Word: director
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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What's really frustrating about Squeakquel is the pedigree of some of the movie's perps. I don't mean the director, Betty Thomas, the Hill Street Blues actress who helmed one good movie (the Howard Stern Private Parts) before loading her résumé with the sort of dispiriting comedies (Doctor Dolittle, 28 Days, I Spy, John Tucker Must Die) that help give a bad name to the movies shown on airplanes. Instead, consider the stars who lend their voices to the Chipettes: Christina Applegate, Amy Poehler and Anna Faris, smart comediennes all. As for the movie...
Squeakquel seems not to have been written so much as manufactured from an unwarranted pride in the first Alvin and desperation about what to do next. (If the director played by Daniel Day-Lewis in Nine had seen this movie, his sudden awareness of what the competition was producing would have instantly unblocked his creative sinuses.) The picture's single triumph, true to the mercantile nature of the enterprise, is thunderously obvious product placement. During one of their many demolition scenes, the Chipmunks perform the Kinks' "You Really Got Me" while opening a bag of Utz Cheese Balls. The whole...
...about a month after the YDN story, Adam L. H. Kissel '94, Director of the Individual Rights Defense Program at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), wrote a letter to Yale President Richard C. Levin, requesting assurance that the infringement upon students' right to speech would never happen again...
...flight has little apparent safety value. "I've discussed that with many people within the aviation-security field. Nobody for the life of them can figure out what that would accomplish," says Douglas Laird, president of the international aviation-security consulting firm Laird & Associates and former security director for Northwest Airlines. A lengthy transatlantic flight would provide ample opportunity to set up and detonate an explosive device; limiting passengers' movements in the final 60 minutes, Laird says, is "just a symbolic gesture...
...hinges on encouraging if-you-see-something-say-something vigilance on the part of passengers. And on that score, the overzealous regulations might have been just the ticket. "It's a knee-jerk reaction to get public attention, perhaps. And that's quite a good thing," says Ken Button, director of George Mason University's Center for Transportation, Policy, Operations and Logistics. Ultimately, he notes, it was the intervention of fellow passengers, along with a faulty trigger device, that brought Abdulmutallab down. "We do have to some extent [to] rely on individuals," says Button. "They should be reminded of this...