Word: moons
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
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...
...looks play so many variations on the upper-class twit. Last year, besides his suavely manic turn in Four Weddings, he was seen as the prim prelate in the Australian soft-core Sirens and as an hors d'oeuvre to a sexually voracious woman in Roman Polanski's Bitter Moon. Now three more Grant films are in the U.S. malls: he is the lead in Nine Months and An Awfully Big Adventure and a supporting player in The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill but Came Down a Mountain...