The film offers no background on the calamitous civil war that left the country in chaos -- the blasted, squalid urban landscapes are the given of the people's lives.
The images unfold like a silent movie, the lives of desperate people set against backgrounds of outmoded factories, squalid bedrooms, crumbling wallpaper, barren landscapes in places like Perm, Ekaterinburg, Omsk, Obgaz and Norilsk.
The movie elides Rick with the power of the landscape, whether splendid or squalid, and with the film's visual impact, which is hardly negligible.
Video Magic always seemed a permanent, if squalid, feature of my town's commercial landscape.
Langmuir becomes for Gibson a vehicle with which to explore the landscape of secondhand buying and selling in America, ranging from squalid storage-room auctions to Sotheby's and New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
With the glittering bay of Naples on one side, this dream landscape on the other and Italy's most celebrated food, plus its most squalid, Mafia-riddled inner-city decay to the north, the region represents the best and worst of Italy; the country's quintessence.
In 1831, a visitor named Alexander Cruckshanks wrote that Cerro de Pasco "looks as if a neutral tint were passed over the whole landscape". He added, "The houses are small and dark, and the mass of people squalid and miserable". "The pollution in Cerro de Pasco is absolute," said Zenón Aira Díaz, 70, a longtime resident and historian.
The psychedelic journey takes you through all kinds of bizarre landscapes, from shamanic dancing in the desert with laser-eyed stone sculptures to a squalid bedsit. .
His apartment was squalid.
Today, Lago Agrio feels squalid.
