Ugly in theme and execution, Elias's "Gut" takes a compelling idea — the allure of death as distraction from the dailiness of life — and loses it among the constraints of a low budget and the weakness of an underdeveloped script.
Bigelow has always been one of our great action directors and she should win the Oscar for pulling off a movie (with the assistance of her superb cast and Mark Boal's screenplay) that I suspect will remain just as compelling and insightful about the allure of war in 30 years' time as it is now.
He found that watching Age 13 with Graveyard Mountain Home as the soundtrack enhanced the film: "Age 13 is not necessarily an enjoyable film to watch... but viewing it with the Chroma Key soundtrack makes an odd experience even odder yet wholly compelling, with a mysterious filmstrip allure that freezes a bygone era".
But will the allure be quite to compelling now that we know who he is?
And if allure isn't the compelling, hard-to-define quality of a consuming age, what would it be?
"The scent and allure of Washington was very compelling to him," said Gordon Davis, a former New York City parks commissioner and the founding chairman of Jazz at Lincoln Center who is a friend of Mr. Johnson.
To capitalize on Armstrong's allure, OLN created "The Lance Chronicles," a compelling 13-part weekly series about his life and the pre-Tour training of his United States Postal Service team.
For example, a recent Fixes post, "For Teenage Smokers, Removing the Allure of the Pack," begins with a compelling statistic: only 1 in 10 smokers picks up the habit after age 18.
It's a slender basis for attribution, but the allure of finding a Shakespeare manuscript is compelling, as is the desire to associate Shakespeare with a liberal passage where Thomas More refutes an anti-immigrant mob.
Are we going to be blinded by the cool factor, by the allure of some spectacular technology that is so compelling, we discount considering all the potential costs and dangers just for the fun of seeing what the end result will look like?
