A grim premise, perhaps, but also the sort of subject matter that the hallowed YA demographic can't seem to get enough of.
Its rather grim premise involves a child named Johnny, a "typical" (i.e., white) child whose very ability to survive to adulthood is menaced by grave medical threats — and, in particular, by the lack of attention from public-health officials.
To maintain peace, to protect our own citizens and our own allies and friends, we must seek security based on more than the grim premise that we can destroy those who seek to destroy us.
The security of both the United States and the Soviet Union was based on a grim premise -- that neither side would fire nuclear weapons at each other, because doing so would mean the end of both nations.
Credit the show's forbiddingly grim premise: A 50-year-old high-school chemistry teacher named Walter White (played by Bryan Cranston) finds out he has terminal lung cancer and starts making crystal meth, hoping to leave behind a nest egg for his son and pregnant wife.
Ms. Moorhouse seeds this grim-sounding premise with comic highlights -- her take on love is filled with the stumbles that obsession causes.
Scott) ★ 'Battle Royale' (No rating, 1 54, in Japanese) This pulpy Japanese film from 2000, directed by Kinji Fukusaku, shares a grim and irresistible premise with "The Hunger Games".
Laughter gathers itself up, like a snowball rolling downhill, and what had seemed a grim and unpromising premise in the first few pages has turned by the end into the "comic extravaganza" that Michaels disingenuously claimed it wasn't.
The premise is grim, but Mr. Salles, whose two previous films, "Central Station" and "Midnight," were set in the violent, impoverished landscape of contemporary urban Brazil, has a way of infusing the most terrible stories with an honest, openhearted romanticism.
The premise may be grim, but Mr. Salles "has a way of infusing the most terrible stories with an honest, openhearted romanticism," A. O. Scott wrote in The New York Times.
