Word: moone
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...location in a handsome old villa in Wujiang City, 10 miles from Suzhou in eastern China, Chen Kaige is shooting Temptress Moon. The film crew, a tight team of 20 or so artisans, is being entertained by the Chinese actress Gong Li and Hong Kong heartthrob Leslie Cheung, both of whom starred in Chen's 1993 hit, Farewell My Concubine. Gong Li picks up a TV remote and pretends it's a telephone ("Wei? Wei?"--"Hello?"), then playfully runs it under a prop man's arm as if she were a beautician with an electric shaver...
Because Chen's Temptress Moon, like Zhang's Triad, is set in Shanghai before the 1949 revolution, both directors can expect their new films to be seen in China. But what can these profligately gifted filmmakers do next? Perhaps emigrate to America, where they can join John Woo and Ang Lee in showing Hollywood how to blend film technique with personal fire. But to do so would be to renounce the people, problems and landscape they have devoted their careers to putting eloquently on film. Maybe they should move down to Hong Kong in 1997, and hope for the best...
After witnessing the successful test of the first atomic bomb--a primordial burst of energy on the predawn New Mexico desert, a man-made fire bright enough to flicker in reflection off the moon--Brigadier General Thomas F. Farrell sought out his immediate superior, Major General Leslie R. Groves. Groves was commander of the top-secret Manhattan Project, which had been commissioned and funded--with $2 billion--to try to build such a bomb. "When Farrell came up to me," Groves remembered, "his first words were, 'The war is over.' My reply was, 'Yes, after we drop two bombs...
...directed to do: "100 million hearts beating as one," "100 million people as one bullet," and "100 million advancing like a ball of fire." No one expected the last to be a prophecy. For more terrifying wonders would come out of the heavens: the sun turned to darkness, the moon to blood...
Miraculously, what could have tipped over into camp or condescension doesn't, thanks to director Mark Lamos and his energetic cast's affection for the piece's sweetly earnest belief in the promise of America. The tone is whimsically wacky: a cat sings coloratura on Rollerblades; a corrugated moon turns a heart-stopping shade of blue. The whole enterprise, done in kiddie-book colors, is so infectious and wholesome that you begin to think, Move over, Oklahoma...