Word: drabs
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...HANDMAID'S TALE. Set in a political and sexual dictatorship of the near future, this anti-fundamentalist fable carries a heady pedigree: screenplay by Harold Pinter from the Margaret Atwood novel. But a fine cast is zombified under Volker Schlondorff's drab direction...
...tells her, needs a "strong central framework of ironic self-awareness." Published without any such carpentry, it becomes her biggest success. He hopes -- even expects -- that she will write about him, but learns to his chagrin that her next project will be about his relatives, particularly his rather drab mother. "My entire family lies gasping on the bank, waiting to be gutted and filleted," he mourns, "and turned into delicious fish-stew, while I'm tossed back into the river...
...jobs, earning $30 on a good day. They live in a $130-a-month hovel that makes a shanty sound luxurious. An old sofa draped with a sheet, a small wooden table and two battered chairs grace the living area. Three store calendars supply the only color on the drab walls. As a fly buzzes lazily by, Connie asks if she is afraid living here. "I'm not scared," she replies. Connie shakes her head and declares, "I'd sleep with...
Time of the Gypsies -- what a drab handle for such a sprawling, enthralling entertainment. The title promises a 60 Minutes-style expose on purse snatching and child exploitation in the tourist capitals of Europe. And is anyone in a hurry to see a 2-hr. 22-min. film in Romany with English subtitles? As it happens, the movie does take time for side trips from Yugoslavia to Italy, to show young Gypsies stealing and pimping at their bosses' stern whims. But its heart is in a Serbian village of Gypsies, where outcasts find a family and fevered dreams...
...praise, then, to Claude Chabrol for painting the story in honest shades of gray, for finding sense in a case that could wallow in sensation. His Marie (Isabelle Huppert) is caged in a drab marriage in a dull town in occupied France. The Germans have put hopes on hold; survival is a matter of wily , compromise. When Marie finds a neighbor artlessly attempting an abortion, she helps out. Word gets around, and soon she is a successful businesswoman. And the perfect homebody: she performs abortions in the kitchen, rents her spare room to a prostitute and takes her collaborator lover...