Word: hitting
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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There was blood at the wickets this pre-Halloween, as the corpses of every one of the weekend's new movies littered the lobbies of North American theaters. The Saw torture-porn franchise took the biggest hit, with its sixth installment getting chainsawed by the Paranormal Activity phenomenon. Another horror entry, Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant, was D.O.A. Astro Boy, the third autumn movie based on a kids, pop-culture touchstone, didn't fly; and neither did the aviation bio-pic Amelia, which took off at low altitude and instantly crashed. As for the weekend's goriest psychodrama...
...rise. Made for $11,000, bought by Paramount Pictures for just $300,000 and marketed for less than $10 million, Oren Peli's subtle scare-athon earned $22 million to become a winner in its fifth week of gradually widening release. It has now earned $62.5 million and could hit $100 million. What's next? The Inevitable. According to today's Los Angeles Times, Paramount is "actively considering producing a sequel...
...upswing in recent months, the Boston-based National Consumer Law Center reported this week that many large banks and other mortgage servicers have decided it's cheaper to foreclose than to offer more affordable loan terms. Making matters even worse, as many as 86% of foreclosure victims in hard-hit areas didn't have legal counsel last year, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law, which released a report earlier this month...
...those numbers don't draw more attorneys into foreclosure law, if only as a short-term specialty until the crisis subsides, homeowner advocates hope it will at least motivate some of them to shift more of their pro bono work in that direction. In hard-hit counties like Miami-Dade, bar associations are responding by holding foreclosure-defense clinics for local lawyers. Otherwise, the fear is that far more people than necessary stand to lose homes, possibly slowing economic recovery and clogging a civil-court system already ravaged by states' budget cuts. (See a video of people facing foreclosure...
Fortunately, while H1N1 virus has made people a lot of people sick, it hasn't been as deadly as many scientists had initially feared. Even in hard-hit communities, hospitals haven't been overwhelmed. In some parts of the country, the virus may even be waning. States in the Southeast, which experienced spikes in infection when students went back to school in August, are now seeing declines. But pandemics often come in multiple waves of infection, and we may see another spike later in the year, during the colder months of winter - and it could be more severe...