Word: wars
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...medieval Japan, Mononoke imagines a war involving several bands of humans--and a more desperate battle between man and the environment. Ashitaka (given voice in Neil Gaiman's American adaptation by Billy Crudup), the youngest survivor of a vanishing tribe, is gored by a demon boar that is a protector of the great forest. His wound will kill him if he can't solve the mystery of his curse. He meets Eboshi (Minnie Driver), ruler of Iron Town, and her fiercest foe, San (Claire Danes), or Mononoke, which means spirit. They want to use him or escape...
There's lots of rancorous chat--as much squabbling as the Hundred Years' War, and with the same stench of anticipated defeat. In the title role, Danes is too shrill, lacking in nuance, a Princess Monotone. But there are images to pry open jaded eyes: the boar, cloaked in wormy tendrils, slithering over the landscape like a killer Koosh ball; a god-deer that causes flowers to spring up when its paws touch the earth. Miyazaki is a magic maker too, creating a fresh, complex, doomed universe--Tolkien meets Kurosawa...
...Warhol was spinning out his sops to celebrities in sycophantic portraits and the swooning talkfests that filled his gossip sheet Interview, much of American art seemed largely earnest--as if it were a vast machine spitting out proof after proof of the solution to what art should mean as war, protest, the surge of feminism and the pulse of disco played themselves out on the nation's stage...
...family colorfully illustrates both ends of the tattoo age spectrum. At 77, my Uncle Harvey sports several, including, on his left forearm, a schooner that arrived there during World War II. Harvey is sheepish about his tattoos, describing them as "stupid mistakes." On the other hand, my 20-year-old stepcousin Aaron will proudly roll up his T-shirt sleeve to show his right arm, covered from shoulder to elbow with his initials surrounded by a design that resembles Victorian wallpaper. An intricately tattooed Yoda from Star Wars sagely sits on his left calf. Aaron describes his body...
WINSTON CHURCHILL was the century's best example of how individuals can shape history rather than being shaped by it. The force of his will and his words gave courage to his country and saved the West. Yet it was also Churchill who, after World War II, discerned the dangers to come from communist tyranny. Just as he defined the moral issues of the 1930s and 1940s, he defined the great moral challenge that would shape America's role in the world up to our own time. Totalitarianism was the greatest evil of the 20th century, and Churchill its most...