Word: brutalized
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Your article on police brutality [NATION, Sept. 1] failed to mention one crucial, complicating fact of police work: the character of criminals. Because law-enforcement officers routinely deal with people who are brutal and do not respond to sweet persuasion, the police must use force. Sadly, the only logic many criminals understand is the big stick. Thus to handcuff the police is to liberate the thug. Of course, there is no excuse for the extreme brutalization of a Haitian immigrant at Brooklyn's 70th Precinct, but a citizen like me has far more chance of being viciously attacked...
...Thousand Acres" -as-film eventually achieves a fascinating symmetry with the events of its own plot. Like an epic sweep of land or a childhood resentment, a Pulitzer-winning novel is a difficult inheritance, and without proper stewardship can degenerate quickly. The cornerstone virtues of the film-Shakespeare's brutal story and Smiley's ingenious new context-are enough to sustain a solid two-hour drama, but Pfeiffer excepted, the filmmakers reap little from the rich soil they have been handed...
...fine version of the somewhat beefy Ellroy crime novel, director Curtis Hanson portrays the cool, brutal world of Hollywood glam and corrupt police in 50s Los Angeles, with all its gradations of questionable ethics and morality...
...imagine the pitch meeting for this project. Or the nervous marketing meetings that follow. Better still, imagine yourself at the earliest possible showing of L.A. Confidential, watching alchemist-director Curtis Hanson (who shares screenwriting credit with Brian Helgeland) turn pulpmeister James Ellroy's brutal, bustling novel into something like cinematic gold...
...journalist who won't stop gabbing about himself long enough to ask a question is worthy of Evelyn Waugh. In Across the Lake, naive young Americans look for local color in an unnamed strife-torn country that could be Guatemala. Their detachment from reality echoes Paul Bowles' brutal stories of hapless adventurers...