Word: bladed
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...then sets to work. After a while, though, the task becomes less thrilling. He puts down his hoe and starts throwing rocks: "When Jim picked up his hoe, he noticed that it was about the length of a baseball bat. He grasped the handle right above the blade and took a couple of practice swings. He found a suitable hitting rock and tossed it up in the air and swung at it with the handle. Strike one." The topic covered here is not goofing off but rather how a young boy feels while doing...
...plant. They talked--and shouted--16 hours a day, seven days a week in a small office on Shanghai's Huashan Street. "I would say, 'I can't live with that, Mr. Hu. I'll get killed,' and he would say, 'My neck is under the blade here,' and so it would go," says Murtaugh. But with the technology-transfer guarantee from Smith, the Shanghai government was as determined as GM to make the joint venture a success. "We were both under orders that this was going to happen," says Murtaugh. "We had to resolve the issues. We couldn...
...course!" Of course there's a magnetic pull of audiences to Roman Empire epics--stories about palace sex, political backstabbing and violent raids are as today as the Clinton Administration. Of course Ridley Scott, whose only big hit was the 1979 Alien but who directed influential films such as Blade Runner and Thelma & Louise, possessed the vision and stamina to bring a complex story to screen life. And you bet Russell Crowe has the thoughtful, coiled danger, the unfakable maleness to become one of Hollywood's most wanted actors. He simply needed a showcase as grand as this...
Maximus escapes the executioner's blade and is sold into a troupe of gladiators, including the African Juba (Djimon Hounsou). Their job is to fight and die, and their Vince McMahon is the wily Proximo (Oliver Reed). Act II of Gladiator is a backstage show-biz story, the one about the old pro who makes a comeback in a new role. Maximus' battleground is now the arena; instead of barbarians, his opponents are hungry tigers. Proximo tells Maximus he must make the crowd love him. If he does, he'll go out there as Tiger Chow but come back...
...intense an action film as it may be, Gladiator fails as a full-fledged epic. Scott has never been particularly adept at the human aspect of his stories (it's no coincidence that Blade Runner is his best film) and here the human relationships are often severely lacking, cold even. The friendship between Maximus and a fellow gladiator (played by Amistad's Djimon Hounsou) has no emotional resonance, nor does his bland romance (if you want to call it that) with the emperor's sister (Connie Nielsen). And as wonderful as Crowe is, the detached nature of his character (mostly...