Tsk tsk tsk. I don't watch reality TV. Never saw the point in it, seeing as it's anything but. Anyone who believes that reality tv is real probably also thinks the same for pro wrestling.
Depends on the reality show. Some are super-scripted, some not. So You Think You Can Dance? features some absolutely fantastic dancing.
But what else can you expect when you cater to people's ignorance and baser urges?
Well, unfortunately we can't all be superior, enlightened, educated, highly intelligent moral beings like you! I mean, your charitable work and your dedicated service to humanity speak for themselves!
When I think "who do I think would make a good President," I want someone BETTER than me. No, not an average dude I could have a beer with, and not the reality TV stars we can all look down on to feel better about ourselves. Our standard for President should be high, much higher than we've recently used.
For example the scenario calls for some computer stuff, so they need a computer guy. The computer guy is that not important to the story, and his race and gender even less so. So what they do is tap in the expectations of the public : a computer guy should be a nerdy white male. If they diverge from the stereotype, people will notice that and the character will draw attention, but it is not what they want, they don't want you to think "hey, a black girl is playing the hacker, interesting", when that hacker is totally secondary to the story.
In other words, the casting decision not only doesn't reflect how things really work, but it actively reinforces a stereotype.
I can't speak for the-numbers, but I know for certain that Box Office Mojo's numbers are guesses. For the most part they do not get actual budget numbers from movie studios, so they estimate. And update their numbers if a studio does actually release numbers for various films.
boxofficemojo is an absolutely fantastic resource for figuring out which movie made how much, and when. But it's not good at things it has no way of verifying, like movie budgets and promotional costs.
The X-Files. Ah, the X-Files. Granted, Mulder and Sculley DID change their attitudes a bit as the seasons went on. Fox started thinking all his alien obsession was BS, and a lot of it was just organized by the government. Super-skeptic Sculley opened her mind to religion first, then the paranormal that Mulder always accepted at face value.
But the standard plot suffered for too many seasons with a "status quo is god" attitude. Mulder had his opinions, Sculley had her opposing opinions, and even though they worked together, Mulder would run into incontrovertible visual evidence of aliens, ghosts, the paranormal, etc. Something that Sculley would just be.. mysteriously absent for, and so she didn't have to face that evidence. This happened enough times to be totally ridiculous.
Case in point: The X-Files movie, which has in the climax a scene where the two are in the arctic on the ice, and an enormous spaceship lifts off and flies above them. Mulder can see it quite clearly, a drugged Sculley is basically face-down in the snow. I knew that at that point, plot-wise, they'd been spinning their wheels for some time.
Might get hit even worse next summer. Haven't they said that all of the episodes in the final season of GoT (which is a shorter season) are going to be longer?
Yeah, but Season 8 will likely air two years from now.
Somewhat poorly written, with plot holes and plot arcs that undercut the themes of other plot arcs in the film. I actually like pretty much everything that happened on Themyscira, it's when Diana leaves to head to England that the writing goes seriously wrong. We have to sit through the usual "fish out of water" nonsense that is always the same in these sorts of plots, a pointless scene of Diana trying on clothes that goes on way too long... at this point, the movie's only real crime is having overlong sequences that should have been edited down or cut. But then the nonsense starts.
Steve and Diana are attacked in an alley by German thugs trying to recover the notebook Steve stole. Diana knocks them out, tries to interrogate the leader, but he takes cyanide in a surprisingly incompetently and confusingly-edited scene. They're sad because they wanted information about who they worked for, what they wanted, who they were, and they leave, disheartened... leaving the four other totally alive and completely interrogatable Germans in the alley. The film is full of these moments that just don't seem thought through.
