Word: epical
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Those lucrative sidelines eventually became a large part of the FARC's undoing, leaving it corrupt and complacent - seemingly more concerned with spoils than social justice - and increasingly despised among even Colombians who once saw the group as a corrective to their country's admittedly epic inequalities. The U.S. and later the European Union designated the FARC as a terrorist organization. When the U.S. finally came to Bogota's aid in 2000 with the multi-billion-dollar Plan Colombia, a counter-insurgency mission disguised as a drug-interdiction project, Colombia's once laughable military began knocking the FARC...
...hundred of which are on show. They ranged from the defense of the Arctic city of Murmansk in 1941 to the Red Army's westward advance across the Crimea, then Bucharest, Sofia and Belgrade, and finally Budapest, Vienna and Berlin. One of the subtexts of the show is the epic dimension of the war on Germany's Eastern Front, which is often underappreciated in the West. By measure of manpower, duration, territorial reach and casualties, it was as much as four times the scale of the conflict on the Western Front that opened with the Normandy invasion of June...
...Khaldei evokes some of the minutiae of that epic clash. In Berlin an old woman with a cane is dwarfed in a corner of the picture by the mountainous ruins around her. A blind man sits amidst the rubble, unseeing of the immensity of the destruction all around. In the wooden city of Murmansk, back in 1941, razed in a single day by 350,000 incendiary bombs, a solitary babushka, carrying a trunk of her belongings past the forest of upright stilts and posts that are the city's charred remains, asks Khaldei, "Aren't you ashamed of yourself...
...Cannes Palme d'Or in 1989, then a sizable commercial success, Quentin Tarantino showed Reservoir Dogs at Cannes in 1992, but that was the merest fanfare to his Pulp Fiction, a Palme d'Or triumph in 1994 and probably the defining movie - certainly the most vivid, film-wise comic epic - of its decade...
...world is used to Tarantino's stuff, and most of the time can't get enough of it. (Now he's working on a World War II epic.) But in the back of his head is the grudging ambition of the outsider, the movie geek, the 45-year-old fanboy. He still feels defiantly out-of-step; while every other director is going digital, Tarantino says, "I go backwards. It's lower-lower-lower tech for me." More than once today, he confided what he once felt and may still feel: "They don't let people like me make movies...