title: Burmese language

text: Nouns in Burmese are pluralized by suffixing "twe" (or if the word ends in a glottal stop) in colloquial Burmese or "mya:" in formal Burmese. The suffix "tou." , which indicates a group of persons or things, is also suffixed to the modified noun. An example is below:


title: Burmese language

text: Although Burmese does not have grammatical gender (e.g. masculine or feminine nouns), a distinction is made between the sexes, especially in animals and plants, by means of suffix particles. Nouns are masculinized with the following suffixes: "hti:" , "hpa" , or "hpui" , depending on the noun, and feminized with the suffix "ma." . Examples of usage are below:


title: Burmese language

text: Like its neighboring languages such as Thai, Bengali, and Chinese, Burmese uses numerical classifiers (also called measure words) when nouns are counted or quantified. This approximately equates to English expressions such as "two slices of bread" or "a cup of coffee". Classifiers are required when counting nouns, so "hka.le: nga:" (lit. 'child five') is incorrect, since the measure word for people "yauk" is missing; it needs to suffix the numeral.


title: Burmese language

text: The standard word order of quantified words is: quantified noun + numeral adjective + classifier, except in round numbers (numbers that end in zero), in which the word order is flipped, where the quantified noun precedes the classifier: quantified noun + classifier + numeral adjective. The only exception to this rule is the number 10, which follows the standard word order.


title: Burmese language

text: The Burmese language makes prominent usage of affixes (called in Burmese), which are untranslatable words that are suffixed or prefixed to words to indicate tense, aspect, case, formality etc. For example, is a suffix used to indicate the imperative mood. While ('work' + suffix indicating politeness) does not indicate the imperative, ('work' + suffix indicating imperative mood + suffix indicating politeness) does. Affixes are often stacked next to each other


title: Burmese language

text: Some affixes modify the word's part of speech. Among the most prominent of these is the prefix , which is prefixed to verbs and adjectives to form nouns or adverbs. For instance, the word means "to enter," but combined with , it means "entrance" . Moreover, in colloquial Burmese, there is a tendency to omit the second in words that follow the pattern + noun/adverb + + noun/adverb, like , which is pronounced and formally pronounced .


title: Burmese language

text: Subject pronouns begin sentences, though the subject is generally omitted in the imperative forms and in conversation. Grammatically speaking, subject markers ( in colloquial, in formal) must be attached to the subject pronoun, although they are also generally omitted in conversation. Object pronouns must have an object marker ( in colloquial, in formal) attached immediately after the pronoun. Proper nouns are often substituted for pronouns. One's status in relation to the audience determines the pronouns used, with certain pronouns used for different audiences.


title: Burmese language

text: Polite pronouns are used to address elders, teachers, and strangers, through the use of feudal-era third person pronouns in lieu of first- and second-person pronouns. In such situations, one refers to oneself in third person: "kya. nau" for men and "kya. ma." for women, both meaning "your servant", and refer to the addressee as "min" ('your highness'), "khang bya:" ('master, lord') () or "hrang" "ruler/master". So ingrained are these terms in the daily polite speech that people use them as the first and second person pronouns without giving a second thought to the root meaning of these pronouns.


title: Burmese language

text: When speaking to a person of the same status or of younger age, "nga" ('I/me') and "nang" ('you') may be used, although most speakers choose to use third person pronouns. For example, an older person may use "dau le:" ('aunt') or "u: lei:" ('uncle') to refer to himself, while a younger person may use either "sa:" ('son') or "sa.mi:" ('daughter').


title: Burmese language

text: Other pronouns are reserved for speaking with bhikkhus (Buddhist monks). When speaking to a bhikkhu, pronouns like "bhun: bhun:" (from "phun: kri:" 'monk'), "chara dau" ('royal teacher'), and "a.hrang bhu.ra:" ('your lordship') are used depending on their status . When referring to oneself, terms like "ta. paey. tau" ('royal disciple') or "da. ka" , ('donor') are used. When speaking to a monk, the following pronouns are used:


title: Burmese language

text: In colloquial Burmese, possessive pronouns are contracted when the root pronoun itself is low toned. This does not occur in literary Burmese, which uses ၏ as postpositional marker for possessive case instead of . Examples include the following:


title: Burmese language

text: The contraction also occurs in some low toned nouns, making them possessive nouns (e.g. or , "mother's" and "Myanmar's" respectively).


title: Burmese language

text: Minor pronunciation differences do exist within regions of Irrawaddy valley. For example, the pronunciation of "food offering [to a monk]" is preferred in Lower Burma, instead of , which is preferred in Upper Burma. However, the most obvious difference between Upper Burmese and Lower Burmese is that Upper Burmese speech still differentiates maternal and paternal sides of a family:


title: Burmese language

text: In a testament to the power of media, the Yangon-based speech is gaining currency even in Upper Burma. Upper Burmese-specific usage, while historically and technically accurate, is increasingly viewed as distinctly rural or regional speech. In fact, some usages are already considered strictly regional Upper Burmese speech and are likely to die out. For example:


title: Burmese language

text: In general, the male-centric names of old Burmese for familial terms have been replaced in standard Burmese with formerly female-centric terms, which are now used by both sexes. One holdover is the use of ('younger brother to a male') and ('younger brother to a female'). Terms like ('elder brother to a male') and ('younger sister to a male') now are used in standard Burmese only as part of compound words like ('brothers') or ('brother and sister').


title: Burmese language

text: Reduplication is prevalent in Burmese and is used to intensify or weaken adjectives' meanings. For example, if "beautiful" is reduplicated, then the intensity of the adjective's meaning increases. Many Burmese words, especially adjectives with two syllables, such as "beautiful", when reduplicated ( → ) become adverbs. This is also true of some Burmese verbs and nouns (e.g. 'a moment' → 'frequently'), which become adverbs when reduplicated.


title: Burmese language

text: Some nouns are also reduplicated to indicate plurality. For instance, ('country'), but when reduplicated to , it means "many countries," as in ('international'). Another example is , which means "a kind," but the reduplicated form means "multiple kinds."


title: Burmese language

text: Burmese digits are traditionally written using a set of numerals unique to the Mon–Burmese script, although Arabic numerals are also used in informal contexts. The cardinal forms of Burmese numerals are primarily inherited from the Proto-Sino-Tibetan language, with cognates with modern-day Sino-Tibetan languages, including the Chinese and Tibetan. Numerals beyond 'ten million' are borrowed from Indic languages like Sanskrit or Pali. Similarly, the ordinal forms of primary Burmese numerals (i.e., from first to tenth) are borrowed from Pali, the liturgical language of Theravada Buddhism. Ordinal numbers beyond ten are suffixed ().


title: Burmese language

text: Burmese numerals follow the nouns they modify, with the exception of round numbers, which precede the nouns they modify. Moreover, numerals are subject to several tone sandhi and voicing rules that involve tone changes (low tone → creaky tone) and voicing shifts depending on the pronunciation of surrounding words. A more thorough explanation is found on Burmese numerals.


title: Burmese language

text: There is no official romanization system for Burmese. There have been attempts to make one, but none have been successful. Replicating Burmese sounds in the Latin script is complicated. There is a Pali-based transcription system in existence, MLC Transcription System which was devised by the Myanmar Language Commission (MLC). However, it only transcribes sounds in formal Burmese and is based on the Burmese alphabet rather than the phonology.


title: Burmese language

text: Several colloquial transcription systems have been proposed, but none is overwhelmingly preferred over others.


title: Burmese language

text: Transcription of Burmese is not standardized, as seen in the varying English transcriptions of Burmese names. For instance, a Burmese personal name like may be variously romanized as Win, Winn, Wyn, or Wynn, while may be romanized as Khaing, Khine, or Khain.


title: Burmese language

text: The Burmese alphabet can be entered from a standard QWERTY keyboard and is supported within the Unicode standard, meaning it can be read and written from most modern computers and smartphones.


title: Burmese language

text: Burmese has complex character rendering requirements, where tone markings and vowel modifications are noted using diacritics. These can be placed before consonants (as with ), above them (as with ) or even around them (as with ). These character clusters are built using multiple keystrokes. In particular, the inconsistent placement of diacritics as a feature of the language presents a conflict between an intuitive WYSIWYG typing approach, and a logical consonant-first storage approach.


title: Burmese language

text: Since its introduction in 2007, the most popular Burmese font, Zawgyi, has been near-ubiquitous in Myanmar. Linguist Justin Watkins argues that the ubiquitous use of Zawgyi harms Myanmar languages, including Burmese, by preventing efficient sorting, searching, processing and analyzing Myanmar text through flexible diacritic ordering.


title: Burmese language

text: Zawgyi is not Unicode-compliant, but occupies the same code space as Unicode Myanmar font. As it is not defined as a standard character encoding, Zawgyi is not built in to any major operating systems as standard. However, allow for its position as the "de facto" (but largely undocumented) standard within the country, telcos and major smartphone distributors (such as Huawei and Samsung) ship phones with Zawgyi font overwriting standard Unicode-compliant fonts, which are installed on most internationally distributed hardware. Facebook also supports Zawgyi as an additional language encoding for their app and website. As a result, almost all SMS alerts (including those from telcos to their customers), social media posts and other web resources may be incomprehensible on these devices without the custom Zawgyi font installed at the operating system level. These may include devices purchased overseas, or distributed by companies who do not customize software for the local market.


title: Burmese language

text: Keyboards which have a Zawgyi keyboard layout printed on them are the most commonly available for purchase domestically.


title: Burmese language

text: Until recently, Unicode compliant fonts have been more difficult to type than Zawgyi, as they have a stricter, less forgiving and arguably less intuitive method for ordering diacritics. However, intelligent input software such as Keymagic and recent versions of smartphone soft-keyboards including Gboard and ttKeyboard allow for more forgiving input sequences and Zawgyi keyboard layouts which produce Unicode-compliant text.


title: Burmese language

text: A number of Unicode-compliant Burmese fonts exist. The national standard keyboard layout is known as the Myanmar3 layout, and it was published along with the Myanmar3 Unicode font. The layout, developed by the Myanmar Unicode and NLP Research Center, has a smart input system to cover the complex structures of Burmese and related scripts.


title: Burmese language

text: In addition to the development of computer fonts and standard keyboard layout, there is still a lot of scope of research for the Burmese language, specifically for Natural Language Processing (NLP) areas like WordNet, Search Engine, development of parallel corpus for Burmese language as well as development of a formally standardized and dense domain-specific corpus of Burmese language.


title: Burmese language

text: Myanmar government has designated Oct 1 2019 as "U-Day" to officially switch to Unicode. The full transition is estimated to take two years.


