Word: emperor
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This Amadeus dares to pose the riddle of genius in the form of a traditional celebrity bio pic. In 1781 Mozart (Tom Hulce), once the put-upon prodigy of musical Europe, comes at the age of 26 to the Viennese court of Hapsburg Emperor Joseph II (played with a sly, thin smile and a delicious air of cagey indecisiveness by Jeffrey Jones). There the man of the moment is Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham): court composer, consummate technician and politician, Emperor's favorite, a musical lion of Vienna. Most important, he knows his place, as an educated servant among...
...mention these commercial risks, though, is to take a Hapsburg Emperor's narrow view of art's bottom line. Amadeus may be a popular film for the same reason it is a good one: it paints, in vibrant strokes, an image of the artist as romantic hero. The textbook Mozart, embalmed in immortality, comes raucously alive as a punk rebel, grossing out the Establishment, confuting his chief rival, working himself to death in an effort to put on paper songs no one else can hear. Who among us cannot sympathize, even identify, with such an icon of iconoclasm...
...establish. Anticipating power, Erdosain dreams himself in a chamber at the bottom of the sea: "On the other side of the porthole, one-eyed sharks were swimming about, vile humored because of their piles ... Now all the fish in the sea were one-eyed, and he was the Emperor of the City of One-Eyed Fish...
...among the peoples, just as the Olympic Games today could be a symbol of unity among all members of the human race." The question is what power such a symbol has, and how long its effects survive. It is easy to point to the 1,503-year hiatus between Emperor Theodosius' suspension and Baron De Coubertin's resuscitation of the Games and conclude that the world did not need them, but the world has only painted itself into its deadly corner in the past 40 years. If, as Stone says, the Games really are a symbol of the "human fraternity...
...resigned to become a singer-songwriter. Some years later, a circus geek called Oofty Goofty became a sidewalk S-M entrepreneur: he let passers-by cane him for a quarter or hit him with a baseball bat for four bits. When another local loon, the self-appointed Norton I, Emperor of North America and Protector of Mexico, died in 1880, 30,000 people (out of a population of 234,000) went to the funeral. A century later, a punk rocker named Jello Biafra ran for mayor and finished fourth among ten candidates. Rudyard Kipling wrote that San Francisco...