Eternity and a Day: Scott Rehashes the Dying Embers of an Empire
“The movie doesn’t have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy in just a good line,” wrote Pauline Kale in her 1969 essay “Trash, Art, and the Movies.” The endlessly quotable, controversial prose of Kael might as well be an underwhelming way to describe Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II, the long-awaited sequel to his celebrated Best Picture winner Gladiator (2000), a film which resuscitated the auteur’s lengthy slump through the 1990s and set him on a perennial course of (mostly) highly anticipated projects for the past twenty-four years.… Read the rest
