Word: fetid
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Lyolya was a scruffy little fellow with a ragged beard who talked in conspiratorial whispers, exhaling a fetid odor of garlic, vodka and bad Soviet tobacco. He told Westerners he had been a leader of the Komsomol, the Communist youth group, at a higher-education institute but was expelled from the organization and the school when he spoke out against the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. He was Jewish and had applied to emigrate, he said, but his parents were influential party members who opposed his departure and blocked his exit visa. He always wore a shabby old U.S. Army fatigue...
...dozen dump sites in Philadelphia, mounds of refuse, piled in fantastic configurations, looked like some strange, fetid form of sculpture. For 18 days, while municipal garbage collectors remained on strike, the waste mounted to an estimated 20,000 tons. Clouds of flies hovered everywhere; rats scurried from their rancid treasure. Plastic trash bags became toxic balloons, swollen tight by noxious fumes from the detritus inside. "Trash entrepreneurs," driving around in vans, carted bags away for 75 cents each. Along with their luggage, residents even began taking their rubbish with them as they left for vacations in the Poconos...
...humiliate-duck world, character is at the base of the comedy. Each nuance of eyebrow makes Bugs' almost inhuman sangfroid seem more endearing; each microsecond of exasperated deadpan underlines Daffy's status as Hollywood's least placable loser; every syllable of Sylvester's lisp or Pepe Le Pew's fetid French intensifies the viewer's ability to believe that these creatures are not only personalities but gifted movie stars. Bugs, even when dolled up in drag (a spectacle that always drives Elmer to embarrassments of lust), is Cagney plus Groucho. Pepe is a Charles Boyer with negative sex appeal...
Within this intrepid travelogue lies the soul of Monty Python. The setting is the third largest island in the world, a fetid, fiercely overgrown jungle seething with carnivorous fauna and suspicious tribes. The protagonists are two British greenhorns with minimal survival skills. Poet James Fenton, 35, likes to spend his spare time reading the poems of Swift in a canoe. Narrator Redmond O'Hanlon, 37, is a literary naturalist who admits before embarking on the 1983 expedition, "The nearest I had ever come to a tropical rain-forest, after all, was in the Bodleian Library." Actually, he edges...
...directors ranging from Byron Haskin to Yasujiro Ozu, Stranger Than Paradise has the odd odor of something left too long behind Aunt Bela's chintz couch. Yet it has been extravagantly praised and is a box-office success in its Manhattan debut. Rarely has a movie so fetid been so feted...