Chuck Russell, Director of 'The Mask' and 'Nightmare on Elm Street 3,' Dies at 74

Chuck Russell, who died Thursday at 74, spent his career arguing — through rubber faces, dissolving blobs, and baroque dreamscapes — that spectacle is not the enemy of meaning but its most honest form. From the nightmare corridors of Elm Street to the cartoon physics of Jim Carrey's transformed body, he insisted that cinema's artifice was its greatest truth. His films did not ask audiences to forget they were watching; they asked them to marvel at what only the screen could make possible. He leaves behind a body of work that helped teach a generation of filmmakers to treat visual effects not a