Word: tales
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...brilliant Canadian art critic and collector, to lead a life divorced from this hollow world? But as Davies weaves his spell one gets the feeling that he suddenly realizes that he has bitten off a bit more than he can chew in 430 pages and decides to hurry the tale to its end so he can start the third book of this trilogy...
Unoriginal plots have made good films before. Fine acting and unusual direction could transform this dry tale into an honest, intense look at a family in crisis. Yorkin, however, does as much as he possibly can to curtail any such developments, repeatedly placing his characters against technicolor skies as they set off to build new lives across the rainbow in Puget Sound...
...called Hidetora, and he speaks in a tongue Will Shakespeare would not have recognized, inhabits a landscape unknown to the Bard, that of 16th century Japan. And Goneril, Regan and Cordelia are here men called Taro, Jiro and Saburo. We are obviously far from the place of this tragic tale's mythic birth and noble retelling, and we are far from the inert reverence of the typical movie adaptation of a classic. Indeed, in Ran (which means "chaos" in Japanese) we venture into a territory where the very word adaptation distorts and diminishes both intention and accomplishment. For what Akira...
Wisely, Glass and Moran have chosen to emphasize the tale's elements of love and redemption, instead of its gruesome aspects. Glass's familiar style is aptly suited to express transfigured states like the fatal ecstasy of the first wife, who dies giving birth to her beloved son, while Moran's more muscular music communicates the horror of the murder without wallowing in it, the way the detached, matterof-fact language of a fable does...
...sense of culture they try to construct withers in the red glare of National Socialism. After 1933 their story becomes a lugubrious tale of giants in exile (Oskar Kokoschka, Kurt Schwitters, Max Beckmann), of ruined hope, lopped lives and rampant state philistinism. By 1945 there is no life left in the expressionist impulse, at least in Germany; it can only be reborn in America as abstraction, and then re-exported to exhausted Europe. By 1955 figurative expressionism is a dodo--shot by Hitler, eaten by art history, its bones a museum specimen. Thus spake, until lately, the scenario...