YEAR OF THE DRAGON: Blu-ray (MGM/UA, 1985) Warner Archive
Michael Cimino’s
career, post Heaven’s Gate (1980)
was ill-served. One might suggest that Cimino had administered the fatal kill
shot with his big and bloated western saga that failed to generate anything but
a whimper among audiences, and, garnering thorough dismissal from the critics. After it sunk the venerable United Artists, Heaven’s Gate garnered the ever-lasting
– if unfairly judged - reputation for being the biggest turkey of all time. In
reality, Heaven’s Gate was none of those things, though it could hardly be
considered a classic to rival the reputation of Hollywood’s beloved, Gone with The Wind, albeit, as a
western. This had been Cimino’s driving ambition during production. In the wake
of Heaven’s Gate and its fallout,
fingers were aggressively pointed at Cimino for his profligate spending; also,
the way he had thoroughly soured UA’s good will, by insisting on freakish
control over every aspect of its creation – to the point, where UA was caught
in a catch-22, simply writing check after check, while mercilessly praying for
a smash hit. It is telling of the Hiroshima-sized crater left in the wake of
Cimino’s epic that no one in Hollywood would even look upon him to helm another
movie. Indeed, Cimino did not work in the biz for another 5 years, but when he
did re-emerge on the screen, it was decidedly a scaled-down affair.
Loosely based on
Robert Daley’s novel, Year of the Dragon
(1985) is a fairly straight-forward crime drama, curiously set in an
undisclosed ‘present’ with a prematurely grayed, Mickey Rourke as Capt. Stanley
White, attired like a Bogart-styled gumshoe from the 1940’s. Stanley has been
assigned to investigate gang warfare in New York’s Chinatown district. His
first line of defense is to launch into a full-scale war on the Chinese
community at large, Asians of every denomination, blanketly referenced
throughout the picture as ‘yellow-skinned niggers’, ‘gooks’, ‘chinks’ and
virtually every other derogatory slur one can imagine. The effect wears thin,
and before long, becomes not only grotesquely prejudicial, but also perversely
transparent in its attempts at shock value. The screenplay by Cimino and Oliver
Stone – prior to Stone’s debut in the director’s chair, seemed to promise some
good things along the way or ‘yet to come’; that and the fact, Dino De
Laurentiis (no stranger to producing some hefty spectacles in his heyday and few
weighty turkeys too) is its producer. But Year
of the Dragon is sloppily stitched together from a few of the more
nightmarish chapters in Daley’s novel, augmented by a lot of overtly gruesome
bloodshed, and some of the least prepossessing exposition heard in any movie yet
– not just one made at the height of the whack-tac-u-lar eighties.
The first hurdle
to overcome is casting. Despite Cimino hoping for – and getting – Mickey Rourke
to star as the hard-bitten realist/cop, Rourke’s performance in Year of the Dragon is about as
uninspired as watching fresh paint cure. He is at his best when admonishing his
superior, Lou Bukowski (Ray Barry), or throwing off pithy one-liners to insult
the Chinese mafia on their own turf. Yeah, ballsy. But did anyone even bother
to teach Rourke how to handle a gun? As a veteran of Nam and a decorated
officer of the law – Stanley’s chosen profession, Rourke should have more sense
than to blindly fire his service revolver into a fleeing crowd, hoping against
hope he will hit his target before he wounds or even kills a few civilians. Worse, at intervals Rourke seems to be reading
his lines from cue cards MacTac’ed to his forehead, or posted just out of
camera range, with a perpetual smugness that an actor like Bruce Willis could
have convincingly pull off as legit. And Rourke is, arguably, the strongest
talent in the line-up. John Lone, who would distinguish himself admirably in
Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (1987)
is woefully miscast as Joey Tai, the presumed head of a crime syndicate,
destined to end very badly for him. Lone, whose fine-boned features make him a
stunningly handsome edition to the cast, also give him an air of unintentional ‘leading
man’ tenderness, counterintuitive to his ‘tough-as-nails’ gangland kingpin, who
hurls the severed head of a competitor across a crowded table to impress his
arch nemesis.
