Word: sagas
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...Tipper Gore and the reformers are to educate Americans about mental illness and hence reduce its stigma, they will have to be honest about such complexities. But openness about mental illness isn't easy. Gore has at times even seemed reluctant to share her saga. She refuses to name the medication she took, and she gives few details about the nature of her depression, saying mainly that it emerged after a car accident that nearly killed...
...calling the kettle black. The latest public critic of increasingly under-fire Secretary of State Madeleine Albright is none other than that most unloved of modern-day diplomats -- former U.N. secretary general Boutros Boutros-Ghali. According to the New York Times, in his new book, "Unvanquished: A U.S.-U.N. Saga," the Egyptian envoy savages Albright's diplomatic abilities. "She seemed to assume," he wrote, "that her mere assertion of a U.S. policy should be sufficient to achieve the support of other nations," and tended to lecture foreign leaders rather than engage in the "difficult diplomatic work of persuading [them...
...familiar trapezoidal text-crawl tells us. "The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute." Immediately one is perplexed. A summary made sense in the earlier films; they were episodes IV, V and VI in the grand fable, and as continuations of an initially untold saga, they required some elucidation. But what's the need for back-story text in a tale that is just beginning? Can it be that Lucas was unable to dramatize these events, so he put them in the crawl? That would explain the gobs of dry exposition, devoted to blustering, filibustering debates...
...course, there's a lot going on here that's simply implied by our familiarity with the characters and storyline of this saga. We know that Anakin and Amidala are destined to marry and bear twins Luke and Leia. We know that the smug Senator Palpatine will eventually reveal his dastardliness as he transforms into the creepy Emporer we've seen in Return of the Jedi. And we know that somehow, he will act in turning the thoughtful and loving little Anakin to the Dark Side to become the monstrous Darth Vader...
...Dependency on the originals extends far beyond decorative quoting: it informs the structure of Lucas' script so that Episode I gets lost in a world of juicy but ultimately soulless revelation. Every five minutes a new character makes its incredibly propitious entrance into the Star Wars saga--R2-D2 is the droid that saves the queen's ship from destruction and C-3PO was Darth Vader's boyhood engineering hobby--Tatooine just happens to be the most convenient planet for a pit stop...