title: José Ferrer

text: José Vicente Ferrer de Otero y Cintrón (January 8, 1912 – January 26, 1992) was a Puerto Rican actor and director of stage, film and television. He was one of the most celebrated and esteemed Hispanic American actors during his lifetime, with a career spanning nearly 60 years between 1935 and 1992. He achieved prominence for his portrayal of Cyrano de Bergerac in the play of the same name, which earned him the inaugural Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play in 1947. He reprised the role in a 1950 film version and won an Academy Award, making him the first Hispanic actor and the first Puerto Rican-born to win an Oscar.


title: José Ferrer

text: His other notable film roles include Charles VII in "Joan of Arc" (1948), Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in "Moulin Rouge" (1952), defense attorney Barney Greenwald in "The Caine Mutiny" (1954), Alfred Dreyfus in "I Accuse!" (1958); which he also directed, the Turkish Bey in "Lawrence of Arabia" (1962), Siegfried Rieber in "Ship of Fools" (1965), and Emperor Shaddam IV in "Dune" (1984). Ferrer also maintained a prolific acting and directing career on Broadway, winning a second Best Actor Tony for "The Shrike", and Best Director for "The Shrike", "The Fourposter", and "Stalag 17."


title: José Ferrer

text: Ferrer was the father of actor Miguel Ferrer, the brother of Rafael Ferrer, the grandfather of actress Tessa Ferrer, and the uncle of actor George Clooney. His contributions to American theatre were recognized in 1981, when he was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame. In 1985, he received the National Medal of Arts from President Reagan, becoming the first actor so honored.


title: José Ferrer

text: Ferrer was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, the son of Rafael Ferrer, a local attorney and writer, and María Providencia Cintrón, of Yabucoa. He was the grandson of Gabriel Ferrer Hernández, a doctor and advocate of Puerto Rican independence from Spain. He had two younger sisters, Elvira and Leticia.


title: José Ferrer

text: The family moved to New York in 1914, when Ferrer was two years old. He studied at the Swiss boarding school Institut Le Rosey. He was adept in several languages, including Spanish, English, French, and Italian.


title: José Ferrer

text: In 1933, Ferrer completed his bachelor's degree in architecture at Princeton University, where he wrote his senior thesis on "French Naturalism and Pardo Bazán". Ferrer was also a member of the Princeton Triangle Club and played piano in a band, "José Ferrer and His Pied Pipers". Ferrer then studied Romance languages at Columbia University for 1934–35.


title: José Ferrer

text: Ferrer's first professional appearance as an actor was at a "showboat" theater on Long Island in the summer of 1934.


title: José Ferrer

text: In 1935, Ferrer was the stage manager at the Suffern Country Playhouse, operated by Joshua Logan, whom Ferrer had known at Princeton. Ruth Gordon and Helen Hayes recommended him to Jed Harris.


title: José Ferrer

text: He could also be seen in "Stick-in-the-Mud" (1935) and "Spring Dance" (1936). Ferrer's first big success was in "Brother Rat" (1936–38) which ran for 577 performances. "In Clover" only ran for three performances. "How to Get Tough About It" (1938) also had a short run, as did "Missouri Legend" (1938).


title: José Ferrer

text: "Mamba's Daughters" (1939) ran for 163 performances. Ferrer followed it with "Key Largo" (1939–40) with Paul Muni and directed by Guthrie McClintic, which went for 105 shows and was later turned into a film.


title: José Ferrer

text: Ferrer had a huge personal success in the title role of "Charley's Aunt" (1940–41), partly in drag, under the direction of Joshua Logan. It went for 233 performances.


title: José Ferrer

text: Ferrer made his debut on Broadway as director with "Vickie" (1942) in which he also starred. It only had a short run.


title: José Ferrer

text: He played Iago in Margaret Webster's Broadway production of "Othello" (1943–44), which starred Paul Robeson in the title role, Webster as Emilia, and Ferrer's wife, Uta Hagen, as Desdemona. That production still holds the record for longest-running repeat performance of a Shakespearean play presented in the United States, going for 296 performances (it would be revived in 1945).


title: José Ferrer

text: Ferrer produced and directed, but did not appear in, "Strange Fruit" (1945–46), starring Mel Ferrer (no relation).


title: José Ferrer

text: Ferrer may be best remembered for his performance in the title role of "Cyrano de Bergerac", which he first played on Broadway in 1946. Ferrer feared that the production would be a failure in rehearsals, due to the open dislike for the play by director Mel Ferrer (no relation), so he called in Joshua Logan (who had directed his star-making performance in "Charley's Aunt") to serve as "play doctor" for the production. Logan wrote that he simply had to eliminate pieces of business which director Ferrer had inserted in his staging; they presumably were intended to sabotage the more sentimental elements of the play that the director considered to be corny and in bad taste. The production became one of the hits of the 1946/47 Broadway season, winning Ferrer the first Best Actor Tony Award for his depiction of the long-nosed poet/swordsman.


title: José Ferrer

text: Ferrer directed, but did not appear in, "As We Forgive Our Debtors" (1947), which ran 5 performances. There was another short run for "Volpone" (1947) which Ferrer adapted and played the title role.


title: José Ferrer

text: Ferrer made his film debut in the Technicolor epic "Joan of Arc" (1948) as the weak-willed Dauphin opposite Ingrid Bergman as Joan. Ferrer's performance earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor.


title: José Ferrer

text: At the City Center, he acted in revivals of "Angel Street" (1948) and "The Alchemist" (1948) and directed "S. S. Glencairn" (1948) and "The Insect Comedy" (1948) (also appearing in the latter).


title: José Ferrer

text: Ferrer had another Broadway hit with "The Silver Whistle" (1948–49) which ran for 219 performances. He performed two shows for "The Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse" on TV in 1949: Cyrano, playing the title role, and an adaptation of "What Makes Sammy Run?", playing Sammy Glick (adapted by Paddy Chayefsky).


title: José Ferrer

text: Ferrer returned to Hollywood to appear in Otto Preminger's "Whirlpool" (1950), supporting Gene Tierney, and Richard Brooks' "Crisis" (1950), opposite Cary Grant.


title: José Ferrer

text: Ferrer then played the title role in "Cyrano de Bergerac" (1950), directed by Michael Gordon and produced by Stanley Kramer. Ferrer won the Best Actor Oscar. The film was widely seen although it lost money. Ferrer donated the Oscar to the University of Puerto Rico, and it was subsequently stolen in 2000.


title: José Ferrer

text: Ferrer returned to Broadway for a revival of "Twentieth Century" (1950–51) which he directed and starred in, opposite Gloria Swanson; it went for 233 performances. Immediately following, he produced and directed, but did not appear in, "Stalag 17" (1951–52), a big hit running for 472 performances. Even more popular was "The Fourposter" (1951–53) in which he directed Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy; it ran for 632 performances.


title: José Ferrer

text: Ferrer returned to cinema screens in the comedy "Anything Can Happen" (1952), directed by George Seaton, where Ferrer played an immigrant.


title: José Ferrer

text: More popular was "Moulin Rouge" (1952) in which Ferrer played the role of Toulouse-Lautrec under John Huston's direction. Ferrer received 40% of the profits.


title: José Ferrer

text: Back on Broadway, Ferrer directed and starred in "The Shrike" (1952), which ran for 161 performances.


title: José Ferrer

text: His next two shows were as director only: Horton Foote's "The Chase" (1952) only had a short run but "My Three Angels" (1953–54), went for 344 performances.


title: José Ferrer

text: Ferrer had another cinema hit with "Miss Sadie Thompson" (1953) starring Rita Hayworth. Ferrer briefly revived some of his shows at the City Centre in 1953: Cyrano, "The Shrike", "Richard III", "Charley's Aunt".


title: José Ferrer

text: He returned to films with "The Caine Mutiny" (1954) for Kramer, co-starring with Humphrey Bogart and Van Johnson, playing defense lawyer Barney Greenwald; the film was a huge hit. Greenwald's Jewish faith, so prominent in the novel that it informed his judgments of the U.S.S. "Caine's" officers, was downplayed in the film, as Ferrer, being Puerto Rican, was nominally Roman Catholic.


title: José Ferrer

text: Also popular was "Deep in My Heart" (1955) where Ferrer played Sigmund Romberg, and which made a profit of over $1 million.


title: José Ferrer

text: Ferrer made his debut as film director at Universal with an adaptation of "The Shrike" (1955), in which he also starred opposite June Allyson.


title: José Ferrer

text: Ferrer then performed Cyrano in an episode of "Producer's Showcase" on television, directed by Mel Ferrer and co-starring Claire Bloom.


title: José Ferrer

text: He went to England to star in and direct a war film for Warwick Productions, "The Cockleshell Heroes" (1955), alongside Trevor Howard; it was a success at the British box office.


title: José Ferrer

text: Ferrer co-wrote, directed and starred in the film "The Great Man" (1956), at Universal. He directed and starred in two films for MGM: "I Accuse!" (1958), where he played Captain Alfred Dreyfus, and "The High Cost of Loving" (1958) a comedy with Gena Rowlands. Both flopped at the box office.


title: José Ferrer

text: Back on Broadway, Ferrer co-wrote and directed the stage musical "Oh, Captain!" (1958) with Tony Randall, which only had a short run. He directed and starred in "Edwin Booth" (1958), playing the title role; it was not a success.


title: José Ferrer

text: In 1958, Ferrer narrated the children's album "Tubby the Tuba", which was nominated for the Best Recording For Children at the 1st Annual Grammy Awards.


title: José Ferrer

text: Ferrer took over the direction of the troubled musical "Juno" (1959) from Vincent J. Donehue, who had himself taken over from Tony Richardson. The show, which starred Shirley Booth, folded after 16 performances and mixed-to extremely negative critical reaction.


title: José Ferrer

text: However, he followed it directing the original stage production of Saul Levitt's "The Andersonville Trial" (1959–60), about the trial following the revelation of conditions at the infamous Civil War prison. It was a hit and featured George C. Scott, running for 179 performances.


title: José Ferrer

text: Around this time, Ferrer also appeared in television in episodes of "General Electric Theater" and "The United States Steel Hour".


title: José Ferrer

text: Ferrer signed a contract with 20th Century Fox to direct films. He made "Return to Peyton Place" (1961) and "State Fair" (1962), both of which were commercial disappointments.


title: José Ferrer

text: Ferrer had a key support role in the film "Lawrence of Arabia" (1962) which was a huge success. Although Ferrer's performance was only small he said it was his best on screen.


title: José Ferrer

text: At Fox, he played an investigating police officer in "Nine Hours to Rama" (1963). He also guest starred on "The Greatest Show on Earth".


title: José Ferrer

text: Ferrer returned to Broadway to star in Noël Coward's musical "The Girl Who Came to Supper" (1963–64) which ran for 112 performances.


title: José Ferrer

text: Ferrer went to Germany to make "Stop Train 349" (1963) with Sean Flynn. He appeared in the 1964 French film "Cyrano et d'Artagnan" directed by Abel Gance.


