kimmy

Well let me say this about that. First off I think we have generally agreed that less-serious areas of the forum have less-serious standards. The Arts/Culture and Sports/Leisure areas were intended to be more easygoing. Second, the Trumps have not used the named "Drumpf" for hundreds of years, apparently. How long has it been since Ben AllegedRapistberger has been accused of sexual assault? Third, I desisted when I was told it was against the rules. But I think to me what's really funny about this "Drumpf" business is that the people who are having fun with it are the same people who get in a knot when somebody spells out the President's middle name. Barack HUSSEIN Obama. What's wrong with that? It's his name, right? So what's the problem? The problem is, it's an obvious attempt to appeal to xenophobia. Likewise Drumpf. I also have to question the sense of liberal-minded people who on the one hand feel it's insulting and bigoted to refer to Caitlyn Jenner as "Bruce" or "he" because that's not how she chooses to identify, yet don't see a problem with referring to Trump by a name his family hasn't used for centuries. If you met Kareem Abdul-Jabbar would you insist on referring to him as Lou Alcindor? If you met Mohammad Ali, would you insist on referring to him as Cassius Clay? I'd say that first off if you answered "yes" then you're an asshole, but assuming the answer is no, then the follow-up question is then "why do you feel it's appropriate to refer to Trump by a name his family stopped using centuries ago?" For the record, I haven't seen the John Oliver clip. I wonder if John Oliver has ever ridiculed his friend Jon Stewart for not using Jonathan Leibowitz as his stage name? -k

My mistake. For some reason I thought Tennessee instead of Kentucky. The trend that's becoming apparent is that Cruz wins "caucus" states (where committed party-people decide the outcome) while Trump wins "open" states (where newcomers and casual voters can affect the outcome). -k

I read somebody else comparing Sanders to McGovern recently... their point being that McGovern was a disaster in that election and concluding that Sanders would be too. As things stand, it's a moot point. Today was a good day for Sanders... but even on a good day he falls further behind, as Clinton's big win in Louisiana more than cancelled out the smaller states Sanders won. The good news for Sanders is that there aren't many more Deep South states left (where Clinton has won by landslides), and they are heading north where Sanders has been more competitive. Sanders and Clinton will be holding a town hall in Michigan on Monday ahead of the primary there. The town hall will be on Fox, which is pretty funny. I imagine the Fox types have mixed feelings about Sanders... they hate his democratic socialist views, but they're probably enjoying the headaches he has caused for Hillary. -k

Cruz won big in Kansas and won Maine by a smaller margin. Trump won Louisiana by a narrow margin and Tennessee by a healthy margin, so it looks like the delegate race doesn't change by much. Terrible day for Marco Rubio. -k

None of that is true. People can express their views, up to the limit of "willful promotion of hatred", which is a high legal bar to reach. People aren't hiding their views because they're afraid of the hate-speech law in Canada. The reason the bigots and racists are keeping their thoughts to themselves is that they don't want to advertise that they're bigots and racists. You are free to say just about anything you want... but other people are free to criticize what you say. That's how this thing works. -k

I am confused. What achievement of Obama? Isn't Cruz on record as wanting to reverse pretty much everything Obama did in the past 7 years? Wouldn't that kind of make following Obama's "achievement" kind of like following an ice-sculpture with a flame-thrower? -k

What if they had gone and bought a plane that actually exists to replace the CF18? Is that just too radical? Am I in crazy town? -k

What's being forced on straight white Christians? Are they being forced to turn gay? Turn brown? Abandon religion? -k

