Cheap The Last Emperor - Director's Cut (Video) (Bernardo Bertolucci) Price

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Customer Reviews of The Last Emperor - Director's Cut

Pu Yi : prisoner No. 981!
This film is really mesmerizing. The sumptuous locations that worked out as real stages to tell the tragic story of the raise and fall of the last Emperor of a very reduced territory of a huge nation. Enclosed in this zone, prisoner of the conventionalisms, his castrated childhood, slaved by his own power, became a fervent fan of the Western way of life thanks to the wise advises of his British mentor: R.J. <
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>But the terrible aspect to remark was the vertiginous speed of the sociopolitical changes, that simply could not be perceived by Pu Yi, immersed in a big soap's bubble, absolutely isolated from an outer world in boiling state, ignoring due his age, the complex of encountered interests around the political environment. <
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>Bernard Bertolucci made a memorable portrait of this terrible existence of a man who descended from the top of the world to a nasty cell, trapped by his desires of power, about the firm belief of return and occupy his previous role as Emperor. Manchuria became his golden exile, establishing sinister pacts with Japan, and the well detailed facts that culminated with a dark final, ignored and forgotten in 1967. <
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>The narrative ellipsis were extraordinary blended due a magisterial edition process, the overtopping photography and the superb camera angles, zealous in every detail (please realize how the camera is always at the same level of our central personage) from his early years to his adultness. <
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>An unforgettable masterpiece all the way through, a mesmerizing reflection about the nature and fragility of the power with a careful handle of the cinematographic time, that achieved to establish its own narrative rhythm with remarkable organic flow. <
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Accomplishes the impossible
Ask any director in a world not yet blessed with The Last Emperor whether it might be possible to create a film that documents, with reasonable depth and historical accuracy, the modernization of China--from imperial days through the Cultural Revolution--and that does so while managing also to capture the immeasurable gravity, ethos, and pathos of the twentieth century and all its billions, and you'd be told in so many words that such a task was absolutely, without a doubt, impossible, no matter the allotted length. <
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>But Bertolucci does it here in a single DVD's length, without offending the historian's peculiar sensibilities, abusing the casual filmgoer's expectations, or descending into vulgar and sledgehammer-like metaphor and simile for the sake of efficiency. This film draws one's attention to the matter at hand, not to itself, its director, or any present flaws (to my eye, there are few or none). <
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>Indeed, The Last Emperor may be one of the small handful of Perfect Films yet created in the history of film, able and willing to showcase all that is good and all that is necessary about the arts and their ability to drive our own will to identification. <
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>I won't bother with plot or synopses here. Suffice it to say that this film is the twentieth century encapsulated, in every best and worst way that one might imagine, somehow made at once informative and accessible. It is the sort of film from which no-one can turn, both pedagogical and affecting, the sort of film that makes grown men cry and cynics pray, even if they're not sure to whom their prayer is addressed. <
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>As a final aside: though there are many poor reviews of the DVD media here, the situation is somewhat more mixed than many of them let on. The DVD is indeed of a poorer resolution than most anamorphic widescreen DVDs. However, viewers who don't happen to own 16:9 HDTV sets won't be able to see the difference, since the resolution of the film on this DVD still exceeds what a "standard" television set can display.

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A masterpiece
The Last Emperor is one of those movies that dazzle us even after 18 years of its original release. The acting is fantastic, the Photography simply beautiful, and the locations,(specially the Forbidden city sequences) are breathtaking. <
>Pu yi, the las Emperor of the Manchu dinasty has become a puppet of war lords, to later become a puppet for the Japanese, to finally become a puppet prisoner in Comunist China. We are taken to the luxurious Imperial Court In the Forbiden City where Pu Yi suffers from extreme lonelyness. The movie presents the human side of the Emperor, and it explains why he acted the way he did. A sympathetic view of a man who played a rather ingrate role in modern Chinese History. <
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