Word: somewhat
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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What gives this film a somewhat higher value is the addition of one new character. "84 Charlie MoPic" is an Army term for a documentary cameraman, and all of this film was shot on super-16 mm, as if through his lens. But MoPic provides more than the title; he is responsible for the film's unique point of view. There is no editing in the formal sense. In the field the cameraman must pan from face to face to cover a scene and use his zoom for close-ups. Tracking shots are handheld, often on the run. Sequences...
Last week we brought the award winners together in New York City. We were astounded and somewhat awed by their accomplishments. For instance, all of 21 years old, Jennifer Spruill is not only a recognized expert in her field, she is creating it. A native of Pittsburgh and an anthropology major at Bryn Mawr College, she is researching the effect that cultural differences have in resolving conflicts. And at the University of California, Berkeley, Troy Wilson took the first direct image of DNA, the wonderfully intricate molecule that makes up our genes...
Such a grand beginning inspires confidence that we are in the hands of a master storyteller, and Schama's epic history richly fulfills that promise. This saga of revolt and revenge may at first seem somewhat familiar, for it has long been one of the great narrative legends of modern time, told and retold by Burke, Tocqueville, Carlyle and others. We already know -- don't we? -- about the dim-witted King Louis XVI, about Queen Marie Antoinette's supposedly saying "Let them eat cake," and the ragged mobs cheering as the bloodied guillotine rises and falls in its awful rhythm...
This reassembling and rearranging of historical detail is brilliantly successful: Schama's tale is vivid, dramatic, thought-provoking. Yet such is the current academic vogue for bloodless and pseudoscientific historiography that the author repeatedly feels a need to apologize for what he somewhat disingenuously calls a "mischievously old-fashioned piece of storytelling." If Schama's portrait of the revolution is often surprising in its closeup details, however, it is no less so in coloring the background imagery of the French society being overturned...
Unfortunately, there is no real mechanism that policy makers can devise to force the Dan Quayles of society to particpate. Any equivalent of a draft would not fly on Capitol Hill. While Nunn/McCurdy's "burden" might thus fall somewhat more on the unfortunate, it also provides them with opportunies they would not otherwise have--to earn themselves the college educations they are not provided by our present system...