Word: absurdly
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Bergman regards in the same fashion the characters of The Passion of Anna (a really absurd title when you think about it or repeat it very much) and consequently keeps the details of their lives as vague as possible. Almost nothing significant happens on the screen; everything is deliberately consigned to the oft-contradicted past or is omitted and simply brushed over by the narrator (as when and why and how Anna and Andreas start living together, for instance). Plot movement plays such a minimal role that the film seems almost a sequence of still photographs on the varieties...
Ending with a triple marriage hard on the heels of a quadruple murder, the film never seems absurd. It is to a large degree an accurate indicator of a new American ethic, an ethic that makes it altogether conceivable that a magazine like Playboy in the near future will have pictoral specials for homosexuals. And like Playboy Meyer has left raunchy sexploitation in favor of sexual spectaculars which focus not on the content and images of sex but their variegated forms...
...Rhode Island in 1937, when he gave Benzedrine to 30 children who had a variety of behavior disorders. The stimulant calmed those who were hyperkinetic, and also improved their school performance. But Bradley's pioneering work was virtually ignored for almost 20 years, mainly perhaps because it seemed absurd to give stimulants to overactive children. Exactly how the drugs exert these effects is not yet clear. As they grow older-usually by the age of 15-most affected youngsters outgrow their hyperkinesis, perhaps because the brain chemistry matures with the arrival of adolescence. But it would be unwise...
...legacy of suppression that began with the Soviet bombardment of Kronstadt led directly to the Stalinist terror and to the faceless, cynical technocracy that the Soviet Union is today. That alone, in retrospect, would make the attack on the fortress absurd. But the burning irony of Kronstadt is that, before the siege began, at a time when it might have been stopped or called off, the real perpetrators were nowhere to be found...
Quackser is an urban savage who prefers shoveling horse manure from the streets of Dublin and spreading it on ladies' flowers to working in the foundry with his father. Without Wilder's protean talents, the film could have been absurd: an upper-middle-class American girl studying at Trinity College (Margot Kidder) nearly runs Quackser over in an MG but winds up taking him to her farewell dance and ultimately to bed. Wilder makes the affair believable by investing his role with an appealing integrity as well as sexual overtones; he himself added two scenes early...