title: José Ferrer

text: Back in Hollywood, Ferrer played Herod Antipas in "The Greatest Story Ever Told" (1965) and was in "Ship of Fools" (1965) for Stanley Kramer.


title: José Ferrer

text: A notable performance of his later stage career was as Miguel de Cervantes and his fictional creation Don Quixote in the hit musical "Man of La Mancha". Ferrer took over the role from Richard Kiley in 1966 and subsequently went on tour with it in the first national company of the show. Tony Martinez continued in the role of Sancho Panza under Ferrer, as he had with Kiley.


title: José Ferrer

text: Ferrer starred in Carl Reiner's "Enter Laughing" (1967) and did a production of "Kismet" (1967) on TV. He went to Europe to do "Cervantes" (1967) and appeared in "A Case of Libel" (1968) for US TV. He also provided the voice of the evil Ben Haramed in the 1968 Rankin/Bass Christmas TV special "The Little Drummer Boy". In 1968 the IRS sent him a tax bill of $122,000 going back to 1962.


title: José Ferrer

text: Ferrer appeared in the television films "The Aquarians" (1970), "Gideon" (1971) and "Crosscurrent" (1971) and guest-starred on "The Name of the Game" and "Banyon".


title: José Ferrer

text: Ferrer directed "The Web and the Rock" (1972) on stage in New York and appeared in "The Marcus-Nelson Murders" (1973), "Orson Welles Great Mysteries" (1973), and "Columbo".


title: José Ferrer

text: Around 1973, he narrated "A Touch of Royalty", a documentary on the life and death of Puerto Rico's baseball star Roberto Clemente. Ferrer voiced both versions, Spanish and English.


title: José Ferrer

text: Ferrer voiced a highly truncated cartoon version of "Cyrano" for an episode of "The ABC Afterschool Special" in 1974.


title: José Ferrer

text: Ferrer appeared in "The Missing Are Deadly" (1975), "Forever Young, Forever Free" (1975), "Order to Assassinate" (1975), "Medical Story" (1975), "The Art of Crime" (1975), "Truman at Potsdam" (1976) (playing Stalin), "The Big Bus" (1976), "Paco" (1976)., "Voyage of the Damned" (1976), "Crash!" (1976), "The Sentinel" (1977), "Zoltan, Hound of Dracula" (1977), "Exo-Man" (1977), "Who Has Seen the Wind" (1977), "The Rhinemann Exchange", "The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover" (1977), "Fedora" (1978) from Billy Wilder, "The Amazing Captain Nemo" (1978) (in the title role), and "The Swarm". He guest starred on "Starsky and Hutch" and "Tales of the Unexpected".


title: José Ferrer

text: During the Bicentennial, Ferrer narrated the world premiere of Michael Jeffrey Shapiro's "A Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776" for narrator and orchestra with Martin Rich leading the Philharmonic Symphony of Westchester.


title: José Ferrer

text: Ferrer was a replacement cast member in a production of David Mamet's "A Life in the Theatre" (1977–78). He produced and starred in "White Pelicans" (1978) and directed "Carmelina" (1979) on stage but it only ran 17 performances.


title: José Ferrer

text: He was in "The Fifth Musketeer" (1979), "The Concorde ... Airport '79" (1979), "Natural Enemies" (1979), "The French Atlantic Affair" (1979), "A Life of Sin", a 1979 film by Puerto Rican director Efraín López Neris which also starred Raul Julia, Míriam Colón and Henry Darrow, and "Battles: The Murder That Wouldn't Die" (1980). He did "The Merchant" on stage in Canada.


title: José Ferrer

text: In 1980, he had a role as future Justice Abe Fortas in the made-for-television film version of Anthony Lewis' "Gideon's Trumpet", opposite Henry Fonda in an Emmy-nominated performance as Clarence Earl Gideon.


title: José Ferrer

text: He also appeared in "Battle Creek Brawl" (1980), "Pleasure Palace" (1980), "The Dream Merchants" (1980), "Magnum, P.I.", "Evita Peron" (1981), "Berlin Tunnel 21" (1981), "Peter and Paul" (1981) with Anthony Hopkins, "Bloody Birthday" (1981), Woody Allen's "A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy" (1982) (a classy yet somewhat antagonistic university professor/author whose booming voice both begins and ends the film), "Blood Tide" (1982), "Blood Feud" (1982), "This Girl for Hire" (1983), "The Being" (1983) and Mel Brooks's version of "To Be or Not to Be" (1983).


title: José Ferrer

text: He guest-starred on "Quincy, M.E.", "Another World", "Fantasy Island", "Hotel", "The Love Boat", "Bridges to Cross", and "Murder, She Wrote".


title: José Ferrer

text: Ferrer was in "The Evil That Men Do" (1984), "Samson and Delilah" (1984), and "George Washington" (1984). He was the Emperor in "Dune" (1984) and was in "" (1985), "Seduced" (1985), "Covenant" (1985), "Blood & Orchids" (1986), "Young Harry Houdini", and "The Wind in the Willows" (1987).


title: José Ferrer

text: Ferrer made his farewell to Cyrano by performing a short passage from the play for the 1986 Tony Awards telecast.


title: José Ferrer

text: Although not the original actor to play the character, Ferrer, beginning in the third season, had a recurring role as Julia Duffy's WASPy father in the long-running television series "Newhart" in the 1980s.


title: José Ferrer

text: In an interview given in the 1980s, he bemoaned the lack of good character parts for aging stars, and admitted that he now took on roles mostly for the money, such as his roles in the horror potboilers "The Swarm", in which he played a doctor, and "Dracula's Dog", in which he played a police inspector.


title: José Ferrer

text: Ferrer's final performances include "The Sun and the Moon" (1987), "American Playhouse" ("Strange Interlude" with Kenneth Branagh), "Mother's Day" (1989), "Matlock", "Hired to Kill" (1990), "Old Explorers" (1990) and "The Perfect Tribute".


title: José Ferrer

text: He was cast in a Broadway play "Conversations with My Father" (1991) but withdrew due to poor health.


title: José Ferrer

text: Through his marriage to Clooney, Ferrer was the uncle of actor George Clooney, the father in law to singer Debby Boone and actress Leilani Sarelle, and the grandfather of actress Tessa Ferrer.


title: José Ferrer

text: Ferrer died of colorectal cancer in Coral Gables, Florida, on January 26, 1992, 18 days after his 80th birthday, and was interred in Santa María Magdalena de Pazzis Cemetery in Old San Juan in his native Puerto Rico.


title: The Circle (2017 film)

text: The Circle is a 2017 American techno-thriller film directed by James Ponsoldt with a screenplay by Ponsoldt and Dave Eggers, based on Eggers' 2013 novel of the same name. The film stars Emma Watson and Tom Hanks, as well as John Boyega, Karen Gillan, Ellar Coltrane, Patton Oswalt, Glenne Headly, and Bill Paxton. This would mark a posthumous release for Paxton, who died in February 2017, and would also be the final film of Headly's released before her death in June 2017.


title: The Circle (2017 film)

text: The film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 26, 2017, and was theatrically released on April 28, 2017, by STXfilms and EuropaCorp. It received negative reviews but grossed $40 million worldwide against a budget of $18 million, becoming director Ponsoldt's highest grossing feature.


title: The Circle (2017 film)

text: Through her friend Annie (Karen Gillan), call center intern Mae Holland (Emma Watson) secures a customer support position at The Circle, a tech and social media company. Mae's long time friend Mercer (Ellar Coltrane) is less supportive. Mae takes the job, hoping to support her parents, particularly her father who suffers from multiple sclerosis. At a company meeting, CEO Eamon Bailey (Tom Hanks) introduces SeeChange, which uses small cameras placed anywhere to provide real-time high-quality video. Mae rises quickly in The Circle, embracing social networking and meeting Ty Lafitte (John Boyega), who displays suspicion of other, more enthusiastic employees. At an outdoor company rally emphasizing the need for accountability in politics, The Circle's Chief Operating Officer, Tom Stenton (Patton Oswalt), introduces Congresswoman Olivia Santos (Judy Reyes), who has agreed to open her daily workings to the public through SeeChange. Ty subsequently shows Mae the area containing the cloud server where all information collected by SeeChange is to be stored. Mae is embarrassed when she realizes that Ty is the creator of TrueYou, the Circle's social network, and she had not recognized him. He tells her that TrueYou has grown out of his control, and its current utilization is not what he intended.


title: The Circle (2017 film)

text: Later, Mae's mother shows Mae a picture of a chandelier Mercer made from deer antlers. She photographs it and shares it on her Circle profile. The image attracts significant negative attention to Mercer, with people accusing him of killing the deer. Mercer confronts her at work and tells her to leave him alone. Distressed by Mercer’s reaction, Mae goes kayaking at night and the rough waters cause her kayak to capsize, requiring rescue by the Coast Guard, who were alerted to the emergency through SeeChange cameras, which recorded her acquiring the kayak and capsizing it. At the next meeting, Eamon introduces Mae to the crowd and they discuss her experience of the rescue, which moves her to become the first "Circler" to go "completely transparent", which involves wearing a small camera and exposing her life to the world 24 hours a day. However, this damages her relationships with her parents and Annie, as she accidentally exposes private aspects of their lives to the camera, and they distance themselves from her as a result.


title: The Circle (2017 film)

text: At a board meeting, Eamon announces support from almost all 50 states for voting through Circle accounts. Mae takes it a step further, and suggests requiring every voting citizen to have a Circle account in order to do so. Eamon and Tom approve, but the suggestion upsets Annie. At the next company-wide meeting, Mae says that The Circle believes it can find anyone on the planet in under 20 minutes and introduces a program to find wanted felons in the same time frame. The program identifies an escaped child murderer within 10 minutes, which prompts the Circlers in the audience to erupt in applause. Mae uses this successful test to suggest transparency can be a force for good. Mae says that the program can find anyone, not just wanted felons, and someone suggests Mercer. Mae is initially hesitant to use the program to locate Mercer, but Tom persuades Mae to continue. Mercer is quickly located in an isolated cabin. Startled by Circle users descending upon his home, he flees in a car, though a Circle user places a small camera on his car window without his knowledge or consent. They pursue him via automobile and a flying drone, which causes Mercer to swerve uncontrollably off a bridge to his death, much to Mae's horror. Days later, Mae calls Annie, who has left The Circle and returned to Scotland, which has improved her well-being. Mae, however, finds that connection with others helps her cope with Mercer's death.


