Word: guignol
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Some bloggers have wondered if it isn't simply in the French blood to root for an underdog taking on authority figures. Generations of French children have been enamored with traditional Guignol puppet shows, in which the protagonist, Guignol, fights with a rotten, bumbling policeman. The nation is also obsessed with the comic-book hero Asterix, a puny but cunning Gaul warrior who always gets the best of Julius Caesar's Roman armies despite being overmatched and outnumbered. (Read "Asterix at 50: A French Comic Hero Conquers the World...
...video game... and it's rated PG-13? Honestly, what's the point? I know PG-13 is the new R; the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings system is a lot more flexible-lenient-craven than it used to be. When Judd Apatow comedies and the grotty-Guignol The Dark Knight can secure the unrestricted rating, it's clear that the old sheriff has been replaced by a parole board. But if an R means anything, it's that moviegoers get to see the bone-cratering damage a fist can do to a face, get to feel...
...libretto (from Christopher Bond's play) is both faithful and liberating. The story, of a bitter man in 19th century London who has lost his wife and child and determines to carve out his revenge, has never seemed so human or so bleak. It's no longer just a Guignol songfest, staring at its creatures, with fascination but not pity, from an Olympian distance above the cage in which they claw at one another. Inside this sarcophagus of a play, beneath Sondheim's cold-steel lyrics, Burton finds a pulsing, mournful heart...
...television! No more TV whenever you want!" Does she make a good point about the danger of too much sedentary time? Absolutely. And it would be easier to take seriously if Honey didn't use every manipulative TV trick in the book--sensationalistic special effects, trumped-up drama, Grand Guignol music--to keep you in planted front of the screen. In words that Homer Simpson once used to describe alcohol, this is TV anointing itself as "the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems...
...finesse of fine art to the pulpiest of fiction. Wolf Creek is impeccably structured (apart from one or two creaky plot points later in the piece), and the director extracts pitch-perfect performances from his young leads, with a marvelously malicious turn from Jarratt, whose Mick Taylor is Grand Guignol with an Akubra hat. As for the charge of exploitation - well, directors have been turning true crime into artful entertainment ever since Alfred Hitchcock dredged up the story of Ed Gein from Psycho's swamp...