Word: morgana
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Fata Morgana...
...catalog of dead colonialism in the Sahara, Fata Morgana focuses on the adandoned debris from World War II, the mad-magical strain in both Black and German tourists digging for ethnic information. With his cache of expressionistic ploys, Herzog has turned a placid and lyrical desert landscape into a spacious gliding visual-aural metaphor...
...other performers fail to find Williamson's easy balance of comic and serious. Nigel Terry, as Arthur, is solemn throughout, and never believable as the inspiration of a people. As his wicked half-sister. Morgana, Helen Mirren is appropriately fiendish. Cheri Lunghix is a competent Guenevere, but Nicholas Clay's Lancelot is a semi-comatose pretty...
...well-known actors, Helen Mirren and Nicol Williamson, pose deeper problems, and offer more radical solutions. Of Morgana, mistress of mandrake and sulfur, Mirren makes an armored, camp enchantress. Swathed in purple veils and seaweed capes, intoning Merlin's dread spells as if they contained the dirtiest and most sacred words in any world, incarcerating the wizard in a cocoon of cotton candy as she proclaims victory over her mentor, Mirren convinces that she could charm a kingdom-or a film- with her perfidy...
...Williamson's Merlin. The voice sweeps from wail to whisper, from adenoidal giggle to basso preposteroso growl - often in the same sentence. It is a daring display, and an exhilarating one. Merlin is, after all, a man out of time: "Our days are numbered," he declaims to Morgana...