title: The Circle (2017 film)

text: Mae returns to The Circle, despite her parents' pleas. Mae calls Ty to ask for a favor and Ty tells her something that he has discovered. At the next company-wide meeting, Mae explains how connection has helped her recover. She speaks with Eamon, and invites Tom onstage, then invites Eamon and Tom to go fully transparent. She explains that Ty has found all their email accounts and exposed them to the world, as no one should be exempt. Eamon and Tom, clearly upset, try to save face before Tom leaves the stage. Her superiors cut power to her presentation, and the stage goes dark, but the audience activates their mobile devices, illuminating Mae, who reiterates her advocacy of transparency. She later returns to kayaking, untroubled by the drones that shadow her.


title: The Circle (2017 film)

text: On December 15, 2014, "Deadline" reported that Tom Hanks would star in a film adaptation of Dave Eggers' 2013 novel "The Circle", with James Ponsoldt writing and directing. In January 2015, "THR" confirmed that Anthony Bregman would produce the film through his banner, Likely Story, along with Ponsoldt, Hanks, and Gary Goetzman. On May 11, 2015, it was announced that Image Nation Abu Dhabi would fully finance the film, together with Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald, while IM Global would handle international sales. IM GLOBAL later sold the rights to various distributors. In June 2015, Emma Watson was officially set to play the lead role of Mae Holland in the film. In August 2015, John Boyega was added to the cast. In September 2015, Karen Gillan, Patton Oswalt, Bill Paxton, and Ellar Coltrane joined the cast.


title: The Circle (2017 film)

text: Principal photography on the film began on September 11, 2015, in Los Angeles, California. On September 17, filming was taking place in Pasadena. Reshoots were done in January 2017.


title: The Circle (2017 film)

text: In February 2016, EuropaCorp acquired the North American distribution rights to the film, while STX Entertainment co-distributes. "The Circle" premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 26, 2017 and was theatrically released on April 28, 2017.


title: The Circle (2017 film)

text: There has not been an official Region 2 UK DVD or Blu-ray release. The movie however, has been released in the US, and in some European countries, including Germany.


title: The Circle (2017 film)

text: "The Circle" grossed $20.5 million in the United States and Canada and $20.1 million in other territories, for a total of $40.6 million, against a production budget of $18 million.


title: The Circle (2017 film)

text: In the United States and Canada, the film was released alongside "How to Be a Latin Lover", "" and "Sleight", and was projected to gross $10–12 million from 3,163 theaters during its opening weekend. However, the film underperformed, debuting at number five with $9 million, behind "The Fate of the Furious", "How to Be a Latin Lover", "" and "The Boss Baby".


title: The Circle (2017 film)

text: On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 15% based on 144 reviews, with an average rating of 4.20/10. The website's critical consensus reads, ""The Circle" assembles an impressive cast, but this digitally driven thriller spins aimlessly in its half-hearted exploration of timely themes." On Metacritic, the film holds a score of 43 out of 100, based on 32 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "D+" on an A+ to F scale.


title: The Circle (2017 film)

text: Glenn Kenny of "The New York Times" criticized the film for its repetitiveness and lack of originality: "The novel is at its most trenchantly funny when depicting the exhausting nature of virtual social life, and it's in this area, too, that the movie gets its very few knowing laughs. But it's plain, not much more than 15 minutes in, that without the story's paranoid aspects you're left with a conceptual framework that's been lapped three times over by the likes of, say, the Joshua Cohen novel "Book of Numbers" or the HBO comedy series "Silicon Valley"." Dan Callahan of "TheWrap" wrote: "The main problem with "The Circle" is that the evil of the tech company is made so obvious right from the start."


title: The Circle (2017 film)

text: Eric Kohn of IndieWire awarded the film a C. He was especially critical of the film's tonal inconsistencies: "Recent years have seen a proliferation of deep-dive narratives on the information age, from the psychological thriller territory of "Mr. Robot" to the parodic extremes of "Silicon Valley". Ponsoldt's project is stuck in between those two extremes. On the one hand, it's an Orwellian drama about surveillance society; at the same time, it's a sincere workplace drama about young adulthood that shoehorns in some techno-babble for the sake of deepening its potential."


title: The Circle (2017 film)

text: Gregory Wakeman of "Cinema Blend" panned the film, arguing that "the movie's grand philosophical debate is so simplistic and comes from two opposing and extreme sides of the spectrum that it's basically rendered mute." He also wrote: "Smug, condescending, and completely without incident, "The Circle" is the reason why people hate Hollywood." Wakeman gave the film one-and-a-half stars out of five. Likewise, Peter Travers of "Rolling Stone" awarded the film one star out of four. He wrote: ""The Circle" feels dull, dated and ripped from yesterday's headlines. It flatlines while you're watching it."


title: The Circle (2017 film)

text: In a positive review, John DeFore of "The Hollywood Reporter" wrote: "The film's final message isn't as difficult to grapple with as the world we're actually living in, but that doesn't make it easy." He also described the film as "a mainstream-friendly critique of social media." Owen Gleiberman of "Variety" was positive as well, directing much of his praise towards the film's contemporary relevance: "You could call "The Circle" a dystopian thriller, yet it's not the usual boilerplate sci-fi about grimly abstract oppressors lording it over everyone else. The movie is smarter and creepier than that; it's a cautionary tale for the age of social-media witch hunts and compulsive oversharing. The fascist digital future the movie imagines is darkly intriguing to contemplate, because one's main thought about it is how much of that future is already here." Mick LaSalle of the "San Francisco Chronicle" also praised the film's timeliness: "What makes "The Circle" so valuable is not only that it's showing us a ghastly possible path that the world may take, but that it articulates the mentality that could create and sustain it."


title: Mamluk

text: Mamluk ( (singular), , "mamālīk" (plural), translated as "one who is owned", meaning "slave", also transliterated as "Mameluke", "mamluq", "mamluke", "mameluk", "mameluke", "mamaluke", or "marmeluke") is a term most commonly referring to non-Arab, ethnically diverse (mostly Southern Russian, Turkic, Caucasian, Eastern and Southeastern European) slave-soldiers and freed slaves who were assigned military and administrative duties, serving the ruling Arab dynasties in the Muslim world.


title: Mamluk

text: The most enduring Mamluk realm was the knightly military class in Egypt in the Middle Ages, which developed from the ranks of slave-soldiers. Originally the Mamluks were slaves of Turkic origin from the Eurasian Steppe, but the institution of military slavery spread to include Circassians, Abkhazians, Georgians, Armenians, Russians, and Hungarians, as well as peoples from the Balkans such as Albanians, Greeks, and South Slavs (see Saqaliba). They also recruited from the Egyptians. The "Mamluk/Ghulam Phenomenon", as David Ayalon dubbed the creation of the specific warrior class, was of great political importance; for one thing, it endured for nearly 1,000 years, from the 9th to the 19th centuries.


title: Mamluk

text: Over time, Mamluks became a powerful military knightly class in various Muslim societies that were controlled by Arab rulers. Particularly in Egypt, but also in the Levant, Mesopotamia, and India, mamluks held political and military power. In some cases, they attained the rank of sultan, while in others they held regional power as emirs or beys. Most notably, Mamluk factions seized the sultanate centered on Egypt and Syria, and controlled it as the Mamluk Sultanate (1250–1517). The Mamluk Sultanate famously defeated the Ilkhanate at the Battle of Ain Jalut. They had earlier fought the western European Christian Crusaders in 1154–1169 and 1213–1221, effectively driving them out of Egypt and the Levant. In 1302 the Mamluk Sultanate formally expelled the last Crusaders from the Levant, ending the era of the Crusades.


title: Mamluk

text: While Mamluks were purchased as property, their status was above ordinary slaves, who were not allowed to carry weapons or perform certain tasks. In places such as Egypt, from the Ayyubid dynasty to the time of Muhammad Ali of Egypt, mamluks were considered to be "true lords" and "true warriors", with social status above the general population in Egypt and the Levant. In a sense, they were like enslaved mercenaries.


title: Mamluk

text: Daniel Pipes argued that the first indication of the Mamluk military class was rooted in the practice of early Muslims such as Zubayr ibn al-Awwam and Uthman ibn Affan who before Islam, owned many slaves and practiced Mawla (Islamic manumission of slaves). The Zubayrids army under Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr, son of Zubayr, used these freed slave retainers during the second civil war.


title: Mamluk

text: Meanwhile, historians agree that the massive implementation of a slave military class such as the Mamluks appears to have developed in Islamic societies beginning with the 9th-century Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad. When in the 9th century has not been determined. Until the 1990s, it was widely believed that the earliest Mamluks were known as "Ghilman" or "Ghulam" (another broadly synonymous term for slaves,) and were bought by the Abbasid caliphs, especially al-Mu'tasim (833–842).


title: Mamluk

text: By the end of the 9th century, such slave warriors had become the dominant element in the military. Conflict between the Ghilman and the population of Baghdad prompted the caliph al-Mu'tasim to move his capital to the city of Samarra, but this did not succeed in calming tensions. The caliph al-Mutawakkil was assassinated by some of these slave soldiers in 861 (see Anarchy at Samarra).


title: Mamluk

text: Since the early 21st century, historians have suggested that there was a distinction between the Mamluk system and the (earlier) Ghilman system, in Samarra, which did not have specialized training and was based on pre-existing Central Asian hierarchies. Adult slaves and freemen both served as warriors in the Ghilman system. The Mamluk system developed later, after the return of the caliphate to Baghdad in the 870s. It included the systematic training of young slaves in military and martial skills. The Mamluk system is considered to have been a small-scale experiment of al-Muwaffaq, to combine the slaves' efficiency as warriors with improved reliability. This recent interpretation seems to have been accepted.


title: Mamluk

text: After the fragmentation of the Abbasid Empire, military slaves, known as either Mamluks or Ghilman, were used throughout the Islamic world as the basis of military power. The Fatimid Caliphate (909-1171) of Egypt had forcibly taken adolescent male Armenians, Turks, Sudanese, and Copts from their families in order to be trained as slave soldiers. They formed the bulk of their military, and the rulers selected prized slaves to serve in their administration. The powerful vizier Badr al-Jamali, for example, was a Mamluk from Armenia. In Iran and Iraq, the Buyid dynasty used Turkic slaves throughout their empire. The rebel al-Basasiri was a Mamluk who eventually ushered in Seljuq dynastic rule in Baghdad after attempting a failed rebellion. When the later Abbasids regained military control over Iraq, they also relied on the Ghilman as their warriors.


title: Mamluk

text: Under Saladin and the Ayyubids of Egypt, the power of the Mamluks increased and they claimed the sultanate in 1250, ruling as the Mamluk Sultanate. Throughout the Islamic world, rulers continued to use enslaved warriors until the 19th century. The Ottoman Empire's devşirme, or "gathering" of young slaves for the Janissaries, lasted until the 17th century. Regimes based on Mamluk power thrived in such Ottoman provinces as the Levant and Egypt until the 19th century.


