Word: tragic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Director Altman has given the claustrophobic tension of Shepard's stageplay breadth and richness without upsetting the mood. The story unfolds in a disheveled motel room, a fenced-in playground, a formica dinerette. The action shifts comfortably from the present to the past, the comic to the tragic, the real to the imagined. And the characters, both skillfully drawn and portrayed, swing with lightning quickness from the pathetic to the courageous, from the cruel to the ridiculous...
FOOL FOR LOVE falters only in its pacing, which is perhaps too slow in starting, too quick in its resolution. The first half hour of the film has a staggered, disjointed rhythm to it, and the climax is perhaps too abrupt and suddenly tragic. Though Shepard's plays are notorious for their refusal to resolve themselves, what distinguishes him as our most audacious playwright translates less gracefully on the screen...
...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...
...source of his triumph is his viewpoint. Great tragic figures generally demand close-ups as a divine right, so that the audience can read the play of noble emotions in their features. In Ran, that shot scarcely exists. Kurosawa's cameras (he usually covers each scene with three) are always pulled back into godlike positions, and they provide a new perspective on the rages and the ultimate madness of Tatsuya Nakadai's Lear figure. From above and beyond, we perceive him not as a great man falling but as a fragile, all too human stumbler. Distance lends an analogous irony...
Last week, in another Christmas season, 245 men and three women of the 101st made noncombat history in a tragic way. They, along with eight civilian crew members, were killed in the worst military air disaster ever. Headed home for the holidays to Fort Campbell, Ky., after six months of multinational peacekeeping duties in the hot winds of the Sinai Peninsula, the troopers died in the bleak brush and deep chill of Newfoundland when their chartered DC-8 jet failed to sustain its takeoff from Gander International Airport. The blue- and-white plane rose less than 1,000 ft., then...