Praise
After Cimino's success with The Deer Hunter, he was considered a "Second Coming" among critics. In 1985, author Michael Bliss described Michael Cimino as a unique American filmmaker after only three films: "Cimino occupies an important position in today's cinema... a man whose cinematic obsession it is to extract, represent, and investigate those essential elements in the American psyche..." Frequent collaborator Mickey Rourke has often praised Cimino for his creativity and dedication to work. On Heaven's Gate, Rouke has said, "I remember thinking this little guy was so well organized. He had this huge production going on all around him yet he could devote his absolute concentration on the smallest of details."
Film director/screenwriter Quentin Tarantino has also expressed great admiration and praise for Cimino's The Deer Hunter, especially with regards to the Vietnamese POW Russian roulette sequence: "The Russian roulette sequence is just out and out one of the best pieces of film ever made, ever shot, ever edited, ever performed. Anybody can go off about Michael Cimino all they want but when you get to that sequence you just have to shut up." Tarantino also loved Cimino's Year of the Dragon and listed its climax as his favorite killer movie moment in 2004.
Read more about this topic: Michael Cimino
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“Everything here below beneath the sun is subject to continual change; and perhaps there is nothing which can be called more inconstant than opinion, which turns round in an everlasting circle like the wheel of fortune. He who reaps praise today is overwhelmed with biting censure tomorrow; today we trample under foot the man who tomorrow will be raised far above us.”
—E.T.A.W. (Ernst Theodor Amadeus Wilhelm)
“Fondly we think we honour merit then,
When we but praise ourselves in other men.”
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744)
“Of the best rulers The people only know that they exist; The next best they love and praise The next they fear; And the next they revile. When they do not command the people’s faith, Some will lose faith in them, And then they resort to oaths! But of the best when their task is accomplished, their work done, The people all remark, “We have done it ourselves.””
—Lao-Tzu (6th century B.C.)