Word: epical
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Director Peter Brook's work in the 1980s includes an 80-minute condensation of Bizet's Carmen and a 9 1/2-hour adaptation of the Hindu epic The Mahabharata. He is probably best remembered for his 1970 A Midsummer Night's Dream, which uncovered weighty conflicts of the sexes and social classes in what had been seen as amiably airy farce. That production, gymnastic and visually abstract, signaled a revolutionary intent from the first glance. This time Brook's method is less obtrusive: though there are no sets to speak of, the costumes are in period and the air is abuzz...
...film was previewed in Japan, the scene was gone. "A big misunderstanding," said a spokesman for the Shochiku-Fuji distribution company, which apparently snipped the 40-second sequence from its prints because it feared a backlash from right-wing Japanese. Bertolucci accused Shochiku-Fuji of mutilating his masterpiece, an epic tale of modern China. Company Executive Shinji Serada phoned the Italian director to apologize, and promised to restore the missing clip. But the flap was certain to dismay the Chinese, who have often accused Japan of trying to avoid the blame for its militaristic past...
After settling an epic four-year legal battle last month by agreeing to pay Pennzoil $3 billion, Texaco seemed ready to emerge from bankruptcy proceedings, and the company's executives thought they had every reason to celebrate. But the men who wear the star may have to put away the champagne and bring back the lawyers. Last week the Internal Revenue Service told Texaco that it may face a stunning back-tax bill: $6.5 billion...
...Bernhard Goetz of Gotham City, and the police commissioner issues a warrant for his arrest. He is not only a hero for a more cynical time, but the standard-bearer of a fresh form of imaginative fiction. In 1986, when Writer-Artist Frank Miller created his formidable Batman epic The Dark Knight Returns (Warner; 188 pages; $12.95), he conceived the adventure as a single narrative flow. Pictures went with the story, which was told like a movie in panels on paper. By strictest definition, that made The Dark Knight Returns a comic book, but that term, with its unfortunate suggestions...
...West Coast, the work of the brothers Gilbert, Jaime and Mario Hernandez appears in books bearing the title of the comic in which they originated, Love and Rockets (Fantagraphics; $10.95 each). Los Bros Hernandez, as they sometimes bill themselves, share a fluid style embracing both the extravagances of pulp epic and the flat-light simplicity of vintage Archie comics. Dave Stevens' The Rocketeer (Eclipse; 70 pages; $19.95), set in the '30s, teems with robust adventure and romantic misalliance, all drawn in the scrumptious Sunday- funnies style of Milton Caniff. And the three volumes titled Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (First Publishing...