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...movies, on Box Office Mojo's daily chart, reveals that all of them sold more tickets on Saturday than on Friday. Only Avatar dipped, by 5%. And, whatever the weather, the overall box office was up a spectacular 58% from the same weekend last year, leading the 2009 tally past the $10 billion mark for the first year ever. So what do we call the alibi for Avatar's Saturday drop? A snow...
...films with eyes for Oscar, or laden with critics awards the past week, Nine, A Single Man, The Young Victoria, Crazy Heart and The Lovely Bones all did moderate business in a handful of theaters. Fantastic Mr. Fox, the stop-motion animated feature that picked up awards this past week from the New York and L.A. film critics' groups, actually dropped 57% in ticket sales; the power of the press continues to be impotent. The critics' darlings, if they're to gain traction at all, must wait for the free publicity they may receive from next month's Golden Globe...
...either won by a song extolling the merits of the time of year ("Merry Xmas Everybody" by Slade, "Do They Know It's Christmas?" by Band Aid); a novelty track ("Mr. Blobby" by, er, Mr. Blobby, "Can We Fix It?" by Bob the Builder); or, for the past four years, a song by the newly minted winner of The X Factor, Britain's wildly popular version of American Idol. Indeed, the chances of any act upsetting X Factor creator and judge Simon Cowell's latest protégé has been so unlikely that bookmakers wouldn't even offer odds...
...might be in focusing attention on an unresolved issue of international law. The U.S. State Dept said Brazil "demonstrates patterns of non-compliance" with the Hague Convention, the global treaty on protecting children it signed in 1999. At least 46 other minors are currently being held in similar limbo past the six-week deadline mandated by the accord. But whatever the international legal agreements, this case has been and eventually will be decided by Brazilian courts. The court of public opinion, however, has already ruled. No one is innocent. Except poor Sean...
...fight a legal battle to win custody of Sean from the boy's Rio stepfather. And keep in mind, it isn't as if David barely knows Sean: before the abduction he'd helped raise his son for four years. Most fathers would agree that losing the past five years after that - the first little-league games, reading lessons, trips to Disney World - would have been wrenching. It would have been as if Juan Miguel González had lost Elián for seven years instead of seven months...