Word: micheler
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...story, adapted from a short novel by the Honore de Balzac, follows a soldier named Augustin Robert (Ben Daniels) who is sent to Egypt in 1798 as the guide and protector of Jean-Michel (Michel Piccoli) an important artist/historiographer. Jean-Michel is on an official mission to draw, measure and document the cultural landmarks of the Egyptian dunes. Of course, the military party with whom he travels are little concerned with monuments or cave-drawings. They have been yanked from their homes and families to conduct a miserable campaign against the Mameluke Dynasty, marching around the desert with their camels...
...favorably against the fur-flying in Braveheart. As in that film, the fighting here is vicious, bloody, and decidedly unromantic. The Mamelukes eventually retreat, their scimitars proving rather ill-matched to rifles and artillery, but the French men are sufficiently rattled to move quickly on to another campsite. Jean-Michel, however, has not finished his drawings, and he and Augustin lag a bit behind. Inevitably, the two are separated from their unit, whom Augustin decides to hunt down so that he and Jean-Michel may be reabsorbed. "I'll come for you," he assures the artist, who squats beneath...
Anyone who saw The English Patient knows that return trips aren't always easy in the desert, and Augustin soon discovers that he has no more idea how to return to Jean-Michel then he does how to find the lost regiment. His heat-stroked, knock-kneed peregrinations around the desert land him into new trouble, especially when he steals water from a Bedouin maiden. The resultant man-hunt sends Augustin hiding in a deep crevasse in a large, barren plateau, but no sooner has he escaped their swords than he runs into a whole new set of daggers, this...
Suharto has been playing hardball with IMF chief Michel Camdessus for months over a $43 billion bailout agreement to restore confidence in his economy. Jakarta has repeatedly reneged on reforms, particularly those requiring the dismantling of lucrative monopolies controlled by Suharto's children and close friends. By telling the IMF that he wants aid on his terms and not theirs, Suharto has effectively bet Indonesia's entire economy, a wager so outlandish that foreign bankers in Jakarta have trouble concealing their admiration for his audacity even as they despair of his cavalier approach to balance-sheet realities. His brinkmanship...
However, by the end of my first year, I had soured on the historical endeavor; I felt like I was stuck in a morass of Michel de Montaigne's almost petulant musings, and I yearned for a return to something more natural...