Word: epical
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...jubilant finale, the troupe is now performing an uproarious double bill about bad theater and worse reviewers: Tom Stoppard's staging of his own The Real Inspector Hound, followed by Sheridan's dizzying spoof of epic tragedy, The Critic, last seen on Broadway 40 years ago in a production that featured Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson in roles that McKellen and Petherbridge play. Hound is a schoolboy-clever send-up of Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, with all its clunking contrivances, coupled with the petulant fantasies of a second-string critic (Petherbridge) about an uprising by all the world...
McKellen, giving perhaps the best performance of his career, is Mr. Puff, a hyperkinetic and vaguely Celtic specialist in panegyric, which is to say, a forerunner of the modern public relations man. From touting others, he has turned to writing his own epic tragedy, The Spanish Armada. At a rehearsal, everything goes wrong. The actors drop whole swatches of dialogue as turgid and unplayable. The bit players upstage the leads, who swat them. A sword fight is a model of slapstick ineptitude. A Minister of State (Petherbridge) comes out, stares at the audience long and balefully, and departs...
King of Madison Avenue? No agency can hang on to that crown for long these days, thanks to an epic acquisition binge. Only two weeks ago, the merger of three large firms--BBDO International, Doyle Dane Bernbach Group and Needham Harper Worldwide--created the biggest agency in the world (estimated annual billings: $5 billion). But that superdeal appeared to have been surpassed last week when London's Saatchi & Saatchi agreed to buy Manhattan-based Ted Bates Worldwide for an estimated $350 million. Those two companies, which are expected to announce the deal early this week, will have billings of about...
...million, runs only 89 minutes in its current form, and had its U.S. release delayed for almost a year before surprising everybody with two consecutive top-grossing weeks. But even with this belated victory, why should Scott have bothered making Legend? Because, of all movie genres, the quest epic is the one most amenable to the artistic dictatorship of studio moviemaking. The fantasy world is not a photocopy of any world present or past; it exists only in the mind of the screenwriter, the eye of the production designer, the hands of the carpenters, the computerized Wurlitzers of the effects...
Unlike a purely political epic, The Saga of Israel and Zionism has a broad spiritual dimension. For nearly 2,000 years a dispersed people kept telling one another, "Next year in Jerusalem." That turned out to be 1948, the year Israel actually became the autonomous homeland of the Jews. It is an oft-told story and one that is usually orchestrated for axes and grindstones. O'Brien is diplomatic but not impartial; he accepts the rationale of Israel and its right to defend itself against surrounding enemies. He sympathizes with Palestinians who feel they have...