61

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Just Watched

« on: November 12, 2023, 02:09:11 AM »

RoboCop (José Padilha, 2014)

Not nearly as bad as I was expecting, but still not a very good movie overall. Its biggest flaw is that it's far more interested in the sci-fi elements at play than it is in its titular character. Everything is explained, everything is debated, and everything is commented on by a team of scientists. That last point is especially annoying in the pivotal scenes where Alex Murphy is struggling to regain his humanity, and any mood or atmosphere that might be developing is ruined by constant cutting to the scientists watching him so they explain what he's doing and what it means for him. This is a movie that wants to be smart, but still treats its viewers like morons. Being more explicit with the science also hurts the movie when it goes against its own rules, as Murphy on at least two occasions manages to just force his way past his programming through the power of bullshit. That wouldn't necessarily have been a big deal if the science had been more vague, like in the original - although it's worth pointing out that Murphy in the original never breaks his programming at all - but the movie makes it a problem because it takes its science so seriously.

While the original's critiques of capitalism, policing, and the media feel timeless, the reboot dates itself immediately by being yet another 2010s action movie that devotes itself to criticizing the U.S. military's use of drones, and yet doesn't really have much to say about it beyond indicating that it's bad. I'm probably being a bit unfair about this, because this weird trend hadn't quite been beaten into the ground by 2014, but it still feels like such a boring choice of theme. It doesn't help that I've never been convinced by the anti-drone backlash that was so fashionable in the 2010s, and I'm convinced that most of it was being spread by people who didn't actually understand what drones are and how they work. The closest the movie comes to some proper satire is Samuel Jackson's talk show infotainer character, but he's not over-the-top enough for it to properly register. There are plenty of talking heads on TV these days who are far more ridiculous than him.

And then there's the main character. Holy hell, the costume is fucking awful. The drop-down visor is bad enough, but the real kiss of death is it being all black. It's such a fucking douchey look. There's no better word to describe it. The funny thing is that the movie seems to recognize that the all-black look is a dumb, juvenile way to try and make him look cool and edgy, and clearly frames it as such by having it be the demand of an out-of-touch asshole CEO, but...they still do it. Pointing out that you know what you're doing is bad isn't a great defense when you just go right ahead and do it anyway. As for Alex Murphy himself, he's fine. I don't think the movie gets off to a great start with him by portraying him as an aggressive cowboy cop who threatens informants at gunpoint, but he's at least shown to be a loving husband and father, which goes a long way towards making him sympathetic. Focusing more on his wife and son isn't a bad idea for the reboot as a way to differentiate itself from the original, too.

That is, as long as it's done well. Unfortunately, this movie can't think of anything to do with the character of Clara Murphy beyond have her be a weeping widow, someone who cries, complains, cries some more, and then complains some more. That is her character. She is there to look sad, scold Alex for riding off to do awesome RoboCop things, and to become a damsel in distress at the last minute, because why not throw another cliché in at that point? Regarding the part about her complaining, it doesn't matter that technically she's in the right all along. It's like why Skyler from Breaking Bad was such a contentious character. The movie is called RoboCop and it's marketed as being about RoboCop doing awesome things, so if you have a character who's trying to stop RoboCop from doing awesome things (as strongly visually represented by Clara stepping in front of Murphy's motorcycle and pleading with him to stop fighting crime and just go home), you're setting up the audience to dislike her as a fun-ruining killjoy. I'll grant that it's tough to portray a character who wants the hero to stop doing what the audience wants him to do, but they definitely could have handled it more carefully than they did in this movie.

There's probably a lot more I could criticize the movie for, but one detail I've got to highlight because it really bugs me is the gender-flipping of the character of Anne Lewis, Murphy's partner in the original. A lot of action movies for whatever reason only have one major female character (including the original), which is bad enough, but what makes it worse is that this movie deliberately enforces the one-woman rule. Murphy's wife becomes a major supporting character in this reboot, and therefore the character of Lewis needs to be made a man to correct for this. That has to be the thought process behind this, right? I hardly think they gender-flipped Lewis and then decided to make Clara a major character, and even if they did, it doesn't make them look much better. And even if we do accept that there can be only one major female character, I can't imagine there are a lot of people who would find an entirely passive weeping, complaining housewife to be a better character than the tough, likable, and proactive Lewis, who plays a major role in helping Murphy defeat the villains and regain his humanity in the original.

