Word: grim
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...radically subverts genre anticipations. Or, possibly, because it more than fulfills their deeply suspicious expectations of a Verhoeven movie. I think they're wrong. I think they're so transfixed by the movie's reckless pace and its often dim view of the human behavior that they ignore the grim and sobering message it imparts...
...when she is accused of collaboration and is first brutally degraded by the Dutch, then almost murdered by a collaborator who is the last person we suspect of leading a double wartime life. The Saturnalia of liberation is more shocking, more bitterly ironic, to Verhoeven than the grim reaping of wartime and he does not blink at showing them. They are, in fact, the most shocking and subversive and hard to accept of all his images. We didn't want to see people we've always thought of as heroes in an anti-heroic light...
...soap opera—still ongoing—might be comic were it not so gruesome. Name any modern plague and this grim tale has it: drug abuse, squalid greed, extended legal charades, shameless self-promotion, and phony, saccharine sentimentality. Feminists might decry Smith’s complete objectification, priests her unforgivable promiscuity, socialists her avarice—the task is simple: Grab a piece of the story and hold tight...
...Take Jacob, for instance. He was not always the grim and asexual idealist he appears to be. At one time he was a doper and a drunk idling his life away in third-world squalor. It is why Helene (Jorgen's sensual yet sensible wife, limpidly played by Sidse Babett Knudsen) long ago left him. And why she is startled to encounter him as a new self, stern and rectitudinous. It's the same way with Jorgen. Underneath his affability there is a willful and angry self-made man - and a brutality that is openly manifested in a drunken restaurant...
...numbers are equally grim around impoverished Latin America, where the United Nations estimates more than 4 million clandestine abortions are performed each year, resulting in more than 5,000 women's deaths. Underground abortions are one of the leading causes of maternal mortality in Chile. Although Chile has one of South America's strictest anti-abortion codes, it's estimated to have twice as many abortions each year (200,000) as Canada - a country with twice Chile's population. (Abortion is legal in Canada.) As a result, Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, a socialist, late last year sanctioned the free distribution...