Word: skirmished
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...film's climax, the Draft Riots engulf the city as Bill and Amsterdam line up for their final face-off--a Celtic clan skirmish that has little to do with the larger atrocities. The point may be that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of corpses when anarchy breaks loose. This daring, perhaps confusing declaration of irrelevance suggests that the epic is a form a director like Scorsese must subvert even as he invokes it. But it doesn't erase the sordid splendor of Scorsese's congested, conflicted, entrancing achievement. --By Richard Corliss...
...master martial artist he defeats in the film's first, superb battle scene; Broken Sword (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), a calligrapher who is as adroit with a brush as with a saber; and Flying Snow (Maggie Cheung), Broken Sword's soul mate. Flying Snow has a side skirmish of her own with Moon (Zhang Ziyi), Broken Sword's smitten apprentice. Loyalties are tested, alliances made and sundered. Death is the price for betrayal?of the King or the heart...
...safe haven for drug dealers, kidnappers, Chechen guerrillas and, if U.S. officials are right, a small number of al-Qaeda operatives. A Russian military jeep drives up a narrow, winding track and is ambushed by bearded gunmen. In the resulting firefight, one of the attackers is killed. Such skirmishes happen almost daily in Chechnya, where Russia is fighting a war against separatist guerrillas. Just last week Chechen rebels shot down a Russian helicopter in neighboring Ingushetia, after reportedly entering the area from Georgia. But this particular scene is part of Marsho (Freedom), the first-ever Chechen feature film, shot...
...warriors do not always get to choose their battles. And while the U.S. has managed to avoid a protracted urban skirmish during the past decade, Saddam wants to provoke just such a fight. If the Bush Administration's goal is Saddam's ouster--and if Iraq's soldiers dig in for the battle--the U.S. may be unable to avoid an armed clash in Baghdad...
...first skirmish of the new battle will come when the parliament passes Khatami's bill, and it goes to the hard-line Guardian Council for approval. The hard-line clerics who dominate this unelected body have vetoed scores of pro-reform legislation in the past, but the President's bill would place them in a quandary: reject the legislation and risk an explosion of popular protest, or approve it and suffer the inevitable consequences. If their recent track record offers any guide, the Council may duck the confrontation by approving the bill, then seek to undermine its implementation via their...