Word: quest
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...inadequate public relations. Nixon never could rid himself of the delusion that only the failings of his media staff kept him from receiving the acclaim he associated with John F. Kennedy. President and chief of staff devoted much time to discussing how to manipulate the press-a doomed quest so long as both rejected a serious dialogue with the hated, feared and secretly envied representatives of the media...
Director Constantin Costa-Gavras (Z, State of Siege) builds Missing around the arrival in Santia go of Herman's father Edmund (Jack Lemmon), who joins Horman's wife (Sissy Spacek) in a frustrating quest to find out what happened to his son (John Shea). Basing his narrative largely on Thomas Hauser's 1978 book, The Execution of Charles Horman (reissued in a new paperback as Missing), Costa-Gavras shows the pair running up against a phalanx of American diplomats who profess to be helping but who know all along that the Chilean military authorities have already murdered...
...enterprise so painstaking, so educational, so forthrightly solemn. Director Annaud even recruited Desmond Morris (The Naked Ape) to devise appropriate gestures for the actors, and Anthony Burgess (Language Made Plain) to create primitive dialects, all heavy on the grunts and gutturals. But jokes will come, especially since Quest for Fire emerges less than a year after Caveman, a goofy romp through prehistory that managed to supply the punch lines to many of Quest's earnest questions. Annaud (who won a 1978 Oscar for Black and White in Color) and Screenwriter Gérard Brach have also overtaxed the audience...
There is something heroic nowadays about a movie that dares its audience to keep a straight face. And there are rewards for passing this strenuous test. Quest's canvas is colorfully daubed with great woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers, and humanized with a prototype love affair between Naoh (Everett McGill), the chief Ulam, and Ika (Rae Dawn Chong, the daughter of Cheech's partner), a chatty, chalk-dipped girl from a more advanced tribe. McGill brings so much conviction to Naoh's desperate attempts first to keep the old fire alive, and then to create...
Annaud's quest to ignite this Fire was a noble one. But the film was always likely to spark giggles. Better then to have entrusted it to a prodigious visionary like Werner Herzog, whose best films cut like a sorcerer's scimitar through the legendary past. Herzog might have turned Quest for Fire into a dizzyingly lyrical poem. What Annaud and Brach have provided is a coffee-table textbook...