title: Mamluk

text: Under the Mamluk Sultanate of Cairo, Mamluks were purchased while still young males. They were raised in the barracks of the Citadel of Cairo. Because of their isolated social status (no social ties or political affiliations) and their austere military training, they were trusted to be loyal to their rulers. When their training was completed, they were discharged, but remained attached to the patron who had purchased them. Mamluks relied on the help of their patron for career advancement, and likewise the patron's reputation and power depended on his recruits. A Mamluk was "bound by a strong esprit de corps to his peers in the same household".


title: Mamluk

text: Mamluks lived within their garrisons and mainly spent their time with each other. Their entertainments included sporting events such as archery competitions and presentations of mounted combat skills at least once a week. The intensive and rigorous training of each new recruit helped ensure continuity of Mamluk practices.


title: Mamluk

text: Sultans owned the largest number of mamluks, but lesser amirs also owned their own troops. Many Mamluks were appointed or promoted to high positions throughout the empire, including army command. At first their status was non-hereditary. Sons of Mamluks were prevented from following their father's role in life. However, over time, in places such as Egypt, the Mamluk forces became linked to existing power structures and gained significant amounts of influence on those powers.


title: Mamluk

text: In Egypt, studies have shown that mamluks from Georgia retained their native language, were aware of the politics of the Caucasus region, and received frequent visits from their parents or other relatives. In addition, they sent gifts to family members or gave money to build useful structures (a defensive tower, or even a church) in their native villages.


title: Mamluk

text: From the 900s through the 1400s, Egypt was controlled by dynastic rulers, notably the Ikhshidids, Fatimids, and Ayyubids. Throughout these dynasties, thousands of Mamluk servants and guards continued to be used and even took high offices. This increasing level of influence among the Mamluk worried the Ayyubids in particular. Eventually a Mamluk rose to become sultan. According to Fabri, a historian had asserted that Mamluks of Egyptian origin were enslaved Christians. He believed that after they were taken from their families, they became renegades. Because Egyptian Mamluks were enslaved Christians, Islamic rulers did not believe they were true believers of Islam despite fighting for wars on behalf of Islam as slave soldiers.


title: Mamluk

text: By 1200 Saladin's brother Al-Adil succeeded in securing control over the whole empire by defeating and killing or imprisoning his brothers and nephews in turn. With each victory Al-Adil incorporated the defeated Mamluk retinue into his own. This process was repeated at Al-Adil's death in 1218, and at his son Al-Kamil's death in 1238. The Ayyubids became increasingly surrounded by the Mamluks, who acted semi-autonomously as regional atabegs. The Mamluks increasingly became involved in the internal court politics of the kingdom itself as various factions used them as allies.


title: Mamluk

text: In June 1249, the Seventh Crusade under Louis IX of France landed in Egypt and took Damietta. After the Egyptian troops retreated at first, the sultan had more than 50 commanders hanged as deserters.


title: Mamluk

text: When the Egyptian sultan as-Salih Ayyub died, the power passed briefly to his son al-Muazzam Turanshah and then his favorite wife Shajar al-Durr, a Turk according to most historians, while others say was an Armenian. She took control with Mamluk support and launched a counterattack against the French. Troops of the Bahri commander Baibars defeated Louis's troops. The king delayed his retreat too long and was captured by the Mamluks in March 1250. He agreed to pay a ransom of 400,000 "livres tournois" to gain release (150,000 livres were never paid).


title: Mamluk

text: Because of political pressure for a male leader, Shajar married the Mamluk commander, Aybak. He was assassinated in his bath. In the ensuing power struggle, viceregent Qutuz, also a Mamluk, took over. He formally founded the Mamluke Sultanate and the Bahri mamluk dynasty.


title: Mamluk

text: The first Mamluk dynasty was named Bahri after the name of one of the regiments, the "Bahriyyah" or River Island regiment. Its name referred to their center on Rhoda Island in the Nile. The regiment consisted mainly of Kipchaks and Cumans.


title: Mamluk

text: When the Mongol Empire's troops of Hulagu Khan sacked Baghdad in 1258 and advanced towards Syria, the Mamluk emir Baibars left Damascus for Cairo. There he was welcomed by Sultan Qutuz. After taking Damascus, Hulagu demanded that Qutuz surrender Egypt. Qutuz had Hulagu's envoys killed and, with Baibars' help, mobilized his troops.


title: Mamluk

text: When Möngke Khan died in action against the Southern Song, Hulagu pulled the majority of his forces out of Syria to attend the kurultai (funeral ceremony). He left his lieutenant, the Christian Kitbuqa, in charge with a token force of about 18,000 men as a garrison. The Mamluk army, led by Qutuz, drew the reduced Ilkhanate army into an ambush near the Orontes River, routed them at the Battle of Ain Jalut in 1260, and captured and executed Kitbuqa.


title: Mamluk

text: After this great triumph, Qutuz was assassinated by conspiring Mamluks. It was widely said that Baibars, who seized power, had been involved in the assassination plot. In the following centuries, the Mamluks ruled discontinuously, with an average span of seven years.


title: Mamluk

text: The Mamluks defeated the Ilkhanates a second time in the First Battle of Homs and began to drive them back east. In the process they consolidated their power over Syria, fortified the area, and formed mail routes and diplomatic connections among the local princes. Baibars' troops attacked Acre in 1263, captured Caesarea in 1265, and took Antioch in 1268.


title: Mamluk

text: Mamluks also defeated new Ilkhanate attacks in Syria in 1271 and 1281 (the Second Battle of Homs). They were defeated by the Ilkhanates and their Christian allies at the Battle of Wadi al-Khazandar in 1299. Soon after that the Mamluks defeated the Ilkhanate again in 1303/1304 and 1312. Finally, the Ilkhanates and the Mamluks signed a treaty of peace in 1323.


title: Mamluk

text: By the late fourteenth century, the majority of the Mamluk ranks were made up of Circassians from the North Caucasus region, whose young males had been frequently captured for slavery. In 1382 the Burji dynasty took over when Barquq was proclaimed sultan. The name "Burji" referred to their center at the citadel of Cairo. The dynasty officials were composed mostly of Circassians.


title: Mamluk

text: Barkuk became an enemy of Timur, who threatened to invade Syria. Timur invaded Syria, defeating the Mamluk army, and he sacked Aleppo and captured Damascus. The Ottoman sultan, Bayezid I, then invaded Syria. After Timur's death in 1405, the Mamluk sultan an-Nasir Faraj regained control of Syria. Frequently facing rebellions by local emirs, he was forced to abdicate in 1412. In 1421, Egypt was attacked by the Kingdom of Cyprus, but the Egyptians forced the Cypriotes to acknowledge the suzerainty of the Egyptian sultan Barsbay. During Barsbay's reign, Egypt's population became greatly reduced from what it had been a few centuries before; it had one-fifth the number of towns.


title: Mamluk

text: Al-Ashraf came to power in 1453. He had friendly relations with the Ottoman Empire, which captured Constantinople later that year, causing great rejoicings in Muslim Egypt. However, under the reign of Khushqadam, Egypt began a struggle with the Ottoman sultanate. In 1467, sultan Qaitbay offended the Ottoman sultan Bayezid II, whose brother was poisoned. Bayezid II seized Adana, Tarsus and other places within Egyptian territory, but was eventually defeated. Qaitbay also tried to help the Muslims in Spain, who were suffering after the Catholic Reconquista, by threatening the Christians in Syria, but he had little effect in Spain. He died in 1496, several hundred thousand ducats in debt to the great trading families of the Republic of Venice.


title: Mamluk

text: Vasco da Gama in 1497 sailed around the Cape of Good Hope and pushed his way east across the Indian Ocean to the shores of Malabar and Kozhikode. There he attacked the fleets that carried freight and Muslim pilgrims from India to the Red Sea, and struck terror into the potentates all around. Various engagements took place. Cairo's Mamluk sultan Al-Ashraf Qansuh al-Ghawri was affronted at the attacks around the Red Sea, the loss of tolls and traffic, the indignities to which Mecca and its port were subjected, and above all for losing one of his ships. He vowed vengeance upon Portugal, first sending monks from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre as envoys, he threatened Pope Julius II that if he did not check Manuel I of Portugal in his depredations on the Indian Sea, he would destroy all Christian holy places.


title: Mamluk

text: The rulers of Gujarat in India and Yemen also turned for help to the Mamluk Sultan of Egypt. They wanted a fleet to be armed in the Red Sea that could protect their important trading sea routes from Portuguese attacks. Jeddah was soon fortified as a harbor of refuge so Arabia and the Red Sea were protected. But the fleets in the Indian Ocean were still at the mercy of the enemy.


title: Mamluk

text: The last Mamluk sultan, Al-Ghawri, fitted out a fleet of 50 vessels. As Mamluks had little expertise in naval warfare, he sought help from the Ottomans to develop this naval enterprise. In 1508 at the Battle of Chaul, the Mamluk fleet defeated the Portuguese viceroy's son Lourenço de Almeida.


title: Mamluk

text: But, in the following year, the Portuguese won the Battle of Diu and wrested the port city of Diu from the Gujarat Sultanate. Some years after, Afonso de Albuquerque attacked Aden, and Egyptian troops suffered disaster from the Portuguese in Yemen. Al-Ghawri fitted out a new fleet to punish the enemy and protect the Indian trade. Before it could exert much power, Egypt had lost its sovereignty. The Ottoman Empire took over Egypt and the Red Sea, together with Mecca and all its Arabian interests.


title: Mamluk

text: The Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II was engaged in warfare in southern Europe when a new era of hostility with Egypt began in 1501. It arose out of the relations with the Safavid dynasty in Persia. Shah Ismail I sent an embassy to the Republic of Venice via Syria, inviting Venice to ally with Persia and recover its territory taken by the Ottomans. Mameluk Egyptian sultan Al-Ghawri was charged by Selim I with giving the Persian envoys passage through Syria on their way to Venice and harboring refugees. To appease him, Al-Ghawri placed in confinement the Venetian merchants then in Syria and Egypt, but after a year released them.


title: Mamluk

text: After the Battle of Chaldiran in 1514, Selim attacked the bey of Dulkadirids, as Egypt's vassal had stood aloof, and sent his head to Al-Ghawri. Now secure against Persia, in 1516 he formed a great army for the conquest of Egypt, but gave out that he intended further attacks on Persia.


title: Mamluk

text: In 1515, Selim began the war which led to the conquest of Egypt and its dependencies. Mamluk cavalry proved no match for the Ottoman artillery and Janissary infantry. On 24 August 1516, at the Battle of Marj Dabiq, Sultan Al-Ghawri was killed. Syria passed into Turkish possession, an event welcomed in many places as it was seen as deliverance from the Mameluks.


title: Mamluk

text: The Mamluk Sultanate survived in Egypt until 1517, when Selim captured Cairo on 20 January. Although not in the same form as under the Sultanate, the Ottoman Empire retained the Mamluks as an Egyptian ruling class and the Mamluks and the Burji family succeeded in regaining much of their influence, but as vassals of the Ottomans.


