Word: julius
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...film, Agony limits itself to those tumultuous few years when the reluctant Michelangelo (Charlton Heston) was commissioned by the warrior Pope, Julius II (Rex Harrison), to forsake his beloved marble and paint the frescoes for the vaulted ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. "It was built by my uncle, Pope Sixtus. That is why it is called the Sistine," says Harrison, surveying a replica meticulously copied by movie artists, and at the same time snappily launching Hollywood's own capsule history of Renaissance art. Unfortunately, the dramatic clash of two iron-willed giants at odds over a ceiling seldom gets...
While heavenly choirs compete with thunderous organ, all the significant moments of Michelangelo's ordeal are painstakingly recreated. His inspiration for the Sistine vault occurs on a mountain-top at sunrise in exquisitely detailed cumulus clouds. He rushes to a battlefield where Julius marvels at Michelangelo's preliminary sketches while enemy cannon balls redden the earth around them. "I planned a ceiling, he plans a miracle," declares the Holy Father, then to his troops: "What are you waiting for? Attack!" And Agony skirts the question of the artist's homosexuality in provocative...
...party Tanzania went to the polls last week, however, the roar in the fore ground sounded strangely like politicians fighting for votes. For six weeks, candidates had been crisscrossing the nation, walking as far as 30 miles to appear under banyan trees at isolated village rallies. Even President Julius Nyerere felt constrained to stump through the countryside with his new Polaroid camera, awing prospective voters by handing out pictures he had just taken of them...
...opera was proclaimed. To many, the most recent "end" came with Richard Strauss, who died in 1949. When Alban Berg's magnificent Wozzek was first performed in 1925, some people covered their ears in horror; today it is widely accepted as an almost mellow classic. Julius Rudel, director of Manhattan's enterprising New York City Opera, receives and reads 50 new opera scores a year. All kinds of opera will still be written, even in an age which seems to many sadly unoperatic-perhaps about Marilyn Monroe, or about Cassius Clay, or the astronauts, or even James Bond...
Prokofiev's score, ably conducted by Julius Rudel, is appropriately dissonant and heavily percussive. Soprano Schauler, whose surmounting of Prokofiev's vocal obstacle course was achievement enough, proved a splendid actress as well. But then, as one who admits to powers of ESP, she was a natural for the role. As for seeing flaming angels, she says she took lessons from her five-year-old son, Jeffrey, who had an invisible playmate named Timothy...