- Awesome, a new Tyler Perry project, goodie! Seriously, how can you not be excited about a new project that will probably be a shameless rip-off of several other abysmal offerings from a purported funnyman who is anything but? You undoubtedly know Perry as the knob behind House of Payne, a lame comedy on TBS that has been an unmitigated failure despite TBS running promos for it at a rate that made them annoying in all of two viewings. Perry’s brand of funny just doesn’t translate to TV, or to film for that matter. He’s on the road promoting his new movie The Family That Preys, which is receiving as indifferent a reaction as his TV show. Yet there is TBS, clearly starved for programming, working with Perry on a new TV series based on another of his movies, Meet the Browns. The series is slated to air in early 2009, meaning you should start seeing approximately four commercials for it during every commercial break on TBS and eighteen shameless promos for it during all TBS programming every hour of every day. The new series will star (and I use that term loosely) David Mann as a man inheriting a dilapidated house from his father. Hilarity will ensure….well, it will be supposed to ensue, but actually won't…..
- I know it’s wrong to steal $485 million from a state-owned bank, but that doesn’t mean I can’t respect the effort that two former Bank of China managers and their wives engaged in to thieve that massive chunk of cash. That’s especially true when the quarter hatched and carried out their plan over the course of 13 long years, taking great pains to create an elaborate, complicated web of deceit that netted them nearly half a billion dollars. Heck, their plan even involved laundering money in other countries, another impressive facet of the scheme. For their crimes, they were convicted last Friday in U.S. District Court in Las Vegas of racketeering conspiracy, money laundering conspiracy and conspiracy to transport stolen money. Quite a laundry list of crimes, to be sure. Additionally, the two bankers were convicted of visa fraud and their wives were convicted of passport fraud. All of this stems from a plan that began in 1991 and continued through October 2004. In other words, it outlasted one Bush presidency, but couldn’t survive the second (and worst in U.S. history) under W. So these four white-collar criminals will make their way to a nice federal prison for many, many years, but at least they go with my admiration for having the testicular fortitude and guts to carry out such a massive theft over the course of nearly a decade and a half…..
- Takin’ it to the streets…..in Taiwan! Today’s Riot Watch takes us to the Far East, where literally tens of thousands of Taiwanese marched in the streets of Taipei over the weekend to speak out against President Ma Ying-jeou’s ongoing efforts to improve relations with the world’s largest and most heinous violator of human rights……….China (you thought I was going to say the secret CIA prisons around the world where suspects are regularly tortured in violation of the Geneva Convention, didn’t you? Almost, those prisons are running a close second to the Chinese in the latest human-rights violator polls). What’s really humorous about this is that President Ying-jeou was only inaugurated 100 days ago, so it didn’t take long for him to piss off his constituents to the point that they took to the streets en masse. Well done, Mr. President, even our own un-esteemed W. didn’t manage to offend, irritate, infuriate and make irate mass numbers of his citizens in the first 100 days of his presidency. Seriously, it took him a good 110, 115 days to piss off that many Americans, but to be fair, we were right in the middle of the NFL playoffs at the time of his inauguration…..
- It only took six weeks for The Dark Knight to go where only one movie has gone before: north of the $500 million earnings barrier. Christian Bale, the late Heath Ledger and crew reached that milestone in roughly half the time it took the only other movie to crack $500 million, Titanic, to get there. Of course, Dark Knight did it with a running time of two and a half hours as opposed to the four-hour waste of time Titanic proved to be. After Sunday, Dark Knight sat at $502.4 million, with its projected earnings ceiling at $530-$550 million, depending on whether it’s current rate of ticket sales holds up. Even more impressive is that the $502.4 million represents one-eighth of Hollywood’s total box office revenue for this summer, which is itself a record $4.2 billion. The previous record had been last year’s $4.18 billion tally, but that mark didn’t last long. Dark Knight is definitely a fitting film to help set the mark; a dark, vivid, gripping movie that was definitely one of the summer’s best….
- Presidente Felipe Calderon doesn’t seem to be getting the message, so maybe you need to kick it up a notch, angry Mexican citizens. Your protests over the weekend were a good start; tens of thousands of people marching in all 32 Mexican states is a good start. But if you really want to get the message through to your leader that you aren’t happy about the rash of killings, kidnappings and shootouts sweeping through your country, maybe you need to make the point more emphatically. While the sight of banners, signs and waves of people marching through the streets makes a statement, overturning cars, storming government buildings and setting things on fire makes that point even more clearly. I know it seems counterintuitive to protest the government’s lack of response to a nationwide crime wave by engaging in the very types of violent crime you’re speaking out against, but that’s what makes the plan so brilliant. By showing the government what they’re ignoring, you’re showing them that they can no longer ignore this type of crime wave. Bring the fight to their doorstep and make them feel the brunt of those very crimes that you’ve been on the receiving end of. When Presidente Calderon and his administration are the ones being victimized, I’m guessing they’ll make an effort to deal with the problem…..
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