Word: fetid
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...time after his death, Hollywood fell into a reverent silence on the subject of thrillers. The few bright children of Hitchcock's style, such as Brian De Palma (Dressed to Kill) and John Carpenter (Christine), were toiling in the fetid cellar of shock tactics; they took their cue from the gore and funereal fun of Psycho, not the narrative crisscrossing of Strangers on a Train. De Palma and Carpenter were only serving their audience. The music- video generation was disinclined to track the intricacies of a well-made plot. Those tame pleasures were best left to TV sleuths and their...
...packed for the trip home, Olebogeng looked around his dorm room, an 18-ft.-sq. space, lit by a single bulb, which he shares with 19 others. A coal-burning stove provides the only heat in winter and helps dry the rows of fetid clothes that hang on string lines. The miners sleep on pads on top of grimy two-level cement-slab bunks and store their possessions in small wooden lockers. One of Olebogeng's roommates was still there, packing T shirts for his two young daughters. "I'm gone so much, I'm surprised they recognize me," said...
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...