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CatBus

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Join date
18-Aug-2011
Last activity
7-Jul-2025
Posts
5,997

Post History

Post
#1180951
Topic
oscars 2018
Time

ChainsawAsh said:

Neglify said:

ChainsawAsh said:

Yeah, the movie is about actors making a war movie in a jungle in Asia and accidentally getting mixed up in a real conflict.

RDJ plays a white, blond, blue-eyed, Australian method actor who was cast as a black character. As a method actor, he stays in character the entire duration of the shoot, so he’s always in blackface, acting as his character. Early in the movie there’s a montage of his other roles, so the audience and all the characters are fully aware that he’s a white Australian in blackface going overboard with his method acting.

In the movie he says he doesn’t drop character until after the DVD commentary. I’m the commentary for Tropic Thunder, RDJ is in character the whole time.

This is why Tropic Thunder and This Is Spinal Tap are two of the best DVD commentaries of all time. (For reference, the Spinal Tap one is all in-characrer, too.)

Big Trouble in Little China. I’m pretty sure you can hear them cracking open a couple beers at the beginning, and sometimes their conversation veers in the direction of what’s happening in the film.

Post
#1180948
Topic
Politics 2: Electric Boogaloo
Time

SilverWook said:

Yikes.

Anyway, this reeks of a sucker play to buy time.

Maybe I’m cynical, but this looks like a Reagan-era back channel buy-off mutual face saver to me. North Korea survives off of threats and concessions – they consider this “tribute”. You pay them their tribute and they’re quiet for a few years. Then they come back later and demand more. From our point of view they’re irrational but it works every time, and from their point of view it demonstrates their greatness.

So all you have to do if you’re a person who doesn’t like to seem like they’re making concessions is have someone else pay the tribute secretly on your behalf. Some nation with access to huge amounts of international shady money connections and back channels that could get it (or equivalent goods) into North Korea, but who has also been very close to Trump for a long time. Trump walks into the room, pees on the rug, and the North Korean negotiators immediately give up all demands and agree to suspend nuclear developments (until after the nest round of elections, at the minimum). The pundits go wild over the hidden genius of the wet rug doctrine, but it’s just a simple payoff exactly like every other time.

Post
#1180550
Topic
Politics 2: Electric Boogaloo
Time

On a different note, there’s this: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/us-holocaust-museum-aung-san-suu-kyi_us_5aa022f4e4b0d4f5b66cd500

An important object lesson that democracy and human rights can be two very, very different things, and support for one does not imply support for the other. There’s an old Soviet joke: “Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting about what’s for dinner.” It’s actually a pretty apt description of democracy divorced from any sense of human rights.

Post
#1180537
Topic
Politics 2: Electric Boogaloo
Time

Mrebo said:

DominicCobb said:

Mrebo said:

DominicCobb said:

Mrebo said:

DominicCobb said:

Are we comparing Trump to Ted Kennedy now?

I guess we could. I’m just asking if anyone wants to see that movie. This is still a general politics thread I believe 😉

Probably shouldn’t, considering we’re talking about how this sort of thing used to keep people from being president.

As for the movie, I like Jason Clarke and it’s a compelling story so… possibly.

Maybe it’s just me but that kind of thing should have kept him out of politics altogether. Not the debate I was looking for but many presidents carried on dalliances (Roosevelt and Kennedy leap to mind) and the media didn’t report on it. Many things have changed.

I tend to agree, it’s just mostly funny in this instance to see Trump supporters (who normally jump at the possibility to take down Dems for the same behavior) bend over backwards to defend him.

Them’s the breaks in politics. If Obama had called for tariffs on steel and aluminum or had talked about sidestepping due process in order to take people’s guns…heads would have exploded on the Right.

And when Obama was reportedly deporting illegal immigrants in record numbers and doing nothing to reform immigration year-after-year…the Left was pretty quiet.

The Left was noisy, but there’s no Left media to amplify that for anyone else to hear. The media was still trying to push the story that there was some sort of illegal immigration crisis in the US (which effectively excused Obama’s actions), and the media’s attempt to fabricate that crisis both pre- and post-dates the Obama Presidency.

The pushback on Obama’s use of drones was also muted.

Muddled more than muted. Lots of people were mad about how the drones were being used, but that got conflated into a larger and louder group of people who didn’t like the concept of drones at all.

Post
#1180536
Topic
Politics 2: Electric Boogaloo
Time

Mrebo said:

CatBus said:

I personally never thought “based on a true story” added anything at all to the appeal of a movie, because 1) you’re going to have to take some liberties just to get the story into two hours, if nothing else, and 2) if there’s a way you can tweak the story for no other purpose other than to make it more interesting, you’re either revisionist for doing it, or bland for not doing it.

Some stories are interesting to me, some are not, and whether or not they’re fictional really doesn’t enter into it. And a story about a fictional politician following the Ted Kennedy arc wouldn’t really appeal to me. But then what do I know, I liked Cabin Boy.

Well this film is not a fictional politician following the arc, it is a story about Ted Kennedy. As for creative license on these things, agree it’s a double edged sword.

What I’m saying (perhaps not well) is that my interest in any true story is the same as my interest in the equivalent fictional story. So since the fictional story wouldn’t appeal to me, the “based on a true story” version doesn’t either.

Post
#1180529
Topic
Politics 2: Electric Boogaloo
Time

I personally never thought “based on a true story” added anything at all to the appeal of a movie, because 1) you’re going to have to take some liberties just to get the story into two hours, if nothing else, and 2) if there’s a way you can tweak the story for no other purpose other than to make it more interesting, you’re either revisionist for doing it, or bland for not doing it.

Some stories are interesting to me, some are not, and whether or not they’re fictional really doesn’t enter into it. And a story about a fictional politician following the Ted Kennedy arc wouldn’t really appeal to me. But then what do I know, I liked Cabin Boy.

Post
#1180366
Topic
Start up menu in the Despecialized Editions - which version?
Time

You probably mean these:

http://originaltrilogy.com/topic/NJVC-Custom-Bluray-Set-of-Harmys-Despecialized-Editions-now-available-on-Mega/id/57042

The DeEds are just the films, other people do menu authoring and various extras. Although the AVCHD versions you have are lower-bitrate than the MKVs, so these Blu-rays would also look (slightly) better, and they’re probably more current versions too, which would make them noticeably better.

Post
#1180336
Topic
Politics 2: Electric Boogaloo
Time

So I realize the whole Stormy Daniels thing actually doesn’t matter (infidelity, and lying about said infidelity and even making payoffs about said infidelity doesn’t really rank as high as obstruction, conspiracy, corruption, money laundering, etc in my book*) but I promise I’ll be treating it with the respect it deserves.

So Donald Trump’s alias in the legal documents is “David Dennison”. Stormy Daniel’s alias in those documents is “Peggy Peterson”. So there’s a part in the document that says:

PP claims that she has been damaged by DD’s alleged actions against her, including but not limited to tort claims proximately causing injury to her person and other related claims. DD denies all such claims. (Hereinafter “PP Claims”).

Heheh. PP Claims. Heh.

* Then again, the coverup is often worse than the crime, so it’s possible Trump and/or his lawyer may have committed an actual crime while covering up a non-crime.