Word: samurais
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Only at the climax does Frankenheimer build something durable out of the mayhem: a metaphorical bridge between old and new Japan, between the integrity of the samurai and the ingenuity of the technocrat. The warlord's fortress is an executive suite; the watchtowers are electronic eyes; hero and villain cross swords over a photocopier, wrestle on sleek chairs and desks, almost electrocute each other with a computer's exposed wires. The final blow, be warned, is a vertical slice through the bad guy's cranium. One wonders how many members of the audience will stay around...
There Belushi blossomed into an archangel of the grotesque. His face-round and blandly menacing in repose, like a middle-level Mafioso's-could contort into semblances of slashing samurai, killer bees, Joe Cocker or Marlon Brando. Belushi's body, stolid as a '53 Studebaker, could erupt in spasms of grace. As one of the Blues Brothers, the blue-eyed soul group that brought Belushi a platinum record and a big-budget movie, this slab in a black suit would suddenly turn a series of split-second cartwheels, like a hippo Baryshnikov. Belushi was the ideal comic...
...Belushi was inching to ward mid-life without another climax immediately in view. Now it has found him. In his early days with Lemmings, he had mocked celebrity burnout with the All-Star Dead Band - Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin. Less than a decade later, the samurai comic had provided another ghastly punch line to his own joke. This time, no one was laughing...
...ranking institution is an almost irreversible disaster. The thousands of students who do not get accepted at the one university of their choice spend a year, sometimes even two, in cram schools preparing to try again. These crammers are called ronin, a word used to describe the masterless, wandering samurai of the 17th and 18th centuries. The ultimate measure of success: acceptance by the 14,000-student Tokyo University (Todai), for which final qualifying exams took place last week. Since all the national universities have a single standard exam, academic security is taken very seriously. Says Todai Physics Professor Steve...
...time of our best season ever, the future looks just horrible," groans PBS President Larry Grossman. Samurai budgeteers have already cut the original 1983 federal appropriation from $172 million to $137 million, and by 1985 that figure is expected to dwindle to $85 million. Bruce Christensen, president of the National Association of Public Television Stations, is worried about the network's toughing out even the first cut. "No industry can lose 25% of its funds and continue to operate at the same level," he says. This means fewer funds to produce or import expensive programs like Brideshead Revisited, Life...