CNN reports that a group of friends got lucky when they purchased a winning lottery ticket worth $129 million at a Detroit porn store. A man named Mike Greer claimed the ticket for a group of friends:

At a press conference in Lansing, Michigan, Greer wouldn’t answer questions as to who purchased the ticket at Uptown Book Store in Highland Park, or why they were at the store in the first place. “Nobody cares,” said Greer.

Good to know that Greer is already making the most of his “fuck you” money in his answers to reporters. Then again, winning $129 million means never having to say “I’m sorry (that I was visiting a porn shop with some work buddies and exchanging cash for goods/services).”

[Side note: I’m really curious about the circumstances behind the purchase of this lottery ticket. Who goes to a porn shop to engage in lottery ticket group-buying? They had to know that it would be one awkward prize to claim.]

Entertainment Tonight has posted a teaser for a teaser of some Green Lantern footage (the full length of which will debut next week):

Over at /Film, the response is not kind. Here’s a typical comment:

The film may be months away but why release images that are not great looking? They obviously think this looks cool enough to put out there for all of us geeks, but it’s like throwing raw meat to wolves. This looks like another boring-ass CGI crapfest. 

On a more extreme note, another commenter chimes in:

This looks horrible. What were they thinking? I really wanted to like this, but the initial suit pics had me worried already. CGI everything, too fake, terrible looking costume, no sense of realism at any point, Ryan Reynolds speaking….Now i get why they put Blake Lively in the movie. It was the only way they could get people to watch it.

There’s just no way to fix this mess in six months. I’ll be watching more trailers in the coming months, but they’re going to need a miracle to get this crap together. This might be one of those comic book properties that may be pretty much unfilmable due to the limited nature of current technology.

Scott Mendelson makes a good observation: Why do movie studios keep premiering footage at Entertainment Tonight? I understand they want the audience that ET provides, but ET often chops it to pieces, overlays a grating voiceover, and focuses on the aspects of the film that are more audience-friendly for the US Weekly/People magazine crowd. Release a trailer to Apple. Hell, choose a site like /Film to premiere the footage unvarnished. But letting ET’s editors get to it first is tantamount to poisoning the well for a film that could really use some fanboy support (check out my conversation with Devin for an elaboration on this topic).

A new study by the University of Kansas asked 281 college men and women about their sexual histories. They found that about a quarter of young men and a half of the women they surveyed had acted out an orgasm. The biggest reason? Wanting to end sex without hurting the other person’s feelings.

At least this younger generation is sexually magnanimous. But reflecting on this study, Tracy Clark-Flory points out how absurd our culture has become:

It’s funny to think that sometimes it ends up that the girl fakes it just so the guy can fake it. What a perfect representation of performative sex. Both partners are so strictly adhering to an expected script that they become outside observers to their own sexual encounter. Or, sometimes, it’s less an issue of performance and more an attempt to avoid one’s own, or one’s partner’s, embarrassment. Let’s remember, the survey focused on college-age dudes and dames, as most surveys do. If faking it to some degree isn’t a defining trait of youthful sex lives, then I don’t know what is.

The Strause’ Brothers new film Skyline is out in theaters today, but I was already pretty trepidacious, seeing as how Rogue Pictures wasn’t screening it for critics. I was hoping the film would be so-bad-it’s-good, but unfortunately, it fell into the so-bad-it’s-mind-numbingly-boring category. While I didn’t enjoy it very much, I was impressed by about 10 minutes worth of the visual effects in the 90-minute film. And if the budget really is around $1 million, then it really is an achievement on the scale of District 9, just without the thrills, inventiveness, script, or great acting in that film. 

I think Devin Faraci’s review is pretty spot on:

Skyline is impressive if unimaginative, and there are lots and lots of bright daylight scenes of giant monsters and fighter planes and alien space craft and weird alien squid beasts. They look great, and I would totally hire Hydraulx to do my FX work if I had FX worked that needed doing.

But the rest of it. Oh, the rest of it! It’s terrible. Actually, many of the FX scenes are terrible as well – the FX looks great, but everything happening on screen around the FX is bone headed or moronic or poorly shot. And that’s pretty much the film in a nutshell: bone headed, moronic and poorly shot. And terribly acted as well, just for good measure. There’s not a single believable moment in Skyline, and I don’t mean that I couldn’t believe in an alien invasion. I mean that not one human being in the film comes across like a human being of any sort, that none of the dialog rings true or is delivered well and that some of the actors can’t even exit an airplane convincingly.

Tamar Lewin has a thorough exposé on Kaplan’s deplorable business practices. Kaplan has discovered that test prep isn’t where the money is at these days; instead, it’s acquired small colleges and has started using them to screw people out of money:

Carlos Urquilla-Diaz, a former Kaplan instructor and administrator who is one of the Miami whistle-blowers, recalled a PowerPoint presentation showing African-American women who were raising two children by themselves as the company’s primary target. Such women, Mr. Urquilla-Diaz said, were considered most likely to drop out before completing the program, leaving Kaplan with the aid money and no need to provide more services.“The idea was, we’ll take anybody, and I mean anybody,” he said.