Word: mythic
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...treatment of war has been anything but regular. In Coming Home war was a sociological case study. Michael Cimino attempted in The Deerhunter to create a charged-up folk tale complete with Robert DeNiro as an MIG-toting ubermensch. And in Apocalypse Now Francis Ford Coppola made war something mythic; something so big and so surreal that one wondered who was playing The Ride of the Valkyries after all. But in Australian director Peter Weir's Gallipoli, there is something of a retrenchment, at least intellectually. In the movie, war does not get treated so much as it simply occurs...
...group of runners in training on an ocean beach, or of making one feel that one has seen just how a D'Oyly Carte production of The Mikado must have looked in the '20s, Hudson painstakingly makes an obscure corner of history reverberate in a nearly mythic way. It is lovely work. And like old snapshots of forgotten people from another time, strangely evocative and moving. -By Richard Schickel
...this comprehensive and entertaining study, Kansas Journalism Professor David Dary deflates the mythic machismo of the bunkhouse and the open range. His real cowpoke is hardly an existential drifter on the Plains. Rather, he is a common laborer beset by the pressures of a hard life and slim wages...
...mythic cattle drives from Texas to the new railheads in Kansas in the 1800s, trailing herds of 3,000 longhorns across rushing rivers and hostile Indian territory, were hardly the stuff of dreams. But many young Easterners, nostalgic for the good life they had known before the horrors of the Civil War, were seduced to join up for what would prove banal, backbreaking labor. The pay for three months: $75 and all the beans one could swallow. On the drive, there were few shootouts with warpath tribes. Most drovers were happy to pay the 50?-per-head surcharge demanded...
...swear it by your eyes/ I swear it by our love). Was there ever a prettier oath? It is a form of hero's brag. That may explain why politicians are so reckless with hyperbolic promise. (Douglas MacArthur: "I shall return,'' a wonderful item of mythic public relations.) Like the ancient kings of Mexico, they like to swear that they will cause the sun to rise, the rain to fall, the crops to grow. Spiro Agnew once told the American people: "I have often been accused of putting my foot in my mouth, but I will never...