There is another bleak element here: a basic shift in how advertising is bought and sold.
One of the film's strengths was that although it was bleak, there were elements of friendship and love, and there was a positive ending.
To not be scrutinized as to whether or not we exist, but to be partners in the quest to examine what that existence currently looks like -- bleak, distressing, with elements of resilience -- and what it could become.
From its opening nighttime scene at a desolate U.S. Army checkpoint to its evocative Stefan Will jazz score and the soundtrack prominence of Kurt Weill's haunting "Speak Low," "Phoenix's" reliance on bleak film noir elements is immediately recognizable.
For me, learning to snowboard was a painful process, spent fighting the elements over a bleak weekend at Cairngorm Mountain in the late 1990s.
The relentlessly bleak plot is stripped of any element that could distract from Allen's singular purpose: to depict human life as cruel, grim, and doomed.
A less exacting conservator ("ivory black"; "vine black"), or a conservator blinded by the common view (black works; bleak time), might have missed this element of the Rothkos, and likely destroyed it.
That's only one of the elements Mina weaves into her bleak account of how corruption can poison a city like Glasgow, with its deep economic problems and intransigent class divisions.
Other elements, such as graphic imagery, bleak endings, and mutilations, defined many of Raimi's other films.
That vibe is misleading, though: "The Middle" is a stealthily sophisticated show, with warm elements that are ballasted by its bleak existential center.
