Word: sagas
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Movie sequels never seem to measure up either to the original or to the memories of our enjoyment. The Empire Strikes Back, the second "chapter" in Lucas' saga, was awaited with trepidation. Again Clarke sneaked an early look-and once more came away eager to write a major story. Says Clarke: "This is no ordinary sequel. Lucas and his company have used their Star Wars profits to make a film far more sophisticated in its technical effects. Lucas' imagination is as bountiful as ever, and he seems to have taken up where Disney left off. There are disappointments...
...Empire Strikes Back comes in the opening credits: the movie is identified as Episode V. Since it is the immediate sequel to the original Star Wars, that opus has been retitled Star Wars: Episode IV, raising a meteor shower of questions. The answers: Lucas has begun his space saga in the middle, and both pictures are the centerpieces of a projected nine-part series. The remaining movies, fore and aft, have not yet been laid out in detail, but Lucas has the framework, a kind of history of what happened in that galaxy long ago and far away. A preview...
...broader history. It invites and aspires to comparisons with the great novels of literary history. The lines and intersections of characters' lives are set within the dislocating phases of world events. All is understood in the perspective of the slowwheeling geometry of time's sweep. Hazzard handles her saga about the lonely remnants of several families with a stylish cinematic control that gives us a highly structured plot moving in the shadow of Greek tragedy. She roams the world with a chastened recognition of larger patterns beyond individual fate, yet never burdens her writing with heavy-handed determinism...
...quite a saga, a tale of horrors seeping forth from a real-life phantasmagoria. Thomas Murton writes of Arkansas' Tucker State Prison Farm as it was before he was brought in for a year as a reform superintendent in 1967: "Discipline was routinely enforced by flogging, beating with clubs, inserting of needles under fingernails, crushing of testicles with pliers, and the last word in torture devices: the 'Tucker telephone,' an instrument used to send an electric current through genitals." In Jail: The Ultimate Ghetto, Ronald Goldfarb records so many atrocities of prison life that the reader...
...saga grows all the time. Last year Illinois Corrections Director Gayle Franzen had to mount a shakedown like a military maneuver to wrest control of Stateville Correctional Center from the inmate gangs who utterly ran the place. Says Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz: "One of the major issues on the prison-reform agenda is how to get the prisons back in the hands of the correction people. Too many prisons are in the hands of inmates." Far too many of the abominations associated with prisons turn out to be not flukes but widespread conditions...