Ariane Koizumi,
as ambitious TV reporter, Tracy Tzu (and billed in the credits, only as Ariane)
is the absolute worst of the leads. Like Lone, Ariane was likely cast for her
Asian heritage. She looks the part. Whether appearing in expensive fur or her
birthday suit, Ariane is veritable eye candy. Were that she could act her way
out of a paper bag. The last bit of bad casting goes to Caroline Kava as Stanley’s
significant other; nurse practitioner with an attitude, Connie White. I’ve
enjoyed Kava’s acting before. And I suppose I might have here, if only she did
not look more like Stanley’s mother than his wife. How Rourke’s emotionally
guarded gunslinger with a badge could even think to work up his winter passion
for Kava’s tart-mouthed frump, dashing off to work in her white orthopedic Oxfords
after she basically told him to ‘screw off’ and fix the dishwasher, is frankly
a minor miracle. Connie’s death comes near the end of Stanley’s unquenchable
desire to decimate the Chinese crime syndicate, and, Rourke’s shedding of tears
at her funeral, if sophomoric at best, nevertheless, seem genuine; Kava – as the
corpse – holding her breath and beaded rosary inside an open casket. This
leaves the heavy-lifting up to Dennis Dun, as Herbert Kwong; the cop-in-training
that Stanley recruits to get close – too close, in fact – to the family dynasty
pulling all the puppet strings inside an enterprising and international drug
cartel. Dunn’s nervous guy on the side is probably the most credible character here,
conveying an edgy determinism to succeed, but as much nerve-jangling anxiety he
will wind up another statistic in service to Stanley’s all-consuming passion to
shut down the criminal element in Chinatown.
Michael Cimino had
been approached several times by Dino De Laurentiis to helm Year of the Dragon – each time,
emphatically turning it down. For Cimino, the refusal was likely predicated on
his lack of knowledge regarding Chinese gang warfare than any standoffish
attitude regarding Year of the Dragon
not being ‘his kind’ of movie. After all, beggars can hardly be choosers. And
Cimino needed the work. So, delving into Daley’s novel and then copious
research, not from books, but by immersing himself in the culture of Chinatown,
Cimino signed on to helm the project on one condition – he could do things his
way. This ought to have sent a shiver down De Laurentiis’ spine – also, the
executive brain trust at MGM – the company, having absorbed UA’s financial debt
and back catalog after Cimino’s other debacle, and, now footing his bills yet
again. Worse for Cimino, he had agreed to the studio’s terms, unaware at the
outset they were already locked in, not only for the picture’s start date, but
also its world premiere. Working under the gun, Cimino brought back Joann
Carelli – the gal he had made a full-fledged producer on Heaven’s Gate; mostly then, a ceremonial post; Carelli tossed under
the proverbial bus on that project after UA’s management finally awakened to
the realization it was Cimino who was running his own show then, with Carelli
merely running interference between him and the studio.
This time,
however, Cimino was serious – or rather, had likely learned a valuable lesson.
That if he was ever again to work in Hollywood after Year of the Dragon, it was best to like everyone at the outset and
not deliberately try to piss anyone off. Cimino also brought in Oliver Stone to
polish the writing. Cimino had, in fact,
been sincerely impressed by Stone’s writing finesse on the, as yet unproduced
screenplay, eventually to become the Oscar-winning Platoon (1986). Coaxing Stone to work on Year of the Dragon for less than his usual fee, in exchange for De
Laurentiis agreeing to fully fund Stone’s passion project – Platoon, Stone would later regret the
trade-off, especially after the luke warm box office on Year of the Dragon caused De Laurentiis to renege on their
agreement, forcing Stone to seek his funding for Platoon elsewhere. And De Laurentiis was a wily wheeler dealer in
other ways too, giving Cimino his ever-important ‘final cut’ but only if Cimino lived up to virtually all of the
other criteria as outlined in his contract. Stone, later to be known for his
own directorial fanaticism, would not look upon his time spent on Year of the Dragon with any great
fondness. “With Michael, it's a 24-hour
day” Stone would later comment, “He
doesn't really sleep ... he's truly an obsessive personality. He's the most
Napoleonic director I ever worked with.”
