Word: drabs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...exhibit ranges from portraits to cityscapes to glimpses into the studio life. Cassatt's severe and pensive mother makes a showing in drab black dress, a prim contrast to Thomas Hovenden's slumped self-portrait (1875). But the star of the show is John Singer Sargent's notorious Madame X (1884), herself an American transplant who moved to Paris as a child, and who, like her expat painter, would always be an outsider in her adopted city.
...living room at Balmoral, knitting and nattering in their plain wool sweaters, caring more for their pets than for their children, the royal family of this film seems a parody of the pettiness and insularity of the English middle class; they might be the Monty Python gang in drab drag. Yet despite their sternest efforts to keep up the moat bridge, Elizabeth (Helen Mirren) and her blinkered clan are about to learn how little they understood the appeal of the woman who, they think, betrayed them...
...however accurate the portrait of the royals in The Queen, the first impression the movie gives is one of cool, devastating satire. Or perhaps Elizabeth and her family really are as drab as the film paints them! They don't aspire to glamour; they renounce it. Cloistered at Balmoral, knitting and nattering in their plain wool sweaters, caring more for their pets than for their children, the Royal Family seems a parody of the pettiness and insularity of the English middle class. They might be the extended clan of Wallace and Gromit or cousins of Mrs. Proposition and Mrs. Conclusion...
...economic miracle has had its limits. Parts of the city are industrial and drab, and in recent years petty street crime has become so bad that some Hong Kong residents no longer shop there for cheap household goods and knock-off designer clothes. But with per capita GDP of almost $7,500, Shenzhen is among the richest cities in China. Today's downtown is a jumble of traffic-clogged streets, luxury hotels, Hugo Boss and Louis Vuitton stores, and foreign eateries like Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. At the Portofino housing complex on the city's outskirts, golf carts carry...
...Long Night, with Anthony Quinn as a non-Hammer hero with amnesia, is a drab affair, and My Gun Is Quick buried its chance at B-minus competence with another unknown, inapt Hammer, Robert Bray. You might say that Spillane should always have played him, as he does in the 1963 The Girl Hunters. (Richard Wright, of Native Son fame, is the only other best-selling novelist I know who played his own major character in a movie. Anyone know others?) But that would be to overrate Spillane's hulking amateurism. He has fun in the movie, but maneuvers only...