Word: low-rent
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What is driving Driver's Mart and the others is in part a desire to Simonize a business stained by imputations of high-pressure tactics and low-rent ethics. The bigger reason is profits. The used-car trade is now the fastest-growing segment of the automobile market, largely because of consumer resistance to rising new-car prices and the brisk turnover in the booming car-leasing business, which accounts for 32% of all new-vehicle transactions. About six of every 10 cars and trucks sold nowadays are secondhand, and given the deep discounting of automakers on pristine models...
...BETTER COME HOME, by Garrison Keillor, with paintings by Steve Johnson and Lou Fancher (Viking; $15.99), presents the sage of Lake Wobegon in bardic mode, with a talking blues for cat owners. Puff disdains the low-rent cat food her master serves and hightails it for the big city. Her master pleads, "Come home, old Puff, come home to us,/ There's a lot of new benefits I'd like to discuss." No dice. "I saw her six months later in a cat magazine./ She was the Number One TV cat-food queen/...I could tell it was Puff even...
...shambly, incidental pleasures, Mallrats gives one the impression that as Smith ages, he isn't going to get better--just more so--and that he'll crank out more low-rent, easy-on-the-ears comedies. When Brodie walks into the mall, he exclaims, "I love the smell of commerce in the morning!" The joke refers to Apocalypse Now, but the bet here is that Smith does love the odor of deals. A film studio to him is just a giant convenience store where he can showcase his bright, disposable wares...
...impact supporting role in True Lies. Thanks in part to his sly, scene-stealing comic turn as Arnold Schwarzenegger's loud, loutish best friend, the movie was boffo in 1994 ($146 million gross). Arnold instantly became one of filmdom's most wanted second bananas--a kind of low-rent Tony Randall for the age of Beavis...
...collegiate dabblers, choose the mode of exaggerated femininity, with a focus on exaggerated female movements--the mincing walk, generous cleavage, the flaming lips (no subtle Prescriptives regimen here), the coquettish, come-hither glances (my God, do women still give come-hither glances?)--and a seemingly inescapable attraction to low-rent apparel from Victoria's Secret and Frederick's of Hollywood, clothing choices which reveal more than mere body parts...