Word: afare
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...RHAPSODY IN AUGUST, three generations of a Japanese family contemplate a great and terrible event, the bombing of Nagasaki. But the milieu director Akira Kurosawa creates for their deliberations is small and serene: a farm where a grandmother, who witnessed the blast from afar and lost her husband in it, gently and indirectly informs her grandchildren about the past. And about the proper way to confront it -- with calm, unblinking acceptance. This is a part of their education their parents have neglected. For the middle generation, seeking economic advantage, especially with a branch of the family that has immigrated...
...WHEN Franklin Delano Roosevelt won in 1932, he wasn't messing around with this businesslike two-name stuff. His fifth cousin/uncle-in-law Teddy had called himself TR, and the new Roosevelt thought that would be cool. But FR sounded a lot like "afar" or "fart," and he was an aristocrat, so he kept the "Delano...
Tropical beach, blazing sun, men in white suits, winsome native children. A horse gallops along the shore as a light plane lazes overhead. A beautiful woman sits in a convertible, adored from afar, drenched in diamonds, caressed by a soft-focus camera. The plane lands, several dapper gents step out and launch a poker game. As the stakes escalate, the sexiest of them frets, "I'm a little short." The woman takes charge. "Not so fast," she says, removing a huge sparkler and tossing it onto the table. "These have always brought me luck," she purrs...
...subject is familiar from Chinatown: Los Angeles has its water piped in from afar; the archetypal modern city is built on the theft of age-old resources. Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi (1983) had the same doomsday message dressed in high-tech style. That movie was serious fun, but O'Neill's is bolder, more disciplined. Every shot has a lure and a meaning; the film's shapely silhouette is easy to trace. Gorgeous and zippy, Water and Power is an intoxicant without a hangover...
Seen simplistically and from afar, Saddam Hussein comes across as a figure seldom found outside the pages of comic books or pulp fiction: the villain who will stop at nothing, an Arab Dr. No alive and menacing in the Middle East. Some are content to leave it at that. The demonizing of Saddam has escalated along with the war and seems omnipresent in the West. Last week the op-ed page of the New York Times ran a David Levine drawing titled The Descent of Man. Running from left to right were representations of Clark Gable, a gorilla, a chimpanzee...