Word: box
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...France, dismissal wasn't particularly unjust, just brutal. In its third game, against Italy on June 17, France lost its talisman Franck Ribéry to injury barely 10 minutes in, then lost defender Eric Abidal to a red card 15 minutes later for hacking Luca Toni in the box. Andrea Pirlo's subsequent penalty put Italy ahead and then Thierry Henry capped France's night by deflecting Daniele De Rossi's free kick into the net in the second half. This is a sorry end to a generation of greatness. But all was not lost. After the game, French...
...bass line for the Dolly Parton song 9 to 5 and he and co-star Alba giving their all to a Bollywood-style dance number. I approve of the opening narration in the stately tones of Morgan Freeman, which turns out to be Myers speaking into a "voice-over box" set on the "Morgan Freeman" key. And I'm a big fan of Timberlake's farce skills; he shows here that he has a future in movies, at least as the guy who can upstage the star comic. (Other guest stars either show up fleetingly, like Jessica Simpson, Kanye West...
...creations of oddball loners like Millar scribbling at drafting tables have also become the movie industry's most reliable development tool. Thanks to the box-office success of A-list superheroes like Spider-Man and the X-Men, Hollywood's appetite for comics-fueled material is insatiable. Titles from the darker corners of the genre, including gritty graphic novels like Wanted and Alan Moore's watershed deconstructivist superhero tome Watchmen are getting the big-screen makeover. Stories and characters first written for an audience of a few hundred thousand geeks at most are reaching, at the box office...
...with rubber nipples, left fans feeling abused. Studios turned their attention to fantasy literature like Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings. But when Spider-Man bested two wizard movies and a Star Wars prequel in 2002 and X-2: X-Men United broke $200 million at the box office in 2003, hand-drawn heroes swung back into favor. The joke in Hollywood now is that in a risk-averse era, comic-book adaptations have a distinct advantage: the drawings mean studio execs can see beforehand what the movie will look like...
...first, it was the family-friendly superheroes who made the leap to multiplexes, with the help of directors like Bryan Singer and Chris Nolan. Slowly, lesser-known comic books got a shot. Some, like Sin City and Hellboy, became modest box-office successes by adhering to the distinctive spirit of their creators. Others, like Road to Perdition and A History of Violence, attracted audiences with sophisticated stories that few people knew were derived from graphic novels...