Word: first
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Explain to me, then, why Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel earned more than $75 million in its first five days of release. Was the boffo gross due to brand recognition after the 2007 movie about Simon, Theodore and Alvin was a hit? But that's no guarantor of success; the Stuart Little, Scooby-Doo and Garfield sequels all tanked. Were parents seeking a celluloid babysitter over the Christmas holiday? They could have taken the cherubs to The Princess and the Frog or Disney's A Christmas Carol, worthy efforts that, together, took in only about a fifth...
...breakup, runs away from home and gets menaced by an eagle at the zoo. There's also a musical-talent sing-off that pits the little guys against a female trio of chipmunks, the Chipettes, laboring under the management of evil Ian Hawke (David Cross), the villain from the first 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...
...highway from the towering and luxurious Hilton Hotel is one of the smartest neighborhoods in the Nigerian capital of Abuja. There, on Asa Street, is the residence of Alhaji Umar Mutallab, a household name in Nigeria and the former chief of the United Bank for Africa and the First Bank of Nigeria, two of the country's largest financial institutions. In the past few days, however, he has become better known around the world as the father of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the young man accused of trying to blow up Northwest/Delta Flight 253 over Detroit on Christmas...
This is not the kind of attention Alhaji Mutallab is used to. Having retired just last week as chairman of First Bank, he is regarded as one of the richest men in the West African nation. (He also founded Jaiz International, the first bank operating on Islamic principles in Nigeria, in 2003.) The family controls many businesses in Nigeria and abroad...