Word: ruler
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Since Philippine President Corazon Aquino displaced long-time ruler Ferdinand Marcos in 1986, an insurgent party has stepped up a terrorist campaign, and there has been one attempted coup...
...could literally survey from the Dragon Throne of Beijing's Forbidden City: some 20 palaces, countless courtyards and a small army of thieving eunuchs. Even that dubious privilege was taken from him in 1924, when at 18 he was booted into exile. Later, the Japanese made him the puppet ruler of conquered Manchuria. Still later, the People's Republic of China made him a prisoner, charged with war crimes and ripe for nearly a decade of ideological "remolding." Finally Pu Yi, the last Emperor of China, was rewarded with the one title he could gracefully live up to: citizen...
...Emperor's day, Bernardo Bertolucci (The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris) would surely not have obtained a passport to visit the Forbidden City, let alone explore its ruler's forbidden soul. Last year, though, the director received free range of both from Pu Yi's successors, who regard his final, harmless-dodderer incarnation as an exemplary triumph for their system. The result is a film epic in length (almost three hours), vision (the reimagining of a lost and exotic world) and imagery (formal and glowing). Yet at its center is an anti-epic figure, inarticulate and victimized. The movie must...
...crib and place him on the throne; the Emperor's English tutor (Peter O'Toole) flapping through the streets on his bicycle; an Emperor and his bride (the lovely, fragile Joan Chen) overwhelmed by their huge wedding chamber; the great courtyard filled with wailing eunuchs, dismissed by their ruler; a tennis court, so strangely out of place in these precincts and yet the locale where Pu Yi hears that he has been deposed -- all of this is Bertolucci at his effortless best, a man from whom unforgettable visual metaphors seem to flow of their own accord...
...American people want their President to be God. But a President can't be. The contentious mass in Washington's center is part of Government, and even Presidents cannot reign as its supreme and unyielding ruler...