The best thing I can say about this reboot is that it has a genuinely great cast. They do their best, but they can't save this. Oh, and I guess the movie is too cool to have anyone actually utter the term "RoboCop" in it, so that's nice. Nothing like a movie indicating to you that it's embarrassed by its subject matter.

62

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump

« on: November 09, 2023, 05:00:49 PM »

If it was an agreement to flip on trump you might have something. However, it is not. It an agreement to truthfully testify

I've explained repeatedly why this is a pedantic quibble. We're never going to get anywhere if you keep returning to arguments that have already been addressed as soon as we're on a new subject.

which could have been given out of a number of reasons, such as desperation.

That's possible, sure. It doesn't seem very likely to me, as even if we assume that the prosecution is politically motivated, launching a massive, high-profile case and indicting a former president with a weak hand would be a very strange move. They could just as easily have not indicted Trump.

This was a ridiculous claim of rape in a dressing room which the victim admits to not have screamed during the event, did not contact police afterwards, continued to shop at the store, and who then admits to becoming a 'massive' Apprentice fan in the proceeding years. A victim who says that she would have considered dropping the claim if Trump had admitted it was consensual. Honk believes that this is totally normal for a rape claim and that we should overlook obvious contradictions.

None of these details are "contradictions," they're just things that you're arbitrarily declaring to be abnormal and presumably therefore indications of dishonesty. Who says that rape victims can't or don't behave like this?

Oddly, we saw from the jury conviction questionnaire that the conviction was heavily focused on defamation comments against the victim in recent years, and not focused on the actual rape allegation.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. The jury found Trump liable for both the incident and the defamation and awarded Carroll millions for both. How was their ruling "heavily focused" one way or the other?

There was one box which the jury checked which asks if the victim 'sexually abused', which could mean sexual comments about her looks in recent years like the other questions about recent events and not the rape, or maybe the jury believes that something else occurred.

No, it couldn't. This is the silliest argument you've made yet. Trump was being sued for a specific alleged incident, not for calling Carroll ugly. Courts are very clear with juries about what exactly it is that they're sitting in judgment of, and if they weren't in this case, Trump's lawyers would have gotten a mistrial in a heartbeat.

The jury specifically voted not to convict that the rape occurred, and voted no on that. They also left a box untouched which said "Did Mr. Trump forcibly touch Ms. Carroll". Somehow the position given is that the victim was sexually abused but there is not a position that the victim was forcibly touched, as if it was possible to be sexually abused without being forcibly touched, providing insight to their idea of 'sexual abuse'.

The document very clearly says to skip the question about forcible touching if they answered yes to sexual abuse, because it's redundant. These are meant as degrees of severity for what Trump allegedly could have done, with forcible touching being the least severe and rape being the most. Selecting a more severe option doesn't automatically exonerate him of the elements involved in the less severe options. Obviously you can't sexually abuse someone without forcibly touching them.

63

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump

« on: November 04, 2023, 03:51:24 AM »

Sydney Powell signed an agreement to testify truthfully. That is all.

That agreement is itself strong evidence that her testimony will be damaging to Trump, because otherwise the prosecution wouldn't be interested in calling her as a witness and giving her a plea bargain in exchange for her testimony. You've talked a lot about movies creating false impressions of what trials are really like, and one detail I'd like to stress that they often get wrong is the idea that when lawyers question witnesses on the stand, the answers they receive are entirely new information to them. In reality, trial lawyers only ask questions that they know the answers to. They do their homework, they find out what the witness knows, and then they ask them carefully selected questions that are designed to form a narrative with the judge or jury that's favorable to their side of the case. So no, the prosecution don't want Powell to testify because they genuinely want to know what she knows, or because they feel that it's their duty to "justice" to publicly hear everything she has to say. They already know what she knows, and hearing her testimony is part of their legal strategy - the ultimate goal of which is of course Trump's conviction.

