Word: heros
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...gambit that only a few years ago turned up in an execrable action movie, Roller ball. Here again, we are in the midst of a futuristic society that worships a deadly game with indecipherable rules. Quintet appears to be a shotgun marriage between backgammon and Russian roulette. The hero (Paul Newman instead of James Caan) is trying to beat the game before he becomes its bloodied victim. Yet the plot is so familiar that the audience figures out the moves at least an hour before the characters do. By the time the inevitable climax finally arrives, most moviegoers may wish...
...issues that are curiosities today. It is the last film of the late director Luchino Visconti (The Damned, Death in Venice). The Innocent is taken from an 1892 novel by the flamboyant poet and adventurer Gabriele D'Annunzio. Not surprisingly, it is the tortured sensibility of the hero, Tullio, a wealthy, thirtyish landowner, that gets most of the attention. Tullio, played with exactly the right touch of smoldering arrogance by Giancarlo Giannini, Lina Wertmuller's man of all movies, has long since transferred his sexual interest from his exquisite wife Giuliana to his mistress, a fiery countess named...
...four plays is Richard II, which is sometimes cited as one of Shakespeare's weaker works. Under the direction of David Giles, however, it takes on a new meaning, becoming an almost contemporary story of power used and abused. Derek Jacobi, who was seen last year as the hero in I, Claudius, portrays the childishness as well as the majesty of Richard, who tells "sad stories of the death of kings." No one has told them better, and Jacobi now should be numbered among the best actors in the English-speaking theater...
...essential Waugh hero is a British Don Quixote dejectedly tilting at the 20th century. His troubles begin with a code of honor that is ill suited for campaigns in society or on the battlefield. Humor is shaped by innumerable collisions with bad manners, bad writing, bad architecture and bad service...
...also never too late to read or reread Waugh. His vitality, matchless craftsmanship, audacious imagination and stinging perceptions ("She wore the livery of the highest fashion, but as one who dressed to inform rather than to attract") have not dated. Like Charles Ryder, the painter hero of Brideshead Revisited, Waugh focused "the frankly traditional battery of his elegance and erudition on the maelstrom of barbarism...