Word: epical
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...teeming poetry set to ancient lays. As he says in the documentary, "I'd taken all the elements that I've ever known to make wide, sweeping statements which conveyed a feeling that was the essence of the spirit of the times." Where the poetry came from--the epic, apocalyptic vision of A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall, the piercing simplicity of Blowin' in the Wind--well, that's a secret...
...film might be his own life too. Bobby Taylor (Townsend) works days at a hot-dog stand while enduring auditions with casting directors who want every black actor to be Eddie Murphy or Super Dude or "just a little more . . . black?" He secures the title role in a blaxploitation epic called Jivetime Jimmy's Revenge, only to chuck it all for a little self-R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Bobby ends up happyish, doing public-service TV spots. Robert, though, earned a happier ending than his film dared hope: Hollywood Shuffle is a surprise...
...Movies, the streetwise critics give thumbs up only to a sci-fi thriller called Attack of the Street Pimps. A TV commercial for the Black Acting School shows its (white) teachers providing the finer points of jive talking and stud strutting. Bobby stars in a Stallone-style epic, Rambro: First Young Blood, and wins the Best Actor Oscar over Robert Redford and Meryl Streep. Townsend knows Bobby fully lives where we all live, in dreams of glory, agony, love -- of life's infinite possibilities. In real life, most of those dreams are dashed or deferred. So who wouldn...
...aftermath "history written in lightning." Others decried it as a libel of blacks and a whitewash of the Ku Klux Klan. Both views are correct. Griffith was a racist and a film genius who poured his love for the Old South and his pioneering cinematic ingenuity into an epic that is at once malignant and magnificent...
...Perhaps an even more important factor is populist backing: leftism is on the rise again in Latin America for a reason, namely the burgeoning feeling around the region that a decade of U.S.-backed capitalist reforms has simply widened an already epic gap between rich and poor-and that the Bush Administration is indifferent to it. As Chavez uses his multi-billion-dollar oil revenues to fund the kind of social projects that Venezuela's legions of impoverished never saw from his kleptocratic predecessors-and to subsidize cheaper oil for his cash-strapped Latin neighbors-more people are willing...