I have to agree that people referring to Trump as "Drumpf" is ridiculous. What's the point of it? It seems to serve no purpose other than an attempt to mock Trump, and is probably against the rules. At least the "Trudeau Jr" moniker serves the debatably valid purpose of distinguishing him from the other PM Trudeau. Referring to Trump as "Drumpf" doesn't even have that little figleaf going for it. And personally, to me, it says more about the mentality of the person attempting to use this as an insult than it says about Trump. If you watched "The Social Network", you might recall the scene at the start of the film where Zuckerberg is talking to the girl in the pub. As he moves into full asshole mode, one of the things he derides her for is the family name Albright, which he theorizes used to be Albrecht but was changed because they didn't want to be seen as immigrants. Well? Do you want to be that big of a jerk? Lots of families changed their names to a more Anglicized spelling when they arrived from Europe. My father's family was one of them. It was a pretty common thing. And yes, people did want to fit in amongst the Anglos and not stand out as being obviously immigrant. It was a different time. Ridiculing Trump because his ancestors did something that a lot of European families did when they came to the New World is foolish. It makes you look foolish when you say "Drumpf, hur hur hur". It's a "truck nuts" moment, much like writing out Obama's middle name or referring to Trudeau as "Junior". Adding those affectations to your post is like putting "truck nuts" on your trailer hitch. It might not be against the rules, but it does announce to the world that you're a person with crass taste and poor judgment. And that's actually a somewhat useful function, so maybe we should continue to allow people to use "Drumpf". -k

A key point that many seem to have difficulty is that there's a difference between "criticism" and "willful promotion of hatred." -k

No, that's hyperbole. Sarcasm would be "this is riveting stuff." -k

I think that issue is very closely related to the question of why aren't there more good roles for non-white actors. I think one thing to mention is that the studios aren't totally ignoring black audiences. There have been a number of comedy movies over recent years, from people like Tyler Perry and the Wayans brothers among others, that are intended to appeal to black viewers. There have been date-night type romance movie intended to appeal to black viewers as well. They've been fairly successful at it... movies made on a modest budget that find a niche that isn't that well served. These light romances and comedies aren't the kind of movies that get attention at the Oscars, regardless of the target audience. -k

There won't be a rush to imitate bald chubby albino dwarf movies until somebody makes the first bald chubby albindo dwarf movie. And that's not going to happen. You are correct in pointing out that they imitate what makes money, but also that they aren't very creative. They prefer to stick with tried and true formulas. For all the statistics and information available, predicting what audiences will like is an art, not a science. They spent $200 million bringing John Carter to the screen, and they were dead wrong. Many similarly large mistakes get made every year. "The Lone Ranger"... a well known name, a super-bankable star in Johnny Depp... what could go wrong? Everything went wrong. It was a huge failure. Could statistics have spared the studio from making enormously expensive failures like John Carter or The Lone Ranger? Maybe... but ultimately, these projects went ahead based on the judgment of executives, not on hard science. -k

I'm pretty skeptical that the majority of movie-goers are black and Hispanic. As a box office draw, I think Will Smith's track-record stands comparison with pretty much anybody. He's had a couple of duds recently... but so have Clooney and Johnny Depp. Anybody see "Hail Caesar!" ? "Mortdecai"? "The Lone Ranger"? Nope. Gigantic flops. Smith had a pretty much uninterrupted string of success from Independence Day and Men In Black straight up to (but not including) After Earth. But the thing is, he's not "black actor Will Smith", he's just Will Smith. He's so familiar to everyone that the idea of race becomes irrelevant. And the bulk of his movies are completely mainstream commercial fare that are equally friendly to audiences of all races. -k

It's simply not possible for anyone to run for the Republican nomination unless they're acceptable to the evangelicals. That means being "pro life", "pro family", and loudly religious. There are gay Republican groups (like Log Cabin Republicans or GOProud) and pro-choice Republicans... but they're not even welcome at Republican events. Voters who support socially liberal values but still want a president who is slavishly pro-business can vote for Hillary this year. -k

Similar logic was employed by Stephane Dion and allies during their ill-fated attempt to undo the results of the 2008 election. It went over like a turd in a punchbowl. The majority may not want Trump, but clearly far fewer want either Cruz or Rubio. It was a beatdown, and IMO calling Cruz a winner because he won his home state to avoid getting swept seems comparable to calling one of Ronda Rousey's opponents a winner because she survived for 30 seconds instead of 15. -k

I agreed with almost everything you wrote, up to this point. "The black community" doesn't make movies. The movies-- whether we're talking about Selma and Twelve Years A Slave and Malcolm X or a Wayans Bros comedy-- aren't made by "the black community", they're made by movie studios. There are very few black people in Hollywood who have the pull to get a movie made. The movies that get made are for the most part based on the assumptions of what studio execs think audiences will pay to see. -k

