When the Driver gets vicious with a thug in a strip club, glassy-eyed odalisques loll around, bored: hard-boiled is one thing, but such scenes reveal a colder, crueller touch than the film really needs.
Nor does the book include anything as oddly beautiful as the coda to The Onion's compendium "Our Dumb Century," a superficially cruel, inexplicably touching news item fantasizing a nursing-home squabble between Ronald Reagan and Muhammad Ali.
You feel for poor Malden, as dumb as he is, and the intelligent actor nails sleazy, desperate, sad, cruel and touching all at once.
So it seems a touch cruel to point out that for many people the Labour party is currently typified by his old comrades Steve Byers, Patricia Hewitt and Geoff Hoon.
The only thing this announcement reveals is just how out of touch, cruel, and compassionless those who view human society through the lens of quantitative measurements can be.
"Some of you know me from The Hunger Games, in which I play Effie Trinket – a cruel, out-of-touch reality TV star who wears insane wigs while delivering long-winded speeches to a violent dystopia," she said.
Some place authority, however kind or cruel, hasn't touched.
Bausch seems to be portraying our world through the eyes of a visiting alien, choreographing a comedy of touching, silly, cruel, occasionally enchanting but ultimately pointless human activity.
Upstairs is a kind of action-painting-projection by Hilary Lloyd, which is bearably pretty and bland, and an autobiographical movie by a Japanese ex-bondage model called Hito Steyerl, which is by turns touching and cruel in that manga-comic way.
