Word: brutalize
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...DiCAPRIO: My view on it is that this is documented history. The film submerges you in that reality. It is the brutal form of expression of people fighting for their rights as Americans at the beginning of a pluralist society. But if you look closely at the film, you'll see that much of it is just suggested - through the editing and the sounds and certain visuals. There is a lot less then was originally intended...
...figures as a kind of shadow 9/11 drama. (Who is stern-talking Oprah protege Dr. Phil, after all, but a more down-home John Ashcroft?) Hollywood's crime stories were neither uniformly authoritarian nor bleeding heart. FX's cop drama The Shield introduced Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis), a crooked, brutal--and extremely effective--L.A. cop, and left it up to us to decide whether his results justified his means. HBO's The Wire used the story of a single Baltimore drug investigation as a parable for the crisis of confidence in American institutions. Its conflicted, bureaucracy-ridden cops could just...
...dead-girl motif surfaced most poetically in publishing's surprise sensation of the year, Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones. In its bravura opening, the narrator, Susie Salmon, lucidly describes her brutal rape-murder at age 14, then goes on (telling the story from heaven) to show us the slow journey of her family and friends to recover from her loss. (This is not only a 2002 phenomenon, of course. The Sixth Sense and Crossing Over with John Edward both indulged our need to believe that our lost ones are still aware and, more important, still aware of us.) Women...
Aside from that Grucci Brothers skyrocket of invective, 25th Hour is pretty lethargic stuff. Monty, a convicted drug dealer on his last day before he is to report to prison, does more moping than moving. The virtue of this brutal downer is on the edges, in the evocation of New York after 9/11: depressed, cratered, postapocalyptic. The film suggests that Gothamites have been frozen in their tracks, like emotional zombies waiting to see if the next attack can make them feel deader than they already...
When East Timor formally celebrated its independence in May, it closed the chapter on four centuries of stern Portuguese colonization and 24 years of brutal Indonesian occupation. The mood was finally one of hope for the future, of anticipation of a peace dividend. Some commentators even spoke of the fledgling country as a template for nation building in Afghanistan...