Rubio was designed to be able to merge with other candidates to form a single, more powerful candidate. But Cruz is not compatible. The remaining hope for Republicans who dread the idea of Trump being the nominee appears to be a "brokered convention", which means that if Trump doesn't obtain a majority of the delegates, then when they go to the national convention this summer, the delegates who oppose Trump can get together and decide to join forces behind a single candidate. When they do the votes, the candidate they rally behind might have more votes than Trump. That would anger an awful lot of people, though. Imagine if Trump went to the convention with 48% of delegates, and Cruz with 22% of support and Rubio with 18% and they got together with other delegates from other candidates who've dropped out, and they do the vote and Cruz wins 51% to 49%. It would make it look like the party essentially got together to overthrow the clear choice of the voters... and it would completely alienate all of the new voters Trump has brought to the party. and it would undermine the legitimacy of the nominee, Cruz in this example. -k

I don't know that she (or Oprah...) is gay. But at the time when she was coming up in the politics and business world, coming "out" would have been career suicide. And coming "out" after decades in the public eye and essentially saying she's been faking it all along would be career suicide as well. Personally... I think it would be amazing if Condoleezza Rice and her long-time partner moved into the White House, but that couldn't happen present-day, especially on the Republican side. Some day there might be a gay president. Some day there might be a female president. Maybe some day a robot president (maybe Rubio still has a shot at becoming the first?) and someday maybe even an atheist president. -k

I think you've hit the nail on the head here... the Republicans have fed and fueled this anger pretty much since Obama took office. They had the assumption that feeding anger and discontent with Washington would result in a Republican presidency... instead if has resulted in creating the perfect environment for an outsider like Trump to walk in and blast the party establishment. They nurtured this anger with the assumption that they could control it. They created this monster. -k

"Hollywood liberals"... while a lot of the people in front of the camera are very liberal, the people in the studio offices who make decisions tend to be old, white, and often have very set-in-stone preconceptions of what audiences will watch. -k

I'm not crapping on peoples' jobs. I'm crapping on the Academy voters and voting process. I do sometimes sit through the credits... usually because I'm hoping for a post-credits "Easter egg" (the one in Deadpool was well worth the wait...) And I fully do realize that there are an awful lot of people who are employed in making a film, any film. Even an Adam Sandler crap-fest has people working behind the scenes, doing their best in thankless jobs. And I appreciate that without their efforts, there wouldn't be a film to watch. I really do. Astronauts don't get into space without the efforts of a huge team of people who work behind the scenes to make it possible. An actor doesn't make it to my screen without a similarly large effort from people who don't get recognition for their work. And in principle I think it's great that there's awards to acknowledge the efforts of at least some of them. The nominees selected by "sound voters", a group of industry professionals who actually know something about sound. But once the nominees are selected, there are no longer "sound voters", there are just voters. All eligible voters vote on all the categories. Do you think that many of the elderly old cranks of the Academy watched "The Force Awakens" or "Fury Road" at all? Of those who did, do you think they were doing so with an eye towards deciding the better sound editing and so-on? I think that only the tremendously gullible would believe that. Politics goes into all the awards... including these ones. -k

I don't know anything about "sound editing". Neither do the vast majority of the Academy voters. Neither me, nor the vast majority of the voters who decide the award, know enough about the subject to judge the category on its merits. That was the point I was trying to make. Maybe "The Martian" was actually an extraordinary achievement in sound editing because of technical obstacles that neither me nor any of the voters actually know anything about. Who knows? Certainly not me... certainly not the people who voted. If Fury Road wins the Sound Editing Oscar, what's your reaction to that? "Yay! I liked that movie!" "Boo! I hated that movie!" "Their sound editing was well done, although I think The Force Awakens deserved it more based on the technical difficulty of..." "um... ok?" I vote for having voters who are active in the industry and relevant to it, as opposed to octogenarians who received lifetime voting privileges in the 1960s and only watch movies nowadays if Woody Allen was involved. -k

I only caught the closing moments of the show... how did Chris Rock do? -k

What the Academy voters consider a "serious movie" has been studied and analyzed to some degree. It's true that Oscar nominations can turn into dollars, which has unfortunately become a money-making strategy by cynical producers who think they can exploit the predictability of Academy voters to make money off of the kind of people who base their movie-going decisions on such things. Perhaps the upcoming changes to the Academy Awards voting eligibility will change that. -k