Word: epical
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...Cannes Film Festival jury, some feared the experience might corrupt him. Would he start making his movies with a Gallic flair, replacing cut-and-slash kung fu with fashionable explorations of anomie? Would the Riviera sunlight cook his brain until he was convinced that he must forsake epic gangster cinema for experiments in narrative impenetrability? Would Hong Kong's action godfather, the man who introduced the world to John Woo and Jet Li, lose his Hong Kongness...
...rest. Tsui Hark hasn't lost sight of the most important objective of any Hong Kong filmmaker: pleasing the audience. In his new movie, Seven Swords, he has dipped into the endless supply of old Chinese wuxia (martial arts) novels to come up with a gritty and extremely violent epic. Noble warriors literally descend from the mountaintop to protect an endangered village from an implacable evil?think Kurosawa's Seven Samurai in Qing-dynasty China. While the attempts at romantic subplots fizzle and the film is paced so strangely that it feels both too long and too short, for fans...
...Mountain, an enchanting, cinematic progression from the trip-hop groove. The 2003 follow-up Black Cherry added a dose of glam and disco; the single Strict Machine became a synthesized surefire floor filler, as well as the theme to a Game Boy advertisement. Supernature is even more varied. An epic in synthesizer sounds, it reveals hints of '60s movie themes, chunks of '70s Eno-era Roxy Music, Donna Summer disco, '90s trip-hop - all with a knowing 21st century pop take. Like the magpie Scissor Sisters and other light-fingered musicians, Goldfrapp shamelessly borrows past pop genres, playing...
...European blood. Indeed, the category Hispanic is a gringo construct-first used by the U.S. Census Bureau in 1980-and the only one based on culture and language instead of race. That dubious distinction frustrates some Hispanics, who believe they belong to a separate race, the product of an epic Latin American miscegenation of Iberian, Native American and African heritage. A growing number, especially in California and the Northeast, prefer the term Latino. But in a Time poll of Hispanic adults, 42% said they choose to be called Hispanic, only 17% said Latino and 34% had no particular preference. Such...
Film enchantment, of a baroque species that mixes the sordid with the soaring, is Gilliam's specialty--that, and making movies with big ideas and impossibly spectacular imagery. At times his films become missions impossible. The Spanish shoot of his epic The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, with Johnny Depp and Jean Rochefort, was so plagued by calamities that the only productive thing to come out of it was the disaster-movie documentary Lost in La Mancha. So many other projects have stalled that, at 64, Gilliam has joined the ranks of such hard-luck masters as Orson Welles...