Word: ben-hur
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...battle, a sea of extras, stretching farther than the eye can see, brings the army to life on a breath-taking scale. Which makes very clear what the veteran visionary Scott wants his Gladiator to be a bona fide throwback to old-fashioned Hollywood epics like Spartacus and Ben-Hur, which prided themselves on creating the biggest spectacle possible. Sure, those films had stories (Spartacus had a great one, in fact), but even more important was the way in which they took full advantage of cinematic technology in order to make the saga seem literally larger-than-life...
Miklos Rozsa paid for his swimming pool by scoring such celluloid epics as Double Indemnity and Ben-Hur. Result: snobbish critics wrongly assumed his concert music was glitzy trash. Five years after his death, the Oscar-winning Hungarian composer is at last getting acclaim for such disciplined yet intensely passionate works as the soaring violin concerto he wrote in 1956 for Jascha Heifetz, newly and brilliantly recorded by McDuffie, Yoel Levi and the Atlanta Symphony. Forget the dumb critics' bum rap--this is great music...
...enchanted jungle. Well-behaved elephants. All of this headed by the regal, charming, sexy Chow Yun-Fat. Sounds better than the Greatest Show on Earth. However, the shaky basis, unnecessary length and wobbly storyline of Anna and the King denies it a place amongst epic love stories like Ben-Hur and The English Patient...
...million Total take for Ben-Hur, 1959's most popular movie...
...basic plot--a bright misfit goes undercover to save his people from foreign domination--it's pure Mulan. You'll also find echoes of Cecil B. DeMille's 1956 essay in panoramic kitsch, The Ten Commandments (including the climactic Red Sea parting), and its Oscar-laden sibling, the 1959 Ben-Hur (including the chariot race). All are about two young men, raised as brothers, whose proud convictions set them on a moral and political collision course...