Word: culted
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Suddenly, like a high-cult Larry Hagman, Lynch was everywhere. The director whose pre-1990 oeuvre comprised just four features -- eight hours of public film -- will have more than matched that total this year. Two two-hour and three one-hour episodes of Twin Peaks. The rambunctious road movie Wild at Heart, winner of the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and now in theatrical release. Four TV commercials for Obsession perfume. A 50-minute video, Industrial Symphony No. 1, featuring a dwarf, prom teens, a floating topless lady, a skinned deer and ethereal warbler Julee Cruise singing...
...such greats as Bessie Smith, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Big Bill Broonzy and Willie Dixon. But the most eagerly awaited offering is the boxed, two-volume (CD or cassette) set containing all 41 known takes by the legendary Robert Johnson, whose brooding, anguished voice and ringing guitar made him a cult figure for a generation of young rockers. As guitarist Eric Clapton puts it in a copiously annotated accompanying booklet: "I have never found anything more deeply soulful than Robert Johnson. His music remains the most powerful cry that I think you can find in the human voice." Keith Richards...
Darkman wants to be Batman. Its hero, a scientist (Liam Neeson) scarred in body and soul after being left for dead by venal thugs, is a cloaked crusader bent more on vengeance than on justice. Director Sam Raimi, whose cheapo slasher film The Evil Dead achieved cult status, mines familiar comic-book terrain with a plucky heroine (Frances McDormand), a couple of corporate villains -- one slick (Colin Friels), the other slimy (Larry Drake) -- and plenty of explosive violence that virtually reads KA-BOOM! in block letters across the screen...
...patrons seemed to be their idea of a social life, we figured that was a matter for the judicial system, not The Harvard Crimson Moral Police. And if they wanted to project a hypocritical holier-than-thou, just-say-no, nice-boy-next-door image to their adoring cult of 12-year-old girls, we weren't going to blow their cover...
...knock against Kurt Vonnegut, back a couple of decades ago when he was a cult author, was that he pandered too glibly to the natural cynicism of the disaffected young. He was too quick, it was said, to detect the smell of society's insulation burning -- and to sigh "So it goes" -- when there was nothing more in the air than, say, a harmless whiff from a distant war or the neighborhood toxic-waste dump. No more; his news in Hocus Pocus is that our charred insulation no longer smolders. It has burned itself out, and civilization's great, tired...