Word: splendor
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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11th century San Marco, Venice. The Doge's chapel was modeled on a now destroyed church in the rival--and more splendid--metropolis Constantinople. But as it prospered, Venice both updated and preserved San Marco's splendor: five shallow Byzantine brick domes were covered over by metal ones. The 320-ft. campanile, foreground, raised in 912, collapsed in 1902. It was rebuilt in 1912--on its 1,000th birthday...
...have lost the love of grandeur, of finding the heroic scale of historical figures. Chen Kaige to the rescue! China's longest-reigning angry young filmmaker has an eye for rapturous compositions on a huge and telling tapestry. His new film mixes DeMille and Dostoyevsky: the cast-of-thousands splendor of a biblical epic and the gnarled psychology of Chen's own Farewell My Concubine. And all in less time than a Stephen King prison drama...
...dreamscapey San Francisco, refugees from the author's novels Idoru and Virtual Light navigate the blurry boundary between terrestrial reality and cyberspace, meeting a new raft of 21st century weirdos as an ill-defined societal apocalypse nears. The ferociously talented Gibson (Neuromancer) delivers his signature melange of techno-pop splendor and postindustrial squalor, but this time his teasing, multicharacter narrative leads only to an irritating head scratcher of a conclusion. Genre freaks: this appears to complete the trilogy. Connoisseurs: just reread Neal Stephenson...
...effects, Clerks, Mallrats and Chasing Amy didn't demand much camera movement (even Smith, before beginning work on Dogma, self-effacingly assured that he'd "move the camera this time.") The inconsistent camera angles are so vexing, they are a distraction from many of the jokes, and subvert the splendor of the special effects (which could use some tweaking themselves...
Indeed the result was quite spectacular. Technically, the play was a sensory splendor--most arresting on the visual plane, but pleasing to more senses than just the eyes. What is immediately apparent is the role of inanimacy in this production, the unspoken heroics of sound and lightning, although purists might have viewed this aesthetic exhibition as more of a reliance than a means to an end. Admittedly, the very hipness of the event did at times seem incongruous with the apparent simultaneous desire for austerity, which is difficult to completely discount with Marlowe's text and the Faust legend...