Word: epically
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...managed in his fourth novel. He tells the life story of a rather prickly film director of genius, one John James Todd, and in doing so describes the making of Todd's silent masterpiece so clearly and vividly that the reader may feel he has seen the nonexistent epic. Titled The Confessions: Part I, it is the first film in a projected trilogy that is to be the realization of Todd's dreams. Imprisoned in Germany during World War I, he read Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, and it took over his powerful imagination. Todd's catastrophe is that...
...time of dread," reads a legend at the start of George Lucas' new epic. Surely it was. We speak not only of the dour Middle Ages in which this sword-and-sorcery film is set but of the late 1980s, when Lucasfilm hit its dark age, after nearly a decade as the most profitable dream-mongering empire in movie history. By 1984 Lucas had produced five of the eight all-time top grossers. But that was a long time ago, in a land far, far away. Lucas' fantasies went murky (Labyrinth) or smirky (Howard the Duck), and his empire suddenly...
These characters were not new with Lucas, of course; they spanned epic literature from Ulysses and King Arthur to the Lord of the Rings and Gormenghast trilogies. But Star Wars gave a high-tech polish to the rustic hardware, a kick to the old eldritch machinery. Alas, a decade later, everything new in Lucas' films seems old again. There is a shroud of inevitability, of why-bother, about Willow's chase through the forest (done better in Return of the Jedi), the impromptu ride down a mountain on a warrior's shield (done better in The Living Daylights...
...thoughtful examination in Trading Places: How We Allowed Japan to Take the Lead (Basic Books; $19.95). Written by Clyde V. Prestowitz Jr., the counselor to the Secretary of Commerce for Japan Affairs between 1983 and 1986 and now a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, this "epic tale of reversal," as the author calls it, starts with Japan's 1945 surrender aboard the U.S.S. Missouri and chronicles its four-decade push toward economic victory...
That operation had been the longest continuous skyjacking in history, a terror-filled 15-day epic that began with the capture of the plane as it neared the gulf and continued during stops at the Iranian city of Mashhad and the Cypriot city of Larnaca before reaching a seven-day standoff in Algiers. For many of the 31 hostages inside the aircraft, the tipoff to approaching | freedom came when the hijackers began systematically wiping overhead compartments and doorways to erase their fingerprints. Then, following a plan apparently worked out in advance with Algerian negotiators, they quietly left the aircraft...