Word: temptress
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...location in a handsome old villa in Wujiang City, 10 miles from Suzhou in eastern China, Chen Kaige is shooting Temptress Moon. The film crew, a tight team of 20 or so artisans, is being entertained by the Chinese actress Gong Li and Hong Kong heartthrob Leslie Cheung, both of whom starred in Chen's 1993 hit, Farewell My Concubine. Gong Li picks up a TV remote and pretends it's a telephone ("Wei? Wei?"--"Hello?"), then playfully runs it under a prop man's arm as if she were a beautician with an electric shaver...
Because Chen's Temptress Moon, like Zhang's Triad, is set in Shanghai before the 1949 revolution, both directors can expect their new films to be seen in China. But what can these profligately gifted filmmakers do next? Perhaps emigrate to America, where they can join John Woo and Ang Lee in showing Hollywood how to blend film technique with personal fire. But to do so would be to renounce the people, problems and landscape they have devoted their careers to putting eloquently on film. Maybe they should move down to Hong Kong in 1997, and hope for the best...
Eventually, he may learn to apply this editing skill to the excesses that mar the novel--a rich attachment to vulgarity, including a deadening level of profanity and a comically exaggerated preoccupation with smells. Clearly, Weiss wants the reader to accept Burry as a fatal temptress. But it does not help to be told early on that her aroma is "part B.O. and maybe patchouli...
...society. Her foil, the unapologetic knave Valmont (the splendid baritone Thomas Hampson), is a cynical womanizer who makes the fatal mistake of falling in love with one of his victims, unwisely and too well. Who is worse? The amoral rake who seduces and abandons without remorse? Or the wily temptress who sends her dark knight on errant missions of the heart? In this telling, the two protagonists not only are equally responsible, they deserve each other, and their fate...
Star Trek ended its final season last week and the closing down of the USS Enterprise seemed as fitting a way as any to usher out the Class of 1994. Hardly a trekkie, I am nevertheless, quite easily seduced by the fantastic, especially if the temptress comes equipped with transporter beams or with phasers set on stun. So the ending of Star Trek was an event for me, something that meritted a mental paper clip, something to plan a day around. It caught me at the right time, too. I had finished my final exam in Matter in the Universe...