Word: exceptional
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Theater owners will endure a dip in popcorn sales. During this film, almost nobody leaves. Except to be sick. Some viewers have vomited during particularly tense scenes. Others get motion sickness from the jerky camera style. At the picture's climax, a Chicago woman let out a full-throttle scream. She was still shaking as the lights came up. "I'm too upset to talk," she said as a friend comforted her with...
...cuts to the monster. In fact, no visible monster! Because the audience sees only what the camera does. At night it is sometimes pitch-black; for excruciating minutes, we are literally in the dark. The physical mayhem is limited to one conk on the head. There's no slashing--except of everything extraneous to the creation of psychological disorder. Blair Witch tweaks Mies van der Rohe's dictum into "Less is morbid" and makes the viewer collaborate actively in both the scenario and the scariness. Says Sanchez: "Horror is something that works in the viewer's mind, not really onscreen...
They seem to realize that the flip side of phenomenon is fluke. Blair Witch, a film that antagonizes as many folks as it enthralls, could be as fleeting a fad as Deely Bobbers, and with no profound meaning for the future of film--except perhaps that struggling filmmakers with a marketable attitude will for a short, happy time be overpaid by studio bosses hoping against reason for another Blair Witch...
They are a wonderfully rum lot and include an ingenue fresh off the bus from Ohio (Heather Graham) who doesn't know much about Hollywood except that a girl is supposed to sleep her way to the top, which she's up for; a failed leading lady (Christine Baranski), boldly living out her frustrated dreams of Method acting in all the wrong places; and a production crew composed of illegal aliens who start out not knowing one end of the camera from the other and end up in learned discussions of how Fellini or Orson Welles might have shot...
...mayor from 1977-81, Springer spent a night in jail to illustrate the awful conditions in the local prisons and fought to bring rock concerts to the conservative city. Which was a great idea except for that 1979 Who concert that turned into a stampede...