sheeeit

I think you might want to research this a bit more.

I think this discussion might be over your head.

Agreed. Guys like Sandler have at least shown that hey do possess range as an actor but they often choose to take lucrative roles that require less effort. The actors I am talking about are the ones that also have become big stars and made lots of money by taking safe/easy acting roles. But unlike guys like Cruise and Sandler, these other guys have never shown any ability to act in difficult roles that require larger ranges. They have tried and the results are bad.

I was recently on a very looooong multi day road trip and listened to a lot of talk radio and a lot of political talk radio. I really never listened very much previously so I have no idea what these shows were like in the past or anything like that. I just based my opinion on the few hours or so over a few days that I listened to a lot of it. 1) Rush- Well he's dead and it appears his show is now guest hosts that are ultra conservative and they constantly play old clips of Rush. Hardly listenable. D 2) Hannity- Not very smart. Relentless repeating. I actually found some of his guests interesting but he is basically unlistenable. D 3) Shapiro- I actually enjoyed a lot of his show. He is certainly smart. My guess is that he is often mis-quoted or mis-understood because nothing he said was too controversial but you have to listen carefully to what he actually says. I'd give him a B. 3) Glenn Beck- Hardly listenable. I think he must be bipolar or something. Not nearly as funny/witty as he thinks. Did have a few guests that were interesting. C- 4) Mark Levin- Brutally bad. I honestly think guys like Glenn Beck are at least genuine in their beliefs but I can not believe this guy actually believes what he says. F 5) NPR- Pretty good mostly. They seem to slant liberal but not too much from what I heard. Hosts are smart and content pretty interesting. B 6) Al Sharpton- Had no idea he had a show and now I know why. He is not very smart or very good at radio. Unlistenable. D 7) Joe Pags- Another I had never heard of. OK guests but he thinks he is very funny/witty and he is not. C- 😎 POTUS- Decent. I liked Dan Abrams and Julie Mason. Chris Cuomo is unlistenable. B- 9) Urban View- Pretty much unlistenable. Not very smart. Wildly hypocritical. Someone named Joe Madison seemed to be on when we were driving a lot. He was shockingly hypocritical and bad. D 10) Progress- It actually had potential but just kept coming back to stupid, tired retread gotchas. C- I am sure there are many I missed. I have decided that political talk radio is designed for stupid/idealogues on both sides of the aisle. I am truly surprised they make any money. Very, very few of them are smart. Edit- I suppose they make money because it seems like 20 minutes out of every hour is commercials.

Do you know how we know you are a soccer dork? Kidding. Great show and can not wait.

I noticed I messed up my post. Was going to say that all of those other folks in Boogie Nights are better actors and it showed when they were in scenes together but he is arguably the biggest "star" of all of them.

Tough one because I have never really seen him go to a deep level. Maybe All the Presidents Men. It is old but he was OK in the Candidate.

Excellent list.

This is also close to what I am using as a barometer of acting ability. Stallone can be good in very, very simple roles with limited dialogue and limited range. So when he is in those roles he does well. But watch him in roles where he actually tries to act and he sucks. Really sucks. he is a bona fide movie star for certain but not a great actor by any stretch.

Redford is a perfect example. he is not a terrible actor and he has been in tons of great films. But he just cant quite get there to the level of the greats.

Solid list.

I get this and somewhat agree. He has been in some big productions and he does have a certain charisma and screen presence in those movies. But those movies are designed to highlight his presence and minimize his acting range. Like the Italian Job. I think it is a really fun movie but out of all of the actors in that movie, he is the worst. Ed Norton, Sutherland, Charlize. They dominated him from an acting standpoint. I think of Entourage and when he does a cameo. He seems just like an athlete or similar that they stick in there who do not know anything about acting. His acting is similar.

Cruise is an interesting one. I actually think he is a very solid to great actor. Obviously a number of his roles are cheesy and campy and he does cheesy and campy really well, but he also has some great roles where he is very good and he holds his own with some of the all time greats. Color of Money was excellent and he showed great range and went toe to toe with Paul Newman. Days of Thunder was as cheesy and campy as you get but he acted one on one in many scenes with Robert Duval and held his won easily. It is hard to think of a movie he wasnt pretty good in. Unlike Walhberg where he just flat out sucks in certain roles.

To me, this is a perfect example of what I see in Walhberg. He was OK in Boogie Nights primarily because his role had little or no range and he could just be this mousy, soft spoken do gooder type role that he is good in. But watch it critically when he is on screen with other great actors (and Boogie Nights had a shitload of great actors). Seymour Hoffman, Julienne Moore, Ed Macy, John Reilly, Don Cheadle- I would consider all of them to be much better actors than Wahlberg but he is a bigger "movie star". If you watch him in movies like Ted, The Gambler, Planet of the Apes, Italian Job, Daddys Home etc. his acting is pitiful. Some of those movies were good and some were bad but his personal performance in them was almost cartoonish. I think part of it is that he just isnt that intelligent. But like I said, he is a bona fide movie star and I enjoy some of his movies. He just is not a great actor.

