Word: jacksonism
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...plus hours of nifty documentary footage), you will see a hail of flying skulls assaulting Aragorn and his colleagues when they meet the Army of the Dead. The Mouth of Sauron, a creature with really scary teeth, rides out to tell Aragorn that Frodo has been killed. Jackson (who can be glimpsed playing a pirate) also solves the riddle of the "wizard kebab"--a photo, snapped on the set, of a white-robed man impaled on a huge spike. It's Saruman, fallen to his death...
...Jackson's trilogy ended on a triumphant note: Return of the King won 11 Oscars and became one of only two films (the other is Titanic) to earn more than $1 billion in theaters. The Matrix, fairly or not, is seen as a terrific film followed by two vagrantly entertaining afterthoughts (Reloaded and Revolutions). The Ultimate Matrix is the Wachowskis' grand play to establish the three films as one fabulous story. They don't pull it off, but there are goodies galore in this package...
...Andrew Jackson? A pistol mouth, a boxing-glove nose and bullets as eyes. Theodore Roosevelt? Gears for eyes, a light-bulb nose and a coiled-wire mustache. Piven's highly inventive collage portraits are matched with amusingly quirky tidbits about the Presidents (the pugnacious Jackson's penchant for dueling, the busy Roosevelt's bustling energy). Most of the jokes are benign--George W. Bush, a former baseball-team owner, has a hot-dog nose and buns for eyebrows--but Piven also meets darker facts head on: Richard Nixon's face is formed with a tape recorder, and his prominent nose...
Nevada senator Harry Reid's capitol office is decorated--incongruously, given his taciturn demeanor--with large portraits of two fabulously flamboyant Americans, Andrew Jackson and Mark Twain. The Jackson portrait is dynamic, wind whipped, but slightly obligatory. Old Hickory, the first President who was not an aristocrat, was the brawling founder of the modern Democratic Party, and Reid, newly elected Senate minority leader, is now the highest-ranking Democrat in Washington...
...once got into a fistfight with his father-in-law-to-be, an observant Jew who opposed the marriage for religious reasons, and I realize how perfect both portraits are. Reid's story is Twainian, a western desert tall tale, and his background is as brutal and hardscrabble as Jackson's. "I guess it's no secret that both my parents drank heavily," he finally says. "I didn't learn my family values in Searchlight," he adds, referring to the tiny Nevada mining town where his father committed suicide and his mother washed laundry for the local brothels. "Mormons were...