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Jean-Jacques Annaud
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March 19, 2001 | Loquacious and leonine with a mass of curly white hair, director Jean-Jacques Annaud is the embodiment of French conviviality. The 57-year-old Academy Award-winning filmmaker relishes conversation and especially delights in aggressive questioning. That's a good thing, because he's getting plenty of tough queries in regard to his latest film, "Enemy at the Gates," an $85 million World War II epic set during the 1942 Nazi siege of Stalingrad (now Volgograd).
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Jean-Jacques Annaud's The Name of the Rose is a flawed attempt to adapt Umberto Eco's highly convoluted medieval bestseller for the screen, necessarily excising much of the esoterica that made the book so compelling. Still, what's left is a riveting whodunit set in a grimly and grimily realistic 14th-century Benedictine monastery populated by a parade of grotesque characters, all of whom spend their time lurking in dark places or scuttling, half-unseen, in the omnipresent gloom. A series of mysterious and gruesome deaths are somehow tied up with the unwelcome attention of the Inquisition, sent to root out suspected heretical behavior among the monastic scribes whose lives are dedicated to transcribing ancient manuscripts for their famous library, access to which is prevented by an ingenious maze-like layout.
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Typically impressive natural vistas from director Jean-Jacques Annaud (some secretly filmed on location in Tibet) highlight this adaptation of the memoir by Heinrich Harrer. Brad Pitt stars as the arrogant Heinrich, a famed Austrian mountain climber who leaves behind his wife and infant son to head a Himalayan expedition in 1939, only to fall into the hands of Allied forces as a prisoner of war. He and a fellow escapee, Peter Aufschnaiter (David Thewlis), make their way to the Forbidden City in Tibet, where Peter finds a wife and Heinrich befriends the Western culture-obsessed teenage Dalai Lama (Jamyang Jamtsho Wangchuk), the spiritual leader of his Buddhist nation. As Heinrich waits out the war, his friendship with the Dalai Lama begins to transform him from haughty to humble, but a crisis with China looms. A controversy over the revelation of the real-life Harrer's Nazi Party affiliation brewed during the film's production, forcing Annaud to briefly deal with the subject in the film. ~ Karl Williams, All Movie Guide
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Jean-Jacques Annaud directed this unusual and compelling tale of animals in the wild, which tells its tale from the bears' point of view. A pair of carefully-trained bruins deliver remarkably effective "performances" (aided by clever editing and, in some sequences, the use of realistic animated models). A infant bear cub (Douce the Bear) witnesses the death of his mother in a rockslide and is forced to set out to fend for himself. The young bear encounters a giant grizzly (Bart the Bear), who at first cannot abide the young bear's presence. However, the grizzly is soon ambushed by a pair of hunters -- Bill (Jack Wallace) and Tom (Tcheky Karyo) -- after an altercation with their pack animals. As the injured beast cleans his wounds in a stream, the young bear comes to his aid, and the giant takes the youngster under his wing.
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French filmmaker Jean-Jacques Annaud is known for tackling profound subject matter in films such as QUEST FOR FIRE, SEVEN YEARS IN TIBET, and ENEMY AT THE GATES. Occasionally he takes refuge in lighter films. After his first successful animal tale, THE BEAR (1989), Annaud's second wildlife film is TWO BROTHERS. Here the focus is two rambunctious, adorable tigers--Kumal and Sangha--who live among ancient temple ruins in the Southeast Asian jungle. They become victims of the garish and gluttonous era of British Colonialism in the early 1900s. Aidan McRory (Guy Pearce), a well-known explorer, hosts lavish hunting parties that are in stark contrast with the untamed wilderness.
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French filmmaker Jean-Jacques Annaud is known for tackling profound subject matter in films such as QUEST FOR FIRE, SEVEN YEARS IN TIBET, and ENEMY AT THE GATES. Occasionally he takes refuge in lighter films.
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Jean-Jacques Annaud