Word: perilously
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...woods, walking into crime-scene tunnels or taking a ride with someone quite likely to be the killer. For the genre director, a horror film is a game of geometry. It's all about the slow movement of the victim and the camera into a space of probable peril. In the Hitchcock school of tension-ratcheting, Lussier is an apt apprentice. (He also borrows a Hitchcock trick, from Stage Fright, of showing a misleading scene from the killer's demented point of view.) The movie is nothing above the ordinary, but that doesn't matter to the horror fanboys...
...teen queen Roberts in the role. Roberts gives the impression of poise earned by experience rather than a natural gift, but by Hollywood standards, she is royalty - Julia Roberts is her aunt - and director Thor Freudenthal seems to have shot her accordingly, bathed in golden light. The family-in-peril angle is also a change from Duncan's story. While Andi and Bruce's kindly social-services caseworker Bernie (Don Cheadle, who could have phoned this in but didn't) would like to keep the siblings together, they live in fear of being sent to separate foster homes. The parallel...
Finally, you have media businesses laying off workers or going under in an even worse economy - brought on by the very crisis at the top of the news--which means fewer ad dollars and, potentially, peril for anyone who loses market share by seeming out of step with the times. It's easier to be bold when your job is secure...
...that's big enough to cause political peril; no one knows for sure if the stimulus package can be passed in the size or with the speed that economists say the nation needs. Democrats say they want the stimulus to be bipartisan, in part to grant political cover if the bill fails to jump-start the economy. In the House, this is largely an optional position, but in the Senate, where Democrats do not hold a filibuster-proof majority, bipartisanship is required...
...Critics of the movie, most prominently Roger Ebert, say that its emphasis on the white man's burden of nobility betrayed a willful ignoring of Tom Robinson, the real person in peril. Atticus loses face; Tom loses his life, but his case is seen not as his or his race's tragedy but as one step on his lawyer's Calvary. Then the plot shifts to the Finches' eccentric neighbor Boo Radley (Robert Duvall, in his first movie role), and Mockingbird forgets about the black man, unfairly convicted by a racist society, to concentrate on the white...