title: Mamluk

text: In 1768, Ali Bey Al-Kabir declared independence from the Ottomans. However, the Ottomans crushed the movement and retained their position after his defeat. By this time new slave recruits were introduced from Georgia in the Caucasus.


title: Mamluk

text: In 1798, the ruling Directory of the Republic of France authorised a campaign in "The Orient" to protect French trade interests and undermine Britain's access to India. To this end, Napoleon Bonaparte led an Armée d'Orient to Egypt.


title: Mamluk

text: The French defeated a Mamluk army in the Battle of the Pyramids and drove the survivors out to Upper Egypt. The Mamluks relied on massed cavalry charges, changed only by the addition of muskets. The French infantry formed square and held firm. Despite multiple victories and an initially successful expedition into Syria, mounting conflict in Europe and the earlier defeat of the supporting French fleet by the British Royal Navy at the Battle of the Nile decided the issue.


title: Mamluk

text: On 14 September 1799, General Jean-Baptiste Kléber established a mounted company of Mamluk auxiliaries and Syrian Janissaries from Turkish troops captured at the siege of Acre. Menou reorganized the company on 7 July 1800, forming three companies of 100 men each and renaming it the "Mamluks de la République". In 1801 General Jean Rapp was sent to Marseille to organize a squadron of 250 Mamluks. On 7 January 1802 the previous order was canceled and the squadron reduced to 150 men. The list of effectives on 21 April 1802 reveals three officers and 155 of other rank. By decree of 25 December 1803 the Mamluks were organized into a company attached to the Chasseurs-à-Cheval of the Imperial Guard (see Mamelukes of the Imperial Guard).


title: Mamluk

text: Napoleon left with his personal guard in late 1799. His successor in Egypt, General Jean-Baptiste Kléber, was assassinated on 14 June 1800. Command of the Army in Egypt fell to Jacques-François Menou. Isolated and out of supplies, Menou surrendered to the British in 1801.


title: Mamluk

text: After the departure of French troops in 1801 the Mamluks continued their struggle for independence; this time against the Ottoman Empire. In 1803, Mamluk leaders Ibrahim Bey and Osman Bey al-Bardisi wrote to the Russian consul-general, asking him to mediate with the Sultan to allow them to negotiate for a cease-fire, and a return to their homeland Georgia. The Russian ambassador in Constantinople refused however to intervene, because of nationalist unrest in Georgia that might have been encouraged by a Mamluk return.


title: Mamluk

text: In 1805, the population of Cairo rebelled. This provided a chance for the Mamluks to seize power, but internal friction prevented them from exploiting this opportunity. In 1806, the Mamluks defeated the Turkish forces in several clashes. in June the rival parties concluded an agreement by which Muhammad Ali, (appointed as governor of Egypt on 26 March 1806), was to be removed and authority returned to the Mamluks. However, they were again unable to capitalize on this opportunity due to discord between factions. Muhammad Ali retained his authority.


title: Mamluk

text: Muhammad Ali knew that he would have to deal with the Mamluks if he wanted to control Egypt. They were still the feudal owners of Egypt and their land was still the source of wealth and power. However, the economic strain of sustaining the military manpower necessary to defend the Mamluks's system from the Europeans and Turks would eventually weaken them to the point of collapse.


title: Mamluk

text: On 1 March 1811, Muhammad Ali invited all of the leading Mamluks to his palace to celebrate the declaration of war against the Wahhabis in Arabia. Between 600 and 700 Mamluks paraded for this purpose in Cairo. Muhammad Ali's forces killed almost all of these near the Al-Azab gates in a narrow road down from Mukatam Hill. This ambush came to be known as the Massacre of the Citadel. According to contemporary reports, only one Mamluk, whose name is given variously as Amim (also Amyn), or Heshjukur (a Besleney), survived when he forced his horse to leap from the walls of the citadel.


title: Mamluk

text: During the following week an estimated 3,000 Mamluks and their relatives were killed throughout Egypt, by Muhammad's regular troops. In the citadel of Cairo alone more than 1,000 Mamluks died.


title: Mamluk

text: Despite Muhammad Ali's destruction of the Mamluks in Egypt, a party of them escaped and fled south into what is now Sudan. In 1811, these Mamluks established a state at Dunqulah in the Sennar as a base for their slave trading. In 1820, the sultan of Sennar informed Muhammad Ali that he was unable to comply with a demand to expel the Mamluks. In response, the Pasha sent 4,000 troops to invade Sudan, clear it of Mamluks, and reclaim it for Egypt. The Pasha's forces received the submission of the Kashif, dispersed the Dunqulah Mamluks, conquered Kordofan, and accepted Sennar's surrender from the last Funj sultan, Badi VII.


title: Mamluk

text: According to Eric Chaney and Lisa Blades, the reliance on mamluks by Muslim rulers had a profound impact on the Arab world's political development. They argue that, because European rulers had to rely on local elites for military forces, lords and bourgeois acquired the necessary bargaining power to push for representative government. Muslim rulers did not face the same pressures partly because the Mamluks allowed the Sultans to bypass local elites.


title: Mamluk

text: There were various places in which Mamluks gained political or military power as a self-replicating military community. Some examples of this can be seen in the Tripolitania region of Libya, where Mamluk governors instated their various policies under the Ottoman Empire until October 18th, 1912, when Italian forces took over the region in the Italo-Turkish war.


title: Mamluk

text: In 1206, the Mamluk commander of the Muslim forces in the Indian subcontinent, Qutb al-Din Aibak, proclaimed himself Sultan, creating the Mamluk Sultanate in Delhi which lasted until 1290.


title: Mamluk

text: Mamluk corps were first introduced in Iraq by Hasan Pasha of Baghdad in 1702. From 1747 to 1831 Iraq was ruled, with short intermissions, by Mamluk officers of Georgian origin who succeeded in asserting autonomy from the Sublime Porte, suppressed tribal revolts, curbed the power of the Janissaries, restored order, and introduced a program of modernization of the economy and the military. In 1831 the Ottomans overthrew Dawud Pasha, the last Mamluk ruler, and imposed direct control over Iraq.


title: Mamluk

text: The following terms originally come from either Turkish or Ottoman Turkish language (the latter composed of Turkish, Arabic, and Persian words and grammar structures).


title: The BFG (2016 film)

text: The BFG (titled onscreen as Roald Dahl's The BFG) is a 2016 fantasy adventure film directed and co-produced by Steven Spielberg, written by Melissa Mathison (her final film before her 2015 death) and based on Roald Dahl's 1982 novel of the same name. The film stars Mark Rylance, Ruby Barnhill in her film debut, Penelope Wilton, Jemaine Clement, Rebecca Hall, Rafe Spall and Bill Hader. In the film, a 10-year-old orphaned girl named Sophie befriends a benevolent giant dubbed the "Big Friendly Giant", who takes her to Giant Country, where they attempt to stop the man-eating giants that are invading the human world.


title: The BFG (2016 film)

text: Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall began development on a live-action adaptation of "The BFG" back in the 1990s, and various screenwriters were hired to work on the screenplay in the subsequent years. DreamWorks acquired the screen rights to Dahl's book in September 2011, and Marshall and Sam Mercer joined as producers, Mathison as screenwriter and Kennedy as executive producer. Spielberg was announced as director in April 2014, alongside his production company Amblin Entertainment as co-producer. Principal photography commenced in March 2015, marking Spielberg's first directorial film for Walt Disney Pictures, which co-financed the film.


title: The BFG (2016 film)

text: "The BFG" premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 14, 2016, and held its North American debut at the El Capitan Theater on June 21, 2016. The film was released in the United States in Disney Digital 3D, RealD 3D, IMAX 3D, and conventional theatrical formats on July 1, 2016, the same year of Dahl's centennial. Despite receiving generally positive reviews from critics, the film was a box office bomb, grossing $195 million against its $140 million budget.


title: The BFG (2016 film)

text: Sophie, a 10-year-old girl living in a London orphanage, is often awake at the "witching hour". One night, she sees an elderly Giant Man outside her window, who captures her and takes her to his home in Giant Country. He explains that he cannot allow Sophie to return to her world and reveal the existence of giants. If she ventures out alone, she may be eaten by the nine much larger giants.


title: The BFG (2016 film)

text: In his workshop of dreams, the giant fashions a nightmare to convince the sleeping Sophie to stay with him in safety. The Fleshlumpeater, the infantile leader of the man-eating giants, intrudes and demands for a "boo-boo" on his finger to be fixed. He smells Sophie, but the elderly giant convinces him to leave. Sophie persuades the friendly giant to take her to visit Dream Country. They accidentally awaken the other giants, and after the Bloodbottler suggests they "frolic", they bully the friendly giant. A thunderstorm drives the man-eating giants into their cave, but the Fleshlumpeater finds Sophie's dropped blanket.


title: The BFG (2016 film)

text: In Dream Country, Sophie and the friendly giant catch good and bad dreams. The giant reveals that his only name – besides "Runt", the other giants' nickname for him – is "the Big Friendly Giant", which leads Sophie to call him "BFG". She accompanies him to London for his nightly work: using his dream-trumpet to spread good dreams to sleeping children. They return to Giant Country just as the other giants have finished eating children around the world. The BFG realizes that Sophie has lost her blanket, exposing her presence to the other giants, and leaves her outside her orphanage. Explaining that his last human companion was discovered and eaten by the giants, he is unwilling to endanger Sophie and departs. Unafraid, Sophie jumps off her balcony in the hope he will appear again to catch her, and he does.


title: The BFG (2016 film)

text: They return to the BFG's workshop and the other giants barge in, hunting for Sophie. They destroy much of the BFG's work, but Sophie evades detection and the BFG drives them off with a hot iron. Sophie finds the home of the last human to live with the BFG, with a portrait of Queen Victoria among his belongings. This inspires her to devise a plan: to forge a nightmare for Elizabeth II, the Queen of the United Kingdom, about giants eating the children of England, the British Army fighting the giants, and Sophie appearing to her.


title: The BFG (2016 film)

text: Sophie and the BFG go to Buckingham Palace and deliver the nightmare to the sleeping Queen. Upon waking, the Queen and members of her staff Mary and Mr. Tibbs find Sophie on the windowsill. She introduces them to the BFG, explaining that the child-eating giants are real and must be stopped. At a large breakfast, the BFG shares his favorite drink, flatulence-inducing "frobscottle", and he and Sophie lead the Queen's soldiers to Giant Country.


