{"id":93071,"date":"2016-04-10T08:39:45","date_gmt":"2016-04-10T16:39:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=93071"},"modified":"2016-04-10T08:39:45","modified_gmt":"2016-04-10T16:39:45","slug":"empire-of-the-sun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=93071","title":{"rendered":"Empire of the Sun"},"content":{"rendered":"

Steve Sailer writes<\/a>: I thought Spielberg\u2019s \u201cEmpire of the Sun\u201d was the greatest movie of the 1980s. Spielberg auditioned hundreds looking for the best boy actor in Britain, and as of 2016 it seems pretty reasonable to think he found him in Christian Bale.<\/p>\n

Usually, boy actors are exceptionally boyish looking so they can be older than their apparent screen age: DiCaprio, for example, is a babyfaced guy who is also a great movie star. But Bale, on the other hand, has always been a normally handsome guy who always looks about his real age.<\/p>\n

But \u201cEmpire of the Sun\u201d bombed at the box office and Christian Bale didn\u2019t get much of a career boost from it.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s adapted from an autobiographical novel by J.G. Ballard by Tom Stoppard, but much of the movie is taken from a handful of pages in the book.<\/p>\n

There are a lot of very Stoppardian moments in movie. Stoppard in his early plays like After Magritte had developed this technique of \u201creal surrealism\u201d where he displays some highly implausible tableau and then backtracks to show you the fairly mundane reasons behind the scene. But Stoppard mostly played this for laughs, while \u201cEmpire of the Sun\u201d is full of astonishing scenes for which the explanation is: The Biggest War of All Time.<\/p>\n

In an interview, Stoppard asserted that most Stoppardian moments in the movie, such as the amazing kamikaze sequence, weren\u2019t actually in his script. Stoppard said his imagination doesn\u2019t work on that big budget of a scale. He attributed them to Spielberg (or, I might add, whomever Spielberg hired to scriptdoctor Stoppard\u2019s work). The movie serves as sort of Spielberg\u2019s giant budget tribute to Stoppard; but there aren\u2019t that many people who like both Stoppard and Spielberg, so the Venn diagram of \u201cEmpire of the Sun\u201d fanatics is small.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Steve Sailer writes: I thought Spielberg\u2019s \u201cEmpire of the Sun\u201d was the greatest movie of the 1980s. Spielberg auditioned hundreds looking for the best boy actor in Britain, and as of 2016 it seems pretty reasonable to think he found … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-93071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hollywood"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=93071"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93071\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":93072,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93071\/revisions\/93072"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=93071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=93071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=93071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}