Word: stygian
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...other paintings of fires, abandoned industrial plants and refineries belching out their pollutants under a Stygian sky, the emotive content of the image (industry as Pandemonium) is at odds with the stolid execution. Few techniques could be less suited to depicting what is fugitive and mobile, like fire and smoke, than cutting silhouettes from roofing tar. Sultan leans toward the mummified sublime. His stage effects of glare and silhouette descend, remotely, from Turner. But he is so used to thinking in terms of figure and ground that he handles the transitions between them -- the midtones, the modulations of light -- clumsily...
Considering that most of the movie takes place in a stygian cave, The Keep looks gorgeous. Slow motion and pixilation enhance the spooky mood; a telephoto lens turns the castle into a pointillist magic mountain. It is cinematic balm when a fantasy movie pays informed tribute to the decorative arts. It is also, most likely, box-office poison...
...traditional movie about real people, it is beguiling as an exercise in hallucinatory style. As he did in his adaptation of another S.E. Hinton novel (The Outsiders), Coppola has taken the protagonist's point of view as his visual strategy. There it was Technicolor romance; here it is stygian monochrome. To the Motorcycle Boy, colorblind and partly deaf from too many fights, the world is "black and white with the sound turned low," and what he sees is what we get. Dark clouds hurtle across the sky; diagonal strips of shadow fall like knife scars on every face; steam...
...same time, the New York Transit Authority is proposing to cut back its maintenance program and curtail service. The city's subways are already a Stygian underworld, with filthy, overcrowded trains careening at high speeds one moment, then stalling for eternities with lights out and passengers steaming...
...Even Connecticut Democrat Toby Moffett, a former rationing advocate, now concludes that that step "should be the last resort." But if plaintive appeals from Washington to "drive three miles a day less" go unheeded, the nation may be forced to begin considering such Stygian last resorts...