Orwell

Written in 1949, George Orwell envisioned a grim future. By 1984, he imagined political leaders manipulating the multitudes into placing infinite faith in their power. In Great Books: 1984, revisit Orwell's life and work, and explore his darkest novel which is sometimes difficult to distinguish from today's reality.

George Orwell's landmark novel is the basis of this eerie, darkly satiric tale whose futuristic world is divided into three sections following an atomic war. London, capital of the Oceania sector, is where Edmond O'Brien is a clerk for "Big Brother," ….

Has America entered an Orwellian world of doublespeak where outright lies can pass for truth? The country's leading intellectuals discuss & examine the mix of businesses, politics & ideology that is the mainstream media.

Pitting the imagination of common man Sam Lowry (the brilliantly befuddled Jonathan Pryce) against the oppressive storm troopers of the Ministry of Information, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil has come to be regarded as an anti-totalitarianism cautionary tale equal to the works of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Gathering footage from both the European and American versions of this masterpiece, Gilliam has assembled the ultimate, 142-minute director’s cut of his most celebrated film.

Lord of the Flies is famed theater director Peter Brook’s daring translation of William Golding’s brilliant novel. The story of thirty English schoolboys stranded on an uncharted island at the start of the “next” war, Lord of the Flies is a seminal film of the New American Cinema and a fascinating anti-Hollywood experiment in location filmmaking. As the cast relived Golding’s frightening fable, Brook found the cinematic “evidence” of the author’s terrifying thesis: there is a beast in us all.

A WW2 U-boat crew is stranded in northern Canada. To avoid internment, they must make their way to the border and get into the still-neutral USA.

Oichi was back in action, and at the start of Trapped, seems quite content with her life as a bounty-huntress. She has even adopted an orphan, just as she herself was taken in herself, but two things wreck this relatively happy situation. She discovers her protege is really a runaway, not an orphan, and consequently has to abandon her - again, as she was discarded. Worse yet, she incurs the wrath of fellow bounty-huntress Oen (Matsuoka), a kitten with a whip and pockets full of venomous snakes, who leaves Oichi for dead. Luckily, she is nursed back to health by Matsuka (Irikawa), a farmer who doesn't care about her shady past, and Oichi discovers the joys of a simpler existence - specifically, one not involving the slaughter of criminals for cash. Of course, the inevitable eventually happens: local thug Bunzo (Abe) starts taking the locals' rice stocks, with Oen closely in tow. No prizes for guessing that the quiet life isn't going to last long, especially after Matsuka is manipulated by Oen into owing a gambling debt to Bunzo.