Word: ripoff
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...course, this too is fiction: a tribute to and ripoff of Nabokov. Pera gives Lo a younger brother, who died in a freak accident (tornado, live wire), and a lingering devotion to her dead dad, for whom Humbert is a sexier surrogate. Lo records scenes of innocent sapphic frolics, moviegoing (It's a Wonderful Life is about "how everything turns out right because the father didn't die after all") and quarrels with her bossy, desperate...
Scott Stapp, front man for the Florida band Creed, sounds like Eddie Vedder, front man for the Seattle band Pearl Jam, reincarnated. Which would be fine except that Vedder isn't dead, so Stapp's vocal style comes across as a sort of ripoff. Still, Creed has its fans: the band's first album, My Own Prison, sold nearly 4 million copies. Its new CD, like Prison, features pile-driving hard rock and lyrics about spiritual longing. A few songs are agreeable in a middle-of-the-road sort of way. But that road is about as well traveled...
...quote Chris Rock, "Where did all the money go?" For $60,000, Blair Witch still seems like a ripoff. It's a gimmick of low quality wrapped in marvelous packaging. Without a doubt, the best production you'll see all year is the marketing magic of Artisan Entertainment, the small studio that suddenly isn't so small anymore. (I also think that Dramamine could have made a fortune by handing out samples at movie theatres to solve the rampant nausea.) But the movie itself was trifling --even though that wickedly clever little ending almost redeems the whole exercise (I like...
Applauded at the march were arguments that there's no such thing as permanent weight loss, that fat people are fat because of their genes and not a weakness for Cheez Curls and Ding Dongs, and the diet industry is a $40 billion annual ripoff. Although the media are despised for cheap fat jokes and the glorification of supermodels and other stick people, "our evil enemy is the diet industry," says Smith, who laid into fad diets and the manufacturers of diet drugs with dangerous side effects...
...both. The trio's over-the-top boasts seemed to send up each genre's excesses. But the Beasties' new CD comes across not as a send-up but as a limp imitation of more interesting performers. The album's buzzing, beeping, video-game-like sound is an exhausted ripoff of hip-hop folk star Beck. A few songs work, like the sci-fi rap number Intergalactic. But for the most part, listening to this album is a tedious, dispiriting task not unlike sorting a backlog of junk e-mail...