Word: guignol
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Director Peter Jackson, whose three earlier features (Bad Taste, Meet the Feebles and Dead Alive) make clever use of puppetry and guignol splatter effects, here is like a physician who assumes a patient's fever in order to understand her illness. He visualizes the landscape of Pauline's and Juliet's minds as a fetid garden, where fairytale plots of courtly love and castle intrigue blot out their edgy lives at home and school. The girls' vision of Borovnia utterly mesmerizes them. Anyone who would break the spell -- like Pauline's sweet, anxious mum -- must be a witch. Must...
This handsomely crafted studio production, unaccountably left to languish for a year in the Warner Bros. vault, comes from an unlikely auteur: poverty- row director Abel Ferrara, whose earlier work, from Ms. 45 to Bad Lieutenant, is a gallery of Grunge Guignol. Somehow, flanked by five scripters (including his regular collaborator Nicholas St. John), he managed to stoke his tale with the eerie subtlety of the best old B movies...
...keep scissoring in the dark, hoping that this triage or that would appease the board. Finally, Hard Target won an R rating with about three minutes lost: a high-impact shot here, a memorable death there. The board might have thought it was protecting teenagers from grim Guignol, but Woo's admirers believe there could be no violence in this film nearly so mindless as the violence done to it. The rating system was preserved, the film's intricate internal rhythm destroyed. "My work is like my child," the mild-mannered director says. "If too many things...
...Jusepe de Ribera, whose masterpieces are displayed in a new exhibition at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art, is the very antitype of the great Matisse show 30 blocks downtown at the Museum of Modern Art: darkness, Baroque realism and a relentless admixture of piety with sadistic guignol, all done at the highest level of skill and conviction. Surprisingly, given the enormous reputation Ribera had in his day, this is the first comprehensive exhibition of his work ever held in America, or for that matter in Europe (it was previously shown in Naples and Madrid). It rounds...
Building a trustworthy bridge between civilized society and the Grand Guignol is tricky work, and Oates' success has varied from book to book. But American Appetites offers a thoroughly credible version of what is both unbelievable and disturbingly familiar. Her prose is headlong. There are cliches; sentences do not ask to be examined for artful felicities. Pausing seems beside the point. The rush is utterly convincing. Any definition of art that excludes this novel is probably too narrow...