In the early fifties, Polanski joined the threadbare Polish film community in Lodz.
A musical on a threadbare budget, the film gamely reaches for the stars, but is hamstrung by its constraints, not all of which derive from a lack of funds.
In four brief paragraphs, the unnamed reporter makes fun of his name change, from Joseph Sternberg; enumerates the difficulties of the threadbare production of his film ("The Salvation Hunters") and the wiles with which the director worked around them; and describes the film's distribution through the good graces of two industry potentates who admired it, Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin.
He had on some kind of threadbare field jacket.
The two ideas knocked together — I was reminded of the one shot in "The Artist" that I found truly affecting: the reflection, in a shop window, of the down-and-out former silent-film star, now threadbare and unshaven, who sees himself in the evening finery behind the glass.
He wasn't bad, but I'd call it a middling effort with some of his material spot-on, but quite a bit more was flat, including a threadbare bit to promote his films and TV shows, which went on much too much.
The film plods predictably from hopelessly threadbare suspense through conventional rape porn to curiosity torture porn.
That's why the protagonist's rhapsodic visions — futuristic outer-space warfare filmed as low-tech, even threadbare action sequences — are more exotic and more wondrous than anything in, say, "Avatar".
You can see how threadbare the place was in one of the film's most famous scenes, when a security guard has answers Harold wants.
