Word: ersatz
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Staying Alive doesn't make it anywhere: not as character study, not as an ersatz Chorus Line, not even as a canny exploitation of the good will engendered by Saturday Night Fever. Six years after Tony crossed the Brooklyn Bridge into the city of everyone's tattered dreams, he is stuck in a rut just off Broadway, teaching jazz dance by day, tending bar at night. Encouraged by his palfriend Jackie (Cynthia Rhodes), Tony auditions for the chorus of a musical called Satan's Alley-a sort of rock musical comedy version of Dante's Inferno...
Dante's episode (from It's a Good Life, aired in 1961) turns the Spielberg ethic on its head and finally gets the movie moving with spooky style. Jeremy Licht plays a boy with monstrous powers, who corrals an ersatz family and bends them to his infantile wishes. In this cartoon nightmare, giant skinned rabbits pop out of hats, and people who talk back have their mouths erased. Like the best Twilight Zone originals, Dante's horror-comic homily provides an oblique moral: youth must not be served, at least not peanut-butter burgers on a paper...
...gone there. I didn't know any of these places or where they were. I was grateful for a jungle or a farm or anything." His first job was in a car wash, and next he worked for a jewelry manufacturer. In 1980 he founded Cao Enterprises, which makes ersatz American Indian baubles, and soon put his former boss out of business. Cao drives a Cadillac Fleetwood...
...computer check on the patterns of its employees' long-distance calls. It turned out that in March alone 2,509 calls went to a single New York City number. What for? A 57-second recorded message that titillates dialers with aural sex, specifically the breathless sounds of an ersatz liaison in which the imaginative caller can pretend that he (or she) is a participant...
...soot over entire neighborhoods. Blue-collar housing consisted of look-alike cottages or row houses. But after World War II, in their own dogged kind of urban renewal, more affluent workers began to alter their monotone dwellings. They painted them in pinks and greens, sheathed them in asbestos shingles, ersatz clapboard or fake stone and brick and punched outsized suburban picture windows into them. This remodeling often led to a complete transformation, to a peculiar, eclectic vernacular that lent variety to the uniformity of gray, Edward Hopper neighborhoods...