Word: cinema
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Film ought to be a lively medium for opera. The cinema can broaden a production's scope while narrowing its focus, providing the viewer with a fresh, if necessarily arbitrary, perspective that can simultaneously combine straightforward storytelling with implicit commentary. Watching a filmed opera should be like attending a performance with an omniscient, highly opinionated...
...laughs, tears and special effects carried Hollywood to one of its most popular years in the U.S. and abroad, European film makers were finding it harder to attract attention, especially in the American market. The "art houses" of the 1960s, where a United Nations of cinema once reigned, now play host to mainstream movies from the suburbs of Los Angeles. Critics' groups, which had regularly knighted Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini, now bestow their awards on Steven Spielberg and Sydney Pollack. With many American critics, moviemakers and moviegoers on a slumming spree, the intellectual cachet of European films...
...Disciples of James Dean--a small club of James Dean fans--in the one-room Five & Dime in a barren town in Texas. Altman borrows the best qualities from the live theatre of precisely staged movements and vocal patterns and merges them with the best potentials of the cinema--fluid-flashbacks, close-up shots and angular filming. The setting of the tacky small-town corner Five & Dime, with its plastic-covered swivel stools around the counter, the displays of cheap trinkets, and the neon-like wall displays and jukebox, never become too confining as Altman uses perpetually changing positions...
...script, which comes from a play of the same name, reeks of sexual innuendoes and satirical views of the modern-day world. The dialogue is one of those rare cinema bonuses--more than a screenplay, it clearly develops a plot, while gradually revealing a literary personality. The movements of the characters are poised and their facial expressions and actions resemble a stage production. The fluidity of the filming make their movements even more interesting and captivating: The camera focuses on their minute actions and their carefully enunciated jokes and tirades...
Weir's movies have always boasted pristine imagery and avoided visual clichés; Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Last Wave and Gallipoli are among the smartest-looking pictures in recent cinema. But in his attempt to blend his preoccupations with the plot of C. J. Koch's 1978 novel, Weir has perhaps packed too much imagery and information into his movie. The sound track is wallpapered with dialogue and Billy Kwan's pensive narration. The plot becomes landlocked in true-life implausibilities; the characters rarely get a hold on the moviegoer's heart or lapels...