Word: surrealness
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...characters are shallow, everything else reeks of over-kill. The sex scenes are unnecessarily explicit, and Schrader revels in giving us the gamut on perversion from bestiality and incest to kink and sado-masochism. Schrader also isn't much interested in generating suspense. When Irena suddenly wanders through a surreal Cajun bayou, the audience is too confused to be worried. Occasionally Schrader resorts to the cheap device of startling the viewer--something appears suddenly or moves when it shouldn't. All in all, Cat People is as imaginative as coitus interruptus--and about as subtle...
...more than two miles thick, are towering mountains, volcanoes, and glaciers as big as Rhode Island that creep inexorably toward the sea at rates up to two miles a year. There are even curious, snow-free "dry valleys" where the winds have sculpted the rocks into a phantasmagoria of surreal shapes...
...skyline-you are advised that One from the Heart means to set reality and artifice into felicitous collision. On the Zoetrope sound stages, Production Designer Dean Tavoularis has created a show-stopping amalgam of razzle and dazzle, sending skyrockets speckling over what looks like a mile-long Strip of surreal glitter. Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro has lighted these sets in gloriously garish Technicolor-pulsating magentas and ambers that mirror the characters' moods even as they assert the environmental imperative. Coppola has staged his scenes in long, sensuous takes. A single shot may comprise several scenes, several planes of action...
...Andre's sheer determination to spread his gospel of the surreal eggs Wally on to respond. It's hard to know exactly what sets him off. Perhaps, he perceives in Andre's calm mellifluous tone a lack of confidence that gives him leeway to speak up loudly and clearly. And that's just how Wally responds, with a diatribe of his own, against the unnecessarily highbrow. The world for him is real, with cockroaches, and stale coffee, and if the cockroaches stay out of his coffee, he'll be happy. He huffs and sputters, but he says what...
...THERE IS a surreal quality to the people Brinnin has assembled. Flitting in and out of each other's lives with a bewildering ease, alluding with cryptic statements to another part of their lives, outside the bounds of Brinnin's knowledge: These are not real people, but characters from another time. On the verge of recognition or oblivion, they appear briefly to impart a glimpse of their lives, haunted, driven, fleeting...