Word: epical
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...wrong. It copped five major Academy Awards. It made money--and, in Hollywood, profits are the measure of genius. Cimino, the overweight preppy from Long Island, thought he was John Ford. He posed for photos in a cowboy hat. He announced his next project: Heaven's Gate, an epic of the American West...
...suitability for the job, the good doctor has Miss Barclay undress on a couch hidden behind a conveniently placed curtain. Enter Mrs. Prentice (Alexandra Phillips) at this most unpropitious time. While Dr. Prentice silently implores Miss Barclay to remain still behind the curtain, the couple launch into an epic shouting match, centered mostly on each other's sexual deficiencies...
...more charitable toward one another. Well-if we are lucky. But perhaps luck, good and bad, also has a deeper physiological purpose, programmed into the human animal in the first dawn of his intelligence: to keep the adrenaline flowing, maybe, and the brain alert to the world's epic of apprehension, terror, greed and hope. Perhaps luck is the way that life puts history into bas-relief, and differentiates moments, and people: the way that the universe punctuates time...
...gory--always run too long. Even the tone of the film vacilates between tongue-in-cheek humor, and at other times, terrible solemnity. Perhaps, the scope of the legend overwhelmed Boorman. But whatever the reason for Excalibur's spasmodic quality, its lack of cohesion prevents it from achieving the epic effect to which it aspires...
Boorman set himself a task only slightly less daunting than the search for the Holy Grail: to tell, in 140 minutes, the epic of Arthur, Guenevere and the Knights of the Round Table. He has a millennium of tough acts to follow: Malory and Tennyson and Tolkien, Wagner and Lerner and Loewe. On screen in the '70s, George Lucas set the story in space (Star Wars); Robert Bresson made it austere (Lancelot of the Lake), and six English cutups made it funny (Monty Python and the Holy Grail) But Boorman has never been cowed by precedent or expectations...