Word: wizardly
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...gain investor trust and employee loyalty, Ogami deliberately set about developing his own cult of personality. In daily business meetings, his employees were forced to chant his pithy sayings from what he called "the messiah's creed"; those who balked risked getting the sack. Like a video-age Wizard of Oz, Ogami projected to the public a larger-than-life?and largely fictional?image of himself in reams of expensively produced promotional material. He marketed himself as one-part Jet Li and one-part Mohandas Gandhi, a martial arts expert with a cartoon catchphrase: "I will save the world...
...with a few good bites left in him. He enunciates plot points like a teacher with a thrilling classroom style; his voice has cello music in it. His character also cues the film's one giddy musical moment: when Dooku rides a celestial scooter, composer John Williams borrows The Wizard of Oz's theme music for the Wicked Witch on her flying bike...
That's what happens when the Wizard of Oz gives interviews. But Lucas' first Star Wars film in 16 years was the victim of its own mammoth hype, stoked by a quillion cover stories, including TIME's, before anyone had seen the completed work--and by the worldwide audience's communal memory of Star Wars (1977) and its sequels, The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983). If the Odyssey had enjoyed--or suffered--as much anticipatory fluffing as Phantom Menace did, some ancient Greeks would surely have muttered, "Homer's lost it." And the poet would...
...little dog Toto takes the curtain in his teeth, tugs it aside and gives the world a glimpse of the Wizard of Oz. The wizard in this case turns out to be a pretty seedy character. To claim supernatural powers and then be caught in sordid acts--sexually abusing children or, even worse, shielding the abusers--is not only a moral problem. It is a near fatal professional error. I wonder if the hierarchy knows how gravely the Roman Catholic Church, especially the American church, has been wounded. There's massive internal bleeding, a hemorrhage of credibility...
...little dog Toto takes the curtain in his teeth, tugs it aside and gives the world a glimpse of the Wizard of Oz. The wizard in this case turns out to be a pretty seedy character. To claim supernatural powers and then be caught in sordid acts--sexually abusing children or, even worse, shielding the abusers--is not only a moral problem. It is a near fatal professional error. I wonder if the hierarchy knows how gravely the Roman Catholic Church, especially the American church, has been wounded. There's massive internal bleeding, a hemorrhage of credibility...