The Last Emperor (1987 Best Picture Winner)
The eleventh episode of our season on the awesome movie year of 1987 features the Academy Awards Best Picture winner, Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor. Directed and co-written by Bernardo Bertolucci and starring John Lone, Joan Chen, Peter O’Toole and Ying Ruocheng, The Last Emperor was nominated for nine Oscars and won them all.
The contemporary reviews quoted in this episode come from Roger Ebert (https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-last-emperor-1987), Sheila Benson in the Los Angeles Times (https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-11-20-ca-15017-story.html), and Pauline Kael in The New Yorker.
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Please like, share, rate and comment on the show and this episode, and tune in for the next 1987 installment, featuring our producer David Rosen’s pick, Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead 2.
2 Replies to “The Last Emperor (1987 Best Picture Winner)”
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I just wanted to let you know that yours is my favourite movie podcast in the whole wide world. I love the variety of films you discuss, the huge amount of research that you do, and especially the unique repartee between the three of you.
As it happens I have a penchant for big historical epics, and once saw The Last Emperor at a cinema screening. As you mentioned, it‘s gorgeous to look at, but by and large it seems to suffocate under its own stateliness. And the message seems very muddled, which I must imagine was the result trying to remain in the CCCP‘s good graces, no matter what everyone involved insists. I agree that a gripping thriller coud have been concocted solely from Pu Yi‘s collaboration with the Japanese, an aspect that surely the Chinese government would have had no objections to.
It‘s strange to think that only two years after this shoot the massacre at Tiananmen Square happened. Bertolucci must have felt massively conflicted (if not compromised) when reports of those events broke.
Anyway, really hope you get around to reviewing some of those other classic butt-strainers like the mentioned Lawrence of Arabia and Gandhi, and the Bridge over the River Kwai (I note there doesn‘t seem to be an equivalent English-language expression for the German word „Schinken“, which denotes an overlong melodramatic period movie). Oh, and The Conformist really is a masterpiece top to bottom, Trintignant is/was great.
Much love from Vienna, Albert
Albert, thank you for the amazing feedback! I especially appreciate that you mentioned the variety of films we cover, since that’s something I take pride in. I’m a huge fan of The Bridge on the River Kwai and I expect we’ll get around to more of those epics in the future.