Word: bleak
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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February is the coldest month, and February in Denmark is about as bleak as it gets?until I reach Finland. Looking at the desolate fields near Lammefjorden outside Copenhagen, at first I don't see much to eat. But Soren Wiuff, a vegetable farmer, is digging up crosnes, tiny curlicue-shaped, artichoke-flavored roots, with his bare hands. A Danish TV crew is taking close-ups of my shoes punching through the frozen mud crust. It's hard to say which they find more entertaining: the idea that someone would visit a root-vegetable farm in Prada heels or that...
...remade in Hollywood (The Seven Samurai as The Magnificent Seven) and Europe (Yojimbo as Leone's Fistful of Dollars). Leone followed up with For a Few Dollars More--surely the most honest title ever given a sequel--and the spaghetti western craze was born. Django, director Sergio Corbucci's bleak riff on Fistful, with its hero lugging a coffin that has a machine gun inside, spawned at least 50 movies named Django. The most recent, Takashi Miike's Sukiyaki Western Django, which played to rapt crowds at the recent Venice and Toronto film festivals but has no American distributor...
...melancholy induced by looking into the waters from a bridge segues into a roll call of famous suicides and murders on the river, sealed with the observation that "The Thames has always harboured an affection for severed heads." Ackroyd attributes the moody riverside settings of Charles Dickens' Bleak House or Great Expectations to the novelist's misery at being sent as a 12-year-old to work in a ramshackle, filthy blacking factory abutting the Thames while his father was locked up in a debtors' prison. Fact and fiction are inseparable in the city of both authors: Dickens may have...
...fairly conventional mystery, with the icily contained and taciturn Hank, who was a criminal investigator during his military career, playing a fairly typical wild card - the guy who keeps asking difficult questions while everyone else pretty much wants to process the case as briskly as possible. Hank is a bleak sort of man, perfectly content to eat in coffee shops featuring Formica décor, and to make his own bed - all neatly squared corners - in his budget motel. He does not laugh a lot - or, if memory serves, at all - and only rarely raises his voice despite his many...
...Everett, 25, remains sedated and on a respirator at Millard Fillmore Gates Hospital in Buffalo following surgery to relieve the pressure on his spine. His orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Andrew Cappucino, had said Everett's chances of walking again are "bleak or dismal." However, after Everett voluntarily moved his arms and legs on Tuesday, Cappuccino reportedly told a Buffalo TV station "we may be witnessing a minor miracle...