Word: greeks
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Doublecrossing and savagery are the ingredients of this plot, and the only thoroughly likeable character is a Viennese expatriate (Helen Miorren), who supplies arms to the Greek rebels seeking to overthrow the Ottomans. The Pasha is greedy, his minister conniving and threatening to those who stand in his way. His Turkish subjects are best described by their predilection for sacrificing sheep. One scene shows a man selling knives used for this purpose, with an American woman shrinking in horror at the thought of this barbarity. And later in the film, the title character sees such a sacrifice and recoils...
Powerful, eccentric, bloody, filled with theological gaffes, Temptation is an excruciatingly earnest and freewheeling docudrama based on the 1955 best- selling novel by a tormented Greek Orthodox believer, Nikos Kazantzakis. It is the result of an obsessive 16-year quest by one of Hollywood's most esteemed directors to bring to the screen a struggling Christ who only slowly comes to see himself as the Messiah. The movie, Scorsese says, "is my way of trying to get closer...
...demands are never ending, the sacrifices outrageous. Relentless workouts, a life lived in sweat. For what? A Greek traveler named Pausanias more than 1,800 years ago wrote of the "unique divinity" that cloaks the Olympics. The mystery may never be phrased better. The lure persists, transfixing competitors, enticing them to devote their lives to it. It leads women like Janet Evans to spend their youth in pools, logging the numbing laps, and men like Tim Daggett to suffer through injury after injury. All for a touch of that divinity...
...variation on the sage theme comes from Claremont Scholar Burton Mack, who sees Jesus as a "rather normal cynic-type figure," using the term not in the modern sense but referring to a particular school of ancient Greek philosophers, Diogenes among them, who advocated virtue and self-control. Like them, he made ample use of a biting sense of humor ("Let the dead bury their dead"). "Jesus wasn't reforming Judaism," Mack insists. "He was just taking up a Hellenistic kind of social criticism...
...many students of literature, Molly Bloom, the heroine of James Joyce's Ulysses, is the greatest character in what may be the greatest novel of the English language. Wife, mother, performer, realist, Earth figure, whore, Molly was to Joyce what the Greek Penelope was to Homer--all that was embodied in the female gender...