Word: epical
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...HASTY PUDDING Theatricals' choice of Sylvester Stallone as its Man of the Year has come amidst much ballyhoo and expression of outrage within the Harvard community. A slaughterer of senior citizens in the epic movie Death Race 2000 and an exterminator of Third World peoples in Rambo, Stallone surely does not merit one of the University's most prestigious honors, so say his Harvard critics...
...actually made it to the screen is close to a miracle; that it turns out to be another of TV's pretty but plodding historical sagas is less surprising. With its lavish sets (including the 17th century Kremlin) and the proverbial cast of thousands, the eight- hour, $27 million epic looks spectacular. Maximillian Schell, the most prominent of four actors who play Peter, has moments of leonine power, and Vanessa Redgrave is striking as his treacherous sister. But the rest of the all-star cast--including Hannah Schygulla, Laurence Olivier, Trevor Howard and Mel Ferrer--is lost in the pageantry...
Able to walk the fine line between a bland documentary and an overdone "epic saga," Kusturica tells the story of a Sarajevo family's struggle during the consolidation of the Yugoslavian state under Tito. The story is told in part through the eyes of Malik, the son of an aspiring Communist Party officer. Malik's Father's "business trip" (as a forced laborer) begins when a political cartoon appears in the party newspaper. The cartoon shows Karl Marx writing at a desk, with a picture of Tito on the wall behind him. Father--known as Mesa in the film--mentions...
What he nourished there for the decade between writing and shooting Ran was a dream that inevitably obsesses (and generally defeats) most great filmmakers: the creation of a work that realizes cinema's unique capacity for the sweeping epic gesture. The problem in realizing what may be the movie's ideal form is to keep one's balance. Reach too far in one direction, and all you do is bring on the empty horses. Restrain the impulse, and you may only bring forth empty images, beautiful and static. It is on the ground that lies between melodrama and abstraction that...
Spielberg and flunky Chris Columbus--who also wrote Gremlins and Goonies (see accompanying story)--have not expanded the modest vision of past Holmes films and the original Doyle stories to fill the epic scope required for Spielberg mega-effects. They have stomped all over the original, creating not a Holmes aided by millions in props and special effects, but a Holmes pulverized by orgasmic Spielbergisms that make anything the hero does seem thoroughly boring...