Word: tormenting
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...slowly settling to form the horror he cannot confront. The struggle between Dysart and Alan (and their private bouts with their respective neuroses and psychoses) is at the core of Equus, giving the drama its chess-match tension as two fierce wills clash and two magnificent intellects trick and torment the vulnerable souls possessing them. Sadism and compassion feed on each other as Dysart and Alan peer, with frightening perception, into one another's heart of darkness, at once attracted and repelled by what they...
This skittery manner has worked for Di rector Roeg in the past, notably in Don 't Look Now, but it does not really suit a study in obsessional behavior. As anyone who has ever suffered that peculiar form of mental torment knows, it tends to fo cus the mind narrowly and dully, rather as an aching tooth does, permitting it few enlivening leaps or juxtapositions of the sort this movie keeps attempting...
...asserts the need to end human suffering; on the other, he has a fierce desire to sprint blindly into the open arms of a beautiful woman. With no resolution of this dilemma at hand, and unable to make a choice and stick to it, Allen muddles through his inner torment. He turns his attention from suffering to death and from death to all his old themes: sex, religion, beauty, driving, California and cooking. It's predictable comedy the worst kind. Allen seems to be questioning both the limits to his own talent (which once seemed limitless) and the scope...
...children away when they protest that his son has beaten him fair and square. The situation defuses quietly after the initial heat--but the incident rips wide open a blister in the family that has festered since Bull Meechum's return, sowing the seeds of hatred that will later torment the characters with guilt...
...pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred...