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Uwe Boll To Quit Making Movies With 1M Signatures
An anonymous reader writes to mention that Uwe Boll, the infamous German director behind such video game adaptations as House of the Dead, BloodRayne, Dungeon Siege and Postal, has recently admitted that he would retire from making movies if enough people want him to stop. When FearNet mentioned to Boll a petition online signed by 18,000 people requesting that he cease making films, Boll responded that '18,000 is not enough to convince me.' So how much would be enough? 'One million,' Boll said."
http://www.petitiononline.com/RRH53888/petition.html
Boll is actually quitting because the German government recently closed the tax loophole that allowed Boll and other German filmmakers to set up their "films" as tax shelters for businessmen (with no intent of ever making any money). The gravy train has dried up and the scam is over.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
His non-videogame based movies aren't bad. The problem is he tries his hand at videogame adaptations and they always turn out the same, overpriced and underwhelmed.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Petition Link
You're missing the point. As long as he's in the business, no one's favorite videogames are safe from being turned into horrible movie adaptations, preventing decent adaptations from ever being made. It's self defense. ; )
How about these for example:
- Good Bye Lenin! (2003) - nominated for Golden Globe (ok, perhaps that doesn't amount to much, but it's a nice movie)
- Der Untergang (2004) - oscar nomination for "best foreign language film of the year" (where "foreign" means "not english")
- Das Leben der Anderen (2006) - won the oscar for "best foreign language film", as well as many other awards in several international film festivals (Great Britain and Canada among those)
That's quite a few movies since Lola rennt (1998). Looks like there are quite a few German directors who are actually doing better after all... those movies are all very much worthwhile watching, by the way (though quite disturbing).
P.S. I'm not German so I'm bound to have missed several more good movies.
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
no no, it's a 'tax shelter' if you donate 12 million of your 'income' to this 'tax shelter program' they reduce the amount of tax you owe by 6 million.
you don't really make a whole lot of money doing it that way, but consider this, if you're $5,000 into the next tax bracket, and you donate $10,000 to drop you down to the next lower tax bracket, and dropping yourself down to the next lower tax bracket saves you from paying $20,000 in taxes total, you would do it in a heart beat.
and the worst of it is as long as the company who owns the rights to the movie is in Germany, and as long as they produce actual films, the tax loophole HAS NOT CHANGED. consider too, that since the holding company is German, they have to pay German taxes on profits. Obviously Uwe Boll doesn't make profits, but his holding company may very well make profit on the books, and have to pay German taxes. since they pay X for rights, and lease the rights for y. if y is greater than x then they pay taxes, but if both companies are owned by boll, then x would equal y... unless that jeopardized his loophole as far as the government is concerned... and it might.
so far they haven't closed the loophole if the production of the film is done in America. If they do, boll will bolt from making movies in America and will make them in Germany the way the law intended.
And because tax laws always lag behind a growing economy, this means there are a lot of people who if they donate X dollars they get Y dollars more back from the government, where Y is greater than X. So potentially he could be raising hundreds of millions of dollars just for saving a few million Germans a few grand every year. Ironically what the government did change about the loophole, is that they made it a crime to fraudulently claim you donated money to a company that never produced films. so now Boll has even more money to spend, because he's the real deal, and the fraudsters can't compete unless they start making bad money losing films too.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
The more we hate him the stronger he becomes!
While the petition to stop him just reached 72000 signatures, the one to save him clocks in at 6, I repeat, six signatures. See for yourself:
http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?bollsave
I'm all nerves watching this...
Never mind that once someone with actual fighting experience stepped up to the challenge (and barely weighed less than Uwe), the fight was denied. Boll only accepted entrants who weighed significantly less and had no idea what they were doing.
If you have $5000 of your income in the C% bracket, and you donate $10,000 to drop down to the B% bracket, your net income after taxes will decrease, not increase -- because the higher C% rate only applied to that last $5000, not your entire income.
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