Maybe the worst sin came at the very end of the film, when Diana and Ares had this discussion where he said he just gives humans ideas, it's human nature to have to choose to do evil acts. I liked this idea! It was a good one! It meant you can't just punch evil. I wish they had stuck with it. Unfortunately, when Ares dies, the German soldiers are shown blinking, coming out of a haze, and smiling. Oh hey, they're good people after all! They were just under Ares's control.... completely undercutting the previous theme of this being a choice. Fuck. That. The writers tried to have it both ways, they wanted to show Germans not being evil, yet presented us this fraudulent choice. This is not the only example in the movie of trying to have things both ways, but it's the most blatant and could have been avoided by just removing that 5-second "germans waking up from a dream" shot.
I wanted to like this movie. There was a lot to like about it, but the story needed a lot more work.
Post-Nolan, it's the best of the new batch of DC films
That's not saying much, DC's crop has generally been dreadful.
Funny how 80s nostalgia works in some cases, not in others. I loved the 1980s vibe in Stranger Things, probably because it was played straight (mostly).
You present no evidence that voter ID and other laws have anything to do with race
Because voter IDs are not easy to attain when you have no resources. Anyone with any means is already going to have one, when you put a barrier to entry, you're going to get less of a turnout. And who are those who can't afford to take time off to vote, who don't have a place nearby to get a voter ID? The poor. Who do the poor tend to be?
The only exception I can think of today is Family Guy and I honestly dunno how they get away with what they do on that show.
Family Guy and South Park. Both like to subvert politically 'acceptable' norms, though Family Guy does like to play to the liberal norms of its creator (Brian very much reflects McFarlaine's sensibilities). Matt and Trey are intentionally cagey about where their politics lie, and they like to play to and then tear down both sides.
Simpsons sadly lost their edge 20 years ago. You definitely couldn't get away with Married With Children now.
My favorite parody films were Airplane, Spaceballs, History of the World Part 1 (some of it anyway), Hot Shots (both. Ah for the days before Charlie Sheen was publicly crazy), the Naked Gun. Even Men in Tights had its fun moments. But then you get nonsense like White Girls, Meet the Spartans, Disaster Movie, that just feel really lazy and only take obvious shots that we already came up with on our own. There were plenty of bad Airplanes knock-offs in the old days, but I don't see the really good parodies anymore.
I don't know why some fuckwad moderator keeps modding this as "-1 Troll," but this ain't trolling. He's giving accurate accounting figures. I know it doesn't always jive with the "lol movies are always profitable, Hollywood accounting sucks" meme, but the truth is that movie studios release a lot of films that flop, but they make up for them with the enormous blockbusters.
It used to be easier a decade ago when you could count on even mediocre releases doing a nice business in the DVD market, but those days are gone and studios have their heads up their asses when it comes to handling streaming.
This is an ebb and flow, and once Hollywood has made a bunch of garbage that they like but no one else watches, they will go make another Avatar or Titanic and fatten their wallets again.
You asked, and they listened! You will get your wish, James Cameron has no less than four Avatar sequels in the pipeline.
It's like choosing a CEO to do brain surgery. Totally different skillsets.
It's a very very common refrain to want the President to be CEO. To run the federal government like a business. But business and government have, by necessity, different aims, and the leadership had better not look the same.
Because clearly, anyone who disagrees with you and your opinions is a moron. Never mind that Trump successfully ran a real estate business for decades and survived recessions, fierce competition, dozens of idiot politicians, etc.
Amazing how well you can do when you start out with a fortune. Why, he managed to build that into a larger fortune only slightly smaller than if he'd invested it in a Fortune 500 index. What a financial genius.
Pirates is the only one with superstar actors in it. Of course the Mummy had Tom Cruise but he's kind of washed up.
Tom Cruise isn't washed up, but strangely he wasn't the draw in the trailers. The movie just looked terrible. The Rock is the biggest action star in the world, but he couldn't save the Baywatch movie. I'm not sure why those movies bomb but Michael Bay's are successful, but there you have it.
Because if they did then another company could waltz in and use the lines.
When have American cable operators ever had to open their lines to another company? Citation please.