As Cimino
quickly was to learn, he had been thrown into the deep end of the pool, casting
already well underway by this time. Concurring with Stone, Cimino initially
preferred Nick Nolte or Jeff Bridges for the part eventually played by Mickey
Rourke. Rourke’s impressive turn in The
Pope of Greenwich Village (1984) would convince Cimino otherwise. But the
premature aging of Rourke for the part – indeed, he is playing a guy fifteen
years his actual senior – seems to have left the actor stumped for any valid
characterization. Nevertheless, his $1 million salary ought to have afforded him
enough motivation to find his niche; that, and Cimino’s insistence he draw upon
his real-life boxing prowess for inspiration, even going so far as to hire a
Hell’s Angel to whip Rourke back into shape. Meanwhile, Cimino turned his
attention to the sets. As shooting in authentic Chinatown would have proved a logistical
nightmare, Cimino had Production Designer, Wolf Kroeger and Art Director,
Victoria Paul immerse themselves in vivid recreations, built on sound stages in
Wilmington, North Carolina. The sets proved so authentic, when Year of the Dragon premiered, Cimino
received a phone call from Stanley Kubrick, offering him kudos for getting such
stunningly handsome footage shot ‘on location’. As Kubrick was Bronx-born and
well-acquainted with the real Chinatown, Cimino took this as the highest form
of praise for his level of authenticity.
Year of the Dragon did, in fact, go on location, to
shoot several authentic interiors; notably, Tracy’s apartment, with a
breathtaking view of New York’s Hudson and the George Washington Bridge; also,
employing various nondescript neighborhoods in Toronto, Vancouver, Victoria, Thailand,
Bangkok and Shangirey. Cimino would later explain how his lack of film school-training
was actually beneficial. “I didn’t know
what I couldn’t do,” he explained, “They
would say to me, ‘you can’t do that’ and I’d say ‘why not’ and ‘watch me’.
Then, I’d just go ahead and do it and it would come out better than anything
they ever thought of.” Indeed, Cimino took great pride in, and was fond of
explaining, how a single scene in Year
of the Dragon, following Lone’s Chinese mafia chieftain, began in one
location, but by the end of Tai’s brief walk through an underground sweat shop,
had crossed over six different locations, shot in three different cities
without a single flub in continuity from one cut to the next. For the record,
the sweat shop was in Bangkok, the guard-rail, in New York, and, the adjacent
apartment, in Wilmington. Informed by one of his young script supervisors this
scene ‘wouldn't cut’ (edit seamlessly),
Cimino bet her $1,000 to the contrary, won the bet, then politely refused to
take her money.
As shooting
neared its end, Cimino could also take immense pride in the fact he had managed
to bring in Year of the Dragon on time
and under budget. Still, executives at MGM balked over the penultimate line of
dialogue in the movie; a scene where Rourke’s careworn and badly beaten cop is
reconciled with Adriane’s toughened up reporter; Stanley commenting, “Well, I guess if you fight a war long
enough, you end up marrying the enemy.” Believing the line to be racially insensitive
to Asian Americans, Cimino reluctantly agreed to redo the scene, with Stanley
coyly offering, “You were right and I was
wrong. I'd like to be a nice guy. But I just don't know how to be nice.” Oliver
Stone was not pleased with this revision. But he had little to say about it,
and would refrain from any more social commentary regarding American/Chinese
relations, until his probing drama, Heaven
and Earth (1993). Cimino was
decidedly working under the gun to make Year
of the Dragon as engrossing a mob movie as any yet played out on the big
screen. While numerous templates had already been well-established in American
movies regarding the Italian mafia, there were virtually no representations of
the Chinese triads. Cimino and MGM encountered several protests, meant to
derail the picture from being made; Cimino, explaining how Chinese influence
and money had powerful political backing that might have easily tanked the
project. “They would back anyone, so no
matter who won they had control and could call in their markers.” Although
Cimino was encouraged to tread lightly on his representation of triad violence –
something the Chinese/American counsel vehemently denied, even suggesting the triads
were a myth – Cimino chose instead to imply the influence of the triads was
gradually taking over not only Chinatown, but spreading like a cancer into the
other boroughs.