A close associate of Sydney Powell insists that she has not "flipped"

The two Substack articles cited are basing their argument almost entirely on the fact that the charges which Powell pled guilty to are ones that Trump wasn't charged with. Okay, so what? I guess Powell won't be testifying against Trump with regard to those specific charges. But why is that such a big deal? Is there some rule that says that you can't testify against someone in exchange for a plea deal unless you've been charged with the same crime? Powell probably has information about Trump's intentions and actions related to the other charges that she's been asked to testify about, even if she wasn't herself charged with those crimes.

I won't claim to be as confident about what's going to happen as the other posters in this thread are. Pretty much every prediction I've made about Trump has turned out to be wrong. I expected him to lose in 2016, to win in 2020, to fade from political relevance once he left office, and certainly to never face a criminal investigation or trial for his misdeeds. So I'm not going to make any definitive predictions about how any of these trials will shake out in the end. Maybe the deal with Powell won't last in the face of her defiance on social media. Maybe she has a cunning scheme to upset the prosecution's entire game plan once she's up on the stand. All I can say is that simply taking events as they happen, there's no doubt that this number of co-defendants pleading guilty is a bad sign for the principal defendant, as is one of those co-defendants making a deal with the prosecution to testify. Whether or not this will all end up being enough to take Trump down for good is entirely beyond me.

64

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump

« on: November 02, 2023, 05:39:49 PM »

If most people are so shocked and surprised at who prosecutors really represent and how they function, how is it a valid argument to tell me that you are right about prosecutors based on (your) common sense and that all references which oppose your narrative are wrong, including statements by lawyers, attorneys associations, and academic papers?

Okay, I'll admit that I shouldn't have dismissed your sources as simply being wrong. It would be more accurate to say that you're taking them out of context and applying what's meant in a broad, general sense to how they should behave in a specific trial. Prosecutors should be unbiased/impartial/neutral in the sense that their primary concern should always be the pursuit of justice. Elements like politics, career prospects, or personal relationships should not be their concern. You don't prosecute someone whom you believe to be innocent because it would look good on your résumé, you don't refuse to prosecute someone because he's a pal of the governor, and so on. All straightforward stuff. However, once the indictment is issued and the case is publicly announced, the prosecution have essentially declared their side. Their goal - not their overall career goal, but their practical goal in this specific case - is the conviction of the defendant. They are no longer looking to convince themselves; they are looking to convince a judge or jury. The evidence they present, the witnesses they call to the stand, and the questions they ask are all intended to build their specific case that the defendant is guilty. To bring it all back to this case, if the prosecution has struck a deal with Powell to have her testify, it's because her testimony will be damaging to Trump. If Powell's testimony would be beneficial to Trump, the prosecution would not be calling her to testify. And if they had thought that her testimony changed the entire case and indicated that Trump was in fact innocent, then they wouldn't have indicted Trump to begin with. That's really what this all comes down to - the fact-finding stage of things comes before the actual prosecution.

65

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump

« on: October 28, 2023, 10:53:08 PM »

Nobody here claimed that prosecutors directly represent the victims of crimes.

66

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump

« on: October 28, 2023, 04:06:27 PM »

No, no, Tom is right. Prosecutors don't actually prosecute. They are Zen truth-seekers with no interest in convincing the jury of any particular narrative. They have no idea what any witness will say until they're up on the stand, and they only properly understand what's actually happened after everyone has already testified and presented their evidence. It's a lot like Ace Attorney in that way.

67

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump

« on: October 28, 2023, 01:34:17 AM »

To suggest that prosecutors are somehow neutral or impartial is insane. It's insane when you say it and it's insane when a guy on YouTube says it. Saying that it's really all about abstract concepts like justice is all well and good, but that's not something that's objectively quantifiable or assessible. In the concrete world, prosecutors file charges against people and argue for their guilt with the intention of having them be convicted in court. That is objectively what they do, and I don't care how many other people or websites you cite saying otherwise. It won't change how wrong they are.

