Word: filth
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...prison by American POWs, in some cases for as long as eight years. Their lot consisted of systematic degradation, maddening isolation and the grinding $ waste of years, punctuated by episodes of ghastly pain. But, presented artlessly, this is not the stuff of compelling drama. There is not enough filth in the corners, not enough ambiguity when the movie shows prisoners resisting the pressure to confess to "war crimes." Chetwynd has recruited an able cast, led by Michael Moriarty, Jeffrey Jones and Paul Le Mat, and he does well with the bitter ironies implicit in visits to the prison by celebrity...
...atmosphere of Pete Davies' The Last Election, in which the government is subsidizing national death and decay. What's really frightening about Davies' 1980s 1984 is that there's no inconceivable, highly organized superplot behind the government funded oppression. His 1984 is formed merely of little pieces of filth from our own culture twisted to their most dangerous extremes...
...Travis Bickle has just returned. Although Travis, played by Robert (fuckin') DeNiro, was not physically injured during his tour of duty, some essential mental functions are decidedly absent, as in, "lights on, nobody home." Having gotten a job as a cab driver, Travis has ample opportunity to observe the filth (animate and inanimate) that permanently infests New York City. Confronted with a grimy and desperate reality, the earnest hack prophesies: "Some day a good rain's gonna come wash the shit from these streets...
...Sorrow and the Pity, Marcel Ophuls' documentary of the French Occupation, the novel's barrage of impressions and opinions assaults, even implicates, the reader. Derisive voices chant an anti-Vichy song. A housewife prepares makeshift tea out of water and carrot tops. The odor of filth rises from the streets. Meanwhile, the heated voices of a cautious bourgeois and a young radical debate questions that offer no moral answers...
...abasement is another wondrous rite of initiation into a high-spirited sorority of love and sacrifice. For the older nuns, the convent is not a ^ prison but an enchanted castle that surrounds them with images of their beloved. All the sisters find beauty in duty, fulfillment in filth. One nun, ministering to lepers, consumes flakes of a diseased man's skin as if it were the Eucharist. Later another nun tastes the dying Therese's tubercular sputum and makes of it a sacrament of ecstatic commitment. To Cavalier, these acts have a spiritual and physical grace, for they are outward...