Word: metaphors
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Money, he has made his own kind of buddy movie. Two men are bound by love or hate; one must betray the other and thereby help certify his mission. In the Nikos Kazantzakis novel and Paul Schrader's script, Scorsese has found a story vibrant with melodrama and metaphor. This Jesus (Willem Dafoe) is not God born as man. He is a man who discovers -- or invents -- his own divinity. And he is both tormented and excited by the revelation. This Judas (Harvey Keitel) is a strong, loving activist. He wants to overthrow the Roman occupiers, while Jesus wants freedom...
...genre, Romero runs clever twists on mandatory horror-movie citations like the Psycho shower sequence (Mrs. Bates is a monkey) and The Old Dark House climax (Ella pulls the power switch). And at the end, Monkey Shines soars into that rarefied sci-fi air where melodrama meets metaphor. Romero, best known for Night of the Living Dead 20 years ago, has grown up here, grown past Hitchcock homages to fix on the war of mind and body that everyone ceaselessly wages. While he's at it, he has made the smartest dark fantasy since David Cronenberg's 1986 update...
...seemingly unimportant events to expose how the family's pieties about mankind have masked a cruel indifference to individual people. The field of potential suspects thereby doubles to include the noble clan. More important, what happened on a moonlit lawn, and why, becomes less a puzzle and more a metaphor for a social system on the brink of change. Throughout, Barnard's narrative never loses its tight focus on a domestic world as richly evoked as in anything by Galsworthy or Trollope...
...machinery, it was Jackson who held its heart. There was a mood of almost religious rapture in the Omni Tuesday night as the preacher restated the riffs and rhapsodies that had carried him to within sight of the mountaintop. His praise for the Massachusetts Governor and his crowning metaphor of "common ground" was all that Dukakis could have hoped. But in ceding the spotlight, Dukakis became almost a spectator at his own coronation -- an image that he underlined when he said that watching his own nomination on television was a "little bit like a play...
...Norte is not just a parable for immigrant visions crushed by reality. It is a caustic metaphor for Hispanic-American filmmakers lusting to conquer Hollywood. Years of slammed doors have tempered hope with skepticism, even when one smash movie has opened doors a crack. La Bamba, a low-budget bio-pic of Chicano Rock 'n' Roller Ritchie Valens, was last summer's surprise hit, earning $55 million at the North American box office. Maybe Hispanic film artists would prefer to believe in La Bamba's rags-to-riches story. But they know how even that film ends: with a fatal...