Word: drabs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...might be photographed by a hidden camera. He also assumed his room would be bugged, and so he put his mind on caution: say nothing sensitive in close quarters. He found himself utterly unsurprised by the city as he drove from the airport to his hotel: "It was drab, monotonous, massive." Only the dazzling, painted spires and domes of the Kremlin and St. Basil's cathedral seemed to challenge the glum and crowded streets. The place brooded, threatened, Helms thought, "but then it always had from 5,000 miles away...
...ornate, plastic interior design and overpriced Swiss chocolate. The Orson Welles burnt to the ground last spring and will not re-open. Only the Brattle Theater--re-emerging after bankruptcy forced the previous owners to sell the building--and the Somerville Theater remain as repertory options to the usually drab first-run fare offered by the USA cinema empire...
...sardonic agent. Bennett's script is a mine of epigrams and a model of construction (except for a framing device that portrays Lahr as an Orton manque and his wife as a pathetic Ken doll). But the workmanlike style of Director Stephen Frears (My Beautiful Laundrette) emphasizes the drab and the obvious. Frears cannot match the script's sleek malice, so he gets his laughs with eccentric casting; most of the actors have faces that are their own caricatures, particularly Alfred Molina as Ken. Molina commands the screen with the round face, hulking frame and liquid loser's eyes...
...machine (the Photomaton), or go to a theatre on the fiftieth floor of a skyscraper (the Chanin Building), or for that matter get an electric shock just from touching a door handle, in a city so charged with energy that the very air tingled with it?" Certainly not in drab, dreary, bombed-out London. And there are some unaccustomed small inaccuracies that further tarnish the golden glow: the PATH commuter trains from New Jersey are not officially part of the city subway system, and Van Cortlandt Park is in the Bronx, more than six miles north of Harlem...
...some that is terrible, with much more that is merely mediocre. For every delectable experience, like a dinner of impeccable Peking duck with its glassily crisp skin folded into delicate crepes, there were several depressing meals of bland, gristly meat and canned vegetables swimming in grease, ineptly served in drab and dirty dining rooms...