a r t s n o b h e a r t t h r o b
Distinguished from Hyams’ Universal Soldier films by the sensitivity of its portraiture, it remains his film in tracking the instability of identities where their vocation is built around enacting violence, as mediated through spectacle.
Side note: I used to watch MMA a lot when I was younger and I was very charmed to see Bas Rutten again.
For most of its runtime, more interesting for the Eastwood negotiation of his star persona than the melodrama (I wish I had revisited Unforgiven before this), but then he leaves and the film reveals its emotional power as Streep revisits the spaces haunted by his absence and her children the same spaces haunted by hers.
Is everyone who's ever expressed an opinion on this thing a complete dufus? I guess so. They are talking about a great artist's most complex work as if it were just a Just Jaeckin movie. Here goes.
It forms a diptych with Emperor Tomato Ketchup in their concern with western understandings of the far east and the humiliation/crypto-castration of Japan after the end of World War II. ETK is a satire of American's rationalization of Japanese militarism during World War…
The history of the onslaught of modernity as psychodrama as bildungsroman, in other words, Bertolucci's second adaptation of The Charterhouse of Parma. He films the Forbidden City in the first half with a Langian relish where awe becomes quasi-science fictional, Puyi at its center with his wet nurse as oedipal consort in the autarchic palace. The narrative is a fall, as the escalating series of cuckings by his wives, his nation, his homeland and his military and political allies attest.…
