Word: shrunk
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
These days, nearly every popular movie wants to be a cartoon. For proof, check out 1989's five top hits: Batman; Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade; Lethal Weapon 2; Honey, I Shrunk the Kids; Ghostbusters II. They all aspire to the freedom of form and story that any animated film takes for granted. Problem is, real life gets in the way. Location shooting is at the whim of weather; special effects can look chintzy onscreen. And actors! They cost the moon, and their bodies aren't elastic enough to perform the comic contortions that Daffy Duck can give...
Eleven years after the arrival of casinos, life in Atlantic City is paradoxical to the point of perversity. Thirty-three million people visit the city every year, and each day 1,300 tour buses clog the streets. But since 1976 the local population has shrunk 20%, to about 35,000, and residents continue to flee to the suburbs. There are 18,103 slot machines, but no car washes, no movie theaters and only one supermarket. And on Mother's Day, people could not get to church because the Tour de Trump, a bicycle race, blocked the roads that morning...
Still, Gil's household is a sea of tranquillity compared with those of his siblings. One sister is single-parenting a potential juvenile delinquent. Another is married to a character played by this summer's one-man nerd fest, Rick Moranis (Ghostbusters II and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids), who has their two-year-old memorizing square roots and reading Kafka. Then there's a brother, who drifts back home looking for a new way to get rich without working, help with his gambling debts and a place to park his illegitimate child, whose name is Cool, whose skin...
...million in 1965 to less than $50 million. Property values are so low that the town's tallest structure, the vacant twelve-story Spivey Building, was sold for $25,000. The number of retail businesses is less than 200 and steadily declining. The population, once 80,000, has shrunk to 55,000, 97% black and two-thirds on welfare...
...cities traded economies, the results might have been reversed. Denver, once riding high on an energy boom, has been slumping for the past four years. Metropolitan-area employment has shrunk by 55,000 jobs, to a present total of 939,100, and real estate values have shriveled; the average Denver house is priced at $79,900, down 15% in two years. Last year more people moved out of the area than moved in for the first time since the Depression years of the 1930s. In that climate, voters bought the promises of Romer and Pena that a new airport would...