Word: summer
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...good news for Apatow and his long-ago roomie Adam Sandler is that their film topped the weekend box office at domestic theaters. The bad news ... Where to begin? Funny People cadged the lowest take for any No. 1 film this year. Not just in the prime-time summer months - we're talking January too. It was also Sandler's poorest opener in five years, since Spanglish. And it earned a B-, or barely passing, from the Cinemascore poll of people who'd seen the movie. That's not so funny. (Read TIME's Funny People review...
...indie action, the rom-com (500) Days of Summer picked up $2.8 million and, at 266 venues, had the weekend's highest per-screen average among the top 60 releases, for a cume of $6,821,000. The bomb-squad thriller The Hurt Locker was right behind, with a five-week total of $6,757,000. The weekend's most highly acclaimed newbies - the save-the-dolphins doc The Cove and the South Korean vampire-priest horror movie Thirst - opened well, with about $55,000 each at four theaters...
...down 25% from the same frame last year, when the top four movies (The Dark Knight, The Mummy 3, Step Brothers and Mamma Mia!) grossed more than the top 10 this weekend. The studios front-loaded their prime merchandise, and now the shelves are getting bare. Note to moguls: Summer usually lasts three months, whenever you decide it begins. So if you launch your blockbuster season on May 1, don't be surprised if it ends on Aug. 1 - right now. This defies business logic, since in most parts of the country, school's out and kids have nothing...
...anniversary of the Pan-European Picnic: the opening of the border with Austria that allowed hundreds of East Germans to cross to the West. But this was preceded by many other events, such as the demonstrations by tens of thousands of people in Heroes' Square in Budapest in the summer of 1988 against Ceausescu's bulldozing of ethnic Hungarian villages in Romania, at a time when gatherings by just a handful of people were illegal. Christina Rozsnyai, Szentendre, Hungary...
...attacks were not wholly unexpected. ETA often steps up its campaign of violence during the summer months, and in recent weeks Spain's Interior Ministry had heightened security at a number of sensitive targets across the country. It wasn't enough - the Burgos bomb was attached to a van parked outside a civil-guard barracks; the Majorca one was tied beneath a civil-guard car. (See pictures of terrorism...