Word: luridly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Kids still young enough to carry lunch pails bearing cartoon characters have seen and heard the lurid stuff of Zippergate everywhere. We have tried to protect them with dashes here and there, but is there a fourth-grader who has seen b---j--- and lost that game of hangman...
...knowing, irony-drenched world of baby-boomer culture, no one wants to be thought a prig. So let's stipulate that simple adultery would not have endangered the President politically or created the lurid spectacle before us. He's been accused of that before and survived. People seemed not to believe his denials in 1992 about Gennifer Flowers--in fact, according to leaks from his recent deposition, the President seems not to have believed them himself--but the public apparently forgave him. An implicit bargain was struck, and it's hard to imagine a national convulsion erupting from disclosures that...
...Marxist repression as on "savage capitalism," and his critique of Castro's human-rights record in full view of 3,000 foreign journalists could sting. Instead of spotlighting a "normal" country at its most open, benign moment, the way Castro hopes, the press might fill their dispatches with lurid stories of teenage prostitutes and an oppressed, despairing citizenry...
Egoyan, however, does not indulge in the potentially lurid nature of this subject matter. He chronicles the tale with a dispassionate, removed manner that subordinates the disturbing incest subplot to the larger story. Egoyan appears interested in broader themes than the dark underside of small towns, a theme long exhausted. The horror of The Sweet Hereafter comes from what characters are prepared to do, rather than what they actually accomplish...
There's little moral rooting interest here; the fun comes from expert actors spitting out the lurid rhythms of punk patter. You want affability fragging into menace? Tarantino can write it for you. Jackson and Fonda, especially, can deliver it with a swell sting...