Word: zillion
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...late, occasionally great age of high-priced show-biz seriousness is over. Cohn will generate a zillion dollars in commissions this year, but he will earn it off pleasant trifles like Nora Ephron's Sleepless in Seattle and Manhattan Murder Mystery -- in which the main characters are habitues of Elaine's, Woody's Upper East Side hangout that was the hottest restaurant on earth during exactly the period when Sam Cohn was the hottest agent. The glorious moment for a certain cliquishly upper-middle-brow Manhattan high life -- back when Saturday Night Live and Vanity Fair were brand new, back...
John Woo's last Hong Kong movie, the action-traction Hard Boiled, was basically Die Hard in a hospital. A zillion bad guys are terrorizing the place, and our indestructible cop hero must mow them down, holding a bazooka- size pistol in one hand -- and a newborn child in the other. No problem. Blam! and a villain's blood splatters a maternity-ward window. Boom! and a few more miscreants eat carpet. Surveying the scene, the cop shields the baby's | eyes and says jauntily, "Hey, X-rated action...
...records you sell, the more you're considered a sellout. Your raison d'etre is antiestablishment rage, but once your record goes platinum, you're forced to admit that a) you're now part of the problem or that b) maybe at least some of the people with a zillion dollars in the bank aren't all bad. Either way, everything feels compromised, corrupted. The phone rings. It's Philip Morris -- they want to sponsor your next tour, hold a cigarette giveaway in your name. And do you mind a double billing with Billy Ray Cyrus...
...remaining unassailable argument for public TV is, as Lawson says, that "it's free and universally available." Not every American can afford entry to the zillion-channel cable nirvana. But if universal access is now the compelling problem -- and it will only get more acute -- why not address it directly by subsidizing cable TV for poor people, a means-tested "cable stamps" program. After all, public TV began as a Great Society scheme, and Sesame Street was intended to uplift ghetto children. The opera shortage, on the other hand, may no longer be a crisis deserving federal attention...
...BEAT-'EM-UP BLOCKBUSTER, CLIFFHANGER, THE audience first glimpses Sylvester Stallone crawling along the underside of a mountain ledge, a zillion feet above sea level. Indeed, most of the movie is devoted to gorgeous Alpine scenery and daredevil feats by its star, who gets to scale icy slopes and trade gouges with villainous John Lithgow atop a chopper perched on a sheer cliff...