Word: luridness
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...film China read: "Alan Ladd and twenty girls - trapped by the rapacious Japs!" In the POW drama The Purple Heart, American airmen are tortured and executed for not ratting their pals. War movies reveled in a grim picture of the superhuman, subhuman foe - propaganda at its most lurid. As Bruce Jackson, who had been a World War II marine, wrote ironically in 1995: "Japs, as we learned from the newsreels that accompanied the double features, were fanatics who jumped up and down waving swords while screaming 'Banzai!' Japs gleefully died for Emperor Hirohito in suicidal charges against American troops...
...late to reconsider. Does this Bluebeard's castle of a culture, this cable-ready 24/7 spectacle of the untrammeled Super-Id, which electronically firehoses its children with every vicious fantasy it can conceive, really wish to have its more lurid capital cases turned into media extravaganzas? If the McVeigh execution opens this video window, it will not be closed, and spectacular public executions will become a matter of the First Amendment and the Public's Right to Know. Maybe they...
...American, baffled by the demeanor of a compatriot from the far side of the Pacific. Another is that the line echoes the title of a Beat Takeshi TV show, You Japanese Are Strange. But the third is on Kitano's loyal worldwide audience. Because his pictures?passion action movies, lurid and pensive?are pretty darned scrutable...
...Harris' depiction of evil, of the strength and seduction in depravity. Each gargoyle gets his due: greedy detective Pazzi (Giancarlo Giannini), the venal official Krendler (Ray Liotta). Even Mason Verger, the pedophile with the skinless face (Gary Oldman, under a layer of Toussaud wax), brings wit to his lurid vengefulness. All the actors do expert turns. And Moore makes a fine, severe Clarice. As Lecter consumes his victims, so Clarice assumes their pain until her face becomes a steel mask, her quest a curse. Clarice's empathy is that of the dead grieving for the dead...
That was a big mistake. The lurid stories that ensued about Internet baby buying provoked Prime Minister Tony Blair to condemn the affair as "absolutely deplorable" and to promise quick reforms in British law. Follow-up stories painted the Kilshaws as difficult neighbors with a dirty, animal-filled house that they had once had "ghostbusted" by investigators of the paranormal. They were accused of being so eager to argue about the babies with the Allens through international TV hookups as to neglect them in real life. The stories were one-sided, but the Kilshaws hurt themselves by trumpeting their conversations...