"It's been a theme in Allen's films since at least Interiors that vitality in women is somehow grotesque," wrote Adam Mars-Jones of his last film, Bullets over Broadway, which contained no less than three shrill examples.
It's somehow grotesque and dull, didactic and indulgent all at once—"Gossip Girl," minus the pleasure and personality, crossed with the 1971 best-seller "Go Ask Alice," a diary of a teen-age girl's drug spiral that is now widely understood to have been fabricated by a therapist as a sort of flamboyant P.S.A.
And yet, somehow, this grotesque group portrait had a sweetness to it as well.
In one of those rare instances where the utterly grotesque somehow becomes oddly beautiful, photographer Adam Voorhes has captured high-resolution images of 700-plus deformed human brains stored in the University of Texas mental hospital.
Yet somehow, for these particularly grotesque crimes, Asians were given an easy ride.
He has the perfect foil in Rufus Hound, who somehow manages to be both grotesque and endearing as the slob of a rival con man.
It is a place where the essential principle of commerce and capitalism made everything grotesque, but where beauty somehow crept in — "ugly in every particular, and picturesque on the whole," as he put it.
The juxtaposition of a failed marriage and the turmoil of Israeli society suggests pointed political commentary, but Yehoshua's portrait of the hesitant courtship between the two peoples — sometimes tender and generous, sometimes grotesque and calamitous — remains, somehow, hopeful.
The colorful and scheming Vermilion, a "grotesque, big-nosed incubus," somehow charms his way into Isaac's life and impresses upon him the world's dire need for a restorative, nonalcoholic tonic.
As they hopscotch from pawn shop to whore house and beyond, Mr. Armfield invests their progressively bleak spaces and situations with a grungy patina that somehow never seems dirty enough, filthy enough, grotesque enough.
IT would somehow have been both fitting and a bit grotesque if Robert Shaw, the great choral conductor who died just over a year ago at 82, had left behind a recording of a Requiem, to be released after his own death.