title: The BFG (2016 film)

text: The BFG plans to ambush the man-eating giants with a nightmare, but has forgotten his dream-trumpet. Sophie carries the nightmare herself into the midst of the giants, and is confronted by the Fleshlumpeater. She releases the nightmare which consumes the giants with guilt, except the unregretful Fleshlumpeater (who intercepts and destroys his), and they are ensnared by military helicopters. Carried away to an isolated island, the giants are left with only "snozzcumbers", a disgusting vegetable, to plant and eat, much to their despair.


title: The BFG (2016 film)

text: Sophie gets adopted by Mary and comes to live in the Queen's palace, and awakens from a dream of the BFG, who returns to his life at Giant Country and writes the story of their adventure. She speaks to him whenever she feels lonely; at his home, the BFG hears her words and smiles.


title: The BFG (2016 film)

text: Adamthwaite, Bacon, Gibbs, Godley, Holmes, Moniz de Sa, and Ólafsson also make cameos as minor London characters. William Samples and Ruby Barnhill's father, Paul Barnhill, make cameos as the palace staff members.


title: The BFG (2016 film)

text: Producers Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy began development on a live-action adaptation of "The BFG" in 1991, and set the project up at Paramount Pictures. Husband and wife screenwriters Robin Swicord and Nicholas Kazan wrote a screenplay adaptation in 1998, with Robin Williams in negotiations for the title role. Williams attended a read-through, which according to Michael Siegel was "surprisingly disappointing". Williams' trademark improvisational style clashed with the BFG's unique language. Siegel elaborates, "He was sort of improvising on the jumbled language. And it was clunky. It was strangely not working. It was harder than it looks even for Robin. It didn't quite deliver." By 2001, the script had been rewritten by Gwyn Lurie, and was greeted with positive feedback from the Dahl estate. Terry Jones and Ed Solomon also attempted screenplay drafts. While the screenplay lingered in development hell, Paramount subsequently lost the film rights and they reverted to the Dahl estate.


title: The BFG (2016 film)

text: In September 2011, DreamWorks acquired the film rights to the book; Kennedy and Marshall were announced to produce, with screenwriter Melissa Mathison adapting the story. Initially, John Madden was hired to direct; however, in April 2014, Steven Spielberg was announced as the director, with Madden now listed as executive producer with producer Michael Siegel. Kennedy had initially thought of Spielberg as director, but hesitated asking him until a more concrete screenplay was presentable. Spielberg stated, ""The BFG" has enchanted families and their children for more than three decades. We are honoured that the Roald Dahl estate has entrusted us with this classic story." Walden Media agreed to co-produce and co-finance the film with DreamWorks and Amblin Entertainment in March 2015. A month later, Walt Disney Studios—which was under prior agreement to distribute the film through its Touchstone Pictures banner—also joined the production as a co-producer and co-financier, and shifted the film from a Touchstone release to a Walt Disney Pictures production instead. Consequently, "The BFG" is the first Disney-branded film directed by Spielberg, though he has previously produced several films for the studio. Similarly, as a result of Amblin Partners' restructuring, DreamWorks did not receive a marquee credit—placement of the studio's production logo on marketing materials and opening titles—and instead, DreamWorks' marquee credit shifted to Amblin. The film is the second adaptation of the novel following the 1989 direct-to-television animated film. It is also Disney's first feature-length adaptation of a Roald Dahl work since 1996, Henry Selick's "James and the Giant Peach".


title: The BFG (2016 film)

text: Mark Rylance was cast as the BFG in October 2014. Spielberg had approached Rylance with the role during the filming of "Bridge of Spies". Spielberg was quoted as saying that "Mark Rylance is a transformational actor. I am excited and thrilled that Mark will be making this journey with us to Giant Country. Everything about his career so far is about making the courageous choice and I'm honoured he has chosen "The BFG" as his next big screen performance." Rylance performed the character through motion capture, a process which he referred to as "liberating". In mid-November 2014, it was revealed that a ten-year-old student of Lower Peover School, Ruby Barnhill, had auditioned for the film. She had to learn six pages of dialogue in preparation for a possible role as the orphan Sophie. After a lengthy search, on December 16, Barnhill was cast in the role, about which she said, "I feel incredibly lucky and I'm so happy." Spielberg stated that they "have discovered a wonderful Sophie in Ruby Barnhill." Bill Hader was set to star in the film in an unspecified role on March 27, 2015. On April 13, 2015, the rest of the cast was announced, which included Penelope Wilton, Rebecca Hall, Jemaine Clement, Michael David Adamthwaite, Daniel Bacon, Chris Gibbs, Adam Godley, Jonathan Holmes, Paul Moniz de Sa, and Ólafur Ólafsson.


title: The BFG (2016 film)

text: Principal photography on the film began on March 23, 2015, in Vancouver and concluded on June 12, 2015. Weta Digital worked on the film's visual effects. It is Mathison's final film following her death on November 4, 2015.


title: The BFG (2016 film)

text: John Williams composed and conducted the film's musical score, marking the twenty-seventh collaboration between Spielberg and Williams. Williams was announced as the film's composer in March 2015. During the process of writing the score, Williams compared the film to "a child's ballet where there are dances involved," elaborating, "The BFG tries to capture dreams with his net and does something that almost looks like a Ray Bolger or Fred Astaire dance; it is an amazingly musical and choreographic sequence which required the orchestra to do things that are more associated with musical films." Williams found similarities with the scoring of "Home Alone", admitting that writing music for "The BFG" "was really an opportunity to compose and orchestrate a little children's fantasy for orchestra." The soundtrack was released by Walt Disney Records on July 1, 2016.


title: The BFG (2016 film)

text: "The BFG" premiered on May 14, 2016, at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, in an out of competition screening. Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures distributed the film worldwide, except for territories in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, where the film's distribution rights were sold by Amblin's international partner, Mister Smith Entertainment, to independent distributors.


title: The BFG (2016 film)

text: Disney released a teaser trailer on December 9, 2015. A second trailer was released on April 5, 2016. A third trailer was released on May 16, 2016. The film held its North American premiere at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood, California on June 21, 2016. It was released in the United States on July 1, 2016. Entertainment One distributed the film in the U.K. on July 22, 2016. DreamWorks' financial partner, Reliance Entertainment, released the film in India on July 29, 2016. Huaxia Film Distribution released the film in China.


title: The BFG (2016 film)

text: Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment released "The BFG" on Blu-ray, DVD, and digital download on November 29, 2016. The film debuted in third of the home media sales chart for the week ending on December 2, 2016. Entertainment One and 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment released the UK edition on DVD in 2016.


title: The BFG (2016 film)

text: "The BFG" grossed $55.5 million in North America and $139.7 million in other territories for a worldwide total of $195.2 million, against a production budget of $140 million.


title: The BFG (2016 film)

text: In the United States and Canada, "The BFG" opened alongside "The Legend of Tarzan" and "" at 3,357 theaters, and was projected to gross $22–32 million in its opening weekend. The film was notably vying for drawing family audiences with the studio's own "Finding Dory". It made $775,000 from its Thursday previews; however, the low figure was not surprising, given how family films tend to attract fewer audiences during late-night showings. This was followed by a $7 million opening day (including previews) and a disappointing $18.6 million opening weekend, which "Deadline Hollywood" called "an awful start for this film which is estimated to cost $140 million". "Forbes" noted that Steven Spielberg's films tend to have long runs, irrespective of their opening numbers. However, it also pointed out that the July 4th weekend proves to be a non-leggy release schedule and most films released during this time end up making only twice their holiday total over the course of their domestic theatrical run. "The New York Times" called the opening figures "a colossal misfire".


title: The BFG (2016 film)

text: Due to the film's poor performance in North America, the film was considered a box office disappointment.


title: The BFG (2016 film)

text: As a result of its low opening numbers in North America, the film needed greater financial success in its international markets, as pointed out by David Hollis, Disney's distribution chief, saying, "we're going to be reliant in a lot of ways on international [audiences]". Internationally—during its opening weekend—where the 4th of July weekend is not a holiday, the film opened to $3.9 million in its opening weekend from two markets, Australia and Russia. In Australia, it opened to $2 million placing third while in Russia it debuted second with $1.9 million, which tops the entire runs of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and "War Horse". In the United Kingdom, where the book is more well known, it opened to $6.9 million.


title: The BFG (2016 film)

text: In China, the release was handled by Huaxia Film Distribution. While it benefitted from a robust marketing effort including Spielberg's presence in the country itself, it suffered from a three month long delay after its North American release. It had an estimated $13.8 million opening, debuting at second place behind "Operation Mekong". Many Chinese online reviews criticized Spielberg for making the film "too juvenile" for adults.


title: The BFG (2016 film)

text: "The BFG" is one of the lowest-grossing films of Spielberg's career, specifically in North America and, when accounting for inflation, one of the year's biggest flops, but "The Hollywood Reporter" noted that Disney would be able to withstand the losses due to the success of "" and "Finding Dory". The site also highlighted that the financial losses for Disney could be $90–100 million based on theatrical returns alone.


title: The BFG (2016 film)

text: On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 74% based on 301 reviews and an average rating of 6.70/10. The site's critical consensus reads, ""The BFG" minimizes the darker elements of Roald Dahl's classic in favor of a resolutely good-natured, visually stunning, and largely successful family-friendly adventure." On another aggregator, Metacritic, the film has a score of 66 out of 100 based on 47 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A−" on an A+ to F scale.


title: The BFG (2016 film)

text: Justin Chang of "Los Angeles Times" called Rylance's performance a "brilliant amalgam of performance-capture technology and peerless screen presence." Scott Mendelson of "Forbes" described the film as "a charming, intelligent, and witty little adventure movie with strong special effects work in the service of a most unassuming story." Mendelson also commended the film's smaller scope in story, as well as Rylance and Barnhill's interaction. Robbie Collin of "The Daily Telegraph" called the film "a significant technical accomplishment", adding that "the infinitesimally detailed motion-capture technology alone, which stretches Rylance’s human performance to gargantuan proportions, is river-straddling bounds beyond anything that’s come before it." Critic Matt Zoller Seitz highly appreciated Spielberg's direction of the film, giving the film three and a half out of four stars. Seitz remarks, "I can imagine some adults finding the movie dull; 'Nothing happens', they'll say. 'And it's too nice.' But I can imagine other adults loving the film for helping them remember what it's like to be young enough to hide from a movie monster because he's big and weird-looking and then laugh because he's kind of silly..."


title: The BFG (2016 film)

text: Todd McCarthy of "The Hollywood Reporter" compared the film objectively to Spielberg's "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial", as a "conspicuously less captivating, magical and transporting experience than its classic forebear." Peter Debruge of "Variety", however, compared the film favorably to "E.T.", writing, "this splendid Steven Spielberg-directed adaptation makes it possible for audiences of all ages to wrap their heads around one of the unlikeliest friendships in cinema history, resulting in the sort of instant family classic “human beans” once relied upon Disney to deliver." A. O. Scott of "The New York Times" praised the film's digital effects and visual style as "exquisite", though he felt that the film lacked the excitement found in Spielberg's previous fantasy films.


