Word: epical
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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EXCEPT FOR ITS ending, there are no weak links in The Big Red One, but three sequences stand out. Fuller's dramatization of the attack at Omaha Beach on D-Day begins as a personal affair. Unlike the 1962 epic The Longest Day, which featured a fleet of landing craft the size of a dozen Spanish Armadas ("Every dot on that screen is one of our boats...we're making history"), The Big Red One focuses of five men, none of whom want to be heroes, all of whom desperately want to live...
...says Raphael Bellefleur, descendant of French aristocrats and now the owner of a baronial estate in the New World. But what is an American? The question has provoked writers as diverse as Henry James and Gertrude Stein, and it haunts Joyce Carol Oates throughout this vast seven-generation epic. That is not all that haunts her. Oates' twelfth novel informs the occult with Freudian insights. Boys change into hounds, men into bears; a man, swallowed by a great flood, returns decades later to be recognized only by his 100-year-old wife. One of the Bellefleurs has a habit...
...have been fair game for the scissors and splicer. In 1903 the distributors of The Great Train Robbery advised nickelodeons that a startling shot of a gunman firing directly at the audience could be inserted at either the beginning or the end of the film. D.W. Griffith's epic Intolerance (1916), which blended parables from four epochs into a "film fugue," bombed at the box office; so Griffith extracted and recut two of the stories and released them as separate films. Too soon, producers were applying the cleaver of their judgment to good films...
...most distinguished graduate of Mrs. Dockie Shipp Weems' School of Expression in Nashville, rose up before the 1956 Democratic Convention and demonstrated a dying art. His keynote address that night beside the Chicago stock yards was a symphony of rhetorical excess, a masterpiece of alliteration and allusion, an epic of the smite-'em style of oratorical Americana...
...final decision to compete, which he announced in March, set the stage for an epic confrontation in the 800 and 1,500 with another nonboycotting Brit, Steve Ovett, 24, who on July 1 shaved .2 second from Coe's mile record of 3 min. 49 sec. Hungry for an international sports success, most Britons seemed to support Coe's decision. Still, young "Seb" came under pressure from boycott backers to stay at home. He handled it with analytical detachment, as befits a scholar-athlete with a double bachelor of arts degree (he studied economics, social history and political...