{"id":1580,"date":"2008-01-13T21:00:44","date_gmt":"2008-01-13T21:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/?p=1580"},"modified":"2008-01-13T21:00:44","modified_gmt":"2008-01-13T21:00:44","slug":"critiques-spartacus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/archives\/1580","title":{"rendered":"Critiques: Spartacus."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As it turned out, the next film up on my project list was 1960&#8217;s <a title=\"Spartacus (1960)\" href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0054331\/\"><i>Spartacus<\/i><\/a>, starring Kirk Douglas, Laurence Olivier, Peter Ustinov and a very young Tony Curtis.  Again, this was a viewing experience that I&#8217;m really glad to have had &#150; <i>Spartacus<\/i> is one of those cast-of-thousands movies with a very palpable sense of its time, caught in the interim stages between a &#8220;big studio&#8221; DeMille-type movie and a more modern-day blockbuster.  Some of the sets are delightfully fake, some of the background paintings look like something out of a stage production, but the scale of the film is really and truly fantastic.  The &#8220;I am Spartacus!&#8221; scene, while legendary, did not disappoint, and the way Kubrick made both sides of the conflict sympathetic and intriguing was, of course, brilliantly well done.  The only thing I didn&#8217;t like was the overtly operatic four-minute overture at the beginning of nothing but music, and a similar pause at the intermission point in the middle.  Contemporary audiences like me may find themselves glancing at their watches and contemplating the fast-forward button.  Aside from that, though, very highly recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As it turned out, the next film up on my project list was 1960&#8217;s Spartacus, starring Kirk Douglas, Laurence Olivier, Peter Ustinov and a very young Tony Curtis. Again, this was a viewing experience that I&#8217;m really glad to have had &#150; Spartacus is one of those cast-of-thousands movies with a very palpable sense of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movies"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4e5QR-pu","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1580"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1580\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}