Word: outlandish
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Masaki Kobayashi's Kwaidan (first released in 1965) is a series of four short films that attempt to redeem the supernatural, to reverse the trend toward the merely real or the merely outlandish. Kobayashi doesn't strain toward the fantastic, challenging technology with science fiction. Instead, he looks for the unexplainable within the ordinary, adapting his stories from Japanese folk tales. Though products of a complex cultural tradition, the films are not in the least culture-bound; if anything, they are distinguished by the simplicity of their conception. Like pornography and war, ghosts-when given half a chance-have...
...murdered and raped as a matter of course. Sharif literally has to claw his way past slain corpses and Black Plague victims; the blight is so baldly presented that Sharif's ultimate arrival at the one unblemished valley in the Balkans proves enchanting: it's one of those great, outlandish movie ideas which only a philistine could conceive of, and only a moron botch. The Last Valley is the first film in a long time to present effective bucolia, even if John Barry's music, today's answer to Max Steiner's, rumbles ever-ominously in the background...
...what it's worth, Trash -by any conventional standards a work of outlandish obscenity-is very much a moral movie. Holly believes in the simple things-love, devotion, trust. And while she must apply these principles to her low-life world of kinky sex, drugs, and eternally imminent death, apply them she does. She is a wholly original creation in a challenging film-the only American picture so far this year worth forcing yourself...
...image that flickered onto Moscow TV screens last week showed an awkward, eight-wheeled contraption that looked somewhat like the top half of a huge samovar. But what the outlandish vehicle lacked in styling, it more than made up for in performance. Three hours after reaching the moon aboard the latest unmanned Russian moon probe, Luna 17, Lunokhod I (literally "moonwalker") lumbered down one of two ramps extended by the mother ship and moved forward under the direct control of TV monitors on earth-thus taking the first giant step for robotkind on another celestial body...
...Take somebody like Arthur Schlesinger. He's been absolutely explicit. He says, if, contrary to my judgment, the government proves to have been successful, then we will all be applauding the wisdom an statesmanship of the government. And I don't think that statement is in any sense outlandish. I think it does reflect the almost automatic opinion of liberal America on the subject. Which isn't terribly surprising. The Germans were perfectly civilized people. Would they have opposed the war if they...