'YEAR OF THE DRAGON'.......THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF MICHAEL CIMINO........

Year Of The Dragon (1985)   As we pointed out in yesterday's post on "Heaven's Gate", if there's one thing we loved about controversial writer-director Michael Cimino, it was his whole-hearted embrace of larger-than-life visual excess........

           In that regard, he crafted his films with the same Grand Opera exaggerations as Sergio Leone......(if you saw crowd scenes in a Cimino film, you knew they'd look bigger, noisier and more chaotic than crowd scenes in anyone else's movies....)

             And with Oliver Stone as a co-screenwriter, Cimino found an over-the-top kindred spirit.....a fellow lover of overdone, overblown mayhem, bombast and hyperbole......

             What a perfect pair to make a movie about a volcanic-tempered New York cop (Mickey Roarke), a Vietnam veteran who wages war on an ambitiously ultra-violent young Chinatown gangster (John Lone).

              Even better, under the auspices of mogul Dino DeLaurentis, Cimino got to re-create his very own little Chinatown on a sound stage in Wilmington, North Carolina.....

              Teeming, busy and colorful, Cimino's rogue Chinatown looks like an ethic village in Disney World..........except for the fact that in a Disney village, you don't normally thrill to the sight of the wild-eyed Roarke engaging in blood-splattered gun battles with Lone's army of punk assassins.

             The bullets fly, the bodies fall........and there's no relief for anyone even in the dialogue sequences. Roarke's defiantly obnoxious character carries on an adversarial relationship with everyone he comes across.......including his equally intemperate wife (Caroline Kava) and his sort of new girlfriend, a TV reporter who's always on the spot for all the carnage... (played by Ariane, a fashion model who shouts her lines like she's reading them from cue cards held too far away from her....)

               Guilty pleasures don't come any guiltier than this........and unlike "Heaven's Gate" which, granted,  takes an iron will and limitless patience to sit through, Cimino makes this one a virtual rollercoaster ride.....it periodically explodes,without a moment's notice, into gloriously gory set pieces........(most of them occurring in a huge Chinatown restaurant, a marvel of production design with multiple floors and stairways....)

               As we once again enjoyed Mickey Roarke (still looking human before his strange boxing career) and John Lone exact grim vengeance on one another, we couldn't help wishing Cimino had been more prolific.  Alas, his problematic personality and enormous ego undid his career in filmmaking.......studios showed little tolerance for a Grand Opera director who behaved like a Grand Opera diva-soprano.

              We know there's no rational artistic defense of "Year Of The Dragon"........it's ridiculous and hyper-ventilating from start to finish.......

              But ya know what?  We got biggest kick out of the goddamn thing.........Cimino never had to slavishly imitate video-store sludge like Tarantino.......he brought his very own internal crazy to his films, with a showman's eye for spectacle.......(and by that, we mean the real stuff, not something concocted by 300 people sitting at computer terminals....)

              So we don't care about any aesthetically-correct consensus of Cimino's work, whatever that might be these days.......for us, "Year Of The Dragon" remains a visually splendid hoot.....4 stars (****).....we would have given it 5 if someone just held the cue cards a little closer to Ariane's face.....