“A Nightmare on Elm Street’’ bastardizes the Wes Craven original. Teens in a small town are having nightmares starring the same fellow. His name is Freddy Krueger. He’s fast, nimble, and strong. He has burned skin. He wears a fedora, a striped pull-over, and a glove with knives along the fingers. He’s part Michael Jackson, part Wolverine, part commercial for ProActiv Solution. Freddy kills kids in their dreams. Why becomes clear, if not logical, as the bodies pile up.
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A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET Directed by: Samuel Bayer.

Written by: Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer.

Starring: Jackie Earle Haley, Kyle Gallner, Rooney Mara.

Rated: R.

We are treated to one victim being whipped around her room like a doll. We discover a new search engine (Gigablast!) and spend time with Jackie Earle Haley, who plays Freddy.

Monsters, whether perceived or real, are nothing new for Haley, who has spent his resurgence making people uncomfortable with humanized readings of a paroled pedophile in “Little Children’’ and as a wrenched shut-away in “Shutter Island.’’ Here he’s all camp, tweaking his lines for laughs. The Freddy has far more in common with Jigsaw, the high-minded serial killer in “Saw.’’ It took the original Freddy Krueger, Robert Englund, several sequels and a spin-off (“Freddy Vs. Jason’’) to become something of a joke. But by then he had our blessing to trash his reputation.

Craven’s original, released in 1984, wasn’t great, but it aced a good test for such a movie. Days after it was over, sleep seemed risky. The movie managed to unite slasher movie conventions (the horny always perish) with intergenerational angst: The kids suffered for their parents’ sins. It also introduced us to Heather Langenkamp, who made a stoic heroine in three “Nightmare’’ movies, and Johnny Depp, whose death by mattress has yet to be topped.

Craven seemed curious about exploring the ways surrealism merged dream-life with its waking counterpart.
By comparison, this remake, has the formal sophistication of a Hoobastank video. Visually, it’s interchangeable with remakes of “Friday the 13th’’ “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,’’ and “The Crazies.’’ There are no characters, per se, just mascara-ed lead-singer-like boys and model-generic girls dying in scoop-neck tops and skinny jeans.

Depressingly, the movie has been released by New Line Cinema, whose fortunes were so reversed by the original “Nightmare’’ that it became known as “The House That Freddy Built.’’ It’s embarrassing to see them fling their first big hit into the microwave.

But a small percentage of people are reserving their judgment, or at least their willingness to cheer or pound their fists, until they see how enforcement of the new law plays out. They are not inclined to show up at protests or argue at work. Although they may have opinions, they don't spend a lot of time reading or watching news reports about reaction to Senate Bill 1070, which was signed into law by Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer last week.

In a sense, these moderate-minded people, if they're not indifferent, represent the conflicted feelings of a nation that for decades has failed to reach agreement on how to deal with illegal immigration.

A new Rasmussen poll released Wednesday indicates that although 64 percent of Arizonans favor the new immigration law and 30 percent are opposed, 6 percent are unsure how they feel. The poll of 500 likely Arizona voters was conducted earlier this week and had a margin of error of plus or minus 4 ½ percentage points.

Sam Burkhardt, 70, of Phoenix, counts himself as one of those with mixed feelings. He is neither stridently in favor of nor opposed to the nation's toughest immigration law, which requires police to inquire about legal status if they reasonably suspect a person is in the country illegally.

"I think something has to be done, but I'm not sure this is the something," said Burkhardt, who is a retired moving-company manager. "I do have concerns about how the Hispanic community is going to be treated."

Burkhardt, who has lived in Arizona for 40 years, avoids bringing up and discussing the topic with people, not wanting to provoke emotional outbursts.

"If they bring it up, I will," he said. "I'm not the one who is going to initiate the conversation."

Some political scientists said they are not surprised by the poll numbers indicating only a small percentage undecided about the new immigration law.

Immigration is not a highly technical issue, so it's easy for people to formulate opinions, said Kenneth Fernandez, a political-science professor at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. Generally, most average voters believe the U.S. should be guarding and controlling its borders and enforcing its laws, he said. But those same people don't want the effort to go overboard, causing police officers to use racial profiling to target suspects.

