Word: offing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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In Hollywood these days, a spectacle is what some randy star makes of himself at 3 a.m. on Sunset Boulevard. American movies have lost the love of grandeur, of finding the heroic scale of historical figures. Chen Kaige to the rescue! China's longest-reigning angry young filmmaker has an...
The Emperor and the Assassin, set in the 3rd century B.C., relates the struggle of Ying Zheng (Li) to unify China and become its first emperor. His aims are honorable, his methods increasingly brutal; he might be the prototype for Lenin or Mao. Ying sends his lover Lady Zhao (Gong...
The film may confuse those unfamiliar with Chinese history, but never mind. Just pay heed to the glorious moviemaking. There is one scene that haunts the heart: an ethereally beautiful blind girl (Xun Zhou) kills herself after the assassin has eradicated the rest of her family. Few directors can create...
Sometime in the '60s, Susanna Kaysen was placed in an upscale psychiatric hospital. It appears from Girl, Interrupted, the book she wrote about the experience a couple of decades later, that she might have fared just as well as an outpatient. It appears from the movie version that we would...
It's not that director (and final-draft writer) James Mangold has botched the job. It's just that he made something rather conventional out of a memoir that was spare, terse and elliptically funny. And naturally, the film's attitude toward its patients is the only acceptable one these...