Mr. De Niro's performance is another in a series of gleefully villainous character turns -- he twists his face around a battered corncob pipe and seems to shrink his eyes to black dots of piggy meanness -- but the movie rests on Mr. Gooding's shoulders.
He was a rustic fellow who sat in a shed wearing a battered old hat, smoking a pipe and ruminating on rural life.
During that time, he has turned the area where he lives into a refuge from the realities of the camp, collecting objects that he exhibits in a museum of sorts: coins, stones whose shapes he finds pleasing, old bottles, lines of conch shells, the battered stem of a discarded water pipe, pieces of coral.
Moustafa Zoubi trained his battered Kalashnikov on a large storm water pipe, his gun barrel darting between the shadow at its entrance and a frantic commotion on the ridge above.
In the inner gallery he has composed what might be called a junkyard still life, "30 Yards (Minor Tragedies Dissected)." Framed by a cut-apart, neatly quartered Dumpster are four compositions made largely of pieces salvaged from previous Fischer works: battered metal sheets, old oil drums, plumbing pipe, engine parts and other detritus.
Oliver Grbec can still recall the winter 20 years ago when the pipes mysteriously burst and the heat went out in his battered tenement three blocks west of what is now known as the new, tourist-friendly Times Square.
Advocates for geothermal energy say that the path of destruction cut by Hurricane Sandy, which unearthed fuel tanks, ravaged cooling towers and battered air-conditioners, has already persuaded some building owners to switch to geothermal systems that use underground pipes to harness the earth's energy for heating and cooling buildings.
In June, the battered pipeline broke free of its moorings and a 1,700-foot 1,700-footction of concrete-coated pipe floated to the surface of the river.
Wore old, battered clothes.