Cable operators haven't, but the regional phone company monopolies in the US were required to open their lines to competition by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. That resulted in what I fondly recall as the "golden age of DSL," where you had a dozen companies in many areas leasing lines from the phone companies and vying for customers. Unfortunately, the Act also shattered most barriers to consolidation, so the bells responded by purchasing all the local guys and absorbing them into the fold, and then erecting other, different barriers to entry. Once that was done, they started gobbling up each other, until finally the shattering of Ma Bell in 1984 was mostly undone, and once again consumers have little choice in the broadband market.
The real question is whether he was a patent troll himself, and he has that history as well.
I didn't see any cases where he represented patent trolls, and I note you didn't cite any. If you have any specifics, I'm happy to discuss.
Sure, I'll go into a specific: I think Tivo's original DVR patents were bullshit. Whether they won court cases or not, they got a club to wield against people using obvious techniques that had been in use before Tivo was doing it. I guess YMMV as to whether that -really- counts as "patent trolling," but I set a low bar.
As it happens, the point here is that we're going to be stuck with terrible internet connections at vastly slower speed than they could because the companies that could make things better (like Google) are shackled by regulations that make the ISP business not enticing.
Then the ISP can get out of the last mile line business. As long as they own the pipes to the houses, they have a legal means of cutting off any sort of competition so they can put up with all sorts of "stifling" regulations.
Or, if we're going to grant a defacto monopoly/duopoly, then that monopoly/duopoly should not be able to stick it to consumers because consumers have no choice.
Slashdot Mirror
Tsk tsk tsk. I don't watch reality TV. Never saw the point in it, seeing as it's anything but. Anyone who believes that reality tv is real probably also thinks the same for pro wrestling.
Depends on the reality show. Some are super-scripted, some not. So You Think You Can Dance? features some absolutely fantastic dancing.
Well, unfortunately we can't all be superior, enlightened, educated, highly intelligent moral beings like you! I mean, your charitable work and your dedicated service to humanity speak for themselves!
When I think "who do I think would make a good President," I want someone BETTER than me. No, not an average dude I could have a beer with, and not the reality TV stars we can all look down on to feel better about ourselves. Our standard for President should be high, much higher than we've recently used.
Oh, please, superhero sidekick involves a lot of domestic chores, sucking dick, bending over and boot licking. You don't see that in Batman and Robin.
I figured that was always strongly implied in Batman and Robin. And more than merely implied in the comics.
Like the black plainclothes cop who's three days from retirement when he gets shot after saying "I'm too old for this shit"?
-jcr
To be fair, Danny Glover was in everything for awhile.
You and me both, AC.
And the insane gets positive moderation...
There is no justice, this is the world we live in these days.
For example the scenario calls for some computer stuff, so they need a computer guy. The computer guy is that not important to the story, and his race and gender even less so. So what they do is tap in the expectations of the public : a computer guy should be a nerdy white male. If they diverge from the stereotype, people will notice that and the character will draw attention, but it is not what they want, they don't want you to think "hey, a black girl is playing the hacker, interesting", when that hacker is totally secondary to the story.
In other words, the casting decision not only doesn't reflect how things really work, but it actively reinforces a stereotype.
I can't speak for the-numbers, but I know for certain that Box Office Mojo's numbers are guesses. For the most part they do not get actual budget numbers from movie studios, so they estimate. And update their numbers if a studio does actually release numbers for various films.
boxofficemojo is an absolutely fantastic resource for figuring out which movie made how much, and when. But it's not good at things it has no way of verifying, like movie budgets and promotional costs.
Do you realize that Transformers was a Japanese invention?
I do! Boy, I bet they're regretting that now.
The X-Files. Ah, the X-Files. Granted, Mulder and Sculley DID change their attitudes a bit as the seasons went on. Fox started thinking all his alien obsession was BS, and a lot of it was just organized by the government. Super-skeptic Sculley opened her mind to religion first, then the paranormal that Mulder always accepted at face value.
