Word: ersatz
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...little less Judah ha-Levi (the towering figure of medieval Hebrew literature) and a litte more Rabelais. While it is not fair to implicate all secular Israelis in the switch from Hebrew to French literature, the trend is there. And insofar as its boosters would have Israel become an ersatz California or phony France, the trend...
...means...oh, nothing very much) has its larkish side, when the male stars are doing their struts and their dish. But it soon goes sappily didactic. Director Beeban Kidron and scripter Douglas Carter Beane want you to believe that the drag queen, because he is at ease with his ersatz sexuality, is a true liberator: he can teach feminism to women and manners to men, in this awful place called Middle America. The movie has its own fantasy credo: that heterosexuals are the real objects of pity and scorn. And gay men? Poor them! In Hollywood films, they are either...
Most of Raftery's students are eager simply to learn how to use products that are completely new to them, American staples like ersatz whipped cream, ready-made pie crusts or-that native classic-squeezable cheese. "They ask me, 'What is this, and what do you do with it?' or 'How do you eat this?'" Many adapt quickly; one former pupil now extols the virtues of Kraft macaroni and cheese as a quick and easy children's breakfast. But at first the sheer abundance of an American supermarket can be overwhelming. Pausing before an array of 22 varieties of bread...
Like the new Wyatt Earp, this episodic ersatz epic feels more like a mini- series than a movie. It's a long drink of water at the fountain of pop- social memory. It wants to find an optimism in survival: if we somehow got through the past 35 years, we must be O.K. So Forrest comes across as a sweeter Zelig, a candied Candide, as the film strains to find America's inner child. But Hanks holds it together because he is working to discover Forrest's inner adult -- the mature man under his infantile guilelessness. This effort pays...
...capitalists, warmongering generals and -- most evil of all -- nasty headmasters. With Waters as its leader, Pink Floyd became famous for its surrealistic, multimedia concerts, culminating with the tour for the band's 1980 album The Wall. Those shows were extravaganzas that ended with a 30-ft.-tall wall of ersatz bricks crashing down on the stage...