He predicts that some people's opinions will change over time as a clearer picture of the law's impact emerges, although it's difficult to tell what the prevailing public opinion ultimately will be. Opinions on the Iraq war shifted to the negative as time went on, affected by casualties and the failure to find weapons of mass destruction there.

Shailesh Ghimire, 35, of Gilbert, has no problem with local police checking a person's immigration status, but he wants to see if officers abide by training in using proper procedures.

A citizen of Nepal, he has had a green card for the past seven years and carries it wherever he goes. He said he wouldn't be offended if he were asked for proof of legal residency. "I have nothing to hide," he said.

At the same time, Ghimire, an Internet-marketing specialist and frequent traveler, has seen how international-airline passengers are regarded with undue suspicion when they aren't White.

"I can see both sides (of the immigration issue)," he said.

His biggest concern, however, is that the law will fail to address what he sees as a main contributor to illegal immigration: employers hiring illegal immigrants.

Since 2008, Arizona has had an employer-sanctions law that makes it illegal to knowingly hire undocumented workers. The new immigration law makes a few clarifications to the 2008 law but no major changes.

Ghimire said Arizona needs even tougher, zero-tolerance enforcement against employers hiring illegal immigrants if the state wants to discourage people from staying in the U.S.

Some Arizona residents are keeping their cool about the law because they're not sure it will ever be put into effect. Civil-rights groups are filing lawsuits to try to block the law.

"It's so new," said Alexander Falkenstein, a 22-year-old finance major at Arizona State University. "No one understands the language or how it will be implemented. I'm waiting to see."

Falkenstein disagrees with giving police extra power to question people. "(But) I'm not going to throw my arms up in the air because I don't even know if (the law) is going to go through."

Some Arizona residents believe that, despite criticism of the law, not much will change.
Deborah Reed, 40, of Phoenix, thinks the law will lead to occasional, but not widespread, incidents of racial profiling and will not cause vast numbers of illegal immigrants to be deported. "I think life will continue as it always does," she said.

Read more: http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/2010/04/30/20100430arizona-immigration-law-moderates.html#ixzz0mZHrEH8b

Migrating birds and those along the shoreline, nesting pelicans and even river otters and mink along Louisiana's fragile islands and barrier marshes are the first in the path of a massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill that was starting to ooze ashore.

The leak from a blown-out well a mile underwater is five times bigger than first believed. Faint fingers of oily sheen were reaching the Mississippi River delta late Thursday, lapping the Louisiana shoreline in long, thin lines. Thicker oil was about five miles offshore. Officials have said they would do everything to keep the Mississippi River open to traffic.

The oil slick could become the nation's worst environmental disaster in decades, threatening to eclipse even the Exxon Valdez in scope. It imperils hundreds of species of fish, birds and other wildlife along the Gulf Coast, one of the world's richest seafood grounds, teeming with shrimp, oysters and other marine life.

"It is of grave concern," David Kennedy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told The Associated Press about the spill. "I am frightened. This is a very, very big thing. And the efforts that are going to be required to do anything about it, especially if it continues on, are just mind-boggling."

Oil clumps seabirds' feathers, leaving them without insulation — and when they preen, they swallow it. Prolonged contact with the skin can cause burns, said Nils Warnock, a spill recovery supervisor with the California Oiled Wildlife Care Network at the University of California. Oil swallowed by animals can cause anemia, hemorrhaging and other problems, said Jay Holcomb, executive director of the International Bird Rescue Research Center in California.

The spewing oil — about 210,000 gallons a day — comes from a well drilled by the rig Deepwater Horizon, which exploded in flames April 20 and sank two days later. BP PLC was operating the rig that was owned by Transocean Ltd. The Coast Guard is working with BP to deploy floating booms, skimmers and chemical dispersants, and set controlled fires to burn the oil off the water's surface.

