- Never again tell me that you need a fresh idea and originality to succeed in Hollywood. If you needed either of those qualities, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps would not have been the top film at the box office this weekend. “Bong Hit” Oliver Stone directed this rip-off of his own 1987 classic, which really isn’t any better than doing an unnecessary sequel to someone else’s movie. Wall Street brought in $19 million for the weekend, falling just below expectations on a mostly lackluster weekend at the box office. To be fair, he did team Michael Douglas with Shia LeBeouf, who successfully murdered the Indiana Jones franchise by team with aging star Harrison Ford, so Stone at least had a blueprint to follow. Second place went to a family-friendly film that also failed to meet expectations, Warner Bros. animated flick Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole. Director Zack Snyder led the movie to a $16.3 million take, significantly below expectations. Add in the fact that the film also opened in 3-D and IMAX and you get a better picture of how disappointing Guardians was. Not far off the pace set by those two films was last weekend’s top film, The Town, which raked in $16 million to boost its total gross to $49 million. That showing was an encouraging one for Ben Affleck’s bank robbery movie and bodes well for a successful run long term. Fourth place went to Easy A, which was also in its second weekend in theaters. A 40-percent drop resulted in a take of $10.7 million, meaning a movie that took $8 million to make has now earned $32.8 million in just ten days of release. Last in the top five was another new release, Disney’s You Again. A big-name cast featuring Kristen Bell, Jamie Lee Curtis, Sigourney Weaver and Betty White (Is it mandated that she be in every movie produced from here on out?) wasn’t enough to lure in the film’s target demographic (women, obviously) and the movie made just $8.3 million. The rest of the top 10 was populated by: M. Night Shyamalan’s Devil (No, 6 after a fall 47 percent for a haul of $6.5 million and a two-week gross of $21.7 million), Resident Evil: Afterlife (No. 7 after grossing $4.9 million for a $52 million cumulative tally), Alpha and Omega (No. 8 with $4.7 million its second weekend in theaters, Takers (hanging around at No. 9 with a $1.6 million weekend) and the movie that refuses to give up its spot in the top 10 despite being in its 11th weekend of release, Inception (No. 10 with $1.2 million its 11th weekend in theaters for a total haul now standing at $287 million). Next weekend, we finally will be free of those ubiquitous commercials for the Facebook biopic The Social Network because it will finally hit theaters alongside the horror remake Let Me In and Case 39………..
- Americans are looking for any way to stop being FAT……as long as it doesn’t involve actual exercise or exertion on their part. So if you ask me how the concept of fat-burning coffee will go over, I’m going to take an optimistic point of view. That’s right, fat-burning coffee. It comes courtesy of a Florida-based company called Boresha International. "The products change lives, and people's health. It's been really neat to see what's happened for some people," said Mimi Shackley, Boresha International's Diamond Director. "It's the world's only thermogenic, fat-burning coffee. It's low glycemic, so it doesn't spike the blood sugar." Those claims are all nice and sparkly, but can a company really use coffee to fight diabetes and obesity. Shackley believes so and she cites an unusual quality of her company’s coffee as the primary reason why. "It makes a really smooth low acidic cup of coffee. Coffee that's roasted over open flames doesn't have that claim. People that normally get acid reflux from coffee, won't get it from our coffee," Shackley stated. Beans in Boresha International’s coffee are roasted using infrared, rather than direct roasting. The coffee is also unique in that it makes use of a patented formula owned by a Nobel Prize nominee, Dr. Ann De Wees Allen. The coffee shop pioneering this interesting brew is the Skinny Cafe in Port St. Lucie, where Boresha International’s blend sells for $1 a cup. The shop features before and after portraits showing off the supposed benefits of drinking its best-known coffee, coffee Shackley claims will give a person “great energy, for hours.” And as an added benefit, Boresha International’s coffee is safe for diabetics, so if you can indulge your sugar habits, at least you can still be a caffeine addict………
- Road rage I know about. Rail rage? Not so sure. But just because I haven’t heard of it doesn’t mean I don’t love it instantly when it comes to my attention. So big ups to you, angry train passengers in Brazil who decided that you’d had just about enough of your local railway’s slow service and in response, took out your frustrations not on the people providing the slow service but rather on the trains that you ride. Furious residents of the capital city of Sao Paulo, Brazil went berserk on trains in their city, smashing windows and doing serious damage to at least 17 train cars Tuesday. Some trains stopped moving Tuesday morning, Conrado Grava de Souza, operations director of the Sao Paulo Metro, explained to national media. Clearly not a group this is going to put up with commuting delays for long, displayed a short fuse when the triggering device to open one of the train's doors malfunctioned, causing one of the trains to stop. That set off a chain reaction in which several other trains stopped and just like a traffic jam on a highway, a few trains stopping at one location dispersed like ripples in a pond and soon, many trains were immobile. Impatient passengers used emergency buttons to get off the train and began walking on the tracks. Their presence led to even more trains having to stop because running over passengers just isn’t a practice any railway likes to engage in. By the time the situation bottomed out, an estimated 150,000 people were disrupted by the interruption in train service. This led to the aforementioned rail rage, with the smashed windows and vandalism aboard the stopped trains. The Sao Paulo Metro reacted to the damaged trains quickly and had all 17 of them back in service by the end of the day…………
- Ilia Spilca is clearly not your average man. Most guys who have their day made if they found themselves in what sounds like a scene straight from a sleazy, low-rent porn flick. Instead, Spilca took great offense to being the lone male in a scene featuring two (possibly hot) bikini-clad police officers off a freeway exit in Albuquerque, N.M. The incident occurred in Junem when Spilca said he was driving to work on northbound Interstate 25 and was pulled over by the two hot lady cops in bikinis. As he exited the freeway, the swirling red and blue lights appeared behind him and he pulled over. “They said, 'What do you have to drink?' I said, 'Nothing, water.' 'I'm going to ask you again what do you have to drink?' I said (for the) second time, 'Water, that's it,'” Spilca said. The problem was Spilca’s choice of water bottles, as he was drinking water from a bottle that looks like a bottle of alcohol. I’m not sure where one procures a water bottle that looks like a bottle of whiskey, gin or tequila (perhaps why Jack Daniels doesn’t make water bottles), but I can see where such a water bottle might cause problems. Spilca was not issued a ticket and went on his way with nothing more than a scare and possibly s new fantasy to brighten his day, but for some odd reason he was more angry than anything else and last Friday, three months after the fact, he filed a citizen's complaint with the city’s Internal Review Office. In the complaint, Spilca claimed the two officers who stopped him were wearing bikinis and had guns tucked into their shorts. Who were these bikini-sporting cops? As it turns out, they were off-duty Albuquerque Police Department officers assisting an on-duty officer, the complaint stated. “I was very angry; I was shaking,” Spilca said. In defense of his officers, APD Commander Steve Warfield said the department has rules for police dress codes, but due to the 24/7 nature of the job, off-duty officers often respond to calls not wearing their uniforms. “There are numerous circumstances where off-duty officers have rendered assistance, have rendered aid (and) assisted on-duty officers with incidents on a daily basis,” Warfield said. Spilca doesn’t exactly have the odds working on his side, as the IRO indicated that more than half of all citizen complaints on police have been found false or aren't proven to be true. This year has been an especially bad year for complaint filers, as only 12 percent of the complaints have been found to be true………
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