Incidentally, while The Bridge's torture scenes aren't quite as ethically dubious as the ones in Zero Dark Thirty indicted by Slavoj Zižek, nor as nauseating as the one in Japanese horror flick Audition, they are horrible and rather gratuitous.
Nor does his reliance on plot twists that might have come straight from a primer on how to generate suspense (in particular a rather gratuitous nod to "Jane Eyre") help to give the novel heft.
I think this is rather gratuitous.
Like most of Wise's films in the genre, that minor classic of the macabre relies on understated psychological suspense rather than gratuitous gore and shock for its effect.
Suddenly flower names are all the rage and Chrysanthemum is seen skipping home to the accompaniment of a rainbow that for once in children's literature feels earned rather than gratuitous.
But you know with composers who are excellent at crafting material that every challenge is in there for an audible, rather than gratuitous, reason".
Hanks and cinematographer Conrad Hall requested Mendes to limit violence in the film to meaningful acts, rather than gratuitous carnage.
Rather than seeming gratuitous, these coincidences suggest that those who love the picture are drawn together by a shared spirit.
In "The Letter of Marque" (1990), for instance, Stephen Maturin and his wayward wife, Diana, reconcile in a scene modeled on the finale of "The Marriage of Figaro," and the reference is not gratuitous: rather, it adds immeasurably to the richness of the novel's emotional texture.
In her storytelling, the author shrewdly alternates the point of view, a technique that, rather than feeling gratuitous and shticky as it so often does these days, works to put Mary in a delicious pickle, since the satisfaction of her deepest desires, and the revelation of her secret career, could crush those for whom she -- and we -- come to feel real affection.
Similarly, critics of cop series such as The Sweeney would object to the skull-crunching punching and bloody shootings rather than the gratuitous semi-nudity of any woman with whom the male leads hooked up or the fact that non-white actors, if employed at all, would be cast as criminals.
