Word: feudal
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...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...
...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...
...touch on something that I want to be as a person--the pursuit of courtesy, chivalry and proper behavior." "There's a heavy anti-industrial streak there," agrees Carrie Crowder, 41, a conservative Republican, mother of two and former S.C.A. member. "It's tied back to the medieval, feudal landscape that is the backdrop for so much of fantasy." Granted, the S.C.A. crowd is a good deal further out on the fringe than most people who will shell out to see The Two Towers, but as John Adcox, 38, a fantasy fan in Atlanta, points out, it's all relative...
...houseboat near Shanghai. It now appears before the world as a modern ruling group, a confident technocracy in suits and ties, complete with a high tech press center. But on closer inspection, the Party is only half-modernized, just like the country's economy?part skyscraper, part feudal village...