He was the Lord of Ten Thousand Years, the absolute monarch of China. He was born to rule a world of ancient tradition. Nothing prepared him for our world of change.
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A dramatic history of Pu Yi, the last of the Emperors of China, from his lofty birth and brief reign in the Forbidden City, the object of worship by half a billion people; through his abdication, his decline and dissolute lifestyle; his exploitation by the invading Japanese, and finally to his obscure existence as just another peasant worker in the People's Republic.
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The boy was 3 when he first sat on the Dragon Throne as emperor of China, and 7 when he abdicated. He had barely reached what in the West is considered the age of reason, and already events beyond his control had shaped his life forever. Bernardo Bertolucci's "The Last Emperor" tells the story of this child, named Pu Yi, in an epic that uses the life of one man as a mirror that reflects China's passage from feudalism through revolution to its current state of relatively peaceful transition.This is a strange epic because it is about an entirely passive character. We are accustomed to epics about heroes who act on their society - Lawrence of Arabia, Gandhi - but Pu Yi was born into a world that allowed him no initiative. The ironic joke was that he was emperor of nothing, for there was no power to go with his title, and throughout the movie he is seen as a pawn and victim, acted upon, exploited for the purposes of others, valued for what he wasn't rather than for what he was.The movie reveals his powerlessness almost at once: Scenes of his childhood in the Forbidden City are intercut with scenes from later in his life, when the Chinese communists had taken power, and he was seized and held in a re-education camp, where a party official spent a decade talking him through a personal transition from emperor to gardener - which was Pu Yi's last, and perhaps happiest, occupation.But the process in the communist jail actually starts many years earlier, in one of the most poignant scenes in the film, when young Pu Yi is given a bicycle and excitedly pedals it around the Forbidden City until he reaches its gates to the outer world, and is stopped by his own guards. He is an emperor who cannot do the one thing any other little boy in China could do, which is to go out of his own house.Bertolucci is able to make Pu Yi's imprisonment seem all the more ironic because this entire film was shot on location inside the People's Republic of China, and he was even given permission to film inside the Forbidden City - a vast, medieval complex covering some 250 acres and containing 9,999 rooms (only heaven, the Chinese believed, had 10,000 rooms). It probably is unforgivably bourgeois to admire a film because of its locations, but in the case of "The Last Emperor" the narrative cannot be separated from the awesome presence of the Forbidden City, and from Bertolucci's astonishing use of locations, authentic costumes and thousands of extras to create the everyday reality of this strange little boy.There is a scene early in the film when Pu Yi, seated on the Dragon Throne, attended by his minders and servants, grows restless, as small boys will do. He leaps impatiently from his seat and runs toward the door of the throne room, where at first a vast, billowing drapery (a yellow one - the color reserved only for the emperor) obstructs the view. Then the curtain is blown aside, and we see an incredible sight: thousands of the emperor's minions, all of them traditionally costumed eunuchs, lined up in geometric precision as far as the eye can see, all of them kowtowing to the boy.After he formally abdicates power in 1912, Pu Yi remains on the throne, a figurehead maintained in luxury for the convenience of the real rulers of China. A Scottish tutor named Reginald Johnston (Peter O'Toole) comes out to instruct him in the ways of Europe, and the youth (played in manhood by John Lone) becomes an anglophile, dreaming of "escaping" to Cambridge. Johnston advises him to escape instead into marriage, and he takes an empress (Joan Chen) and a concubine. In 1924, he is thrown out of the Forbidden City, and moves with his retinue back to his native Manchuria, then controlled by the Japanese. In a scene of great, elegant irony, Bertolucci shows him in Western clothes, a cigarette in hand, leaning on a piano and crooning "Am I Blue?"As World War II grows closer, Pu Yi grows increasingly irrelevant, except to the Japanese, who set him up briefly as their puppet in Manchuria. His wife becomes an opium addict and begins a dalliance with a lesbian Japanese spy; his old tutor returns to England; he gives himself over to a life of depravity and drifting, and then everything changes for him when the communists take control of China and he is captured by Russians, who turn him over to their new allies.We might expect the communists to sentence Pu Yi to death (a fate he confidently expected), but instead there is the re-education process, complicated by the fact that this grown man has never done anything for himself. He does not know how to tie his own shoes or turn off the tap after filling a glass with drinking water. When we see him at the end of the film, he is working as a gardener in Peking, and seems happy, and we assume that for him, at least, re-education was a success because it was essentially education in the first place, for a man whose whole life was directed