Editorial Product Review: essential video:This superbly acted, mordantly funny romp through 70 years or so of Roman history is one of the best-loved miniseries ever made, and deservedly so. Derek Jacobi plays Roman Emperor Claudius, who reflects in old age on his life and his remarkable family, giving us a history lesson that's unlike anything you learned in school. The story begins in 24 B.C. during the reign of Augustus Caesar, Rome's first emperor, and ends in A.D. 54 with ...
Editorial Product Review: :Like Tolstoy's novel, this epic-length War and Peace is rough going, but worth the effort. Winner of the 1969 Academy Award® for Best Foreign Language Film and widely considered the most faithful adaptation of Tolstoy's classic, Sergei Bondarchuk's massive Soviet-Italian coproduction was seven years in the making, at a record-setting cost of $100 million. Bondarchuk himself plays the central role of Pierre Bezukhov, buffeted by fate during Russia's tumultuous Napoleonic Wars, serving as pawn and philosopher through some ...
Editorial Product Review: :Are you feeling stifled? Indecisive? Perhaps the wisdom of the ancients can awaken your body to reveal new powers. Watch the body workers in Carlos Castaneda's Magical Passes: Unbending Intent and feel the power coursing through them; soon you'll be tracing these positions and movements yourself. Castaneda's teacher Don Juan Matus learned these martial art-like motions in dreams and passed them on to his apprentices as a means to achieving mastery over one's will, or 'unbending intent.' Now ...
Editorial Product Review: essential video:The 1964 Olympics in Tokyo were a milestone as much for the intense athletic competition as the joyous commemoration of Japan's recovery following its defeat in World War II. Director Kon Ichikawa (The Burmese Harp, Fires on the Plain) created an epic film of the event, a documentary that covered the entire athletic competition while also capturing the surrounding atmosphere. Early in the film is a stunning aerial shot of Hiroshima, which first shows the devastated ...
Editorial Product Review: essential video:Superlatives abound when describing Krzysztof Kieslowski's The Decalogue, a series of 10 one-hour dramas originally made for Polish TV between 1988 and 1989 and seen throughout the world in film festivals and cinematheque and museum programs. Though each episode is inspired by one of the Ten Commandments of the Bible, these are not Sunday school fables illustrating some simplistic moral lesson--the connections to the individual commandments are not always obvious and are often downright curious--but powerful, ...
Editorial Product Review: :Toshirô Mifune is confidence supreme and humility incarnate as the mature samurai master Musashi Miyamoto in the final film of Inagaki's sprawling trilogy. Now a legendary swordsman whose latest quest is to save an isolated village from rampaging brigands (shades of Seven Samurai), he remains haunted by the memory of Otsu (Kaoru Yachigusa). Meanwhile the ruthless and increasingly jealous Kojiro Sasaki (Koji Tsuruta) plots his battle royal with Musashi to prove who is the finest fencer in Japan. ...
Editorial Product Review:Description:Alexander NevskyCommissioned by Stalin in 1938 to stir public sentiment against a threatened German invasion, cinematic giant turned to the thirteenth century prince who defeated an army of Teutonic Knights as the subject of his first sound fil
Editorial Product Review:Description:Alexander NevskyCommissioned by Stalin in 1938 to stir public sentiment against a threatened German invasion, cinematic giant turned to the thirteenth century prince who defeated an army of Teutonic Knights as the subject of his first sound fil
Editorial Product Review:Description:Alexander NevskyCommissioned by Stalin in 1938 to stir public sentiment against a threatened German invasion, cinematic giant turned to the thirteenth century prince who defeated an army of Teutonic Knights as the subject of his first sound fil
Editorial Product Review: essential video:Chushingura means 'loyalty,' and that potent Japanese theme runs like hot blood throughout this stately samurai epic. It's often called the Gone with the Wind of Japanese cinema, and while that may be a fitting cultural parallel, it gives an inaccurate impression of the film, based on one of Japan's most enduring and oft-interpreted historical events. A simmering, deliberately paced drama set during the Tokugawa shogunate in 1701, it centers on 47 loyal samurai who seek ...
The Web Services Policy Working Group has published two Web Services Policy 1.5 - Working Drafts: an update to the Primer and a First Public Working Draft of Guidelines for Policy Assertion Authors. The new Guidelines document provides ...