Word: affectlessly
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...than breathtaking. Offhandedly it proposed that B movies, and almost everything else in the junk culture, actually influenced behavior more profoundly than the official culture did. Openly, instead of in the coded language of melodrama, the picture suggested that most of the violence in society was both meaningless and affectless. And this it did with a brash, jump-cut technique that seemed to be anti-technique. Dedicated to Monogram Pictures, the old Poverty Row movie mill, this was a Hollywood film as it might have been had the place served as the locale instead of a state of mind...
...things to all the people he meets. Peter Sellers' meticulously controlled performance brings off this seemingly impossible task; as he proved in Lolita, he is a master at adapting the surreal characters of modern fiction to the naturalistic demands of movies. His Chance is sexless, affectless and guileless to a fault. His face shows no emotion except the beatific, innocent smile of a moron. His verbal repertoire consists only of mild pleasantries, polite chuckles and vague homilies about gardening. Sellers' gestures are so specific and consistent that Chance never becomes clownish or arch. He is convincing enough...
...most cutting inventions?or adaptations?is the urban guerrilla seen as Mickey Mouse. In Six Terrorists, 1971, a file of them strut across the page, in aviator jackets and miniskirts, equipped with flick knife and carbine: young bourgeois clones of affectless violence, Black Shirt, S.L.A. or Brigata Rossa. It is an uncannily predictive drawing. "The Mickey Mouse face," Steinberg remarks, "is sexless, neither black nor white, without character or age: for me it represents the junk-food people, the spoilt young ones who have all their experiences, inferior as they are, handed to them on a plate." An encyclopedic disgust...
Still, she is agile and relaxed, and does not seem particularly out of place either up against the affectless cool of Bill Cosby or the brush-fire intensity of Harvey Keitel, who is among the best young actors around...
BADLANDS. The affectless, antiseptic world of two young killers delineated with hard skill by Director-Writer Terrence Malick. A chilly, forbidding work that catches currents of casual violence which seem typically American...