toward making him impotent and irrelevant.In Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane," one of the tycoon's friends says, "I was there before the beginning - and now I'm here, beyond the end." "The Last Emperor" ends with an extraordinary sequence, beyond the end, in which an elderly Pu Yi goes to visit the Forbidden City, which is now open to tourists. He sees a little boy sneak past the velvet rope and climb onto the Dragon Throne. Once that would have been a fatal offense. But the old man who was once the boy on that throne looks on, now, with a complex mixture of emotions. It is an inspired ending for the film, which never makes the mistake of having only one thing to say about the life of a man who embodied all of the contradictions and paradoxes of 20th century China.There aren't a lot of action scenes in "The Last Emperor," and little enough intrigue. (Even the Japanese spy isn't subtle: "I'm a spy, and I don't care who knows it," she tells the empress on their first meeting.) As in "Gandhi," great historical changes take place during "The Last Emperor," but, unlike Gandhi, the emperor has no influence on them. His life is a sad irony, his end is a bittersweet elegy. But it is precisely because so little "happens" in this epic that its vast and expensive production schedule is important. When we see those thousands of servants bowing to a little boy, for example, the image is effective precisely because the kowtowing means nothing to the boy, and the lives of the servants have been dedicated to no useful purpose.Everything involving the life of Pu Yi was a waste. Everything except one thing: the notion that a single human life could have infinite value. In its own way, the Dragon Throne argued that, making an emperor into a god in order to ennoble his subjects. And in its own way, the Chinese revolution argued the same thing, by making him into a gardener.Download here
Last Emperor, The (Biography,Drama,History)
Hollywoodland (Crime,Drama,History,Mystery,Thriller)
Based on the true story of Hollywood's most notorious unsolved mystery
Everyone has secrets. Everyone has motives.
In a town full of fiction, everyone has a version of the truth.
Living in Holly wood can make you famous. Dying in Hollywood can make you a legend.
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An exploration of fame and identity, inspired by one of Hollywood's most infamous real-life mysteries. June 16, 1959. The glamour of Tinseltown permanently fades for actor George Reeves, the heroic Man of Steel on TV's Adventures of Superman, as the actor dies in his Hollywood Hills home. Felled by a single gunshot wound, Reeves leaves behind a fiancée - aspiring starlet Leonore Lemmon - and millions of fans who are shocked by his death. But it is his grieving mother, Helen Bessolo, who will not let the questionable circumstances surrounding his demise go unaddressed. Helen seeks justice, or at least answers. The Los Angeles Police Department closes the case, but Helen hires - for $50 a day - private detective Louis Simo. Simo soon ascertains that the torrid affair Reeves had with Toni Mannix, the wife of MGM studio executive Eddie Mannix, might hold the key to the truth. But truth and justice are not so easily found in Hollywood. Simo pursues dangerous and elusive leads in both high and low places and, in trying to turn up the heat, risks getting burned. The detective also uncovers unexpected connections to his own life as the case turns more personal and he learns more about Reeves himself. Behind the icon was a complex man who gave his life to Hollywood in more ways than one.
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Troy (Action,Drama,History,Romance)
For Destiny
For Honor
For Love
For Passion
For Troy
For Victory
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It is the year 1250 B.C. during the late Bronze age. Two emerging nations begin to clash after Paris, the Trojan prince, convinces Helen, Queen of Sparta, to leave her husband Menelaus, and sail with him back to Troy. After Menelaus finds out that his wife was taken by the Trojans, he asks his brother Agamemnom to help him get her back. Agamemnon sees this as an opportunity for power. So they set off with 1,000 ships holding 50,000 Greeks to Troy. With the help of Achilles, the Greeks are able to fight the never before defeated Trojans. But they come to a stop by Hector, Prince of Troy. The whole movie shows their battle struggles, and the foreshadowing of fate in this remake by Wolfgang Petersen of Homer's "The Iliad."
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"Overnight" tells a riches-to-rags story, like "Project Greenlight" played in reverse. "Greenlight," you will recall, is the Miramax contest to choose and produce one screenplay every year by a hopeful first-time filmmaker. In "Overnight," the director starts out with a contract and money from Miramax, and works his way back to no contract, no film, and no money. Call it "Project Red Light."
The documentary tells the Hollywood story of a nine-day's wonder named Troy Duffy. He was a bartender at a sports bar called J. Sloan's on Melrose, and had written a screenplay titled "The Boondock Saints." He, his brothers and some friends had a rock band. In Los Angeles, every bartender under the age of 70 has a screenplay and is in a rock band, and they all want Harvey Weinstein of Miramax to read their script. After all, Harvey made Matt Damon and Ben Affleck stars by producing their screenplay of "Good Will Hunting."
