Word: bestialized
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...Straw Dogs - another, artistically less successful movie about a test - the director's prodigious skill cannot conceal a rather shabby and cynical intellectual construct. In Deliver ance, man must become one with na ture in order to survive. But for Boorman and Dickey, becoming one apparently means becoming bestial. Deliverance comes not through a knowledge of nature's most primitive and powerful forces but through a capitulation to them...
...reckoning with the rank and bestial exploitation emerged spontaneously. A group of Africans being forced to cultivate cotton in Baixa de Cassange in the interior of central Angola stopped working and refused to pay taxes. The cotton workers' families had averaged an annual income of twenty to thirty dollars the year before. The Portugese army was called out to intimidate the striking workers. The rebels would not budge. According to non-Portugese estimates, 10,000 Africans were massacred. The final struggle for liberation was begun...
...classic heroic response to a virtually feudal situation. Yet David, in defending himself against the threat to what Robert Ardrey would call his territorial imperative, soon becomes as bestial as the attackers. Peckinpah asserts with gripping, merciless logic that any man, no matter how cold or cowardly, is capable of committing the most appalling violence -and of enjoying it. "You never took a stand," Amy accuses David early in the film; when he finally does, he acts not from any sense of honor but from animal instinct. The assault on the cottage and his defense of it produce...
...with, Satan) is "the bringer of light"; he represents "things we strive for." and indulgence. The Hare Krishna movement is "very Luciferian," and politics are "Lucifer's field." Satan is the god of doom and desolation, a god who embodies things "we're most afraid of," things low and bestial and also things high and spiritual. Sex criminals and the Hell's Angels are very Satanic, and so are high religious mystics...
...writing the screenplay Truffaut showed unbelievable sensitivity to the way each event in the film would affect his audience. And in the film's realization, Truffaut's spare performance as Dr. Itard and the boy's bestial miming both work against every conventional means of melodramatic expression, so that in no case does the playing of a scene signal, "I am a piece of drama being played for emotion." It is rather the simple conditions of each situation that shape our emotional responses...