix of cigarette smoke and step-printed slow motion, furtive glances and liquored...
...surprise, then, that his first U.S. feature should present two mid-length stories framed by a third. And in tribute to Hollywood cinema, My Blueberry Nights is not confined to a neighborhood (as Chungking Express and Fallen Angels were), or a single hotel (as in In the Mood for Love and 2046). This is a road movie, which begins in Venice, Cal., then flashes back to and ends in New York City, with long detours to Memphis and Nevada. It's an itinerary any foreign filmmaker fascinated with with America would choose to illustrate the country's scope and variety...
...Still, even the luxury section is at double capacity. In fact, the American says, he is envious of the prisons depicted in the Hollywood movies he watches there. Just inside the second gate, where many of the shootings allegedly occur, inmates mill about freely in the hallways, far from their cells, joking around and chatting on cell phones, which are supposedly not permitted...
...Characterizing the situation in Zimbabwe as political oppression would be putting it mildly. The stories being told by many Zimbabweans now living in South Africa seem to be straight out of a Hollywood horror movie. When they return home to Zimbabwe, they find that their family members are afraid to speak out for fear of landing in jail. If Zimbabwe had the assets that world powers have, perhaps the people of that beautiful country would find salvation. I just hope that my own country's policy of quiet diplomacy turns noisier. Nicole Geater, cape town...
...ultimately reject their messages, old-school fairy tales are part of our cultural vocabulary. There's something a little sad about kids growing up in a culture where their fairy tales come pre-satirized, the skepticism, critique and revision having been done for them by the mama birds of Hollywood. Isn't irony supposed to derive from having something to rebel against? Isn't there a value in learning, for yourself, that life doesn't play out as simply as it does in fairy tales? Is there room for an original, nonparodic fairy story that's earnest without being cloying...