Word: lantern
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...then, Peck dismantles this pretty image, exposing the unpretty reality it describes and dignifies: "When his body folded over at the waist...and his face smacked the tub's bottom, I didn't think it was like a rice-paper lantern being closed. I thought it was like the body of a six foot-two-inch man who weighed eighty pounds and who'd had all the shit and blood and water and air sucked out of him folding over in death...
Coppola composes movies as Wagner composed operas, setting primal conflicts to soaring emotional lines. The force of his will is as imposing as the range of his art. He goes for majesty over subtlety and, often as not, finds what he's looking for. Magic-lantern images are everywhere: in the blood pouring from an altar crucifix; in the Castle Dracula chauffeur garbed as Darth Vader; in the endless supertrain of the count's cape; in the placental gel and rat's-nest cocoons that encase the vampire. But more: in the wonderfully spectral mood that does justice...
...only stirring aspect of this slack, predictable movie is the fact that it won this year's foreign-film Oscar. There is something wrong with a system that rewards a movie as negligible as this with anything more than indifference -- especially in a year when Raise the Red Lantern was a nominee and Europa, Europa did not achieve even that status...
...just come to be the fourth concubine of the master (Ma Jingwu). The first mistress is old and irrelevant; the second is ingratiating, lethal, with "a Buddha's face and a scorpion's heart"; the third a saucily imperious opera singer. Each day the chamberlain will raise the red lantern in front of one of their houses, and that woman will be blessed with the master's favors. His strategy, supported by millenniums of male domination, is divide and conquer. So the caged princesses must play power games, with their rivals as opponents and their servants as pawns. Subtly, sullenly...
...emotional anchor for all Zhang's films is Gong Li -- her face a map of cool insurrection, her figure proud and voluptuously Western. But Red Lantern offers other, more exalted orders of ogling. As it plays out its melodrama, it | radiates a ravishing color scheme; it delights in the symmetrical framing of gorgeous objects, human and architectural. For the Westerner, it offers a tour of exotic lands and customs: China in its last imperial gasp. How very sumptuous, you will say of the visual style -- though Red Lantern was made for an impossibly thrifty $1 million...