Word: luridness
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Armistead Maupin, the author of the often lurid, 14-month-old Tales of the City, is regarded by some as a kind of contemporary Boswell: "I haven't written anything that hasn't happened -God knows that in San Francisco you don't have to make it up." San Francisco suburbanites had their own serial in the Pacific Sun until its author, Cyra McFadden, got a book contract and published The Serial (Knopf; $4.95), a fast-selling, funny, 52-chapter account of Living Together Relationships and Creative Divorce Groups in Marin County...
This latest in a long line of movies about mental institutions is chiefly distinguished by what it does not do. It does not revel in too many lurid scenes of zany inmates being violent or bestial (though it has its share, enough to earn it an R rating). It does not idealize the mental institution as a citadel of scientific wisdom and compassion, nor caricature it as a latter-day Bedlam administered by sadists. It does not explain away its protagonist's schizophrenia with some unearthed childhood trauma, as if the condition were a sort of Freudian acrostic...
...Robbins and Jacqueline Susanne write--packed with romance, sex and adventure, protrayed in the most tasteless and cliched manner. It's the type of movie that P.R. men probably would advertise as "epic," meaning that it's long (a gruelling two hours and 45 minutes), lavish and full of lurid scenes. The Other Side of Midnight has the dubious distinction of containing more outrageously tacky moments than one ever would have though it possible to put into one movie. As the film moves from the slums of Marseilles to Paris, Washington, D.C., Hollywood and the Greek islands...
...topic was sex. The two MIT women told all--in lurid detail. They named all--over 30 of their bed mates...
...murder. What is clear, however, is that Joan Didion has produced a remarkable modern variation on Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady. Her technique may seem feverish but it is calculated to give the novel its unique quality-a blend of literary invention and the sort of lurid stories found on the "freak-death" pages of big-city newspapers. Her ear for contemporary speech rhythms, her eye for the incriminating details rank with those of William Gaddis in J.R. But it is Didion's romantic imagination of disaster that puts innocence and corruption on their inevitable collision...