When Richard E Grant sees his best friend cut his hair in the final reel, preparing to leave their shared hippy squalor for the strict world of work, is he being horrified by a premonition of the post-1979 country in which Britons will all jolly well have to pull their socks up?
We, as people, aren't the same, and we, as women, certainly don't want to share the squalor of the men's bathroom, even if the line is shorter.
Placing those decorative feminine touches amid the squalor of the two-room apartment shared by Stanley and Stella, she is not merely frivolous; she is remaking the world in her image.
Like the characters in "The Island," the several hundred black men I shared a cell with refused to be dehumanized by the squalor of their conditions.
This is also the only time Valery Gergiev, one of the world's most sought-after conductors and the theater's artistic director, brings glamour to this gritty city with a pretty face, where czarist palaces share streets with Dickensian squalor, a city of giant potholes and columned facades, of high culture and low wages.
Facing highs and lows that include a torrid romance with fellow mag-crew'er Jake (Shia LeBoeuf), lecherous potential clients, and the squalor that streaks America's lower-class realities, Star's experience is shared with the audience as a journey without a specific endpoint: a reflection of growing up, and the confusion and ecstasy that surrounds it.
Whether it's Cubans with Fidel Castro nightmares, Colombians fleeing a savage civil war, or Mexicans who immigrated to escape brutal violence and squalor, the vision of the U.S. as a haven of stability is a shared ideal.
Haiti's capital is a study in extremes – hillside slums of squalor overlook fancy hotels and United Nations compounds – but with the working day all but done most inhabitants shared the same thought: head home.
The brothers, who only those of us with press notes can reliably conclude are brothers, live in Southern squalor with their mother (Karen Young), another character who needs a press-notes assist, since Ms. Young looks youthful enough to be the gents' sister or shared girlfriend.
Sometimes you long for the routine of a shared workplace, and when I file copy from my lonely eyrie, I occasionally entertain wistful thoughts of "neurotic men in shirt sleeves and eye-shades" as Evelyn Waugh put it in Scoop, rushing "from telephone to tape machines, insulting and betraying one another in surroundings of unredeemed squalor".