Protective boom has been set out on Breton Island, where colonial species such as pelicans, gulls and skimmers nest, and at the sandy tips of the passes from the Mississippi River's birdfoot delta, said Robert Love, a state wildlife official.

The leak from the ocean floor proved to be far bigger than initially reported, contributing to a growing sense among some in Louisiana that the government failed them again, just as it did during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. President Barack Obama dispatched Cabinet officials to deal with the crisis.

Cade Thomas, a fishing guide in Venice, worried that his livelihood will be destroyed. He said he did not know whether to blame the Coast Guard, the government or BP.

"They lied to us. They came out and said it was leaking 1,000 barrels when I think they knew it was more. And they weren't proactive," he said. "As soon as it blew up, they should have started wrapping it with booms."

Government officials said the well 40 miles offshore is spewing about 5,000 barrels, or 200,000 gallons, a day into the gulf.

At that rate, the spill could eclipse the worst oil spill in U.S. history — the 11 million gallons that leaked from the grounded tanker Exxon Valdez in Alaska's Prince William Sound in 1989 — in the three months it could take to drill a relief well and plug the gushing well 5,000 feet underwater on the sea floor. Ultimately, the spill could grow much larger than the Valdez because Gulf of Mexico wells tap deposits that hold many times more oil than a single tanker.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was focusing on national wildlife refuges on a chain of barrier islands.

"We're trying to go for the ones where the pelicans are nesting right now," said Tom McKenzie, the agency's regional spokesman, adding that about 900 were on North Breton.

About 34,000 birds have been counted in the national refuges most at risk, McKenzie said. Gulls, pelicans, roseate spoonbills, egrets, shore birds, terns and blue herons are in the path of the spill.

Mink and river otter also live in the delta and might eat oiled carcasses, said Robert Love, head of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries' coastal and nongame division.

Bird rescuer Holcomb worked the Valdez disaster and was headed to Louisiana. He said some birds may avoid the oil spill, but others won't.

"These are experiences that the birds haven't encountered before," he said. "They might think it's seaweed. It's never harmed them before."

BP has requested more resources from the Defense Department, especially underwater equipment that might be better than what is commercially available. A BP executive said the corporation would "take help from anyone." That includes fishermen who could be hired to help deploy containment boom.
An emergency shrimping season was opened to allow shrimpers to scoop up their catch before it is fouled by oil.

This murky water and the oysters in it have provided a livelihood for three generations of Frank and Mitch Jurisich's family in Empire, La.

Now, on the open water just beyond the marshes, they can smell the oil that threatens everything they know and love.

"Just smelling it, it puts more of a sense of urgency, a sense of fear," Frank Jurisich said.

The brothers hope to get all the oysters they can sell before the oil washes ashore. They filled more than 100 burlap sacks Thursday and stopped to eat some oysters. "This might be our last day," Mitch Jurisich said.

Without the fishing industry, Frank Jurisich said the family "would be lost. This is who we are and what we do."

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal declared a state of emergency so officials could begin preparing for the oil's impact. He also asked the federal government if he could call up 6,000 National Guard troops to help.

In Buras, La., where Hurricane Katrina made landfall in 2005, the owner of the Black Velvet Oyster Bar & Grill couldn't keep his eyes off the television. News and weather shows were making projections that oil would soon inundate the coastal wetlands where his family has worked since the 1860s.

"A hurricane is like closing your bank account for a few days, but this here has the capacity to destroy our bank accounts," said Byron Marinovitch, 47.

"We're really disgusted," he added. "We don't believe anything coming out of BP's mouth."

Mike Brewer, 40, who lost his oil spill response company in the devastation of Hurricane Katrina nearly five years ago, said the area was accustomed to the occasional minor spill. But he feared the scale of the escaping oil was beyond the capacity of existing resources.

"You're pumping out a massive amount of oil. There is no way to stop it," he said.

___

Associated Press writers Holbrook Mohr in Mississippi, Phuong Le in Seattle, Janet McConnaughey, Kevin McGill, Michael Kunzelman and Brett Martel in New Orleans, and Melinda Deslatte in Baton Rouge also contributed to this report.