From the outset
of the plot, Year of the Dragon lays
an insidious groundwork that outlined an unspoken law between New York’s NYPD
and Chinatown, whereupon the police agreed to remove themselves from administering
the law within its boundaries; the Chinese left to rule themselves and micromanage
their crime families in a tenuous balance to occasionally erupt in bloodshed
among themselves. Year of the Dragon
opens with a staged processional and two bloody assassinations; one, a much-lauded
chieftain, Jackie Wong (Ming C. Lee) of the crime syndicate, ruthlessly stabbed
in the chest as he enjoys his dinner at a local eatery; the other, an Italian
shop owner, Lenny Carranza (Tony Lip), who finds his meager dried goods store
being encroached upon by youth gangs scrounging for territorial rights. Although
Tai’s triad has had an unofficial agreement with the Italian mafia, this break
in their détente creates an immediate rift and a vacuum into which Capt.
Stanley White finds he is ill-equipped to quash the rivalry without, first,
administering his own particular brand of street justice. A decorated Vietnam
veteran, Stanley is the proverbial bull the China shop – literally; breaking into
an underground illegal gambling parlor and demanding to know the whereabouts of
Joey Tai.
At home, Stanley’s
nature is hardly restrained. In fact, he has put his marriage repeatedly on the
line; invested wholeheartedly in his career, and, resisting his wife, Connie’s
long-standing desire to have a child, while professing to still be open to the
idea. Connie knows this is just a lie. Stanley will never change. Perhaps, it
is time she moved on and found a man who actually wants all the things she
does. While Stanley’s reassignment to Chinatown has been predicated on an
understanding he will go ‘hardball’ on its youth gangs, he instead elects to
aggressively target Joey Tai, the late Jackie’s son-in-law who has since taken
over the triad. Chiding Tai and his silver-tongued cohorts, Fred Hung (Pao Han
Lin) and Harry Yung (Victor Wong), with a slew of racial slurs to level the
playing field, Stanley promises to bring down the wrath of the police if Tai does
not comply. In short order, Stanley’s sledgehammer approach lands him in hot
water with his superior, Louis Bukowski (Ray Barry). But it wins him a lot of
points with the Commissioner, William McKenna (Eddie Jones), who realizes
Bukowski’s ‘sidelines’ approach has yet to put a crimp in the tail of the
Chinese mafia.
Meanwhile,
although Joey has connived his way into the triad elders’ good graces, steadily
his brand of ‘vigorous leadership’ will be reviewed as needlessly ratcheting up
the ferocity in Chinatown, to the detriment of even its most profitable
gambling houses and restaurants. Realizing his ace in the hole must be a
Chinese American whose face is unfamiliar to the mob, someone he can plant
within their midst to learn the inner details, Stanley recruits neophyte NYPD trainee,
Herbert Kwong to go undercover and infiltrate Joey's organization. To further
his plan, Stanley also enters into a problematic relationship with Tracy Tzu,
an American-born Chinese reporter, working Chinatown for her English language
network. Stanley and Tracy are nearly assassinated when Joey employs his youth
gang members to send a message at Harry Yung’s fashionable nightclub; Joey,
barely able to get off a few rounds as the ballroom is decimated in a hailstorm
of bullets. Taking the attack personally, Stanley raises the stakes even
further, placing Herbert and Tracy in grave danger.