Troy Duffy hits the trifecta. Not only does Harvey buy his screenplay, but he signs Duffy to direct it, and the band gets a recording contract, and he agrees to buy the bar; they'll own it together. To celebrate his good fortune, Duffy asked two friends, Tony Montana and Mark Brian Smith, to make a documentary of his rise. It turned out to be about his fall.
I'd give anything to see footage of the early meetings between Weinstein and Duffy. What magic did the bartender have, to so bedazzle Harvey? By the opening scenes of "Overnight," Duffy has sold a $300,000 script, has been given a $15 million budget, has signed with the William Morris Agency, and brags, "I get drunk at night, wake up the next morning hung over, go into those meetings in my overalls, and they're all wearing suits." Being Hollywood agents, they are probably also more familiar with the danger signals of alcoholism than Duffy is.
One of the subtexts of the movie involves how people look at Troy Duffy. He is very full of himself. At one point he actually says that Harvey Weinstein would like to be him. He keeps all of the money, tells the guys in the band they will get paid later, later tells them they don't deserve a dime, and still later tells them, "You do deserve it, but you're not gonna get it." He is deeply satisfied with himself: "We got a deep cesspool of creativity here," he says, and boasts "this is the first time in history they've signed a band sight unseen." Also, he might have reflected, sound unheard. As he's acting out his ego trip, the camera shows the others in the room looking at him with what can only be described as extremely fed-up expressions. His family, we sense during one scene, has been listening to this blowhard for a lifetime, and although they are happy to share his success, they're sort of waiting to see how he screws up.
So are we. The movie is pieced together out of uneven footage, and the idea of a documentary seems to have occurred in the midst of filming; at one point, a Morris agent walks into the room, looks at the lens, and says, "Oh, you got a better camera!" There are unfortunately no scenes between Duffy and Weinstein; the initial infatuation happens before the film starts, and then Weinstein pulls out of the deal by putting "The Boondock Saints" into dreaded "turnaround." The recording contract is also canceled.
Eventually a Hollywood producer named Elie Samada, who has been behind some good films but is a controversial character, picks up "The Boondock Saints" for much less than the Miramax price, and Duffy is elated again. Having dissed Keanu Reeves, Ethan Hawke and Jon Bon Jovi ("I didn't even know he was an actor"), he hires the excellent Willem Dafoe; we see one scene being filmed, in which characters a lot like Duffy and his friends get drunk and go berserk. The finished movie is taken to the Cannes marketplace, where not one single offer is made to purchase it. "Saints" eventually plays for one week in five theaters. The soundtrack album sells less than 600 copies. Then a car jumps the curb and hits Duffy, who "flees his apartment and arms himself."
Ah, but there's a happy ending! "The Boondock Saints" becomes a cult favorite on DVD, and Duffy is currently directing "Boondock II: All Saint's Day." Unfortunately, the Morris agency neglected to secure for him any portion of the DVD profits.Download here
Look, Up in the Sky: The Amazing Story of Superman (Documentary,History)
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In 1938, two aspiring comic strip talents, Jerry Siegal and Joe Shuster, published a character that would create a new genre of fantasy, Superman, the first superhero. This film explores the creation of the character and his subsequent evolution over the decades through various media. With various interviews of noted creative luminaries, the film shows how the character has adapted to the times and bounced back from times when he felt irrelevant to always regain his prominence as one of the great heroes of popular culture.
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We Were Soldiers (Action,Drama,History,War)
400 U.S paratroopers. 4000 Vietnamese soldiers. 12 000 miles away from home. 1 man led them into battle.
Fathers, Brothers, Husbands & Sons.
We were... young, brave, husbands, wives, sons, mothers, daughters, soldiers.
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In a place soon to be known as The Valley of Death, in a small clearing called landing zone X-Ray, Lt. Colonel Hal Moore (Mel Gibson) and 400 young fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons, all troopers from an elite American combat division, were surrounded by 4,000 North Vietnamese soldiers. The ensuing battle was one of the most savage in U.S. history. We Were Soldiers Once...And Young is a tribute to the nobility of those men under fire, their common acts of uncommon valor, and their loyalty to and love for one another.
