Word: epical
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...heart attack in a Times Square-area hotel while struggling downstairs with his garbage. The measure of Atlas' biography is that he does not exploit the implications of that curtain scene. With admirable restraint he suggests that Schwartz was a lyric poet who insisted on being an epic poet: given that divergence, tragedy was the only possible outcome...
...fact that it's virtually impossible to whistle, sing or hum. "Gimme the Goods" revives the sad small-time hoods of "Lido Shuffle," still looking for that one last job to put them on Easy Street. This time, the tune is much more funky, a roaring big-band epic that pulls out all the stops. Steve Lukather kicks in a gine guitar solo here, and its passion points up the relative sterility of all the hoopla framing it. (Jay Graydon, lately of "Doonesbury" fame, has the same effect on "Then She Walked Away"--his ringing, simple guitar makes the rest...
Like its hero, The Honourable Schoolboy is all too obviously imperfect. In his effort to detail the slow, agonizing life of the aging spy, le Carre has gone overboard, producing a novel of epic proportions that conveys a theme of only moderate importance. What begins as a portrait of tired, dirty, washed-out and disillusioning reality becomes a frequently tedious chronicle of flatulent, hemmorhoidal and unnecessarily repulsive dreariness. The author uses a bludgeon when a tap on the shoulder would suffice--and heavy-handedness goes beyond his unsubtle attempts to expose the spy game. Le Carre's blatant symbolism...
Howard Fast's novel The Immigrants is yet another pop epic to underscore this fact. The life and writing career of the author follow a familiar script as well. Fast, 62, was once the U.S.'s best-known literary Communist. In the '40s he wrote throbbingly about American history: the Revolutionary War in The Unvanquished and Citizen Tom Paine, Reconstruction in Freedom Road. As a political activist of the far left, he spent three months in jail during 1950 for failing to comply with a House Un-American Activities Committee subpoena. He was a columnist...
This $8 million epic, Bertolucci's first effort since Last Tango in Paris, is a fabulous wreck. Abundantly flawed, maddeningly simpleminded, 1900 nonetheless possesses more brute poetic force than any other film since Coppola's similarly operatic Godfather II. If Bertolucci irritates as much as he dazzles, he never bores: his extravagant failure has greater staying power than most other directors' triumphs...