The following
day the Triad elders convene to discuss the bloody coup, each denying responsibility
for it. Joey suggests the elders appoint him the acting head of their
organization, or face further such assaults from the Nam Soong triads, the
Mafia, and, the Vietnamese. His own business in shambles, Yung votes for Joey –
a decision seconded by the remaining members. Shortly thereafter, Joey makes
his pilgrimage to Bangkok for a prearranged meeting with the mafia. Meanwhile,
Stan and Bukowski are given a severe dressing down by Commissioner Sullivan
(Mark Hammer) who demands an end to their hard line tactics. We cut to Tai
visiting the slum where his hit men reside, discovering it was he who ordered
the attack on Yung’s establishment in order to force the elders into accepting
his protection as their only alternative. Feigning concern for the two young
assassins, one severely wounded in the foot by Stanley, Tai orders the youth
gang’s leader, Ronnie Chang (Joey Chin) to murder both boys and dispose of
their bodies. After all, dead men tell
no tales. So, Chang shoots the pair
dead, their remains dumped in a vat inside one of the hellish underground sweat
shops. As Stanley and Herbert are going over various details, they are informed
of the discovery of these corpses. Stanley hurries to the crime scene, meeting
with acting officer, Alan Perez (Jack Kehler) who introduces him to Tony Ho
(Steve Chen) who has ‘discovered’ the bodies.
Drawing the
action just a little too close to home, Stanley invites Connie out to dinner at
Joey’s nightclub, virtually ignoring his wife at the bar to engage Joey in a
little one-on-one. Joey tries to bribe Stanley with a bit of disposable income
for his advancing retirement. Stanley turns it down. Realizing Stanley’s idea of their ‘dinner out’
was just a ploy to get in Joey’s face, Connie goes home and pitches all of her
husband’s possessions onto the front porch. Stanley should be mortified. But
actually, he is more nonplussed than anything, departing with his things to
take up temporary residence with Tracy in her high-rise apartment. Applying pressure, charm, and abject pleading
for his case, Stanley finds a sympathetic ear. Tracy lets him into her home,
heart and bed – the lovable bastard having scored another notch in his grand
plan to oust Joey Tai from power. Stanley is ruthless, ordering his men to
stage a massive lockdown on any spurious activities in Chinatown. Incensed, the
Triad elders begin to lose faith in Joey, turning to mafia boss, Teddy Tedesco
(Paul Scaglione) for counsel. In the badinage of thinly veiled threats that
follows, Joey and Teddy iron out their tenuous détente, the whole conversation
captured for posterity – and a jury to decide – by Herbert, recording everything
from across the street. From this
conversation, Stanley and his follower, Rizzo (Leonard Termo) learn Joey is
planning to fly to Bangkok.
Bukowski and
Stanley tie one on at a sleezy pool hall/bar; Bulkowski, openly criticizing
Stanley for ignoring Connie – the best thing that ever happened to him. In
Thailand, Joey meets with White Powder Ma (Fan Mui Sang), chieftain of the Nam
Soong gang and a rival distributor of Ban Sung's (Yukio Yamamoto) heroin. Meanwhile,
back in New York, Stanley attempts to patch things up with Connie. Regrettably,
their one peaceful interlude is interrupted by a home invasion, staged at Joey’s
request by Ronnie Cheung. Connie is fatally garroted, but Stanley manages to
shoot Cheung’s unidentified accomplice dead. Rizzo appears and helps Stanley
make chase; Stanley eventually firing the fatal shot that splits Cheung’s head
like an ax, moments before his getaway car careens into a solid cement wall,
exploding into a hellish fireball. We return to Thailand. Joey is done playing
nice. He enters into negotiations with the drug lord, Ban Sung to buy a purer
form of heroin. Ban Sung resists the
offer, claiming it is insignificant to the price he gets from White Powder Ma,
to which Joey responds by depositing White Powder Ma’s disembodied head on the
table. Back in New York, Stanley mourns the loss of his wife; Tony Ho,
appearing at the funeral to offer his sincere condolences.
Meanwhile, at
the airport, Tracy confronts Joey to learn the real reason for his trip to
Bangkok. Realizing there is a mole
within his organization, Joey is momentarily thrown by Tracy’s questions, but
refuses to answer her. Meanwhile, Stanley orders Herbert to go undercover inside
Joey’s restaurant and wiretap his office. Herbert refuses. It’s too dangerous.
