Word: pa
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...strong arm of the conservatorship is felt in everything from Spears' curtailed spending to the weeding out of people who are considered bad influences. Even her downtime on the tour was carefully choreographed. When Spears' tour bus pulled into Pittsburgh, Pa., in March, the manager of the local Mad Mex restaurant didn't think twice about Spears' advance team's request: no flash photography, and her tables were not to be offered Red Bull or alcohol. Hard to argue with the results: a low-key meal devoid of drama. The most exciting thing the manager had to say was that...
...PA will keep expanding through the pre-Halloween fright season, trying to hold off other horror pictures - The Stepfather, Saw VI, The House of the Devil and Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant - at least until the last weekend of October. That's when we get the one back-from-the dead movie that won't be stopped: Michael Jackson's This...
Beyond the viral ingenuity of the marketing, what's cool about PA is that it's not just a fun thrill ride; it's an instructive artistic experience. A horror-movie revisionist, Peli follows a less-is-more strategy. He knows that waiting for the big scary jolt does more damage to the nervous system than getting it. The tension builds slowly, as the apprehensive Katie, a student, and the skeptical Micah, a day trader, feel the first emotional tremors. The movie keeps us in its grip because we never leave the couple's haunted property and because...
...come home yet? What's that strange rash?) Movies take that anxiety, crystallize it and, because fiction demands an ending, resolve it. The threat is provided, the fear made flesh, the monster confronted. All gone - feel better? Horror movies provide vicarious psychotherapy in an hour and a half. PA is different. At the end, it doesn't let viewers off the hook. It leaves them hanging and dares them to turn that last shiver into a laugh of relief that the delicious ordeal is over. (See the top 10 movie gimmicks...
...PA has less in common with modern gore movies than with certain avant-garde films of the late '60s, like Michael Snow's Wavelength - a murder mystery in the form of a single, slow, 45-min. zoom shot through a room - and Morgan Fisher's Phi Phenomenon, an 11-min. shot of a wall clock without a second hand. In Fisher's film, viewers were meant to concentrate so intently that they could see the minute hand move. PA uses a similar strategy: the stationary camera in the overnight bedroom scenes has a time code at the bottom right...