Word: epics
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Jesus & Janizaries. A bulb lighted up in his epic brain. Movies filmed in Spain could earn fluid money for their backers elsewhere in the world. Appealing to several American corporations that had plenty of cold pesetas, he said he wanted to film the story of John Paul Jones...
Japanese Moviemaker Masaichi Nagata takes a ride down the old De Mille stream and soon finds himself up Spectacular Creek without a paddle. This footless, episodic epic on the life and teachings of Gautama Buddha tries to crowd everything in Buddhist literature into one elephantine moving picture. The parallels between Japan's first bid for a slice of the supermovie market and the Biblical pageantry of Samuel Bronston and Dino de Laurentiis are numbing: skyscraper temples to sinister gods, unseen choirs zum-zumming on the sound track, corps of nimble nautch dancers in every other reel. And when...
...been banned almost everywhere-even in France, and so have most of the rest of De Sade's works, which describe in relentless detail murder, torture, coprophagy, and sex orgies that are a triumph of human engineering. "Here I am," boasts a De Sade heroine during an epic orgy, "at one stroke incestuous, adultress, sodomite; and all that in a girl who only lost her maidenhead today!" If De Sade's books were only pornography, they would long ago have been forgotten. But the pornographic passages are ostensibly meant to demonstrate De Sade's passionately held conviction...
Cleopatra. Every dollar of the $40 million spent on this epic-to-end-all-epics is dazzlingly apparent in the tons of gold leaf, typhoons of pink smoke, and wilderness of bosoms that assault the beholder. But the world's most expensive star. Elizabeth Taylor, plays Cleo as if she were doing a fancy-dress dream sequence from Butterfield 8. Richard Burton is all too realistic as Antony-the man who sold himself down the Nile for a sex symbol...
...Boris Pasternak (described as looking "at the same time like an Arab and his horse") believes it is "no longer possible for lyric poetry to express the immensity of our experience. Life has grown too cumbersome, too complicated." Venerable Ezra Pound, 77, "stuck" and unable to finish his epic Cantos, says, "The question is. am I dead?" Katherine Anne Porter gloomily concludes, "Misunderstanding and separation are the natural conditions...