But the standard plot suffered for too many seasons with a "status quo is god" attitude. Mulder had his opinions, Sculley had her opposing opinions, and even though they worked together, Mulder would run into incontrovertible visual evidence of aliens, ghosts, the paranormal, etc. Something that Sculley would just be.. mysteriously absent for, and so she didn't have to face that evidence. This happened enough times to be totally ridiculous.
Case in point: The X-Files movie, which has in the climax a scene where the two are in the arctic on the ice, and an enormous spaceship lifts off and flies above them. Mulder can see it quite clearly, a drugged Sculley is basically face-down in the snow. I knew that at that point, plot-wise, they'd been spinning their wheels for some time.
Might get hit even worse next summer. Haven't they said that all of the episodes in the final season of GoT (which is a shorter season) are going to be longer?
Yeah, but Season 8 will likely air two years from now.
And what was wrong with the Wonderwoman movie?
Somewhat poorly written, with plot holes and plot arcs that undercut the themes of other plot arcs in the film.
I actually like pretty much everything that happened on Themyscira, it's when Diana leaves to head to England that the writing goes seriously wrong. We have to sit through the usual "fish out of water" nonsense that is always the same in these sorts of plots, a pointless scene of Diana trying on clothes that goes on way too long... at this point, the movie's only real crime is having overlong sequences that should have been edited down or cut. But then the nonsense starts.
Steve and Diana are attacked in an alley by German thugs trying to recover the notebook Steve stole. Diana knocks them out, tries to interrogate the leader, but he takes cyanide in a surprisingly incompetently and confusingly-edited scene. They're sad because they wanted information about who they worked for, what they wanted, who they were, and they leave, disheartened... leaving the four other totally alive and completely interrogatable Germans in the alley. The film is full of these moments that just don't seem thought through.
Maybe the worst sin came at the very end of the film, when Diana and Ares had this discussion where he said he just gives humans ideas, it's human nature to have to choose to do evil acts. I liked this idea! It was a good one! It meant you can't just punch evil. I wish they had stuck with it. Unfortunately, when Ares dies, the German soldiers are shown blinking, coming out of a haze, and smiling. Oh hey, they're good people after all! They were just under Ares's control.... completely undercutting the previous theme of this being a choice. Fuck. That. The writers tried to have it both ways, they wanted to show Germans not being evil, yet presented us this fraudulent choice. This is not the only example in the movie of trying to have things both ways, but it's the most blatant and could have been avoided by just removing that 5-second "germans waking up from a dream" shot.
I wanted to like this movie. There was a lot to like about it, but the story needed a lot more work.
Post-Nolan, it's the best of the new batch of DC films
That's not saying much, DC's crop has generally been dreadful.
Yeah. I wouldn't give up a single episode of A Game of Thrones to see any movie. Unless it was "A Game of Thrones: Season 8 Is A Movie Now".
I'd watch that.
The last episode of Season 7 was about an hour and half, so each episode is almost movie-length now.
Funny how 80s nostalgia works in some cases, not in others. I loved the 1980s vibe in Stranger Things, probably because it was played straight (mostly).
You present no evidence that voter ID and other laws have anything to do with race
Because voter IDs are not easy to attain when you have no resources. Anyone with any means is already going to have one, when you put a barrier to entry, you're going to get less of a turnout. And who are those who can't afford to take time off to vote, who don't have a place nearby to get a voter ID? The poor. Who do the poor tend to be?
The only exception I can think of today is Family Guy and I honestly dunno how they get away with what they do on that show.
Family Guy and South Park. Both like to subvert politically 'acceptable' norms, though Family Guy does like to play to the liberal norms of its creator (Brian very much reflects McFarlaine's sensibilities). Matt and Trey are intentionally cagey about where their politics lie, and they like to play to and then tear down both sides.