And he will not die to satisfy Stanley’s thirst for revenge. Nevertheless, Herbert
does get a job as a lowly bus boy at the restaurant, taping the triad’s
conversations. The elders are disgusted with Joey’s recently botched attempt on
Stanley’s life. Joey promises them a foreseeable end to all their woes,
divulging the name of the ship carrying their heroin supply. The conversation
is interrupted by Perez, who informs Joey his offices are bugged. Believing he
has escaped the restaurant in the nick of time, Herbert is ruthlessly gunned
down by one of Joey’s youth gang recruits; Stanley, arriving just in time to coddle
his dying friend in his arms. Crashing Joey’s night out, Stanley pulverizes his
nemesis inside one of the bathroom stalls, his full-on assault, breaking Joey’s
nose and dunking his head in the toilet, interrupted by another of Joey’s youth
gang recruits, Red Hair (Doreen Chen), who attempts to shoot Stanley. She
wounds him in the neck. But Stanley makes chase through the nightclub and out
onto the streets, gunning down Red Hair in the middle of oncoming traffic. Alas,
Stanley is too late to spare Tracy, who is followed home by a trio of Joey’s
men, attacked and raped at knife point. At daybreak, Joey meets with the elders
for the last time. He will personally collect the heroin shipment to ensure
their prosperity.
Learning of
Tracy’s rape, Stanley vows to murder Joey. That evening, despite having been relieved
of his duties, Stanley makes good on his promise, tailing Joey and Perez to the
pier. Knowing Perez is the mole responsible for Herbert’s death, Stanley easily
dispatches with him. The car flips over and Joey is forced to flee on foot.
Getting into another car, he dares an escape across a trestle with an oncoming
train headed in his direction. In desperation, Joey puts the car in reverse,
coming in Stanley’s direct line of fire. Having escaped the train, Joey and Stanley
engage in a bizarre joust, charging at one another, guns blazing. Stanley is
the better shot, and proves it by riddling his competition in bullets. As Joey
slumps to the ground, Stanley spares his life. Instead, Joey asks for Stanley’s
gun, committing suicide moments before the police arrive to arrest him. We
return to Chinatown, another funeral procession – Joey Tai, immortalized under
the watchful eye of the new administration. Despite having no jurisdiction,
Stanley arrives on the scene, creating a disturbance that delays Joey’s cortege
from continuing down the avenue. He demands that every last one of the
participants and pallbearers be arrested. In the ensuing ruckus, Stanley and
Tracy are reunited. She thinks him crazier than ever, but cannot resist his inimitable
‘bad boy’ charm. The two reconciled lovers walk off together, leaving the
police to clean up Chinatown…maybe.
Year of the Dragon would be a worthy crime thriller
if not for its pedestrian dialogue sandwiched between feebly strung together
action sequences. Cimino makes up a lot of mileage in the latter half of the story,
beginning with Joey’s big reveal of White Powder Ma’s severed head, right up
until the climactic showdown between Joey and Stanley on the railroad tracks at
the pier. But the first two-thirds of the movie are an interminable display of seemingly
disjointed vignettes – one rudimentary scene of exposition, book-ended by two grotesquely
graphic scenes of thought-numbing viciousness, mostly involving a lot of Red
Dye #9 being indiscriminately spilled in gallon quantities all over the set.
Cimino is obviously going for broke here – his investment in bloody carnage preceding,
and arguably, outclassing even Quentin Tarantino’s directorial verve for graphically
illustrating murder and other inhumane cruelties by nearly 7 years (Reservoir Dogs, 1992). Not
surprisingly, Tarantino is a huge fan of Year
of the Dragon. Screen violence is often the barometer by which permissible
acts are measured against the norm and Hollywood’s own ratings system, designed
to delay more impressionable young minds from being exposed to such gratuitous
nightmares.
