Word: epical
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...passport to visit the Forbidden City, let alone explore its ruler's forbidden soul. Last year, though, the director received free range of both from Pu Yi's successors, who regard his final, harmless-dodderer incarnation as an exemplary triumph for their system. The result is a film epic in length (almost three hours), vision (the reimagining of a lost and exotic world) and imagery (formal and glowing). Yet at its center is an anti-epic figure, inarticulate and victimized. The movie must therefore depend for its emotional power on a force rarely applied to the large-scale cinema: irony...
...military historian who had never seen combat, John Keegan distinguished - himself a decade ago by writing The Face of Battle, a vivid triptych on three epic British battles that had all taken place within about 100 miles of one another: Agincourt (1415), Waterloo (1815) and the Somme (1916). Keegan ignored many considerations of high strategy and concentrated instead on what the ordinary soldiers had encountered through the centuries: the recurring experience of pain, noise, terror, courage, exhaustion...
...ambitious new films, both telling tales of the end of empire, are as different as their titles: Cry Freedom and Sammy & Rosie Get Laid. The first is Director Richard Attenborough's stately, schizophrenic epic of South Africa a decade ago as blacks groped toward liberation. Sammy & Rosie is Screenwriter Hanif Kureishi's double vision of London as the hip place to be and the last place on postimperial earth. For 2 hr. 35 min., Cry Freedom meanders through a meadow of noble sentiments, finding its only drama in the education of a white liberal South African and his escape from...
...Rafi gets no more or less sympathy than any other character in this exuberant egalitarian stew of a movie. Once the empire has died, taking with it the old notions of great men who shape destinies and insignificant men who suffer like extras in an antediluvian epic, every motive is up for grabs. And what do we find in an empire's night ashes? Punks and ghosts and madmen dancing in the carnage or singing a Motown melody as all the survivors copulate on Armageddon Eve. In Sammy & Rosie's cultural revolution, the radicals strike not poses but sexual sparks...
...kindergarten teacher from the sticks. He, heir to the throne of Great Britain. Together, their love burned in a torrid bonfire of passion that captured the imagination of the world. A great love. An epic love. A love that kept Sasquatch off the front page of the Weekly World News...