Word: viewers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Nobody, that is, except thousands of waltz-happy PBS viewers. Rieu's concert videos, in which he and his 26-piece Johann Strauss Orchestra are seen playing for delirious throngs of European fans, have become a staple of public-TV pledge-drive programming. Last year The Vienna I Love came in right behind Riverdance in viewer popularity. The telecasts not only bring in money for local PBS affiliates, they also promote Rieu's CDs. When he visited the U.S. in August to work the phones at stations across the country, his on-camera appearances helped lift Vienna into Billboard...
...This movie is about uncomfortableness," Lee says. "Whatever you do is somehow wrong. So the actors could not feel self-assured about their performing. It's not about performing; it's about people being observed in an uncomfortable situation." The viewer should feel the same way. A squirming sympathy is the only proper reaction to the clumsiness of the parents' attempts to connect with their kids, like Ben's solemn advice to his son on masturbation ("Don't do it in the shower"). Yet the film's lesson is that, God help us and them, we are our parents...
...going through torture to entertain us. Maso: they are also torturing us with the whip of seductiveness and the clamps of suspense. In most films this unholy relationship is tacit; we suspend disbelief, forget our connivance in the covenant. The Game yanks this affair center screen and dares the viewer not only to think about it but also to feel it--feel creepy, feel scared, feel guilty...
Though it doesn't quite match Ang Lee's wonderful gift for rendering social conventions hilarious, "Shall We Dance?" is bound to tickle the most staid viewer. It makes abundant, admittedly effective use of stock comic devices and characters. Eriko Watanabe cuts a droll figure as the experienced but caustic and somewhat unattractive dancer whom Sugiyama agrees to partner in an amateur competition; Naoto Takenaka hams it up as a painfully self-conscious colleague who dons a wig and hurls himself with fiendish gusto into the rhumba; Sugiyama's two fellow dance-pupils--one short and hyper...
...view of the film unfairly pulls apart the flowing, organic whole of the piece. If the movie is advertised as Altman's return to the town of his youth, then there may be more than one viewer vaguely envying the director, whatever the criminal underworld depicted alongside the jazz. Down to the challenging ending--which opens up a valuable re-thinking of the characters--"Kansas City" provides an intelligent feast for the eyes--and the ears...