Word: fortress
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Before he gave up power to a democratically elected government in 1990, former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet Ugarte erected a legal fortress around himself. His 17 years of iron-fisted, right-wing military rule had been blamed for the death or disappearance of 3,400 suspected communists and leftists, not to mention the torture of thousands of others. With that legacy hanging over his head, Pinochet rammed through an array of constitutional measures that made him immune to prosecution, including a lifetime Senator's seat that he took amid widespread protest last March, when he retired as an army general...
...with Rashomon, a work of tremendous moral and cinematic force whose influence on Western filmmakers is immeasurable. This was the first in a series of masterpieces from Kurosawa in the '50s and '60s, one more startling than the other: Ikiru, The Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, The Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo, High and Low; in his work, the CinemaScope frame always threatens to explode with odd tensions and latent energies. It is perhaps Ikiru, about a man with cancer who searches for meaning in life, that had the greatest impact on me. Seeing this film was one of the most intense...
...Japan, its title now a byword for the fragility of truth. Even as his samurai epics like Throne of Blood (1957) and Ran (1985) borrowed from the West, particularly Shakespeare, movies outside Japan borrowed from him: The Seven Samurai is at the heart of The Magnificent Seven; The Hidden Fortress is concealed in Star Wars...
...with finicky stars should note that he recently stepped in to help Barry Levinson cut a deal with Warner. And Ovitz?s old friends at CAA are painfully aware that he has taken ample office space on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills, not far from the I.M. Pei?designed fortress that Ovitz constructed when he was master of the CAA universe...
...funeral last week of the last Czar of Russia and his family, held in the austerely beautiful confines of St. Petersburg's Peter and Paul Fortress, was originally intended to be an act of national repentance for 80 years of death and division. It turned out to be a symbol of the dominant feature of Russian politics today: the fine art of cutting a deal...