Several grainy fragments of ransom videos in which desperate victims plead for help make the skin crawl.
Doctors said they had encountered cases in which desperate, frightened parents tried to pressure their own adult children into acting as donors for them.
But the times have changed, and this methodology was better suited for an environment of full employment, not one in which desperate Americans are looking for any port in a storm.
It was a circuitous route that reminded her of the scene in "Home Alone" in which the desperate character rides in the back of a U-Haul with a polka band just to have a way home.
Like "The Maze Runner," "Catching Fire" features a moment in which the desperate players must picture the geography around them as seen from above, like a game board or puzzle in whose pattern can be found a crucial clue.
A poignant example is "The Foundling" (1870), in which a desperate young mother hides on one side of a fence as a gentleman with a lantern picks up the baby she has abandoned in a basket on the other side.
Or "Speck's Idea," in which a desperate Paris art dealer named Sandor Speck reflects on the breakup of his marriage: In his experience, love affairs and marriages perished between seven and eight o'clock, the hour of rain and no taxis.
Her best film performance from the 1930s may have come with Alice Adams, in which Hepburns desperate, please-notice-me gestures actually fit the valiantly pretentious heroine of Booth Tarkingtons book.
The second act is an elegant two-step sequence, in which Abbi, desperate to pee, sneaks into a construction site's porta-potty, which is then pulled up into the air by a crane — and when she escapes, gasping in relief, Ilana, who is wearing that bicycle chain, gets hooked onto the back of a bread truck, which drives off.
Sam is autistic, and his parents' move made the Mandels part of a phenomenon in which families, desperate for the most sophisticated special education for their disabled children, have moved from other states and even other nations in search of care.
My solution was to use the talent show and its hyped-up, brittle sentimentality as a metaphor for an immigration system in which poor, desperate asylum seekers and other migrants are subjected to the shallow, limited concentration span of audiences wanting both their tear ducts and their laughter muscles exercised.
