Word: luridness
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Henry, made four years ago in Chicago and just now released, is loosely based on the confessions of serial killer Henry Lee Lucas. The film does show some lurid vignettes of a master murderer busy at his work -- a terrorized family here, a plugged-in TV salesman there. But director John McNaughton, who wrote the spare script with Richard Fire, shows few of Henry's dozen or so crimes. Instead he reveals the victims, at the scenes of their deaths, in slow zoom shots accompanied by elegiac music. He is a coroner with a touch of the poet...
None of this is to say there isn't a place for celebrity journalism. It can and should be fun, occasionally bitchy and lurid, rich in relevant information about the lives of the rich and famous and the accomplished. But it should be based on reporting. And real reporting is nothing more than the best obtainable version of the truth. Getting at the truth is hard work. It requires phone calls, knocking on doors, spending hours with people who know the subject and, most important of all, giving credence to information that might be contrary to a reporter's preconceived...
...painted Cotopaxi in 1862 in full eruption, he could not have left much doubt that this scene also held a lesson for an America plunged into hatred and despair by the Civil War. The morning sun rises through the plume of smoke and ash, irresistibly, its disk made lurid but not extinguished by the subterranean fires, its light mirrored in a tranquil lake. Catastrophe will not wipe out nature; in the foreground of the volcanic plain, new plants spring to life. This, as the art historian David C. Huntington once remarked, is about as close as American painting...
Britain's tabloid newspapers have long slavered over the lurid and the voyeuristic, whether it be gruesome photographs of air-crash victims on the pages of the People or bare-bosomed women on page 3 of the Sun. But in recent months, the newspapers' owners have discovered that the regular diet of sex, scandal and sensationalism has resulted in parliamentary dyspepsia and growing public outrage. With the threat of government press curbs looming, 20 of the country's leading newspapers last week signed a broad code of ethics, which includes the hiring of mediators, ostensibly to slap down editors...
Afanasyev suffered a nasty embarrassment last month, when Pravda reprinted a lurid dispatch from an Italian newspaper claiming that reformist Supreme Soviet Deputy Boris Yeltsin boozed and shopped his way through a tour of the U.S. The paper was later forced to publish an apology, even though tapes subsequently broadcast over Soviet television appeared to show Yeltsin at least mildly intoxicated. But Afanasyev's most serious failure was one that has also undone many an editor in the West: falling circulation. Over the past four years, as Soviet news buffs switched to livelier journalistic fare, Pravda's readership slipped from...