Word: squalorous
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...Brazilian who is sent to Reform School in an arbitrary police round-up. By the end of the film he is a murderer, a dope smuggler, a pimp, and only several months older than when we first meet him. We witness with him the brutality, corruption, drug abuse, homosexuality, squalor and general degradation that is his class's lot. Stay away from this film if you are the least bit squeamish; there is an unending stream of unsettling images that give the movie the appearance of a bad acid trip. Why go see a film like this when...
...India. It is the holy river Ganges, which flows more than a thousand miles south to Calcutta, where the boys are from. A visitor would recognize no similarity between the impossibly quiet life of the mountain landscape and the bustle of a city that has become synonymous for unimaginable squalor and degradation. Its reputation transcends differences among cultures and continents but serves as a worst-case scenario for the human condition. For the rest of the world, it is only an abstract image of crowded and dirty nothingness--"New York subways are nearly as crowded as the streets of Calcutta...
...races, without any feelings of personal superiority. Perhaps the most telling fact about Koch is that he is a longtime resident of Greenwich Village. A Villager is a special kind of New Yorker. Anyone who chooses to live in the Village opts for the extremes of city life ? squalor and elegance; beauty and danger; stoop ball and art show. He also indicates that he enjoys the potential anarchy of city life? an idea that appeals to more than dare admit...
...most workers find their labor mechanical, boring, imprisoning, stultifying, repetitive, dreary, heartbreaking. In his 1972 book Working, Studs Terkel began: "This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence-to the spirit as well as to the body." The historical horrors of industrialization (child labor, Dickensian squalor, the dark satanic mills) translate into the 20th century's robotic busywork on the line, tightening the same damned screw on the Camaro's firewall assembly, going nuts to the banging, jangling Chaplinesque whirr of modern materialism in labor, bringing forth issue, disgorging itself upon the market...
Then again, Murphy is a poorly concieved, poorly written character. He's the Last Honest Cop, supposedly appalled by the corruption in the precinct and the squalor in the streets, an ancient cliche. Murphy might have been utilized as the liberal mouthpiece for the film-makers' ideas on urban blight--but Petrie and Gould blow it again. Murphy tells his Puerto Rican girlfriend that he stays in the Bronx because he wants to help the victimized citizenry, he says he understands them: "You see Puerto Ricans are really no different from us Irish. We both like to dance and drink...