Word: epical
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Director Mark Prascak has trimmed Ibsen's epic-length verse drama Peer Gynt to a more comfortable hour and forty minutes, reduced its cast to 10 actors playing a multiplicity of roles, changed its title character's name, modernized its dialogue, and staged it on the edge of a swimming pool. Does it work? I don't know; it's hard to tell...
...source material is the longest epic of world literature, a 100,000- stanza poem about seven times the combined length of The Iliad and The Odyssey. Like those works, the Mahabharata is a glorious welter of incident and digression, evoking not just a central story of ruinous war but an array of myths and human archetypes and an animal world aquiver with magic. It would be hard to overstate its role as a wellspring of Indian culture. Brook, however, was drawn to its transcending themes: man's joyous awakening to nature and love and duty, the menacing lures of vanity...
...vows, of curses, of omens. Above all it glories in the eternal reign of the storyteller, whose chronicles outlast the might of the captains and kings and, yes, even gods who figure in his tales. At one point a deity confronts the poet who is purportedly narrating the epic and demands, "Vyasa, which of us has invented the other?" That is art at its most self- aggrandizing. Yet how indeed does man come to comprehend anything beyond his immediate world if not through the artist? The Mahabharata is studded with such observations and moves at a pace leisurely enough...
...found out. A director-daredevil in the grand British line of Michael Powell and David Lean, Boorman thinks there is still an empire, of traditions if not of global power, worth challenging and defending. Let smaller-souled men paint still lifes of kitchen sinks; Boorman is a muralist, with epic ambitions and a lust for impossible risks. He has spent his movie career navigating wild rivers (Deliverance) or cutting his way through jungles (The Emerald Forest), plunging into the mythic past (Excalibur) or the hallucinatory present (Exorcist II: The Heretic). Each film is an exploration of the dark places where...
...starring Griffin Dunne as an impish obstetrician who insists that his painted fist is a woman's newborn baby ("Wanna breast-feed him?"). But most find plenty of fun at show biz's expense. Movies: Amazon Women on the Moon, a parody of the already camp Zsa Zsa Gabor epic Queen of Outer Space. Books: "Irving Sidney's" First Lady of the Evening, in which the President marries a hooker. TV: commercials for a synthetic hors d'oeuvre called Silly Pate and for the laundered lilt of Black Singer Don ("No Soul") Simmons. The whole thing has the offhand lunacy...