What otherwise terrible movie is an unacknowledged classic in your mind?
I’d have to say Starship Troopers
‘Starship Troopers’ really came into its own when Fox News turned into the movie’s jingoistic news network after 9/11
Hudson Hawk? Jaws 4?? Good grief.
Don't choose the worst dreck ever, but dreck that has some unrecognized awesomeness.
"Commando," e.g. Idiotic beyond belief, but with the best one-liners of Schwarzenegger's career and non-CGI action sequences which still hold up pretty well
Definitely Roadhouse
But Gymkata? oof. I am pretty sure that was just awful when I saw it in the 80s
Battleship is a clever vote: US & Japanese fleets working together against the Chinese - err, alien - navy
Robocop isn't terrible though, where S Troopers is just ridiculous
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like this. It is genuinely the comedy of errors you see in the vid.
B. You didn't stand up to usher out your kids, bc you weren't wearing pants.
I have no dignity left🤦♂️. I remained seated, bc the show must go on. I'd done enough TV by then to know that.
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Pic: James at Xmas
You just have to push through. I also thought the interviewer, @BBCJamesM, or the producers, might end it. (We are very grateful to James for handling it all with such aplomb.) And also, it all happened so fast, I didn't really know what to do. But yes, I do wear
The GOP is now naturally a party of opposition, not of government.
1. Many (@gtconway3d; @AdamSerwer) have commented on the GOP's gradual embrace of ideological rigidity over competence, and know-nothingism in response to inconvenient facts. Good administration requires a
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basic ability to admit reality and solicit expertise in response to its problems:
thinking rhetorically, of the ease, like putting on an old glove, with which the GOP and Fox have slid back into hysterical opposition to a Democratic president:
The "Korean Journal of Defense Analysis" just posted an article @AriusDerr and I wrote: "North Korea’s Missed Opportunity: The Unique, Dovish Moment of the Overlapping Trump and Moon Presidencies."
how much effort we when through to say in proper social science language that Trump was colossally unprepared to negotiate personally with Kim Jong Un and therefore massively screwed up. The paper is literally an extra 1000 words long, because we couldn't just say Trump is an
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idiot.
Here is a nice example:
"Trump also apparently expected no less than a Nobel Prize just for showing up, regardless of what he actually delivered. By contrast, the Nobel Prize-winning Camp David Accords did, in fact, durably reset
the Israel–Egypt relationship. The
Watching Fox fawn all over Rush and bypass his gleeful harshness, while other outlets briefly touch on his passing and then move on is both disappointing and revealing.
Revealing in that it shows just how cramped and closed the right-wing media space really is. In the real
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world, Rush is a figure of minor interest, a sort of a media pre-cursor to Trump with his mix of politics and shock entertainment, but no deep thinker or national voice. You probably vaguely knew who he was but didn't care that much, bc you haven't listened to AM in decades.
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Hence the normal news notes his passing, calls him 'provocative' (an understatement), and moves on. Bc it's just not that important given covid, the impeachment, the big storm, and so on.
In MAGA-world though, Rush is some kind of patron saint, the guy who saved AM radio,and
'Ray Donovan' should go down as the iconic show of the Trump era, like '24' was for W:
A violent, rage-filled, gangster-ish sociopath, unable to connect even with his family, reduces his opponents through clever stratagems or alpha-male displays of force and humiliation.
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He is, of course, surrounded by beautiful, wealthy, and/or important women, and, naturally, they swoon before his macho ferocity and throw themselves at him (instead of, you know, fleeing in terror). He cheats on his wife to sleep with them, and then treats all of them, wife
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included, like s*, bc when you're a star, you can do anything
And in a perfect Trumpian touch, Donovan does it all in style - buff, top-shelf liquor, designer clothes, luxury car - bc remember, Trump's problem with the Capitol sack wasn't the violence but that the putschists
Blame @FoxNews. This needs to be emphasized a lot going forward.
Broadcast TV Fox reaches & dissuades moderate conservatives who otherwise might accept that alterations in power to the Democrats are not the apocalypse.
The furthest right quintile is unreachable. The American
hard right has been lost in conspiracy theories for a century: FDR as Bolshevik, fluoridation, Trilateral Commission, New World Order, birtherism. Mercifully, they're served by narrowcast radio & social media of limited reach.
It's Fox TV reaching the next, softer right,
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quintile which is the problem. These voters are church-going conservatives w/ intense preferences on stuff like abortion, taxes, & immigration, but crucially they are not hard-right bananas. They know Trump was flawed & that the Capitol sack was terrible.Their post-sack drift