Word: rituals
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...repressed violence. The music, sung by Johnny Cash, is slick and unemotional. The main flaw is that the love affair between Alma and the sheriff lacks the qualities of desperation and frustration that would make it convincing. Alvin Sargent's script does not help matters much with such ritual movie Southernisms as "Eat your beans, Grandpa" and "Would you like a Dr Pepper?" Peck succeeds in conveying the sheriff's vulnerability but never his passion...
Gang raped available women, often followed by a modern version of ritual sacrifice which is accomplished by inserting a lighted flare inside the victim's vagina and watching her explode...
...about sum up the evening's essential appeal. Sooner or later some learned anthropologist is bound to discover that sword play-whether it be little kids thrashing it out with crossed sticks or European masters fencing for a winning point-is a primitive kind of drama. What with its ritual, conflict, spectacle, and resolution, how could it be anything else? The Three Musketeers is full of such clashes of steel, and William Taylor appears to have done a fine job in teaching a couple of dozen of the actors how to handle their swords...
...someone else first tried it. He would say: "Look, here are the giblets, Nikita. Have you tried them yet?" Khrushchev, knowing that his host wanted some for himself but was afraid to be first, would reply, "Oh, I forgot." The only member of his circle exempt from this tasting ritual was NKVD Chief Lavrenty Beria, who ate only food transported from his own dacha...
...churchmen, but a mixed bag of cantankerous "saints and strangers"-angry religious rebels and ungodly adventurers who took unseemly pleasure in hurling invective at one another. The "saints" were bona fide revolutionaries-reformers within a Reformation. The Anglican Church under the Stuarts, with its emphasis on bishops and mandated ritual, was for them hardly more pure or godly than the "whore of Rome," as they called the Roman Catholic Church. The Bible should be the only authority, the reformers felt. Some also believed that each congregation should be its own independent governing body. Those who hoped for such independence within...