No longer does the notion of China, as a place real or imagined, figure in the fiction; the action could be taking place in any major city, and there is even a more or less gratuitous action sequence set in South America, a market where martial arts movies are very popular.
"Nothing is gratuitous: characters and actions are linked in a hidden web, sometimes with devastating irony". THE SECOND SHIFT, by Arlie Hochschild with Anne Machung.
Its philosophies may be basic, its violence and action gratuitous, but undeniably, for anyone working or with an interest in video games, the BioShock series is pivotal.
The violence does not rank as gratuitous because, as an action show, "Black Lightning" very much needs it.
But regardless of the pitiful sums involved, make no mistake: This action is utterly gratuitous.
Of course, by using Hitchcock as an educational tool you risk putting young people off his films for life, the same way they're put off Shakespeare, but there's a chance that class discussion of his storytelling techniques could result in a new generation of film-makers who know how to film an action scene without gratuitous wobblicam and incontinent editing.
Ms. Zambello's program note put a perhaps gratuitous feminist spin on the action, but worse from the reactionaries' point of view, the picturesque traditional trappings of Highland Gothic had been jettisoned in favor of a bleak, symbol-heavy heap of rubble.
But the propagandists' main goal was to convince the world that President Saakashvili had provoked the Russian action with a gratuitous Georgian assault on Tskhinvali followed by a "genocide" against the locals who the Russians were honor-bound to defend.
But for others, forgiveness is the epitome of supererogatory action since it is completely gratuitous, dependent on the good will of the offended party (Heyd 1982).
And this same imprecision meant that the soundtrack could not flow seamlessly with the action onstage, making it feel more gratuitous and misplaced.
To a public convinced that the war was coming to an end, the students' actions seemed not only illegal and outrageous but gratuitous.
