It was a savage scene from a barren planet, light-years away from where Kino lived.
One episode had the internet a-twitter over a savage scene of torture in which a rat is forced to eat through the victim's stomach, and a gruesome scene of castration had viewers gasping.
Soon she falls asleep, and her mind summons a savage scene, a spectacle that would not be out of place in the cinematic genre of torture porn popularized over the last decade and a half.
Polar bear-savaging scenes would have been downgraded to a run-in with a fractious squirrel.
The frieze of Bassae counts, without exaggeration, among the most savage battle scenes ever rendered in art through its depiction of an amazonomarchy, a battle between the Amazon women warriors and Greek men.
In fact, all everyday activities have devolved into depravity and violence, from Mom chopping vegetables and kids playing jump rope to some of the most savage bedroom scenes we've seen since the The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
Maddin has the comic inspiration to sublet his family home and bring in actors (including Savage) to reënact scenes of his childhood there, and these scenes have such intense psychodramatic power that Maddin deflects and apostrophizes them through the elaborate gamesmanship that characterizes most of the film.
He wanted it to feel like an action scene first and a music scene second; as visceral and savage as those boxing scenes.
Death dominates and pervades the whole evening, from the savage opening murder scene, which leaves no question about Joseph De Rocher's guilt, to his final execution by legal injection, enacted in a terrible silence that goes beyond even the ability of music to express.
And while Mr. To may not fill the movie with rousing speeches, either by inclination or out of political necessity, the brilliant, unsettling action scenes — ugly, savage, dehumanizing — speak volumes.
