Word: epical
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Cassavetes is determined to present here an epic chase of lost opportunities, and in his celebration of friendship, he squeezes the last drop out of all the old good-time virtues. The beginning of the film delights in physicality. There is a long vomit sequence that, for all its sordidness, perfectly expresses the emotions at the end of a two-day drunk. Vomiting is Cassavetes' simple but apt metaphor for twenty years of marriage suddenly become twenty years too much...
...epic displays of Monday-morning quarterbacking are, unfortunately, barometers of our current paranoid scene. Why blame the Kennedy myth on Kennedy? The American people created the myth. It was the last thing we did as a whole...
...producer-director-writer James Clavell was able to get the six million-plus cash backing for the film only because of his last work: the dreadfully successful To Sir, with Love. If not for his track record, he would not have been able to make a full-blown medieval epic whose hero is a rationalist mercenary who urges idealists to kill if they want to preserve any happiness and falls in love with a Satan-worshipper. And Clavell went straight to major financing: ABC pictures and its affiliated Cinemara releasing company. It reminds one of the runaway productions made...
...which goes beyond personal conflict; it is treated as such. Like a good old Warner Brothers hack, Clavell lets the atmosphere seep in as his story rides, doesn't try to obfuscate the dialogue, and relies squarely on his camera only in climactic moments. Since the film is an epic, there are many of them: gruesome treks, battle scenes and fatal individual combats. There is little of the David Lean-William Wyler pretension strangling itself in technicolor and wallowing in bathos...
...integrity. There was always a kind of folk realism to the Western. Audiences related to the films historically: this was their image of their past, a totally moral one, and the Western was as popular during good times as during bad. The swashbuckler, which was regarded as epic only when stricken with elephantiasis, was always a totally escapist form: it transported the audience to a never-never land where evil baron Basil Rathbone could say to rebel Errol Flynn, "You speak treason!"; to which Flynn could add: "Fluently." What creative rapport could Hollywood establish with twelfth-century England or Italian...