Word: grimness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Written by David Seltzer (who also wrote the Ur-Apocalyptic flick The Omen), the show has some of the religious intrigue of The Da Vinci Code and some of the grim phantasmagoria of The Passion of the Christ--two successes NBC would clearly like to have rub off on it. "In the tumultuous times we live in," says NBC entertainment president Kevin Reilly, who green-lighted both Medium and Revelations, "Apocalyptic theory and big existential questions tend to be on the rise...
...overly humble world of cultural punditry. Her work abounds in self-contradictions. She is a girl almost without a sense of humor; yet she made her reputation with an article on the high frivolity of 'camp.' She is a part-time novelist [who writes] ... like a grim translation from the German: 'By literary genre,' she observes, 'I mean a body of work belonging to literature considered as an art and to which inherent standards of artistic excellence pertain.' She is the kind of girl who takes 33 talky pages to tell you that art 'must tend toward the pursuit...
...voice and material. On the rousing opener, At the Bottom of Everything, a mandolin clips jauntily away while he crows, "We must blend into the choir, sing as static with the whole/ We must memorize nine numbers and deny we have a soul." These are smart lines, however grim, and with Jesse Harris (Norah Jones' songwriting shoulder) adding wonderfully warm guitar, the song is even hummable. On other tracks, Oberst imports pedal steel and Emmylou Harris (the vocal equivalent of pedal steel) to add a harmonic steadiness that keeps you from wanting to jump off a bridge...
...that task," Wehner wrote in his memo. There's also an inconvenient fact that Bush rarely mentions: if workers start investing payroll taxes in individual accounts, the government will need another source to cover benefits for retirees--as much as $2 trillion by some estimates. The options are grim: borrowing heavily, cutting benefits or both. While Bush has not spelled out how he would deal with what are known in bureaucratic jargon as the "transition costs," Wehner and others at the White House have signaled that he is leaning toward a significant reduction in future benefits that gets deeper over...
...Dirty War can be didactic and self-congratulatory, it also smartly balances a thriller's plotting with an astute eye for politics and bureaucratic idiocy. Whether you consider it a gripping, worthy scare or titillating scaremongering may depend on whether you think it is a fair warning or a grim preview reel of inevitable coming attractions. For the sake of all of us, if not of the movie, let's hope it's the former...