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When Pu Yi ascended the throne in Peking in 1908, he was only 3 years old. From his short-lived reign to his arrest as a counterrevolutionary in Red China in 1950, he spent his life as little more than a pawn of those who wished to further their own agendas. Nevertheless, director Bernardo Bertolucci’s gorgeous and seductive The Last Emperor imbues this powerless and constantly thwarted figure with a resolute if melancholy grace.
Never has the chaos and horror of battle been so in-your-face, so personal, as in writer/director Oliver Stone’s Platoon. Based on his experiences in Vietnam, this is a stark, caustic account of one man’s war.
Like Lawrence of Arabia, Out of Africa is a story of time and place. Just as T.E. Lawrence’s tale could only have happened in the Middle Eastern deserts of the Great War, Isak Dinesen’s would not exist without the gorgeous vistas of East Africa of almost exactly the same time.
Is Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham, in a virtuoso performance he has yet to match) insane? Amadeus opens with an old, bitter Salieri living out his last days in an asylum, where he’s been relegated following a suicide attempt. The film’s story, and the story of his life, unfolds as he confesses to a priest how, and why, he killed Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
It’s a complicated love/hate relationship that mothers and daughters share. They can be each other’s best friend and worst enemy, often at the same time. Terms of Endearment perfectly captures that morass of conflicting emotions — at least from the daughter’s point of view, as I can testify from personal experience.
Director Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi is one of the most ambitious biographical films ever made, encompassing not just more than half a century of one man’s life but also one country’s struggle for independence. Ben Kingsley is a marvel as Mohandas K. — later called Mahatma — Gandhi, doing a remarkable job of conveying the soft-spoken determination of a man who would come to inspire a messianic fervor among his people and convincingly aging himself 55 years with little more than alterations in his posture and way of carrying himself.
Chariots of Fire may be veddy British, veddy 1920s — Gilbert and Sullivan, straw bowlers, cricket, school ties — but its story is as timeless as the Olympics themselves. This is quite possibly the most lyrical, most spiritual sports movie ever made.
Ordinary People, Robert Redford’s directorial debut, is a talky drama about people who can’t talk to one another. Conrad, a high-school student recovering from a suicide attempt after his brother’s boating accident, is all but ignored by his parents. Too-cheerful Calvin pretends that things are just hunky-dory, and when Conrad tries to talk to Beth, she changes the subject or pushes him away.
I wonder where Billy Kramer would be today. Six years old when his self-indulgent, self-involved yuppie parents split, in Kramer vs. Kramer, the poor tyke is traumatized by his mother’s abandonment of him and his father’s halfhearted (at first) attempts at parenting, and even the very last scene of the movie, which is supposed to make us cheer for his mother’s last-minute change of heart, is just another example of the constant jerking around the little guy receives from his parents.
The Deer Hunter is a lyrical, slow-to-unfold story of the devastating effects of a tour in Vietnam on three close friends. Mike (Robert DeNiro), Nick (Christopher Walken), and Steve (John Savage), steelworkers in a gray, run-down Pennsylvania town, are ordinary, blue-collar guys who’s chief amusements run to drinking and pool. Apparently much alike on the surface, each will be affected in different ways by the war.
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