Word: paranoid
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...prequel for the first sequel (the third film will take place after the original), bringing on inexperienced actors/idols Edison Chen and Shawn Yue to play young versions of Ming and Yan, respectively. The co-directors also abandoned the rigidly structured cat-and-mouse formula that gave the original its paranoid charge, opting to create a sprawling crime epic of family, loyalty and betrayal. That's the kind of Godfather territory Hong Kong's run-of-the-mill triad flicks rarely tread. "We knew we had the chance to do something really different and great, so we took it," says director...
...songs. The lyrics Cash wrote for his signature hit I Walk the Line express an unexceptional sentiment: because I love you, I behave. But the thumping bass line and Cash's delivery ("I keep my eyes wide open all the time") make the mood part predatory, part paranoid. Even the upbeat love story Ballad of a Teenage Queen has a spooky side; it sounds as if it's beamed from the bottom of the well of loneliness. Phillips used acoustical reverbs on many Sun productions, but Cash hardly needed it. His voice was its own eerie echo chamber. "His voice...
...Koreans, who in recent years have seized pop-film primacy from Hong Kong, make the most of their borrowings from other cultures. Jang Jun Hwan's Save the Green Planet! has a paranoid science-fiction premise: that aliens are to take over Earth at the next lunar eclipse and that, our deranged hero believes, they use their hair to broadcast telepathic signals. You've heard this before, possibly from someone muttering next to you on a bus. But then the madness escalates: for a while you think the movie is going crazy; then you realize that the insanity is contagious...
Even when he ruled Iraq, Saddam Hussein led a nomad's life. As President he was too paranoid to sleep in the massive, marble-lined palaces he erected all over Iraq as monuments to his power. According to close associates, he would stay instead in small houses on the edges of his various compounds, changing location every eight to 10 hours and keeping an assistant on duty around the clock to pack and unpack his suitcases. Saddam, his former secretary says, so admired the fortitude of the Bedouin tribes that wander the Iraqi wilderness that he often headed into...
...play him as either a buffoon or an obvious monster. The first choice trivializes his crimes; the second lets viewers smugly conclude they could never make the same mistake as those evil, stupid Germans. Star Robert Carlyle (The Full Monty) avoids both traps. His Hitler is a humorless paranoid whose anti-Jewish rants are laughed off by his comrades in the trenches of WW I. But after the war, he discovers his gift for rabble-rousing. He is an artist of grievance, and in bitter, between-the-wars Germany, that is enough to gain power--that, plus luck and savvy...