Three Crowns of the Sailor
Director: Raoul Ruiz
Year Released: 1983
Rating: 2.0
Just like the famous Coleridge poem, this Ruiz update is a frame story, with the disheveled mariner telling his tale of woe to another man for the price of three Danish crowns. Sometimes clever and visually inventive, this keeps with Ruiz's almost absolute focus on style over substance, with the characters crudely drawn and their situations arbitrarily sewn together (even the dialogue seems to purposely go nowhere, as if no one's conversing with each other but rather themselves). I typically find this Cinema Is For Images Only approach to be hollow and its pleasures fleeting - once the admittedly pretty pictures have whizzed past the eye, what remains? - and am not always willing to be 'toyed with' by filmmakers (although at least Ruiz isn't sneaky about it).
