Word: princess
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Using the demise of imperial Russia as its backdrop, the tale centers around the heroine Anastasia, princess of the Romanov dynasty. During a celebration marking the third centennial anniversary of Romanov rule, the evil sorcerer Rasputin makes an abrupt entrance. He places a curse on the czar's family and with a little bit of fairy dust subsequently incites the Russian revolution (it's a tough pill to swallow). Though her family escapes for Paris (in the all too familiar get-separated-by-fast-moving-train scene), Anastasia is suddenly orphaned...
...film picks up 10 years later, as Anastasia, now 18-year-old "Anya," struggles to find her identity. She eventually runs into Dimitri, a former palace servant-turned-leading man, who is looking for someone to pretend to be the princess so that he can reap a reward from Anastasia's surviving grandmother. Amidst all this, Anastasia must deal with her amnesia (which seems a strange perversion of repressed memory syndrome) and with the pesky Rasputin who rises from Hell in order to destroy the last heir of the Romanovs...
...love story would work just fine standing alone. Meg Ryan does a magnificent job breathing life into Anastasia, giving the starry-eyed princess the touch of quirkiness that she needs to be believable. But there is little character development for the heroine--all her emotions are more asserted than dramatized...
Here, though, the Fox studios did not approach the life of Anastasia with the primary intention of recasting history. Rather, they were only searching for the obligatory princess heroine that every animated flick features. Consider the vast range that have appeared in Disney's canon, from Snow White and Cinderella to Ariel, the princess under the sea, Pocahontas, the Indian princess, and Jasmine, the sultan's daughter, to name but a few. As Anya herself astutely observes, "I guess that every lonely girl hopes she's a princess." One can only imagine where this will lead--perhaps Disney's Diana...
...everyone but himself, his family and a few others, Dunne brings on the familiar cast--Clark, Cochran, Bailey, Ito. Yet we also meet another set of characters--the rich and the celebrated with whom he socialized during the trial. On and on, the names pulse through the book: the Princess of Wales, Elizabeth Taylor, Nancy Reagan, Warren Beatty--each one desperate for Dunne to tell him or her the latest news from the courthouse. Part O.J. reportage and part gossip column, Another City, Not My Own also tells the story of Dunne's personal tragedies and redemption. Los Angeles...