Miraculously, Year of the Dragon did not receive an ‘R’,
but a PG-13. Given its racially loaded content – there are enough ‘yellow-skinned’ slurs for six contemporary
action flicks – and, an even rawer penchant for finding new ways to bludgeon,
burst or otherwise dismember the human body, I find this rather shocking. Year of the Dragon’s vehemence would ostensibly
‘work’ if it contained at least a nugget of purpose, or, if Cimino had been
discriminate in ratcheting up its severity to its frenzied crescendo. Sadly,
Cimino is contented merely to give us one blood bath layered upon the next. I
lost count of the victims felled in Year
of the Dragon after only a few scenes into its 2 hr.+ run time. But it
remains one of the most pointlessly hard-nosed and fierce crime dramas ever put
on film. It does not help matters that the acting is uniformly bad; ergo, the
scenes in which live people actually pause to exchange dialogue without Ginsu-ing
or shooting each other in the head, leave the viewer positively craving the
next moment when all bets are off and the hatchets, pistols and power rifles
come out. Year of the Dragon was not
the hit-maker MGM/UA had hoped. After a relatively promising opening weekend,
it debuted at #5 at the box office, Year
of the Dragon barely grossed $18 million against its $24 million outlay – a
bomb, by any measure.
Year of the Dragon also received 5 Razzie Awards for
Worst Screenplay, Director, New Find and Actress (both Ariane) and Picture. It
incurred outrage from Asian American communities for its racial stereotyping, xenophobia
and decidedly perverse slant on Asian culture in general, forcing MGM/UA to preempt
the picture with the following flimsy disclaimer, “This film does not intend to demean or to ignore the many positive
features of Asian Americans and specifically Chinese American communities. Any
similarity between the depiction in this film and any association,
organization, individual or Chinatown that exists in real life is accidental.”
In the picture’s defense, noted critic, Pauline Kael assessed that Year of the Dragon was no more
xenophobic than Cimino’s crown jewel – The
Deer Hunter (1978) but referred to its overall structure as ‘flabby’, lacking tension and clarity.
Cimino sincerely defended Year of the
Dragon as being ‘not a racist film’
but rather a movie in which racist attitudes are exposed for their vile nature,
leaving the audience to judge. Setting aside the controversy, Year of the Dragon is not a great film.
I would sincerely argue it isn’t even a good one as, in the last analysis, if
does not entertain as much as it anesthetizes the senses in a blaze of menial
sex and violence that neither substantiates nor punctuates the plot, but has
been added in, merely to fill run time, if not necessarily our leisure in meaningful
ways.
Warner Archive
continues to mine its chestnuts in lieu of its treasures on Blu-ray. Honestly,
given all the great stuff still MIA under the studio’s banner, I am getting fairly
fed up with their promotion of movies that, by most any collective consensus,
even on such culturally astute sites as Rotten
Tomatoes, fair from middling to poor in both their public reception and
quality, yet continue to get pushed to the head of the line. What gives? As
with everything WAC pumps out, no one should be disputing the quality of their
efforts. This 1080p transfer sports an impressively rich palette of colors –
red, Chinese red…no less – being the predominant hue. At times, the image can
look just a tad washed out. But overall, color grading is impressive, showing
off Alex Thomson’s cinematography to great advantage. Flesh tones can appear slightly
skewed to pink, but again, nothing egregious or distracting. Contrast is a shay
weaker than anticipated, although I sincerely suspect this to be a flaw baked
into the original film elements and not a flaw of this transfer. Eighties film
stock was notorious for this. Film grain can appear thick at times, but this
too is indigenous to its source materials. The 5.1 audio shows off David
Mansfield’s score to its very best effect. The only extra, apart from a
trailer, is Cimino’s audio commentary, recorded at the time of the DVD release
from some years ago. Bottom line: Year
of the Dragon is a bloody, violent and distressingly tragic movie to wade
through. It belies Cimino’s prowess as a film-maker of quality fare because it
lacks a core understanding of the basic tenets of good solid film-making
(ergo, blood and guts do not a good movie make) or any meaningful character development
on which the audience can invest its own passion for good solid storytelling. This
Blu-ray has been competently rendered. The movie…well…judge and buy accordingly.
Regrets.
FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)
2
VIDEO/AUDIO
4
EXTRAS
1
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