68

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump

« on: October 27, 2023, 11:29:10 PM »

We have an adversarial legal system, and the prosecution is absolutely, 100% in opposition to the defendant in any given criminal trial. That's not a creation of movies, it's the reality, and whatever lofty platitudes you can find online about how the ultimate duty of prosecutors lies with abstract concepts like justice do not change the facts about how prosecutors go about their business every day. Lawyers do not call witnesses to the stand or question them because they themselves are looking for more information about the case. They already know what information the witness has. They already know the answers to the questions they ask. It's their job to know these things. The witnesses they call and the questions they ask are designed to convince the jury of a specific narrative - that the defendant is guilty, in the prosecution's case, or that the defendant is not guilty, in the defense's case.

69

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump

« on: October 26, 2023, 05:13:15 PM »

Yes, the deal is for truthful testimony, just like it is with all witnesses who flip, and truthful testimony must therefore be damaging to Trump, because otherwise the prosecution wouldn't be making deals with these witnesses to testify to begin with. I don't think I can put it any more simply than that. The prosecution is not on Trump's side. They are not trying to help him. If they're asking people to testify and making deals with them to that effect, it's because their testimony will hurt Trump. That's how this works. That's how it's always worked. You're quibbling about a distinction without a difference.

70

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump

« on: October 26, 2023, 03:21:37 PM »

I think it would be a big mistake to stop making deals on the assumption that the case is "sealed" and further evidence is unnecessary. The more evidence we can get to hammer in as firmly as possible the fact of Trump's corruption, the better off we as a nation will be in the long run. We won't be able to kill off the cult of Trump within our lifetimes, but future generations at least should be able to accept Trump's corruption as a substantiated historical fact, not a controversial gray area of history that nobody really knows the truth about.

71

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump

« on: October 23, 2023, 12:16:45 AM »

You don't need to bother pretending she's on your side. Trump will no doubt be yelling about how he's never even heard of her and also that he never liked her to begin with, if he hasn't done so already.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/22/politics/trump-sidney-powell/index.html

72

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump

« on: October 21, 2023, 09:30:05 PM »

You are arguing that some kind of hidden language is being employed here, but that wouldn't work. What happens when Powell doesn't "flip" against Trump and supports his narrative and claims that she was "testifying truthfully"?

The same thing that happens to any co-defendant who is expected to flip and then reneges; evidence is produced to impeach them and discredit their testimony, and the deal is called off because of their dishonesty. Prosecutors are not taking a gamble when they offer a witness a deal to testify in the hopes that they'll say something that will hurt another defendant. They know what the facts of the case are, they know what the answers to the questions they ask are, and presumably they're prepared to handle a witness who tries to be tricky. I'm sure they have to phrase any deal they make carefully so as not to say that a specific kind of testimony from her is what's being rewarded, and I'm also sure that they wouldn't make such a clumsy mistake in a case as high-profile as this one.

73

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump

« on: October 21, 2023, 12:37:45 AM »

If Powell didn't have damaging testimony to offer against Trump or other defendants, her testimony wouldn't have been a condition of the deal. The prosecution is not going to put her on the stand so she can testify that Trump is totally innocent. You can quibble about how actually she's just agreeing to testify truthfully and not specifically to testify against anyone else, but in practice it comes down to the same thing.

That being said, I think it's far too early to be celebrating over this. This wouldn't be the first time - or even the second time - that someone was convicted for being an accessory or accomplice to one of Trump's crimes while Trump himself walked free. There's something deeply paradoxical about that, but it's the reality.

74

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump

« on: October 20, 2023, 06:59:15 PM »

Tom's right, guys. Pleading guilty to misdemeanors is a huge win for Powell. Frankly, I'm extremely jealous of her. One day maybe I'll be lucky enough to plead guilty to a misdemeanor too.

Criticizing the military is not morally wrong at all.

Period.

End of sentence.

