Word: spartacus
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...evening two weeks ago, inspired by the movie Gladiator, the boys had grabbed a copy of Spartacus at the video store...
...there have been very successful movies--Titanic, The Mask of Zorro, Saving Private Ryan--that introduced classic genres to new audiences, employing modern writing and digital techniques. The Roman epic occupies a strange, special place in the heart of moviegoers. We love the good ones like Ben-Hur and Spartacus, but even the bad ones are guilty pleasures." Scott recalls seeing these epics in his youth. "I loved the costume drama of it all and remembered that world vividly," he says. "But I also knew you can't bring that to bear today. You've got to reinvent...
...pans across the battle, a sea of extras, stretching farther than the eye can see, brings the army to life on a breath-taking scale. Which makes very clear what the veteran visionary Scott wants his Gladiator to be a bona fide throwback to old-fashioned Hollywood epics like Spartacus and Ben-Hur, which prided themselves on creating the biggest spectacle possible. Sure, those films had stories (Spartacus had a great one, in fact), but even more important was the way in which they took full advantage of cinematic technology in order to make the saga seem literally larger-than...
...sister (Connie Nielsen). And as wonderful as Crowe is, the detached nature of his character (mostly the fault of the script) hinders his ability to turn Maximus into a truly mythic hero. The great Hollywood epics all had a sense of sweeping emotional grandeur (when the rebels all yell "Spartacus!" it's a cheesy yet uplifting scene) which is noticeably absent from Scott's film, which is more of a relentless, almost mechanical, exercise in blood sports. The end result is a movie that's exciting yet empty, visually gorgeous yet emotionally barren. As big-budget action films go, Gladiator...
From the moment he took the stand last week, Edwards answered yes-or-no questions with unsolicited sermons. It's like "Spartacus to the Romans," complained prosecutor Jim Letten. U.S. District Judge Frank Polozola admonished, "This is not a theater." Of course it was. Edwards told of high-stakes poker games in the Governor's mansion and of "stacking up cash and throwing it away" on lavish impulses. Prosecutors say he used $733,567 in cash toward the purchase of a $1.3 million house. "The government prints $200 million in $100 bills every day. Must be a lot of other...