Simpsons sadly lost their edge 20 years ago. You definitely couldn't get away with Married With Children now.
My favorite parody films were Airplane, Spaceballs, History of the World Part 1 (some of it anyway), Hot Shots (both. Ah for the days before Charlie Sheen was publicly crazy), the Naked Gun. Even Men in Tights had its fun moments. But then you get nonsense like White Girls, Meet the Spartans, Disaster Movie, that just feel really lazy and only take obvious shots that we already came up with on our own. There were plenty of bad Airplanes knock-offs in the old days, but I don't see the really good parodies anymore.
I don't know why some fuckwad moderator keeps modding this as "-1 Troll," but this ain't trolling. He's giving accurate accounting figures. I know it doesn't always jive with the "lol movies are always profitable, Hollywood accounting sucks" meme, but the truth is that movie studios release a lot of films that flop, but they make up for them with the enormous blockbusters.
It used to be easier a decade ago when you could count on even mediocre releases doing a nice business in the DVD market, but those days are gone and studios have their heads up their asses when it comes to handling streaming.
What did he say that was factually wrong, curiously?
This is an ebb and flow, and once Hollywood has made a bunch of garbage that they like but no one else watches, they will go make another Avatar or Titanic and fatten their wallets again.
You asked, and they listened! You will get your wish, James Cameron has no less than four Avatar sequels in the pipeline.
It's like choosing a CEO to do brain surgery. Totally different skillsets.
It's a very very common refrain to want the President to be CEO. To run the federal government like a business. But business and government have, by necessity, different aims, and the leadership had better not look the same.
Because clearly, anyone who disagrees with you and your opinions is a moron. Never mind that Trump successfully ran a real estate business for decades and survived recessions, fierce competition, dozens of idiot politicians, etc.
Amazing how well you can do when you start out with a fortune. Why, he managed to build that into a larger fortune only slightly smaller than if he'd invested it in a Fortune 500 index. What a financial genius.
Pirates is the only one with superstar actors in it. Of course the Mummy had Tom Cruise but he's kind of washed up.
Tom Cruise isn't washed up, but strangely he wasn't the draw in the trailers. The movie just looked terrible. The Rock is the biggest action star in the world, but he couldn't save the Baywatch movie. I'm not sure why those movies bomb but Michael Bay's are successful, but there you have it.
Because if they did then another company could waltz in and use the lines.
When have American cable operators ever had to open their lines to another company? Citation please.
Cable operators haven't, but the regional phone company monopolies in the US were required to open their lines to competition by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. That resulted in what I fondly recall as the "golden age of DSL," where you had a dozen companies in many areas leasing lines from the phone companies and vying for customers. Unfortunately, the Act also shattered most barriers to consolidation, so the bells responded by purchasing all the local guys and absorbing them into the fold, and then erecting other, different barriers to entry. Once that was done, they started gobbling up each other, until finally the shattering of Ma Bell in 1984 was mostly undone, and once again consumers have little choice in the broadband market.
The real question is whether he was a patent troll himself, and he has that history as well.
I didn't see any cases where he represented patent trolls, and I note you didn't cite any. If you have any specifics, I'm happy to discuss.
Sure, I'll go into a specific: I think Tivo's original DVR patents were bullshit. Whether they won court cases or not, they got a club to wield against people using obvious techniques that had been in use before Tivo was doing it. I guess YMMV as to whether that -really- counts as "patent trolling," but I set a low bar.
As it happens, the point here is that we're going to be stuck with terrible internet connections at vastly slower speed than they could because the companies that could make things better (like Google) are shackled by regulations that make the ISP business not enticing.
Then the ISP can get out of the last mile line business. As long as they own the pipes to the houses, they have a legal means of cutting off any sort of competition so they can put up with all sorts of "stifling" regulations.
Or, if we're going to grant a defacto monopoly/duopoly, then that monopoly/duopoly should not be able to stick it to consumers because consumers have no choice.