Word: epical
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...subject that doesn't come up - and almost never does when this tight-knit group of friends gets together - is politics. That sets them apart from previous generations of Chinese élites, whose lives were defined by the epic events that shaped China's past half-century: the Cultural Revolution, the opening to the West, the student protests in Tiananmen Square and their subsequent suppression. The conversation at Gang Ji Restaurant suggests today's twentysomethings are tuning all that out. "There's nothing we can do about politics," says Chen. "So there's no point in talking about...
...Goya's Ghosts is not entirely successful in doing so. Though it is made on a crowded an epic scale, it is going to seem remote to many viewers. It has structural problems - a jump in time of 15 years right at its center - and Portman makes an unfortunate, almost ludicrous, choice in her portrayal of the older, post-prison, Ines On the other hand, it has about it a kind of messy passion that is quite fascinating. It obviously means a great deal to its auteur, and that passion grants the film a felt and wayward life not usually...
...What I found myself thinking about, curiously enough, was Les Miserables. Whether you steal some bread or casually decline a slice of pork, in certain situations terrible consequences can ensue from such seeming inconsequences - not to mention a narrative of epic proportions. I'm not saying that Goya's Ghosts is ever going to be regarded as a world-historical masterpiece. But it has grand scale and grand ambitions, and in the midst of our annual silly season at the movies I would like to suggest that, flawed as it is, the film does reward our serious attention...
...wait-as in a late-night steak-knife commercial, there's more. Equally impressive are the works of skater video artist Shaun Gladwell, epic landscape photographer Rosemary Laing and conceptualist Christian Capurro, all invited by Biennale director Robert Storr to show independently in the Italian pavilion and Arsenale. Capurro, in particular, stopped traffic with his intriguing project, Another Misspent Portrait of Etienne de Silhouette, which had invited hundreds of people to erase the pages of a 1986 copy of Vogue Hommes, clocking up over 260 hours and turning the magazine (by Capurro's calculation) into an $A11,349.18 work...
...impossible is like inviting Paris Hilton to a party. He'll be on the next flight to Doomsville, as when he read that a volcano was to erupt on Guadeloupe; off he went to tempt death and came back with the spectacular documentary La Soufrière. On the Amazon epic Fitzcarraldo, he took his crew hundreds of miles from the nearest city and had them lug a 320-ton riverboat overland and up steep hills. He found a suitably lush location on the Amazon and ran into the longest dry spell in the region's history. "I shouldn't make...