Word: ripping
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...breakneck speed. Institutions that had seemed both immutable and central to Soviet life are vanishing into thin air or being turned inside out at a dizzying pace. A citizen who returned last week from a fortnight out of the country might think he had awakened from a decades-long Rip van Winkle sleep, so totally had the country changed in his absence...
...almost 400 members of the Central Committee, once one of the country's most powerful institutions, suddenly faced the prospect of losing their jobs as well as the privileges -- from dachas to chauffeur-driven sedans -- that so infuriated the average Soviet worker. Gorbachev's decision, however, did more than rip the heart out of the once monolithic party. His move signaled that the Communist Party's influence over the country's affairs was finished once and for all, its structure shattered and its 15 million members across the country forced to reshape their political allegiances...
...American genre tradition. Blood Simple was a film noir, Raising Arizona a screwball comedy of sorts and Miller's Crossing, which was probably 1990's best movie, a reanimation of the classic gangster dramas of the 1930s. But these movies were not send-ups, rip-offs or slavish homages. Each was, instead, a dark, devious and witty reinvention of whatever inspired it. Barton Fink is, in this context, a logical next step. Evoking no particular genre, it is nothing less than a shrewdly perverse gloss on the darkly romantic (and wildly oversimplified) dialectic by which people have for ages tried...
After more stories and another novel, Sayles went to work in Hollywood for B-movie king Roger Corman, churning out such scripts as Piranha, a low-budget rip-off of Jaws. His idols, however, were independent filmmakers like John Cassavetes. In 1978, having saved $40,000 from script fees and book royalties, Sayles struck out on his own; he recruited a cast of actor friends and made the film that would become The Return of the Secaucus Seven...
...launches an unfair offensive, "I'm going to hit him right back between the eyes," snarls Harkin. Tennessee Senator AL GORE mixes lofty rhetoric with a downright bloodthirsty warning to George Bush. "You run with your heart and soul," he notes. But you also have to be willing to "rip the lungs out" of a hardball-playing adversary...