Word: epical
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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JANIS JOPLIN would have detested The Rose. Starring Bette Midler, this thinly-disguised biography chronicles the epic self-destruction of Rose, a white woman from the south, singin' the blues. Director Mark Rydell clearly knows how to hack at the heartstrings; the very first shot of the film identifies Rose, i.e. Janis "pearl" Joplin, with the other self-destructive heroes of our culture, Marilyn Monroe and James Dean. As the biography of a real woman, The Rose reveals nothing. It takes a marvelously idiosyncratic human being and reduces her to a cliche...
Visionary ineloquence has a lot to do with native American culture, being woven into the American sense of the epic-and in painting, Still is its living example. His entire output is a repudiation of the cult of the "well-made picture." From the beginning, Still's art-unlike, say, de Kooning's-set itself in opposition to the cubist tradition with its small scale, ambiguities of space and geometric calibration. What he wanted, and had found by 1947, was a much simpler, grander and more declarative kind of structure: opaque, ragged planes of color rearing...
...tradition to which Still's work is related is heroic landscape, the art of the epic vista, as seen in 19th century America by painters like Bierstadt and Moran. No doubt, in some general way, his years spent under larger skies than Manhattan's, in the Midwest and Pacific Northwest, contributed to the sense of vast atmospheric scale in his art. But to read it directly as landscape violates its meaning. The cliffs and ravines of color, the jagged rifts of blue or vermilion breaking through a matrix of dense enveloping black, are no metaphors of the Grand...
...travel the world with his tape in my pocket as if it were my passport, some one has listened to it. When Mike Wallace came to interview me in Italy for 60 Minutes and asked me to hear Kissinger's voice telling his own cowboy epic, I played the tape in front of the whole CBS group. Wallace heard what he wanted and he got very excited, even amused...
...CAST, although generally competent, particularly warms to their roles during the last scene, which-appropriately enough for a law school audience--takes place in a courtroom. From an epic style in the earlier portion of the play. Brecht shifts nimbly to parable. Grusha must contend with the haughty mother over who will gain possession of the child. Azdak, the magistrate-rogue, played with animation by David Miller, gives the "chalk-circle test." Grusha lets go of Michael because she doesn't want to hurt him "I brought him up! Should I tear him apart...