Word: hums
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Last year, when Hollywood shot its wad on steroid spectacles, and the $60 million budget became a ho-hum affair, movie-goers provided a surprise punch line to the financial joke the industry had been playing on itself. For the first time in moguls' memory, none of the top three hits were an action adventure with a big male star. Ghost and Pretty Woman were romantic fantasies angled to women; Home Alone, the year's box-office winner, starred a nine- year-old boy. These modest movies were old-fashioned sleepers, whose success suggested a future for women's movies...
...groups link themselves with the most banal and commercial of today's pop stars--people like George Michael and Phil Collins whose primary lyric is "I miss you, baby." With their pleasant, sleep-inducing hum, a cappella groups sing in a manner reminiscent of Muzak, that great piped-in music so often heard in certain Woolworth's branches...
Suddenly, a quasi-melodic hum from a group of grinning men and women in the front broke through the din. My peers smiled with them and some even tapped their feet. Students on my row became so enthused that they refused to get up, thereby blocking my escape...
...sexual combustion. Max is a neat freak, Nora a slob, so for a reel they play Oscar and Felix. She has no friends, his are nudgy -- this movie hates middle- class Jews a lot. Then the lovers must break up and make up, and the ho boy! becomes ho hum. White Palace settles into stolid ordinariness, after flirting with being a handsome essay on the grandeur of reciprocal lust...
While I slept, he would sneak into my room and hum the Cowboys' fight song. After waking me into a hypnotic trance, he would shock me if I smiled at the mention of Doug Williams, Gary Clark or the Fun Bunch. In my most horrifying humiliation, he forced me to write that article, threatening that if I didn't, he would secretly cancel my applications to medical school...