Word: saga
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...romantic love; it is also what happened in The Godfather, where Coppola used gore to undermine the sanctities of the American family. Though imperfect, Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter is as powerful as those bombshells of the early '70s. This excruciatingly violent, three-hour Viet Nam saga demolishes the moral and ideological cliches of an era: it shoves the audience into hell and leaves it stranded without...
...tragic saga of Jonestown was far from over. At Dover, teams of military pathologists, FBI technicians and civilian embalmers worked to identify the 911 corpses (the count now seemed official and final) and prepare them for burial or cremation. Yet the condition of the remains and the lack of fingerprint records for many victims meant the process was slow-and in many cases would prove futile. Autopsies were to be conducted on seven bodies: Cult Leader Jim Jones, Cult Physician Larry Schacht and five others selected at random. Officials decided that trying to pin down the precise cause of death...
Some things are better left unadapted and unanimated, and one of them seems to be J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. The trilogy-saga does not cry out for amplification; it runs well past half a million words, every one of them revered as holy writ by Tolkien's vast army of fans. What is more, each one of these devotees has strong opinions on what Middle-earth and its inhabitants look like. Show them a hobbit that is not their idea of a hobbit, then run for cover...
...amplitude, the Tolkien story embraces both pipe and slippers and Armageddon. Hence the saga's surge in popularity during the 1960s, when so many people craved the conviction that the Apocalypse rested in their hands. The hobbit Frodo Baggins is an ordinary creature with hairy toes suddenly charged with a task that will decide the battle between good and evil in his world. This elemental quest is what the whole fantasy boils down to and percolates up from. Bakshi tries to strike the same balance between the personal and universal, but in a fraction of the time at Tolkien...
...Yorker Justin Scott spent two years researching and writing The Ship-killer. It shows. His saga of the battered, unyielding Carolyn is as heady as Francis Chichester's narrative, with a draught of Melville and a slosh of Josh Slocum. His choice of villain is a shrewd one. Leviathan is even more dangerous and ungovernable than any vessel described in Noël Mostert's Supership. Scott, who has published five previous novels, limns his driven people as stylishly as his boats. As for Peter Hardin, he will surely name his next sloop Ajaratu...