Word: killers
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...Even for a January splatter-fest movie, Unpraiseable is spectacularly stupid. Toward the end, the killer knows Agent Marsh's identity and is out to seize, fricassee and kill her. So her boss takes her off the case and tells her, in effect, get out of here; we won't have any cops guard you when you go through the rain, at night, alone and unprotected, to the creepy motel room you've moved into. Apparently, Marsh has an electric car, because when she drives onto a bridge - where there are no drivers to help her - the killer is able...
...plays into the sick myth of the brilliant serial killer. The evil genius with a sadistic streak, who plays mind games with his victims and the police, has replaced the criminal mastermind of old dime novels. Instead of tying the heroine to the railroad tracks (these days, the train would never arrive), he straps them into Rube Goldberg contraptions that slowly rip their fingernails off and tear their dignity to shreds. We live in a cruel world, but this is one area of criminality where fiction has long outstripped fact. According to the folks at Wikipedia - and those obsessive list...
...Lately, virtually all serial killers are derivative of Thomas Harris' Hannibal Lecter series and its spawn, the Saw films, where the killer is (1) gloriously nuts and (2) convinced he is wreaking divine vengeance on his victims. He's meant to be pitied as much as reviled. In Unfaceable the killer - revealed fairly early in the proceedings, so I'm not spoiling much - is a young man (played by Joseph Cross) bereft over his father's suicide, and driven to punish those he believes responsible. Don't blame me, blame society. Sadly, this sympathy-for-the-devil tone permeates modern...
...last time pop music was dealt this card, it went by the name Kurt Cobain, another lower-middle-class kid for whom being messed up was a source of creativity and, eventually, the killer of it too. Cobain told his few high school friends that he had "suicide genes," and there's a dangerous echo of that infatuation with doom in Winehouse's fetish for ill-fated soul singers. No matter how true her music feels, it's hard to tell the difference between pain and performance and impossible to guess how approval reinforces her self-perception...
...that film, Theron reportedly gained 30 pounds to star as prostitute and serial killer Aileen Wuornos...