title: The BFG (2016 film)

text: Richard Brody of "The New Yorker" stating that it "plays like a forced march of fun, a mandatory strain of magic and a prescribed dose of poetry, like a movie ready-made for screening in classrooms when a teacher is absent." Brody, however, observes that "Spielberg is the BFG who's menaced by bigger and more monstrous giants who aren't interested in edifying their audiences but merely in consuming them—consuming the consumer, so to speak." Richard Roeper of the "Chicago Sun-Times" called the film "technically impressive but listless and tedious... painfully cutesy, silly and gross rather than whimsical and funny." He thought that the film moved far too slowly and was missing a "sense of wonder and adventure", saying that he'd "rather see every one of Spielberg's previous films before having to sit through "The BFG" again".


title: Empire

text: An empire is a "political unit" made up of several territories and peoples, "usually created by conquest, and divided between a dominant center and subordinate peripheries". The center of the empire (sometimes referred to as the metropole) exercises political control over the peripheries. Within an empire, there is non-equivalence between different populations who have different sets of rights and are governed differently. Narrowly defined, an empire is a sovereign state whose head of state is an emperor; but not all states with aggregate territory under the rule of supreme authorities are called empires or ruled by an emperor; nor have all self-described empires been accepted as such by contemporaries and historians (the Central African Empire, and some Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in early England being examples).


title: Empire

text: There have been "ancient and modern, centralized and decentralized, ultra-brutal and relatively benign" Empires. An important distinction has been between land empires made up solely of contiguous territories, such as the Austro-Hungarian Empire or the Russian Empire; and those created by sea-power, which include territories that are far remote from the 'home' country of the empire, such as the Carthaginian Empire and British Empire. Aside from the more formal usage, the word "empire" can also refer colloquially to a large-scale business enterprise (e.g. a transnational corporation), a political organization controlled by a single individual (a political boss), or a group (political bosses). The concept of "empire" is associated with other such concepts as "imperialism", "colonialism", and "globalization", with imperialism referring to the creation and maintenance of unequal relationships between nations and not necessarily the policy of a state headed by an emperor or empress. "Empire" is often used as a term to describe displeasure to overpowering situations.


title: Empire

text: An empire is an aggregate of many separate states or territories under a supreme ruler or oligarchy. This is in contrast to a federation, which is an extensive state voluntarily composed of autonomous states and peoples. An empire is a large polity which rules over territories outside of its original borders.


title: Empire

text: Definitions of what physically and politically constitutes an empire vary. It might be a state affecting imperial policies or a particular political structure. Empires are typically formed from diverse ethnic, national, cultural, and religious components. 'Empire' and 'colonialism' are used to refer to relationships between a powerful state or society versus a less powerful one; Michael W. Doyle has defined empire as "effective control, whether formal or informal, of a subordinated society by an imperial society".


title: Empire

text: Tom Nairn and Paul James define empires as polities that "extend relations of power across territorial spaces over which they have no prior or given legal sovereignty, and where, in one or more of the domains of economics, politics, and culture, they gain some measure of extensive hegemony over those spaces to extract or accrue value". Rein Taagepera has defined an empire as "any relatively large sovereign political entity whose components are not sovereign".


title: Empire

text: The terrestrial empire's maritime analogue is the thalassocracy, an empire composed of islands and coasts which are accessible to its terrestrial homeland, such as the Athenian-dominated Delian League.


title: Empire

text: Furthermore, empires can expand by both land and sea. Stephen Howe notes that empires by land can be characterized by expansion over terrain, "extending directly outwards from the original frontier" while an empire by sea can be characterized by colonial expansion and empire building "by an increasingly powerful navy".


title: Empire

text: However, sometimes an empire is only a semantic construction, such as when a ruler assumes the title of "emperor". That polity over which the ruler reigns logically becomes an "empire", despite having no additional territory or hegemony. Examples of this form of empire are the Central African Empire, Mexican Empire, or the Korean Empire proclaimed in 1897 when Korea, far from gaining new territory, was on the verge of being annexed by the Empire of Japan, one of the last to use the name officially. Among the last states in the 20th century known as empires in this sense were the Central African Empire, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Manchukuo, Russia, Germany, and Korea.


title: Empire

text: Scholars distinguish empires from nation-states. In an empire, there is a hierarchy whereby one group of people (usually, the metropole) has command over other groups of people, and there is a hierarchy of rights and prestige for different groups of people. Josep Colomer distinguished between empires and nation-states in the following way:


title: Empire

text: Empires originated as different types of states, although they commonly began as powerful monarchies. Ideas about empires have changed over time, ranging from public approval to universal distaste. Empires are built out of separate units with some kind of diversity – ethnic, national, cultural, religious – and imply at least some inequality between the rulers and the ruled. Without this inequality, the system would be seen as a commonwealth. Throughout history, the major powers of the world constantly seek to conquer other parts of the world. Imperialism is the idea of a major power controlling another nation or land with the intentions to use the native people and resources to help the mother country in any way possible. Many empires were the result of military conquest, incorporating the vanquished states into a political union, but imperial hegemony can be established in other ways. The Athenian Empire, the Roman Empire, and the British Empire developed at least in part under elective auspices. The Empire of Brazil declared itself an empire after separating from the Portuguese Empire in 1822. France has twice transitioned from being called the French Republic to being called the French Empire while it retained an overseas empire.


title: Empire

text: Europeans began applying the designation of "empire" to non-European monarchies, such as the Qing Empire and the Mughal Empire, as well as the Maratha Empire, eventually leading to the looser denotations applicable to any political structure meeting the criteria of "imperium". Some monarchies styled themselves as having greater size, scope, and power than the territorial, politico-military, and economic facts support. As a consequence, some monarchs assumed the title of "emperor" (or its corresponding translation, "tsar", "empereur", "kaiser", "shah" etc.) and renamed their states as "The Empire of ...". Empires were seen as an expanding power, administration, ideas and beliefs followed by cultural habits from place to place. Empires tend to impose their culture on the subject states to strengthen the imperial structure. This can have notable effects that outlast the empire itself, both positive and negative. Most histories of empires have been hostile, especially if the authors were promoting nationalism. Stephen Howe, although himself hostile, listed positive qualities: the guaranteed stability, security, and legal order for their subjects. They tried to minimize ethnic and religious antagonism inside the empire. The aristocracies that ruled them were often more cosmopolitan and broad-minded than their nationalistic successors.


title: Empire

text: There are two main ways to establish and maintain an imperial political structure: (i) as a territorial empire of direct conquest and control with force or (ii) as a coercive, hegemonic empire of indirect conquest and control with power. The former method provides greater tribute and direct political control, yet limits further expansion because it absorbs military forces to fixed garrisons. The latter method provides less tribute and indirect control, but avails military forces for further expansion. Territorial empires (e.g. the Macedonian Empire and Byzantine Empire) tend to be contiguous areas. The term, on occasion, has been applied to maritime republics or thalassocracies (e.g. the Athenian and British empires) with looser structures and more scattered territories, often consisting of many islands and other forms of possessions which required the creation and maintenance of a powerful navy. Empires such as the Holy Roman Empire also came together by electing the emperor with votes from member realms through the Imperial election.


title: Empire

text: Stephen Howe writes that with the exception of the Roman, Chinese and "perhaps ancient Egyptian states"; early empires seldom survived the death of their founder and were usually limited in scope to conquest and collection of tribute, having little impact on the everyday lives of their subjects.


title: Empire

text: The earliest known empire appeared in southern Egypt sometime around 3200 BC. Southern Egypt was divided by three kingdoms each centered on a powerful city. Hierapolis conquered the other two cities over two centuries, and later grew into the country of Egypt. The Akkadian Empire, established by Sargon of Akkad (24th century BC), was an early all-Mesopotamian empire which spread into Anatolia, the Levant and Ancient Iran. This imperial achievement was repeated by Shamshi-Adad I of Assyria and Hammurabi of Babylon in the 19th and 18th centuries BC. In the 15th century BC, the New Kingdom of Ancient Egypt, ruled by Thutmose III, was ancient Africa's major force upon incorporating Nubia and the ancient city-states of the Levant.


title: Empire

text: Circa 1500 BC in China rose the Shang Empire which was succeeded by the Zhou Empire circa 1100 BC. Both equalled or surpassed in territory their contemporary Near Eastern empires such as the Middle Assyrian Empire, Hittite Empire, Egyptian Empire and those of the Mitanni and Elamites. The Zhou Empire dissolved in 770 BC into feudal multi-state system which lasted for five and a half centuries until the universal conquest of Qin in 221 BC. The first empire comparable to Rome in organization was the Neo-Assyrian Empire (916–612 BC). The Median Empire was the first empire within the territory of Persia. By the 6th century BC, after having allied with the Babylonians, Scythians and Cimmerians to defeat the Neo-Assyrian Empire, the Medes were able to establish their own empire, which was the largest of its day and lasted for about sixty years.


title: Empire

text: The Axial Age (mid-First Millennium BC) witnessed unprecedented imperial expansion in the Indo-Mediterranean region and China. The successful and extensive Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BC), also known as the first Persian Empire, covered Mesopotamia, Egypt, parts of Greece, Thrace, the Middle East, much of Central Asia, and North-Western India. It is considered the first great empire in history or the first "world empire". It was overthrown and replaced by the short-lived empire of Alexander the Great. His Empire was succeeded by three Empires ruled by the Diadochi—the Seleucid, Ptolemaic, and Macedonian, which, despite being independent, are called the "Hellenistic Empire" by virtue of their similarities in culture and administration.


title: Empire

text: Meanwhile, in the western Mediterranean the Empires of Carthage and Rome began their rise. Having decisively defeated Carthage in 202 BC, Rome defeated Macedonia in 200 BC and the Seleucids in 190–189 BC to establish an all-Mediterranean Empire. The Seleucid Empire broke apart and its former eastern part was absorbed by the Parthian Empire. In 30 BC Rome annexed Ptolemaic Egypt.


title: Empire

text: In India during the Axial Age appeared the Maurya Empire—a geographically extensive and powerful empire, ruled by the Mauryan dynasty from 321 to 185 BC. The empire was founded in 322 BC by Chandragupta Maurya through the help of Chanakya, who rapidly expanded his power westward across central and western India, taking advantage of the disruptions of local powers following the withdrawal by Alexander the Great. By 320 BC, the Maurya Empire had fully occupied northwestern India as well as defeating and conquering the satraps left by Alexander. Under Emperor Asoka the Great, the Maurya Empire became the first Indian empire to conquer the whole Indian Peninsula — an achievement repeated only twice, by the Gupta and Mughal Empires. In the reign of Asoka Buddhism spread to become the dominant religion in many parts of the ancient India.