Word: roman
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Long before Russell Crowe helped reignite filmgoers' enthusiasm for Roman epics, Sir Peter Ustinov, now 81, was king of the genre. He fiddled as Nero while Rome burned in Quo Vadis? (1951) and won the first of his two Academy Awards in 1960 for a supporting role in Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus. "When I was in Rome for the 50th anniversary of Quo Vadis?, the mayor asked me to say a few words in Italian," Ustinov recalls. "I reminded him I was Nero, who only spoke Latin." The story captures the wit and erudition for which Ustinov - who was knighted...
...empires are very similar. That's why Americans make the best Roman films...
...help but reflect on the similarities between ancient Rome and modern America. "We had Pax Romana, now there's Pax Americana," Ustinov says. "The empires are very close to each other - the eagle, the legions, the respect for the flag. That's why Americans make the best Roman films." American hegemony is just one of a multitude of topics on which Ustinov is happy to expound. The British-born son of a French mother and a half-German, half-Russian father (who had an Ethiopian grandmother to boot), his cosmopolitan origins and a lifetime of hobnobbing with the high...
...PIANIST. Adrien Brody’s magnetic, largely silent performance in Roman Polanski’s Holocaust drama almost compensates for The Pianist’s inconsistent tone and distasteful political sensibilities. Brody’s Wladek Szpilman, who could hardly have picked a worse time and place to be Jewish, transforms from cocky concert pianist to starving phantom hunted by Nazis after escaping death in the bombed-out ghetto. The film soars briefly as it reflects on the redemptive power of music and the Szpilman’s commitment to survival; it stumbles badly in its misleading depiction...
This behavior, it turns out, is typical of Szpilman, on whose memoirs Roman Polanski, a survivor of Poland's wartime ghetto, has based his very good movie. Szpilman, portrayed with stoic grace by Adrien Brody, clings to every last shred of normality, despite confronting one of the great abnormalities in human history--the monstrous ghetto in which Warsaw's Jews were brutally forced to live...