Word: magical
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Franchise: it's Hollywood's magic word. For decades, the moguls groused because their products, unlike cars and potato chips, were not endlessly reproducible. The Birth of a Nation, Gone With the Wind and The Sound of Music were the up-to-their-time top grossers, but there was no Re-Birth, Re-Wind or Re-Sound. It took The Godfather, Part II, to make sequels chic. (An Oscar for Best Picture will do that.) In 1977, the opening crawl of Star Wars--announcing the film as "Episode IV: A New Hope"--stoked an endless stream of sequels, threequels...
...Rings. Must be some other old stuff we could turn into some sort of spectacle. So clang, clang, clang go the broadswords, swish, swish, swish go the flights of arrows, and twitch, twitch, twitch go our bottoms in the seats. There's too much realism, not enough magic in historical romance these days. What these movies really need are cheeky athletes as their heroes, not actors lugubriously acting. They also need villains briskly spewing sardonic menace instead of grunting incomprehensibly. Above all, they need flash, sass and genial trash. --By Richard Schickel
...including theater from Montenegro and Kosovo, electronic music from France and comedy from Japan. School groups, amateurs and even a few professionals conjure up some very creative venues. Among last year's hits were Ladies and Gents, a play set in cleaned-up public toilets, and hourly poetry readings, magic shows and even short filmsall done in an elevator...
...this summer in investment banking doesn’t give me much time to follow the Yankees. Other interests compete for my limited time—making it hard to devote three hours to watching a ballgame. And I’ve become more jaded. The mysticism and magic baseball used to conjure have faded...
...Franchise: it's Hollywood's magic word. For decades, the moguls groused because their products, unlike cars and potato chips, were not endlessly reproducible. The Birth of a Nation, Gone With the Wind and The Sound of Music were the up-to-their-time top grossers, but there was no Re-Birth, Re-Wind or Re-Sound. It took The Godfather, Part II, to make sequels chic. (An Oscar for Best Picture will do that.) In 1977, the opening crawl of Star Wars - announcing the film as "Episode IV: A New Hope" - stoked an endless stream of sequels, threequels...