Word: epical
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...THIS EPIC cost a lot of money. It may even be Lindsay Anderson's last film. Many directors with far more promising, if smaller, projects cannot get financing. Anderson is far more full of ideas than is this film, and McDowell can do much better work than playing a role where most of his time is spent watching things happen to him. Films which seem initially to be failures by artists we respect deserve to be looked at closely, and on their own terms. Sometimes, as we begin to understand the artist's purpose, the work seems to grow...
ALTHOUGH Schwarz-Bart is dealing with an epic subject at minimal length, telescoping action and using primitively direct means to etch his characters, he nowhere descends to type. The various slaves and Frenchmen are distinct individuals as well as symbols; a major reason for the purity of Solitude's anger is her heritage, developed beyond that of most other slaves. The fantasies of slave-owners are indictment enough without the glaze of the author's own rancor, and one of the oppressors is almost sympathetic, with strong psychological motivations for his actions as a slave-owner (his father had been...
...Prescott and Bancroft. They developed a style of history which demands literary excellence and imagination and Starr has both. It is a style which is narrative rather than analytical; the author's analysis is implied in and intuited from his selection and presentation of materials. It reads like an epic poem, like a saga of heroes, and it means to evoke a feeling of continuity: movement forward along not always logical but inevitable lines. In that way it imparts a life and meaning to the past that no bare analysis is capable of. The book itself becomes part...
THURSDAY: Alexander Nevsky. (1938) Sergei Eisenstein's epic of 13th century warfare in Russia scarcely veils its gung-ho John Wayne-style plumping for Josef Stalin and his then-tough policy towards Hitler's Germany. CH.2...
...nearly 400 pages, The Great American Novel is part of the same line. Ostensibly a baseball epic of the 1943 Ruppert Mundys, the book is to contemporary fiction what silicone injections are to topless dancing. It is an extravagant mockery of form, a freak show aggressively thrust at the public. "Read me big boy till I faint," Roth seems to be saying, in a paraphrasing of Portnoy's burlesque-queen fantasy. He seems to have cleaned his desk drawers of every party bit and wild turn. He has also researched his subject, spending hours at the baseball Hall...