Word: tyrant
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Stalin--tyrant and village primitive--yammered all through the double feature, talking down the stars onscreen. At about 2 a.m. he would propose, as if spontaneously, "Let's go and get something to eat." No one said no. Everyone would ride 10 miles to Stalin's dacha at Kuntsevo and begin another of the booze-fogged, terror-soaked marathon predawn dinners that the Minister of Cultural Terror, Yury Zhdanov, had convinced Stalin were the equivalent of the symposia of the ancient Greeks. "These vomit-flecked routs," the British biographer Simon Sebag Montefiore observes in Stalin: The Court...
...method is conversion, not coercion, it is self-suffering, not the suffering of the tyrant,” Gandhi wrote. The story of India’s nonviolent fight for independence is well known. If nothing else, the popularity of the 1982 film Gandhi ensured that, setting both its eponymous hero and his partner, Jawaharlal Nehru, who would become India’s first Prime Minister, firmly in the American consciousness...
Though at this point Gen. Pinochet’s capacity to stand trial is unclear, Chile’s judicial system has no choice but to proceed with extreme caution, weighing the desire to hold a tyrant to account against an imperative to preserve due process in so doing; and while the preferred result is, of course, to do both, the former must absolutely be held in the weightier regard. If Gen. Pinochet, murderer or otherwise, must be left to live the rest of his life in freedom so that the end of greater justice is accomplished, then...
...downfall. Despite his irritating tendency to say the wrong thing to just about everyone, there are elements of appealing humanity in Troy. There is something gripping about his irate desperation and something frightening about the ease with which Troy evolves from confident and optimistic bartender to paranoid resentful tyrant. The filmmakers have been handed a fascinating fable and they make good use of their material. They choose scenes that effectively highlight the quicksilver personality of Troy; moreover, they use just the right dose of other characters’ appearances to temper Troy’s intensity and provide outside perspective...
...should we concern ourselves with this hateful tyrant, whose life the movie traces for nearly half a century starting with his immigration to Japan from Korea in 1920? The most obvious reason is that Kim is played by "Beat" Takeshi Kitano, the Japanese actor-director whose blind-swordsman movie Zatoichi won him best-director honors at last year's Venice Film Festival. Shunpei Kim is Kitano's first lead role under another director in more than a decade, and the best performance of an illustrious career. But an equally important force behind what may be this year's best Japanese...