Word: lurid
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...trunk and then abandoned car and corpse in eastern Pennsylvania. Under police questioning, he confessed to the crime but claimed that a coked-up Teresa had first attacked him, after he caught her performing oral sex on their infant son Philip. The jury had no trouble disbelieving this lurid fantasy. Today Taylor is serving a 30-year sentence for murder...
Henry, made four years ago in Chicago and just now released, is loosely based on the confessions of serial killer Henry Lee Lucas. The film does show some lurid vignettes of a master murderer busy at his work -- a terrorized family here, a plugged-in TV salesman there. But director John McNaughton, who wrote the spare script with Richard Fire, shows few of Henry's dozen or so crimes. Instead he reveals the victims, at the scenes of their deaths, in slow zoom shots accompanied by elegiac music. He is a coroner with a touch of the poet...
None of this is to say there isn't a place for celebrity journalism. It can and should be fun, occasionally bitchy and lurid, rich in relevant information about the lives of the rich and famous and the accomplished. But it should be based on reporting. And real reporting is nothing more than the best obtainable version of the truth. Getting at the truth is hard work. It requires phone calls, knocking on doors, spending hours with people who know the subject and, most important of all, giving credence to information that might be contrary to a reporter's preconceived...
...painted Cotopaxi in 1862 in full eruption, he could not have left much doubt that this scene also held a lesson for an America plunged into hatred and despair by the Civil War. The morning sun rises through the plume of smoke and ash, irresistibly, its disk made lurid but not extinguished by the subterranean fires, its light mirrored in a tranquil lake. Catastrophe will not wipe out nature; in the foreground of the volcanic plain, new plants spring to life. This, as the art historian David C. Huntington once remarked, is about as close as American painting...