Word: gored
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...hairy deal, say cynics who were bred on gross-out horror movies. Show us heads exploding, chests busting, legs sawed off. Yet the packed audience at a late-night screening of Paranormal Activity in Times Square this past week didn't need gore effects to be scared witless. Yes, they knew it was only a movie - one that, like The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield and plenty others before it, used "found footage" to give a patina of realism to the fanciful events that were dreamed up by writer-director Oren Peli and are endured by actors Micah Sloat...
Peli downplays shock and emphasizes suspense: a shadow creeping across a wall or the ripple of an unseen form under the bedsheets. The gore scenes in splatter movies carry a sadistic punch, but those are outside most moviegoers' experience. What Peli is interested in is dread, a feeling everyone is familiar with. (Will I lose my job? Has she found someone else? Why hasn't our kid come home yet? What's that strange rash?) Movies take that anxiety, crystallize it and, because fiction demands an ending, resolve it. The threat is provided, the fear made flesh, the monster confronted...
...less in common with modern gore movies than with certain avant-garde films of the late '60s, like Michael Snow's Wavelength - a murder mystery in the form of a single, slow, 45-min. zoom shot through a room - and Morgan Fisher's Phi Phenomenon, an 11-min. shot of a wall clock without a second hand. In Fisher's film, viewers were meant to concentrate so intently that they could see the minute hand move. PA uses a similar strategy: the stationary camera in the overnight bedroom scenes has a time code at the bottom right of the frame...
Others, including those close to him, wonder privately if fighting climate change is less a conviction for Arias than a vehicle back to the international accolades he enjoyed a quarter century ago. They point out that his conservation kick was greatly influenced by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore's Academy Award-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth., and wonder if Arias was motivated more by the message of the film, or the worldwide praise Gore received as a result of championing the cause...
Indeed, the world is full of examples of leaders who, quite genuinely, had humility as a goal, until events forced them to abandon it. In his campaign debates with Al Gore in 2000, George W. Bush said the U.S. should act as a "humble nation," the better to win the support of others for its policies. Sounded great. But Bush's commitment to be an international shrinking violet did not survive the terrorist attacks of 9/11, nor should it have. What the U.S. and the world wanted and needed in response to 9/11...