Word: simonal
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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...
Send in the teen clichés. Alvin (voiced by Justin Long) joins the football team and wins a game; Simon (Matthew Gray Gubler) gets a toilet swirlie from the jock bullies; Theodore (Jesse McCartney), fretting that his brother act is close to 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...
...fired from one, and on another she seemed so addled that another character had to be hastily written in to pick up Murphy's slack. No question that she had lately achieved the wraith look, and there was apparently a volcanic side to her marriage to the English screenwriter Simon Monjack - whose most prominent credit was the script for the bio-pic Factory Girl, about Edie Sedgwick, the Warhol superstar, dead of a drug overdose in 1971. Pop psychologists combed Murphy's filmography for early presentiments of her death, and found one in Girl, Interrupted, the 1999 study of young...
...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 on it. Until...
...parvenus: Michael Huffington, the former Republican Congressman and ex-husband of Arianna, blew $28 million on a failed Senate bid in 1994; Al Checchi, a former co-chairman of Northwest Airlines, spent $40 million losing to Gray Davis in the Democratic gubernatorial primary in 1998; and the businessman Bill Simon, who campaigned unsuccessfully against Davis in 2002. All of them were seen as overconfident and underprepared, liable to self-destruct when pressed on basic policy questions. Raphael Sonenshein, a political-science professor at California State University at Fullerton, notes that self-made, first-time candidates often imagine incorrectly that politics...