Word: dark
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Kurt Weston's dark and depressing images - many of which are stylized self-portraits - are also a star of the show. A former fashion photographer in Chicago, Weston lost his vision due to AIDS in 1996, and focuses his lens, and sometimes simply his scanner, on images of decay and disability. "I not only want to look at these things, photograph these things, but put an exclamation point on them," he explains. "I'm saying, 'You need to look at this disabled body, this aging body. And maybe you need to reconsider your ideas about what is normal or abnormal...
...quarter-century after his debut feature, The Element of Crime, won the Technical Prize at Cannes - and after showing Europa/Zentropa (Jury Prize, or third place) in 1991, Breaking the Waves (Grand Jury Prize, or second place) in 1996, and Dancer in the Dark (finally, the Palme d'Or) in 2000 - von Trier presents his eighth film in the competition. Antichrist is both his most familiar film - a horror film of a soul gone mad, as in Psycho and The Shining - and one of his most transgressive, which is reviewer's jargon for gross-out gruesome...
...thesis, and to argue that nature itself may be evil. ("Nature," the woman says, "is Satan's church.") What troubles even von Trier partisans is the connection this woman has with some of his other female protagonists. Emily Watson in Breaking the Waves, Bjork in Dancer in the Dark, Nicole Kidman in Dogville and Bryce Dallas Howard in Manderlay are all made to endure, at the rough hands of men, indignations that are depicted so long and lovingly that they seem like exploitation. In the Romer interview, von Trier insists that "calling me a misogynist is wrong...
...summer of 1995, I was interviewing a woman who was a member of Saddleback Church in California. It was dark and we were sitting outside in a circle of light under a lamppost while she talked to me about her faith. The moment itself is hard to describe. It's as if someone stood on the edge of the circle and was breathing on us. A warm, moist air surrounded us. She was mid-sentence and stopped talking. It was a moment like I hadn't felt before - or since. There was the presence of something else that was spiritual...
...entrance, the stuffed bodies of Belka and Strelka, the first dogs to return to Earth alive after a space flight, sit with their heads cocked inquisitively. Some of the halls are lined with kitschy "space art" (one piece shows a white-clad cosmonaut floating in a sea of dark swirls); other exhibits include examples of Soviet and Russian cosmonaut food, including black bread, borscht and caviar. The museum's efforts to appeal to kids appear to have worked - teenagers and children with their parents fill the small halls even on a weekday afternoon. (Read "The Cruise of the Vostok...