Word: luridness
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...hours' drive east of Kyoto. The advent of railways made backwaters of many towns along the old Nakasendo path and, in a happy turn for visitors, isolated the ancient wooden settlements from modern encroachment. Mitake's suburbanites may have forgotten the road, but the signs are still there. Lurid azaleas and miniature topiary pines trace its zigzag route past new housefronts and tiny gardens. (The kinks and bends were originally designed to slow down cavalry attacks.) By the roadside are vegetable plots as well as piles of rice husks, which will be mixed with vinegar to pickle the crops. Shrines...
...family riven by the teenage son's death - in acutely somber vignettes that avoid the seductions of sentimentality and melodrama. The Piano Teacher stirs up a tasty poison porridge of lusts and hatreds between a precocious pianist (Benoît Magimel) and his stern tutor (Isabelle Huppert); in chic, lurid images it suggests that teachers, perhaps all adults, try to express and exorcise their frustrations by dominating their charges. In coarser hands, this tale of obsession and self-mutilation could be ludicrous from the start; in these hands it is goofy only toward the end, when the sadistic teacher becomes...
...Angeles, home of Philip Marlowe (among other truth seekers) and moviemakers (among other chronic liars) for Mulholland Dr.; Santa Rosa (scene of Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt) for the toxic scent of small-town failure in The Man Who Wasn't There. Both films serve up a lovely, lurid brew of greed, murder and twisted identities. But the Coen movie, with Billy Bob Thornton and Frances McDormand locked in a jealous adagio, is twistily faithful to the noir formula. The Lynch, which sails through its first 90 minutes as a ripping yarn about a mystery woman (brunet Laura Harring...
...lawyers they have hired). Her half brother Peter Carlyon of Memphis, Tenn., says that Bakley had phoned to say she was afraid of Blake and that if she ended up dead he would be to blame. But sympathy has emerged from the L.A.P.D. Responding to Braun's lurid tales, police spokesman Lieut. Horace Frank said, "It's kind of unfair. Here's a person who's been murdered, and now they start painting her as a bad person." He added, "The focus of the investigation is not on her past. We have to focus on one thing: Who killed...
...what to expect from The Cold Six Thousand (Knopf; 672 pages; $25.95), which seamlessly picks up the story at the moment the earlier novel ended. Neophytes, though, deserve some advice and counseling. Think twice before you begin the first page. Are you sure you want to witness nearly every lurid conspiracy theory concerning public events during the mid-1960s fleshed out in brutal, nightmarish and totally unsentimental fiction? No? We hardened veterans thought not. Goodbye...