Do you realize that there's an actual context to what's being discussed here? The subject under discussion here isn't whether or not criticizing the military is inherently morally wrong (of course it's not), but why it's generally seen as conservative dogma that the military should never be criticized or insulted, and then those same conservatives ignore or downplay the contempt that Trump regularly shows for the military. I've allowed for the possibility that this dogma may have shifted somewhat since Trump's election, but no - once Biden was elected, conservatives promptly began scolding him for disrespecting - or just seeming to disrespect - the military the same way they regularly did with Obama. And now that Trump is campaigning again and his usual lack of respect for the military is making the news, conservatives have once more dropped into apathy.

75

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump

« on: October 20, 2023, 03:24:02 PM »

You don't need to bother pretending she's on your side. Trump will no doubt be yelling about how he's never even heard of her and also that he never liked her to begin with, if he hasn't done so already.

Also, it's not polarizing to point out that a stance of "criticizing/insulting the military is morally wrong" should logically apply to everyone regardless of whether or not you like them.

76

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump

« on: October 18, 2023, 03:02:02 AM »

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-calling-military-officials-dumbest-people-applauded-1835218

This wouldn't necessarily be a big deal if not for how regularly and openly conservatives fetishize venerating the military. They got mad when Obama saluted a soldier with the same hand that was holding a drink. They got mad when Biden (allegedly) looked at his watch during a military funeral. But Trump is now demonstrating his contempt for the military quite plainly, and just like they did the last dozen or so times he did something similar, they're completely ignoring it. It's such a blatant, obvious double standard. Disrespecting the military, or even just seeming to disrespect the military, is monstrous when it's a Democrat. But when it's Trump, it's not a big deal and anyone who complains is a triggered snowflake.

77

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Superhero Movies & Comics General

« on: October 11, 2023, 04:46:27 PM »

No, there are other large actors who can act well, or at least considerably better than Momoa. But then again, I don't think Aquaman needed to be played by an enormous guy to begin with. I'm pretty sure that Momoa was mostly cast because of his history of playing fierce badass characters, and they wanted to preemptively push back against people making jokes about how lame Aquaman is. Personally, I think that worrying so much about people making jokes on the Internet is a poor priority for a film studio, but, alas, Hollywood has yet to take advice from me.

And yes, capeshit is my biggest issue in life, as it should be for everyone.

78

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Superhero Movies & Comics General

« on: October 11, 2023, 02:11:21 AM »

I've watched Blue Beetle. It's decent. Xolo Maridueña is charismatic and likable as Jaime, and his family are endearing - there's a dumb running gag about his grandmother that gets old very fast in the latter half of the movie, but that's my only complaint there. The action scenes are nice and creative, as they should be for a capeshitter like this. I really like the setting, which does what so many previous DC movies refused to do and takes advantage of the fact that this is an entirely fictional city to give it a unique sense of character. Palmera City is bright, glittering, and enticing, a seemingly idyllic paradise for the wealthy and well-connected...and an unattainable dream for impoverished families like the Reyes, who live in a humble working-class neighborhood on the city's outskirts and are treated with disdain by its more fortunate residents. And on a related note, there's some very nice and topical social commentary about what living in America means for a Hispanic family nowadays, and the male members of the family promote a wholesome and non-toxic sense of masculinity, which I don't think we see a lot of in pop culture nowadays.

There are, unfortunately, some downsides to the movie. Susan Sarandon as the main villain gives a very weird, very campy, almost deliberately unnaturalistic performance. I don't know what the idea behind it was, but it doesn't work well. Bruna Marquezine isn't a bad actress, but she's miscast as Jaime's love interest, a character who's supposed to be a privileged, wealthy socialite whose compassion stands in contrast to her aunt's callousness, and yet is initially received with hostility by the Reyes family because of her elite status. Marquezine's ethnicity and very strong Brazilian accent work against these dynamics. I'm not saying there aren't any rich Brazilians; only that in this movie, in this setting, I really think they would have been better off casting a white or white-passing American actress. It's not like this movie is suffering from a lack of diversity. Oh, and it really drives me nuts how while Jaime explicitly makes a point of never killing anyone, his family and love interest in the final act kill lots and lots of people. Very directly killing people, too, as in by pointing guns at them and shooting them dead. It really undermines the strength of whatever no-killing moral they were trying to go for.

