Word: feudal
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Lhasa's Jokhang Temple by a group of Red Guards. She weeps as she describes smashing idols and destroying scriptures. An old man recounts his band of warriors' futile attempt at defending their homeland in 1955. He was jailed; his family, because of its prominence in the old feudal system, was reclassified as lowly shanakpo, or bad class, by the communists and publicly beaten in the mid-1960s. The independence campaign by Tibetans-in-exile is useless, the man says. "It may make them feel good, but for us it makes life worse...
...balanced appraisal of Oswaldo Paya, the Cuban dissident who stayed in the country to work for democratic reform, was worth the wait. Paya's drive calling for a plebiscite on free speech and multiparty elections has placed the emphasis on a hopeful future. Castro has run Cuba as his feudal estate for 44 years, but his naive supporters are finally seeing him for the tyrant he is. As Padgett wrote, Paya has succeeded in "wresting the Cuba debate away from pro- and anti-Castro extremists." The debate is now about measures that will be pro- or anti-Cuba, the freedom...
...mini-epics in their own right, describe how man began the war with machines and how the Matrix came into being (in the usual dystopic, postapocalyptic anim? tradition, man is hoisted by the petard of his own pride). The taut Program is set in a simulacrum of feudal Japan; Detective Story somehow turns the Wachowskis' vision into film noir, complete with fog, fedoras?and Trinity in (what else?) tight, black leather...
...Adoor, born in 1941 to a feudal family in a Kerala village that's also called Adoor, was writing and acting in plays from the age of eight. Movies, his family believed, were vacuous spectacles for nostalgic city dwellers. Adoor was planning to study drama, a more respectable art form, when he made an unpleasant discovery: to attend the school in Delhi, he had to speak fluent Hindi. He quickly lowered his standards and instead in 1962 entered India's new Film and Television Institute in Pune, believing that writing for the screen couldn't be too different than writing...
...director that Zhang found his true calling and an all-consuming lifelong passion. With Red Sorghum, Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern, Zhang proved himself in the art houses abroad. But many mainland critics remained unimpressed, accusing him of "exoticizing" the nation's feudal past and poverty-stricken countryside for foreigners. They felt he should play cultural ambassador, using his camera to burnish China's overseas image. Chinese audiences share this ambivalence. Younger moviegoers have an almost universal description of why they dislike Zhang's fixation on the past and on the countryside: "The films are really just...