Word: luridly
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Today we fret about the growing partisanship and scurrilous sensationalism of the press, but our media are simply reverting to mid--19th century form. Nearly all dailies back then were extravagantly partisan, and the "sporting papers"--the Scorpion, the Sunday Flash, the Weekly Rake--provided lurid, low-down, gossipy coverage of celebrities and sex and crime...
Fincher, whose work on Fight Club and Panic Room displayed his expertise in melding the suspenseful and the lurid, plays it cool here. He lets his stars do their thing: Ruffalo emitting just a whisper of rage under his just-the-facts-ma'am demeanor; Downey playing the chatty, suicidal genius (the actor's line readings always have a jazzman's musical ingenuity); and Gyllenhaal in his winsome mode, looking like a puppy who just got swatted with a newspaper by the master he somehow still adores. The star quality has to carry the movie, all 2 1/2 hours...
...perfectly lurid way it all came unraveled is a tale that doesn't require much telling-not that it won't be told and told and told again by cable, tabs and blogs. The truly meaningful question is why that unraveling happened at all. Annapolis grads and shuttle jocks aren't supposed to come unglued. And NASA, a brutally Darwinian place that has been screening astronauts for almost 50 years, is not supposed to let loose screws through. Is NASA not as good at this as we thought? Are astronauts more destructible souls than they seem? And what does...
...also seems to undermine the notion that we are free agents responsible for our choices--not just in this lifetime but also in a life to come. In his millennial essay "Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died," Tom Wolfe worried that when science has killed the soul, "the lurid carnival that will ensue may make the phrase 'the total eclipse of all values' seem tame...
...rows of bleachers than span the stage, a chorus of about 150 keened along. Once the plot kicks in, though, the music becomes westernized and, to these inexpert ears, neither daring in form nor instantly appealing in tune. The color scheme ?? rigid and vivid in Hero, wonderfully lurid in Golden Flower ? is not so much subtle here as absent: grays, mostly, with rare and welcome splashes of bright tones in a carpet laid down under the bleacher steps in Act I, and the chorus outfitted in striking robes...