Word: bestial
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Actually, cold is not quite appropriate; queasy is better. There's something unsavory about the actions. All the mental and physical sickness, the frenetic activity, the bestial violence--in fluid drama it might contribute power, but in one that's disjointed and essentially static it's just lurid...
...really crazy? The bestial Soviet state, obviously, and a system that officially turns the sane into the insane and pretends that its own insanity is rea son itself. As slyly as if he were pulling a rabbit from his hat, Stoppard has written a play as propaganda, and its anti-Soviet message is all the more effective for its wit and humor. Andre Previn's music, which he himself conducted, is equally witty. Hinting at Prokofiev and Shostakovich, Previn underlines Stoppard's words and adds his own notes of satire. When Alexander, for instance, says that confinement will...
...always carry my tunes wit me, huh-huh..." Bobby kept his eyes trained on the Warren Beatty ad, his shoulders hunched away from the bestial slob...
This latest in a long line of movies about mental institutions is chiefly distinguished by what it does not do. It does not revel in too many lurid scenes of zany inmates being violent or bestial (though it has its share, enough to earn it an R rating). It does not idealize the mental institution as a citadel of scientific wisdom and compassion, nor caricature it as a latter-day Bedlam administered by sadists. It does not explain away its protagonist's schizophrenia with some unearthed childhood trauma, as if the condition were a sort of Freudian acrostic...
...populated with a standard cast - tyrants and victims familiar to viewers of the Late Show. Its captain, "Irons" Saul Pendleton, is a bit less bestial than the average; but the man-slaughtering first mate, Otto Lassiter, is one of nature's full-rigged monsters. The mate is more than a Caliban thrown in by the author for dramatic effect; as Hayden makes clear, such men were indeed sought out by captains, and prized for their lethal efficiency...