Word: luridness
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...almost -- and survival. Done with a severe palette (Rothenberg's excursions into color, in recent years, have been tentative), they have a hard grip on the eye. Of late, whole figures have reappeared in her work. By all rights, Green Ray, 1984, with its two capering figures in a lurid spotlight on a stage of some sort -- Teddy bears, or Mickey Mice, surmounted by human masks -- ought to look merely absurd; yet their forlorn hoofings imply unwelcome news about the state of being an artist...
...those who might be worried about contemporary teenagers. On the one hand, the example of its author looks hopeful: Bret Easton Ellis, 21, is a student at Bennington College and obviously an enterprising and successful young man. But the story he tells about members of his generation is lurid in the extreme. Most readers who are not helplessly zonked on sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll will finish Less Than Zero with the conviction that they have not fretted over the current condition of young people nearly enough...
Emphasizing the sense of veiled cruelty that is ever-present in the story of The Turn of the Screw, the lighting effects are spectacular. Nothing is presented in the clear light of day, but rather in a dim and slightly mottled gloom, punctuated occasionally by the lurid light of a blood-red sky. Furtive figures frantically seek to escape this depressing darkness, a darkness that almost becomes a metaphor for Quint's malevolence. Clever special effects make the two ghosts seem especially spectral. While the evil former man-servant appears and vanishes high at the top of the tower. Miss...
Unfortunately, the evidence does not live up to these lurid claims. Menikoff devotes 23 closely printed pages to the nefarious fiddling that went on with Stevenson's punctuation and spelling; the imposition of "house styles" by various publishers was, of course, common during Stevenson's lifetime, and is not entirely unheard of today. On a more substantive level, some sexual undertones in the story were muffled, and some mildly profane or irreligious sentiments were excised or rendered inoffensive. These changes now seem fatuous, but they did not accomplish what Menikoff asserts: "A finished and artistically sophisticated novel was reduced...
...herself whole-bodied to her clients' midnight dreams. No less, Turner throws herself headfirst into the film, hyperventilating on the medium's potential for erogenous adventure. This is a clever, daring, mad performance in a movie that is just as reckless. Crimes of Passion and its more lurid brethren in the skin trade are not for everyone, but they should at least be available for any consenting adult to savor or condemn. The porn vigilantes ignore two important partners in a work of fiction: the filmmaker, whose point of view explains and may even criticize the violent acts...