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'I wonder what Custer was thinking," Lt. Col. Hal Moore says, "when he realized he'd moved his men into slaughter." Sgt. Maj. Plumley, his right-hand man, replies, "Sir, Custer was a p----." There you have the two emotional poles of "We Were Soldiers," the story of the first major land battle in the Vietnam War, late in 1965. Moore (Mel Gibson) is a family man, and a Harvard graduate who studies international relations. Plumley (Sam Elliott) is an Army lifer, hard, brave, unsentimental. They are both about as good as battle leaders get. But by the end of that first battle, they realize they may be in the wrong war.The reference to Custer is not coincidence. Moore leads the First Battalion of the Seventh Cavalry, Custer's regiment. "We will ride into battle and this will be our horse," Moore says, standing in front of a helicopter. Some 400 of his men ride into battle in the Ia Drang Valley, known as the "Valley of Death," and are surrounded by some 2,000 North Vietnamese troops. Moore realizes it's an ambush, and indeed in the film's opening scenes he reads about just such a tactic used by the Vietnamese against the French a few years earlier."We Were Soldiers," like "Black Hawk Down," is a film in which the Americans do not automatically prevail in the style of traditional Hollywood war movies. Ia Drang cannot be called a defeat, since Moore's men fought bravely and well, suffering heavy casualties but killing even more Viet Cong. But it is not a victory; it's more the curtain-raiser of a war in which American troops were better trained and better equipped, but outnumbered, out maneuvered and finally outlasted.For much of its length, the movie consists of battle scenes. They are not as lucid and easy to follow as the events in "Black Hawk Down," but then the terrain is different, the canvas is larger, and there are no eyes in the sky to track troop movements. Director Randall Wallace (who wrote "Braveheart" and "Pearl Harbor") does make the situation clear from moment to moment, as Moore and his North Vietnamese counterpart try to outsmart each other with theory and instinct.Wallace cuts between the American troops, their wives back home on an Army base, and a tunnel bunker where Ahn (Don Duang), the Viet Cong commander, plans strategy on a map. Both men are smart and intuitive. The enemy knows the terrain and has the advantage of surprise, but is surprised itself at the way the Americans improvise and rise to the occasion."Black Hawk Down" was criticized because the characters seemed hard to tell apart. "We Were Soldiers" doesn't have that problem; in the Hollywood tradition it identifies a few key players, casts them with stars, and follows their stories. In addition to the Gibson and Elliott characters, there are Maj. Crandall (Greg Kinnear), a helicopter pilot who flies into danger; the gung-ho Lt. Geoghegan (Chris Klein), and Joe Galloway (Barry Pepper), a photojournalist and soldier's son, who hitches a ride into battle, and finds himself fighting at the side of the others to save his life.The key relationship is between Moore and Plumley, and Gibson and Elliott depict it with quiet authority. They're depicted as professional soldiers with experience from Korea. As they're preparing to ride into battle, Moore tells Plumley, "Better get yourself that M-16." The veteran replies: "By the time I need one, there'll be plenty of them lying on the ground." There are.Events on the Army base center around the lives of the soldiers' wives, including Julie Moore (Madeleine Stowe), who looks after their five children and is the de facto leader of the other spouses. We also meet Barbara Geoghegan (Keri Russell), who, because she is singled out, gives the audience a strong hint that the prognosis for her husband is not good.Telegrams announcing deaths in battle are delivered by a Yellow Cab driver. Was the Army so insensitive that even on a base they couldn't find an officer to deliver the news? That sets up a shameless scene later, when a Yellow Cab pulls up in front of a house and of course the wife inside assumes her husband is dead, only to find him in the cab. This scene is a reminder of "Pearl Harbor," in which the Ben Affleck character is reported shot down over the English Channel and makes a surprise return to Hawaii without calling ahead. Call me a romantic, but when your loved one thinks you're dead, give them a ring."We Were Soldiers" and "Black Hawk Down" both seem to replace patriotism with professionalism. This movie waves the flag more than the other (even the Viet Cong's Ahn looks at the stars and stripes with enigmatic thoughtfulness), but the narration tells us, "In the end, they fought for each other." This is an echo of the "Black Hawk Down" line, "It's about the men next to you. That's all it is." Some will object, as they did with the earlier film, that the battle scenes consist of Americans with killing waves of faceless, non-white enemies. There is an attempt to give a face and a mind to the Viet Cong in the character of Ahn, but significantly, he is not listed in the major credits and I had to call the studio to find out his name and the name of the actor who played him. Yet almost all war movies identify with one side or the other, and it's remarkable that "We Were Soldiers" includes a dedication not only to the Americans who fell at Ia Drang, but also to "the members of the People's Army of North Vietnam who died in that place." I was reminded of an experience 15 years ago at the Hawaii Film Festival, when a delegation of North Vietnamese directors arrived with a group of their films about the war. An audience member noticed that the enemy was not only faceless, but was not even named: At no point did the movies refer to Americans. "That is true," said one of the directors. "We have been at war so long, first with the Chinese, then the French, then the Americans, that we just think in terms of the enemy."Download here
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