Word: warlord
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Like Hairspray and Piazza, and a hundred others I could name, The First Emperor is a remake of a movie for the musical stage. So let's talk first about The Emperor's Shadow. It dramatizes an episode in the legend of the warlord who united the disparate Chinese tribes in 310 B.C. and ordered the erection of what would become the Great Wall. (Zhang told another fable of the first Emperor in Hero.) His name has a dozen transliterations, but we'll settle for the Met's spelling, Qin Shi Huangdi ? and, from now on, call him the warlord...
...sensitive friend who will become the musician Gao Jianli ? think Jimmy Cagney and Pat O'Brien in Angels With Dirty Faces. Both are suckled by Jianli's mother and raised as brothers. When they're 10, they're separated for pursue their different and colliding destinies. In maturity, the warlord (played with a bull-headed majesty by Jiang Wen, China's leading movie actor) hears than Jianli (Ge You, a stalwart of several Zhang Yimou films) is enslaved by a rival clan; he sends one of his lieutenants to defeat the clan and return with Jianli. He needs a theme...
...Farewell My Concubine, nicely arranges the vectors of comradeship and competition, power and conscience. Zhou Xiaowen's direction is on the stolid side, but his coaxes his lead actors into giving superb performances, full of the intelligent fury the material demands. This is a movie headed for tragedy (the warlord orders Jianli blinded by the fumes of horse urine!), and by the end two of the three are dead. The lieutenant, driven mad with jealousy on hearing of Yueyang's affair with Jianli, murders and mutilates her. Shadow nearly becomes a Sino splatter movie when a courtier tells the warlord...
Said Ali, 21, is a volunteer fighter for the Shabab militia, the feared enforcers of the Islamic Courts Union. The U.S. brands the organization as an ally of al-Qaeda; in reality, it is also a nationalist anti-warlord movement that contains many Muslim moderates and has no international ambitions. He was 11 when he left his village in southern Somalia and traveled to Mogadishu to look for an education. But all public education had collapsed with the last functioning government in 1991, leaving private school the only option. And Said Ali, like most of his generation, was unable...
...places. But then it became only a place for killers, and for 14 years I could not visit." Though they lived in a port city a mere 15 minutes walk from the shore, "some of my children had never seen the sea," Fanah adds. When the Courts removed the warlord's blockades that had barricaded the city into tiny, heavily armed enclaves, he took his kids to the beach. " 'Why is all this water?' my boy ask me. I had to explain...