Word: epical
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...lavish Amadeus is not exactly Cinderella, it is an odd choice for so much Hollywood glory. It is long (2 hr. 38 min.), without the epic quality that often marks lengthy pictures. Its theme, moreover, is rarefied: God's inexplicable gift of genius to a lout (Mozart, as Shaffer conceives his character), and his assignment of mediocrity to someone who is eminently deserving (the devout Salieri). But the biggest obstacle is Mozart, whose very name intimidates many moviegoers. The picture has prospered anyway, grossing $34 million in the U.S. and Canada even before the awards...
...some senses, The Oriental Renaissance betrays its own antiquity. Schwab's sprawling intertextual odyssey aims at an epic global vision reconciling East and West. He confesses, quoting Walt Whitman's "A Passage to India": "And I myself did not anticipate... that I would discover Whitman's line 'Thou roundness of the world at last accomplished.'" The irony of that world come full circle is that the term "Oriental" itself has evolved; no longer in its current use does it describe the "Oriental" of Schwab's time. Orientalism, for Schwab, mainly concerns Sanskrit studies which have since been canonized into...
Nonetheless, Iraq began to celebrate as soon as War Communique 1774 announced that its forces "had achieved victory over the Iranian invaders in the Huwaiza marshes in a unique epic of warfare." Schools and offices closed, and city streets soon filled with dancing, chanting throngs. In smaller towns, crowds marched to government offices to hear local leaders deliver speeches. The festivities were filmed and televised late into the night, scenes of celebration alternating with views of the mangled Iranian dead...
...German contradiction is also embodied by Wagner, who wrote the noxious anti-Semitic essay Jewry in Music, yet who also allowed Hermann Levi to conduct the premiere of the Christian epic Parsifal at Bayreuth. Faust, the national symbol, might be speaking for both Luther and Wagner when he says at the beginning of Goethe's play, "With keen endeavor I have studied philosophy, jurisprudence and medicine, and even, alas, theology. And yet here I stand, a poor fool no wiser than I was before...
Vision Quest attempts to be two films at once: a coming of age flick and a jock-epic. As an adolescent identity search the film fails. Louden asks a lot of questions about sex which are neither interesting nor funny. He gets caught sniffing Carla's panties in the laundry room, and he writes a piece for the school paper on female reproductive organs. Yawn, Carla, unresponsive to Louden's sexual urgings, plays the stoic sex kitten for most of the movie. She doesn't even take off her clothes, destroying any hope of a teen-sex angle. In addition...