Word: surrealness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...times are surreal enough now; we can appreciate Fellini as a prophet and documentarian of every cultural excess of the late 20th century. There's no question that Fellini was in part satirizing his milieu. But because he was incapable of a stillborn frame of film, his pictures celebrate what they criticize; they amount to a cautionary blueprint for survival in the atomic age. If you've been very lucky or very naughty, then life for you is like a Fellini movie...
...Burton's movies are continually faulted for being visual feasts without plots. More like cartoons than live-action films, they are heavy on surreal style and light on story development. Luckily, his leads are generally more cartoonish than real anyway: Pee Wee Herman, Beetlejuice and Batman. But as "Batman Returns" hinted, even these films are too limiting for Burton. With "The Nightmare Before Christmas," Burton may have found the ideal vehicle for his sensibilities: an actual animated feature totally free from the constraints of actors...
...Americans have ventured into Somalia in a sort of surreal confusion, first impersonating Mother Teresa and now John Wayne. It would help to clarify that self-image, for to do so would clarify the mission, and then to recast the rhetoric of the enterprise...
There seem to be a few focuses to this surreal piece of cinema: the concept of performance, the phenomenon of mass gatherings and the role of the past in the evils of today...
...flowing lava, deserts and snow drifts suggest a wasteland, presumably Siberia, that, accompanied by haunting music, add to the sense of the impending doom of the love affair. The bizarre sequences involving a flying man form a stark contrast to the jovial musical scenes and make the film a surreal montage rather than a generic documentary...