It's a didactic film in the very best sense of the word, even, dare I say, a Brechtian film.
A didactic film that is garish or woodenly acted shouldn't be rewarded just for its message either; you need both, which is why great directing is hard, and why only a few people get nominated.
But his motion is also a matter of metaphysics: the movie is a classic in yet another genre, the two-roads-diverged story, and its twist pivots on a face that's a masterstroke of casting and that launches this brisk, didactic film into the realm of horror classics.
The bluntly didactic film is far from Kurosawa's best; it says something about the nature of movies that the subject was treated far more effectively in the pop-metaphorical terms of a monster movie directed a year earlier by Kurosawa's longtime assistant, Ishiro Honda.
"What people thought of when they heard about it was a bunch of politically correct, didactic, boring films," she said.
Although didactic, the film had an exceptional cast that included Joanne Woodward, Anthony Perkins, Laurence Harvey, and Cloris Leachman.
It's a prose style inspired by the didactic operas and films of Madame Mao — the only permissible art in China during Min's youth — and she has developed it into an instrument with remarkable range, full of sorrow and humor, sometimes appealingly coarse and sometimes nuanced.
Yet, in its obsession with the polishing of candlesticks, the folding of towels and the almost Prussian deployment of napkins and bed linen, Martha Stewart actually owes an enormous debt to the implacably didactic "mental hygiene" films that were popular in American schools from 1945 to 1970.
That dialogue gives you some idea of the oversimplification rampant in "Green Card Fever," an amiable but highly didactic romantic drama filmed in the United States (Columbus, Ohio) in English.
But where Sinclair could be overly didactic, Anderson's film suffers from a lack of thematic clarity, compounded by some of his shifts in emphasis.
