Word: tales
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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PUCCINI: Turandot. Eva Marton as Turandot, Jose Carreras as Calaf, Katia Ricciarelli as Liu. Lorin Maazel conducting the Vienna State Opera Orchestra. MGM/UA Home Video, $79.95, stereo. Stage Director Harold Prince's stylishly barbaric 1983 production grimly captured the fairy tale's bloodthirsty, amoral ! quality with striking imagery: the gruesome severed head of the luckless Prince of Persia is held high on a stake, impassive masks hide the faces and emotions of Turandot and her retinue, and the ice princess makes her entrance in Act II down what must be the longest staircase in operatic history...
Bizarre symbolism abounds in this tale. Red is everywhere, from the Coke cans to the ever enigmatic Santa suit. And why does Roberts choose to befriend a small marsupial, of all creatures, that he finds in his apartment. But this movie is definitely not, as one Boston critic put it, too weird for words. The comedy of Coca-Cola Kid is akin to that of Bill Forsyth, odd and ethnic, but not inaccessible by any means. In contrast to the supposed Oscar heavy-weights that have gone thud this fall, The Coca-Cola Kid doesn't take itself or anyone...
...answer is that the two do not have much to do with each other, except that both are drawn from 19th century novels and both end with haunting cries on behalf of the dispossessed. Nickleby was story theater, narrating its tale as much as acting it out, and using relatively simple sets, lights and costumes. Les Miserables is lavish, with turntables rotating iron gates, marble pillars and big makeshift barricades. Nickleby told of virtue rewarded and villainy punished, while Les Miserables depicts a world less blessed with moral order. But whether or not Les Miserables can match Nickleby's commercial...
...literary dead end. Leon allows only a misty glimpse of the sweet by-and-by. The future is not dramatized because the elements of drama no longer exist. Instead, the narrator tells us about 1986, the year humanity took its first step down the evolutionary ladder. The tale is a burlesque that mixes natural history, sitcom humor and the Old Testament. For the Flood there is conflict, economic disaster and pollution; the part of Noah's Ark is played by the Bahia de Darwin, a cruise ship that shuttles tourists from Ecuador to the Galapagos. There are baggy-pants characters...
...Hollywood that capered through the Depression, Welles introduced the cinema of melancholy. With Citizen Kane--a tale of power and love, and the loss of both--American film found the dark, seductive side of its own success story. For the next decade, domestic dramas, spy pictures and detective thrillers would be shrouded in expressionist shadows and shot with oblique camera angles. Kane's multiple-narrator format announced that no one was to be trusted with the whole truth; the camera could lie too, and we would have to decide whether to believe it. Welles dragged the movies into modernism, with...