Word: special
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...House proposal to combine a smaller increase in the minimum wage with new tax breaks for low-income workers, an approach that Bush supports. The House plan, proposed by Wisconsin Republican Thomas Petri, would expand the earned-income tax credit. The tax rule allows poor working families to take special deductions of as much as $874 a year; Petri has suggested boosting the ceiling...
...cornerstone of Ronald Reagan's campaign for the White House was an attack on Government waste, fraud and abuse. Singled out for special scorn were "giveaway" programs for the poor. Now, as Congress delves into a spreading scandal at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the hypocrisy of Reagan's rhetoric has been brought into sharp relief. During his Administration, a massive giveaway did take place, but to the greedy, not the needy. HUD, whose prime mission is to provide shelter for low-income citizens, instead became a gold mine for Republican insiders, ambitious developers and powerful Washington consultants...
...Once again the psychomagnotheric slime is flowing in Manhattan. Once again spooks are aloft among the other pollutants in its atmosphere. Once again paranormal phenomena (this time in the service of Vigo, a sometime Carpathian tyrant, whose spirit inhabits an antique portrait) have singled out Dana (Sigourney Weaver) for special attention. Once again the old team of exorcists -- wisecracking Venkman (Bill Murray), absentminded Egon (Harold Ramis), earnest Ray (Dan Aykroyd) and stouthearted Winston (Ernie Hudson) -- is ready to deploy its pseudo science in the service of exorcism...
...movie and everyone in it remain, under Ivan Reitman's determinedly casual direction, very loosely organized. They amble agreeably, but not necessarily hilariously, from one special-effects sequence to the next. These are not better, worse or even different from the original's trick work, and their lack of punctuating surprise is the film's largest problem, especially at the shamelessly repetitive climax...
...through which the starship Enterprise is commanded to navigate by a not very menacing religious fanatic named Sybok (Laurence Luckinbill). He imagines he will find God lurking back of this particular beyond. What he finds instead is, of course, a false deity manifested in the form of an unpersuasive special effect...