The biggest problem with the movie, though, is that it all feels a bit too generic and familiar. We've met all these characters before, seen these tropes before, heard this dialogue before, and so on. It's hard to give specific examples of this - the two I could most easily point to are that the working-class family dynamic feels like it's already been covered by the Shazam! movies, and the idea of Jaime inheriting a legacy from an older, tech-savvy hero who bolsters him with his technology feels like it comes from the MCU spoder. It's just a general feeling I get that so much of this movie is running over tired, well-worn ground. Is it fair to judge a movie based on what other movies have done before? Well, to a degree, yes. Given the current glut of capeshit, movies have to work harder to stand out from the crowd now. This lack of originality may be a big part of why so many capeshit movies are flopping at the box office when ten years or so ago most of them did very well.

Oh, and this is a minor point, but I don't care for this movie's in-name-only adaptation of OMAC. It reminds me of the in-name-only version of "Intergang" from Black Adam. I would really rather that movies not bother using the names of characters and organizations from the source material if they bear no actual resemblance to the source material. No adaptation is better than an in-name-only adaptation.

Also, we finally have a trailer for the last DCEU film until Gunn's Superman movie:



Right off the bat, this trailer hits us with a voiceover warning us of what I can already guarantee will be a major flaw in the movie, just like it was in the previous one - Momoa's sheer inability to move out of his comfort zone of playing a chill dudebro. Maybe the people I've argued with about this before have a point in that I shouldn't say he "plays himself," but if it simplifies things, I'll just say that Momoa apparently can't do drama. He can deliver a joke, he can handle an action scene, and he can be a very likable and charismatic screen presence, but he can't effectively portray a lead character that goes through the ups and downs, the peaks and valleys of a conventional movie and emerges from the end of it as a different person. Changing his tone of voice from line to line in this voiceover is the least he could do, the very least, and he doesn't do it. Maybe he can't do it, or maybe he refuses to do it because he thinks it'll hurt his brand, like how Dwayne Johnson refuses to ever lose a fight in a movie because he thinks it would hurt his brand. No ill will towards Momoa; I'm sure he's a great guy in real life, but I've grown tired of his stock "chillax, bro, let's get wasted tonight!" performance.

The rest of the trailer looks okay for the most part. It's probably a good idea to keep building on the characters from the first movie rather than introducing a bunch of new ones. Check out how they're basically pretending Amber Heard isn't even in this movie - and compare it to how everyone at the studio fell over themselves going to bat for Ezra Miller after their spree of violent crimes. Hmm. The CGI unfortunately looks poor once again, although nothing jumps out as being as terrible as it was in The Flash. I guess there's nothing we can do about that as long as Marvel continues to overwhelm the VFX industry and work them ragged with their current oversaturation of content. Finally, check out another article basically predicting that this is going to be a disaster:

https://variety.com/2023/film/news/aquaman-2-jason-momoa-drunk-claims-amber-heard-cut-scenes-elon-musk-letter-1235747775/

79

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Died Suddenly

« on: October 08, 2023, 02:32:15 AM »

What's even the argument here, that the vaccine killed one of these boys after two years and the other after three years? And the millions of us who are still doing fine, we're just waiting until the poison eventually kicks in?

Eight year old weren't being vaccinated in 2021. Vaccination of children is a more recent phenomenon.

Children have been safely vaccinated for many, many years, but I take it you specifically mean the covid vaccine. Okay, fair enough. In that case, what's the connection between these deaths and the pro-vaccination campaigns they appeared in? Does appearing in a pro-vaccination campaign make you more likely to die from a vaccine? For that matter, what evidence is there that their deaths are related to vaccines at all?

80

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Died Suddenly

« on: October 07, 2023, 07:48:51 PM »

What's even the argument here, that the vaccine killed one of these boys after two years and the other after three years? And the millions of us who are still doing fine, we're just waiting until the poison eventually kicks in?