Word: bleakness
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Last summer, after a stint learning his new craft at the Sundance Filmmakers Lab, Mitchell headed to Toronto and directed while wearing Hedwig's heels. ("It was like torture," he says.) He opened up the material by adding flashbacks of Hedwig's bleak Berlin childhood, her rocky romantic history and even her botched sex-change operation (which explains the "angry inch"). "We kept the dramatic structure of the show," says Mitchell, who also kept its heady themes (borrowed from Plato and Ibsen), as well as Trask's irresistible score of country, rock and '70s-style ballads. And Hedwig still bears...
...something about the director being right there with the actors," explains Stephen Mirrione, Traffic's editor. "He gets what he needs and can move on." Soderbergh also gave each story a distinct look in order to keep the audience oriented. He shot the Cincinnati and Washington footage in a bleak and bluish color; rendered Mexico grainy, baking in blinding light; and slightly overexposed the San Diego scenes to make the colors soft and blossoming. "All this rot is going on underneath this very pristine surface," explains the director. "It's a nice contrast...
...more ambiguous as the blank-faced Vladimir Putin took charge. He was at least a sober antidote to the fitful Boris Yeltsin, but his unmoved reaction to the submarine Kursk's demise and his unapologetic bludgeoning of Chechnya showed him to be less than inspiring. Africa's news was bleak. The world awoke this year to the unspeakable holocaust AIDS is wreaking there, a calamity that overshadowed the fights and famines already blighting the continent...
...were able to make a couple of plays when it looked a little bleak," said Harvard Coach Frank Sullivan. "I give our guys a lot of credit for keeping their poise. It's very easy to lose your poise and think the game was over with less than 20 seconds to go. But they didn't. They hung in there and two guys made big plays...
...have long had reason to believe that the Mars we see today is not the Mars that once was. That bleak, freeze-dried world, most planetary scientists agree, was once a warm, wet place, running with rivers and sloshing with seas or oceans. None of that water remains, of course, but the riverbeds and basins stamped in the surface offer powerful arguments that it was there in abundance...