Word: motivelessly
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...there are too many moments in My Best Friend's Wedding when her ferocity reads as near motiveless malignity, especially as it is largely directed at Cameron Diaz's Kimmy, the bride-to-be. She's pert and pretty, smart and spunky--not at all someone we wish ill. When our sympathies shift to her, the movie sours. It is no help either that Ronald Bass neglected to write (or Mulroney was unable to find) a character in Michael. Why all this fuss over this lox, we keep wondering. Director P.J. Hogan (Muriel's Wedding) stages a couple of marvelously...
...some point too the motive and the forces of motiveless malignity converge; it doesn't matter whether an explosion is touched off by a fanatic or a mischief maker--the cause is buried by the effect. A bomb is like the physical equivalent of an insinuation--an anonymous, handwritten note that says, "Just when you thought you were safe..." Terror now lurks in the shadows like a stranger in a dark ramp behind the parade of nations...
...inner cities, where weapons are treated like household appliances, the lessons in cruelty usually start at home. Psychologist Charles Patrick Ewing, author of Kids Who Kill, has found that many young people committing seemingly motiveless killings were themselves sexually or physically abused. "To brutalize another human being, a youngster has to have been brutalized himself," he says. Ewing finds that teenage murderers often don't recall, or won't admit, that they were once victims. "A street tough would rather go to the gas chamber than admit to having been beaten or sodomized by a male relative...
...statements that will not only deceive them but also trick them into foolish or ruinous courses of behavior. Curiously, though, lying to hurt people just for the hell or the fun of it -- the Iago syndrome -- is probably quite rare. Though Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote influentially about Iago's "motiveless malignity," the play itself does not really support this judgment. Iago has a motive, all right: he believes Othello has unfairly passed him over for a promotion, and he wants revenge. Some perceived advantage prompts most lies. If there is no benefit in telling a lie, most people...
...20th century memories ranging from Oswald Mosley's English fascists to the Ceausescu and Marcos regimes. Yet it is entirely faithful to the politics and psychology of Shakespeare's text. No production in memory has better evoked the terrifying instability of this buccaneer world. Rather than the embodiment of motiveless malignity, Richard is simply a skillful and ruthless practitioner of the techniques of his backstabbing times. While invested by McKellen with all the understandable self-pity of a man whose mother reviled him from birth for his physical deformities and who contemplates death in the certainty that no living creature...