Word: ballads
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...World War II Japan's new wave, who told haunting, often surreal tales of prostitutes, pimps and working-class heroes; in Tokyo. Rejecting the idealized, selfless protagonists of classical Japanese film, he depicted resilient men and women who guard their dignity even amid brutal conditions. In 1983's The Ballad of Narayama, one of two Imamura films to win the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, residents of a mythic 19th century village struggle with an edict requiring them to abandon their elders to die on a mountain. "I want to make messy, really human, unsettling films," he said...
...Laura David Raskin The title tune from the 1944 film became one of the most recorded songs of all time. This ex-Secretary, who calls it a "hauntingly beautiful ballad," first heard it as a Navy officer on leave during World...
...fast." By the end of the verse, his voice has dropped an octave to whisper, "And it's all over now, Baby Blue." We also adopted Dylan's dismissal of the clueless - "Something is happening but you don't know what it is, / Do you, Mr. Jones?" - in "Ballad of a Thin Man." The ultimate shrug-off came from "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right": "You just sorta wasted my precious time...
...college back then, and couldn't miss the similarity between the poems I was studying and the ones Dylan was creating. The connection was particularly acute in "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," his 1962 updating of the medieval ballad "Edward My Son," in which he compressed its seven questioning verses into five ("Where have you been?... What did you see?... What did you hear?... Who did you meet?... What'll you do now, my blue-eyed son, my darling young one?"), building a Chartres of apocalyptic imagery. Dylan once said he didn't know if the world would...
...pretty, sad-eyed young woman who's nearly run over by a bus. Then to shots of a girls' volleyball game, their grace and strength italicized by being filmed in slow motion. All this to Antony and the Johnsons' "My Lady Story," a dreamy-sounding, gentle massage of a ballad with scalpel-sharp lyrics ("My lady's story / Is one of annihilation... / I'm a hole in love / I'm a bride on fire / I am twisted / Into a starve of wire...