Word: epical
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Giant. Minor bits by James Dean and Dennis Hopper illuminate this baggy epic from the Edna Ferber bestseller. CH.4. Two parts. Sat. 9 p.m., Mon. 9 p.m. Color...
...dollies in at all too frequent intervals. Rather than heightening the sense of political turbulence, however, this deadens it, lending The Assassination of Trotsky the faintly instructional air of a classroom film strip. By contrast, the movie assassination is staged like a scene out of some Hammer horror epic. Trotsky roars and staggers about after Jacson has smashed his skull with an ice ax. Images of Rasputin, riddled by bullets and reeling from poison, are inevitable and surely inappropriate...
Better Luck. What remains is an enervating epic about a young man, unpromising at school, whose parents did not pay him quite enough attention. Since Young Winston attempts to be a kind of vest-pocket spectacle, there are also a couple of the battles in which he fought (a set-to in the Sudan, a Boer skirmish). Attenborough stages them with all the fury of a grade school recess. He has better luck with the actors, perhaps because he is an actor himself. Ward is credible in the thorny role of Winston as a young man, Shaw superb...
...same criteria. Troell, in this single story from a larger epic we are promised he'll continue, has put together the most effective film in years to be based on the shared life of a social group. The films that usually get the kudos in this category are dreary affairs like Going Down the Road and Fat City, which reduce people coerced into drudgery into pitiable misfits, driven by brute biological urges and inchoate longings for a better way. (The directors are also inappropriately general because of their mistrust of the subject matter. They milk our sympathy with occasional gropes...
Although an epic of sorts about World War II. The Sorrow is primarily a documentary of people--who are, after all, the substance of history. The events of the war are a framework and a point of departure, no more than that. The film carries the sad message of human fallibility and deals with the complex of eagerness and discouragement which drives men to apathy. Its lessons are taught by those who endured the war's daily life with more or less dignity. They are the bit players, but they fill this European stage. Ultimately, humankind's performance depends...