Word: aura
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...held that Communist Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, a student sympathizer, had fled to Guangzhou and was preparing to mobilize southern divisions of the People's Liberation Army in an uprising against the north. At rallies, the song "We Love Freedom" gave way to the more sobering "Blood-Stained Aura." This had been composed two years earlier as propaganda, commemorating the Chinese soldiers who fought in the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese conflict. Now the crowds sang the words in bitter reference to fallen students: "If I bid farewell and never return/ Will you comprehend? Will you understand...
...world's coolest, most knowledgeable video-store clerk. Kill Bill paid homage to Hong Kong swordplay films, and Death Proof to car-crazy exploitationers of the '70s. This one, which might seem a mixture of wartime films from the U.S. and France (it does absorb some of the aura of François Truffaut's 1980 The Last Metro), is really, as Tarantino has said, "a spaghetti Western but with World War II iconography." That means Sergio Leone's Fistful trilogy with Clint Eastwood and Leone's all-time top Western homage Once Upon a Time in the West. Tarantino...
...crib to, and goes to a window ledge where he teeters, then falls to his death. The sex act, Nic's life and the wash conclude simultaneously. The child's last moment has a beauty to match its horror: as he lands there's the splash of a white aura; he's become an instant snow angel...
...houses that Swinton, 48, reigns. Part of the renown comes from her aura: slim, pale and towering, keen of features and intellect, she invests her film characters with an imperious mien that some viewers want to mess with - but they can't, because she's been there first; she's always willing to defile herself for her art. She brings a fearless commitment to all her movies, big and small, entertaining or dreadfully daunting; she'll try anything and make it work. It's a mystery how this bold, striking star-in-the-making avoided Hollywood...
These days, Republicans have the desperate aura of an endangered species. They lost Congress, then the White House; more recently, they lost a slam-dunk House election in a conservative New York district, then Senator Arlen Specter. Polls suggest that only one-fourth of the electorate considers itself Republican, that independents are trending Democratic and that as few as five states have solid Republican pluralities. And the electorate is getting less white, less rural, less Christian - in short, less demographically Republican. GOP officials who completely controlled Washington three years ago are vowing to "regain our status as a national party...