Word: tales
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...story what they ask of a dream," observed Poet Randall Jarrell, "that it satisfy their wishes." For more than a century, Hans Christian Andersen has satisfied the wishes of the Western world's children. One hundred years after his death he remains the unsurpassed master of the fairy tale. Who has not smiled ruefully at the imperial victim of The Emperor's New Clothes, or identified with The Princess on the Pea? What youth remains ignorant of Andersen's articulate birds and magic elves? Yet, as Cambridge Professor Elias Bredsdorff brilliantly demonstrates, these creatures were the offhand...
...rare functional approach. With complete respect and evident love for the Mozart-Schikaneder score, Bergman added dazzling stage sets, high Renaissance costumes and editorial wit, and elicited a daring bawdiness from the text that warms the heart. The result is a brilliantly illustrated, sensuous and noble fairy-tale...
Bergman took up the challenge here, too. He has cooked up a few plot devices in an effort to give the tale some grit and human motivation, and comes dangerously close to melodrama. About halfway through the film we learn that Sarastro, High Priest of the Temple, was once the Queen of the Night's consort, is actually Pamina's father, and has snatched her from her mother's clutches out of paternal concern for her own good. According to the original text this is all wrong. The High Priest is traditionally a somewhat remote cult figure; here...
...first this seems appropriate. The first half of Barry Lyndon comes on like a picaresque fairy tale, though too sardonic and materialistic to be an actual fairy tale, and too dreamy and slow-moving to be truly picaresque. Barry is tricked into enlisting, deserts, impersonates an officer, is caught, joins a card-sharping fellow-Irishman and finally marries the enigmatic Countess of Lyndon, a wealthy, beautiful English aristocrat...
After a pretentious intermission, Barry Lyndon goes from bad to worse. The fairy tale atmosphere of the first part dissolves into a full-fledged Victorian novel of materialism--a family struggle over inheritance, Barry's mother's desire for her son to get a peerage, the social ostracism that Barry faces after an outburst of physical violence. Kubrick's elegant touch is not entirely lost, but it is squandered and irreversibly diluted. At last a strange plot line emerges. The Countess of Lyndon's son by her first husband, Bullingdon, conceives a hatred for his stepfather that is largely justified...