Word: bleakness
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Your piece on the poor performance of foreign-language films at U.S. box offices [CINEMA, Jan. 13] unfairly blamed this on Americans' cultural self-absorption. You somehow missed the main point. Uplifting movies like Cinema Paradiso succeeded because they aren't arty and bleak. Audiences worldwide want films that are entertaining in order to take their minds off their troubles. PAUL F. STETSON Copenhagen
...with his profound thoughts on the motivations and character of the opponents of the multicultural center. It was not a surprise to find that his column quickly degenerated into a series of mind-numbingly repetitive attacks against his favorite target, Peninsula "hacks." Substituting insults for arguments, Kaufman painted a bleak picture of a WASP establishment seeking to oppress the evernoble minority hordes...
...play or song can fully right a wrong inflicted and endured." Indeed, Payback comes to no conclusion, offering no closure in the lives of Billy and Paddy. In one sense, it is very frustrating not to know whether they die or how they choose to live. Yet in the bleak, violent, greedy New York City of 1987, from water tunnels seven hundred feet below the bustle of Broadway to overcrowded bars of Hell's Kitchen, humans suffered, and often, there was just...
...social and sexual rigidities of their moment. On the other hand, Isabel's unfathomable devotion to the contemptible aesthete Gilbert Osmond (whose black heart John Malkovich always wears on his sleeve) seems in particular to flummox her feminism. This leads her and screenwriter Laura Jones to soften James' bleak conclusion, but long before that, this Portrait has blurred to the point of indistinction...
...STREETS (CBS) Ken Olin's thirtysomething days are long gone. Here he's a desperate detective--the central figure in one of the more profound crime dramas ever to hit a television screen. Lyrically bleak in tone, EZ Streets is a haunting meditation on moral ambiguity, on city politics and--most effectively--on fate. Alas, the dismally rated series was abruptly canceled after two airings. Alone, perhaps, we anxiously await its scheduled return next year...