Word: lantern
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...than they; she breaks and loses things. In a cynical reading of the tale, she might be a political functionary in the vast Chinese bureaucracy, fighting small battles to achieve obscure goals. That also seems the case with Zhang, director of the classics Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern, who has been drifting artistically since he and his leading lady, Gong Li, split five years ago. To Western eyes, this meandering parable registers as a perplexity and a disappointment...
DIED. GIL KANE, 73, self-taught comic-book artist whose half-century career included reviving Green Lantern in the late 1950s and the Atom soon after, and reinterpreting other great superheroes, from Spider-Man and the Hulk to Captain America and Conan the Barbarian; of cancer; in Miami...
...case, the East-meets-West dynamic that emerges is forced. Anna's character, though played well by a strong and elegant Jodie Foster, is flat. She enters the film a fearless Amazon who shows so little fear that a scene in which she picks up a lantern and scurries to investigate strange howling noises in the dark of the night causes one to laugh at the incongruity of the situation. Her characteristics are anachronistic; the film blunders and attributes to Anna the characteristics of a steely Scully-like character instead of a confused widow desperately trying remain brave...
...easy into that dark night. The director wants to turn this fairy tale into a full-blooded ghost story--and a total Tim Burton experience. So for this end-of-the-century parable (it's set in 1799), he imports the bats from Batman, the jack-o'-lantern from Nightmare Before Christmas and, as Ichabod Crane, Johnny Depp from Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wood. Instead of the bright Halloween hues of the Disney version, Burton gives his film a swankly, dankly desaturated color scheme. And just to make sure he doesn't go soft, he hires Andrew Kevin Walker, author...
...From this movement emerged the visually stunning Yellow Earth, Red Sorghum, and Raise the Red Lantern. Zhang Yuan's films embody a directional shift in Chinese film. Instead of turning backward in time to locate and problematize the Chinese experience, Zhang turns inward. His films capture modern psychological tales rather than distanced histories. However, the Fifth Generations' affinity for setting their films in the pre-Revolutionary past was more than stylistic choice-it was practical necessity. State monopoly funding of films and a wary censorship board forced any critique of the regime to be shrouded in allegory. Zhang bypassed...