Word: napoleon
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...want to know the new ending of the tale, stop reading. In fact, this would be a good point for its fans to stop watching. In the post-Soviet-era conclusion, a group of dissident critters escapes the farm and lives to witness its collapse and Napoleon's fall. We flash forward to see order and peace restored--by a handsome blond family of new human farmers. It's a tiny change, a couple of minutes in all, but a baffling one that squares with neither history nor Orwell's vision. Who are these interlopers? The Czars? Boris Yeltsin...
...parallels and Orwell's timeless warnings against slippery language and manipulation; in a clever if heavy-handed addition, pigs salvage a TV set from the farmhouse to keep the animals docile. And the filmmakers use ingenious images to dramatize how image control is essential to tyrants. When the hog Napoleon (voiced by Patrick Stewart) becomes absolute dictator, his apotheosis is celebrated by a martial chorus of foot-stomping ducks in a perfect and hilarious imitation of a Stalinist propaganda musical...
...says Semel. The director even toyed with the idea of having Steven Spielberg direct AI, and the two men discussed the story, but Kubrick decided he wanted to do it after Eyes. Warner owns the rights to the script--just as MGM owns the rights to another Kubrick script, Napoleon--but there are no plans to make the film. Pity. For the man who made 2001: A Space Odyssey, AI would have been a fitting finale...
...system that has been one of the most elitist in the world. Historically both the government and the government-owned businesses were run by a small cadre of men who graduated from the elite Grandes Ecoles, survivors of the relentless winnowing that characterized French education since the days of Napoleon...
...high-handed style. In an early miscalculation, Barak summarily fired half the staff at headquarters without consulting anyone. When the pink-slipped employees barricaded themselves inside the building, he was forced to back down. His arrogance had been an annoyance in the military, where detractors dubbed him "Napo," for Napoleon. In the political world, there was less tolerance. One Labor figure publicly called Barak a "dictator"; another said he had "delusions of grandeur...