Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, February 15, 1991 TAG: 9102150312
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Chris Gladden
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
It turns nobodies into somebodies (Sylvester Stallone and "Rocky"). It confers artistic respectability on flamboyant pop celebrities (Cher and "Moonstruck"). It boosts careers and enhances resumes and often translates directly into dollars.
Movies that have closed reopen when they're nominated for Oscars. Academy Award publicity virtually guarantees a boost in video rentals when a movie moves to cassette.
A mere nomination opens doors that otherwise would have remained shut. This year, for instance, director-writer Whit Stillman is nominated for best original screenplay. Stillman made the extremely low-budget but insightful and amusing "Metropolitan." It is doubtful that people in movie circles will henceforth be saying Whit Who?
But the importance of Oscar is relative. While no one can take an honestly earned one away from you, its aura of power only extends so far.
Consider Bernardo Bertolucci. His 1987 epic "The Last Emperor" won nine Academy Awards, among them, best picture, best director, best adapted screenplay and best cinematography.
Bertolucci gathered his Academy Award-winning team again for "The Sheltering Sky."
Like "Emperor," it is a large-scale movie set in an exotic culture. It stars double-Oscar nominee Debra Winger and respected actor John Malkovich.
Yet this big-budget, prestige production filmed on location in northern Africa slipped in and out of one Roanoke movie house in a week's time with barely a whisper.
Warner Brothers clearly didn't put a tremendous amount of promotional effort behind this picture despite Bertolucci's stature as a filmmaker and the box-office clout of its stars.
The fact that it opened for such a brief run smacks of tokenism. But you can't blame the studio. No doubt, studio executives looked at this movie in terms of commercial potential and sadly shook their heads.
For one thing, it was adapted from Paul Bowles' existential novel about the disintegration of two people's sense of self as they try to repair a dysfunctional marriage in the Sahara desert. Not an easy story to sell to audiences these days despite the fact that the movie was promoted as a love story.
For another thing, Bertolucci pulls some punches at pivotal points in the movie. Bowles' novel is hypnotic and disturbing. He deals partially with the shocking subject of a woman's complete submission to lust and sexual humiliation as she loses her sense of identity. The movie is plenty lurid at times but Bertolucci seems to lose his courage in faithfully depicting the story and the result is a foggy batch of motivations that can only confuse audiences.
Then there are three cardinal box office sins: no characters to like, an overwhelming artiness that includes the most pretentious ending on film in recent years, and an uninvolving story that takes too long to tell.
Finally, there's just plain bad timing. While there's already one American woman POW in the Persian Gulf and potentially many more, how many moviegoers want to see a picture in which an American woman becomes a willing sex slave to a bedouin tribesman?
Someone in the Warner Brothers hierarchy must have pondered those considerations - weighed them against Bertolucci's Oscar-laden track record - and said "send this baby to home video as fast as we can."
by CNB