Did not expect this many replies. To make it more objective (which is really hard- thats what she said) I look at actors specific performance based on the role they are cast. Every actor has made a bad movie but that doesn't mean their acting was bad in it. I also like to watch 2 actors together and it becomes apparent when one is better than the other. Agreed on Cage and Stallone and Segal just isnt what I would call a great "movie star". Sandler is a bit of an outlier. It takes real acting chops to make it on SNL. Plus he writes so many of his own movies and is clearly playing to a base. He was pretty solid in Hidden Gems and he never gets over shadowed by other actors.

Was having this discussion with a group the other night. We were talking about truly big time, bankable actors (even some Oscar nominees/winners) that are really just not very good at acting. Of course, acting can be quite subjective. My contributions: Mark Wahlberg- He is basically rangeless. In The Fighter, it is almost comical how much better of an actor Christian Bale and Amy Adams are compared to him. Also, he received a lot of critical Acclaim for his role in The Departed. I watched it agin recently, admittedly I was high so the good was really good and the bad was really bad, but his scenes were almost comically bad. His range is so small it is amazing he is as successful as he is. And seems like a genuinely good guy. Scarlett Johansson- She is certainly a bona fide movie star and incredibly attractive. But, like above, her range is very limited. I do think she is getting better.

Thanks? Im curious though. Do you think if we keep 2500-4000 troops in Afghanistan long-term that the “no casualties“ will continue?

A good argument can be made for staying but the cost you speak of, specifically no casualties, is temporary. The former admin made a deal with the Taliban to be out by May and, in return, the Taliban agreed to basically stand down. But they , the Taliban, have already said they will go back to being the terrorists that they are if the May deadline is extended. When Americans start dying again the cost/benefit isn’t going to mean much.

I suppose it is possible. I think an analysis of actual trials (not TV/movies) would show that the lone hold out thing is very rare (not simply hung juries but specifically lone hold outs). It is a bit higher when considering multiple charges but still a very small number. And even rarer are instances where a lone hold out caused a mistrial that 11 other jurors decided differently where the next trial did not result in a conviction or a plea that involved significant jail time. It happens and that is just a part of our system. But I do not believe that the racists you decry actually change justice. They might delay it, but there are no where near enough to actually change anything. Appreciate the debate.

I will politely pass on Texags and take your word for it. To your overall point, we just disagree on the size and scope and influence. I certainly believe there are racists in society. It is human nature. There are racists among every type of humans in every society. I am just going to believe that the scale of racist that you like to describe is very small. I think the chances that a true racist could make it into the jury pool and be selected for this trial and pass through jury selection without detection and then have enough sway over the other jurors to get them to decide in a manner that they would not have otherwise is so small that it is not worth talking about. I think the legal defense of Chauvin would be exactly the same if the only difference were that Floyd was white. I do not believe (and really do not believe you do either) that people on the jury would vote in anyway diffferent than they will if Floyd was white or Chauvin was black. I think the dialog on sites like Texags would be identical if Floyd was white. I think they are massively more pro police than anti black in their arguments and rhetoric. Do you really believe that if the exact same circumstances existed but Floyd was white that a site like texags would be calling for Chauvin to be guilty? I do not.

That is exactly what I am saying but not in the overtly racist way in which you are saying it. I do not think the race angle you embraced will have much of anything to do with the outcome. In fact your whole ridiculous statement "scary big black guy with a criminal record who didn't obey all orders" is worthless. I don't think anyone on that jury would acquit based on anything related to your statement. However, if a medical expert tells them that the amount of drugs found in the defendants system was capable of causing him to have difficulty breathing and was large enough to cause his death then I think any person would have to at least consider that. And, as I pointed out, they would only consider it relevant if the other factors I outlined were also present. I don't think it will happen and I think the guy deservedly goes down. I am just suggesting a scenario that could end in his acquittal.

There are so many problems with this simplistic line of thinking and reasoning. As for sentencing differences, there are so many different factors involved that it is really impossible to draw any meaningful conclusions from it. Example- Defendant A slaps his girlfriend across the face because she cheated on him. Pleads guilty to battery and serves 1 month. Defendant B beats his gf bloody because he was high. Pleads down to battery and serves 6 months. When someone looks at the cases 10 years later all they see is 2 supposedly equal crimes with big differences in time served. Maybe one was white and one black? Maybe one was rich and the other poor? But you should not draw any conclusions based on either race or economics in this case as the underlying facts were so different. The economics or race were largely irrelevant in the sentencing but anyone can twist them. Also, people used Los Angeles as one of the offenders and called it systemic racism. However, during the period in question (2010-2016), Los Angeles had a black woman DA, a supreme court that was 72% minority, an overwhelming number of trial judges that were democrats (hard to get a good count but estimated to be 85%) and more ethnic prosecutors than in anytime previous. According to the studies that you presented, during the time in question, LA was one of the worst offenders of unfair sentencing. You claim it was race based. For that to be true, there had to be some kind of coordination between a black woman district attorney (who sets the standard for the entire department) and a bunch of democrat judges and a bunch of minority prosecutors and an appellate court that oversaw the entire system that was 72% minority that all colluded to give black and hispanic criminals longer sentences than whites for the same crimes. I think that is virtually impossible. So I think the answer lies elsewhere.

Point 1 is not irrelevant for the jury. Obviously the guy died. The defense will absolutely have to provide something for the jury to blame the death on. That is why I said all 3 things must be present. If the defense gets a doctor to testify to #3 above then the jury will still have to have some reason that he died. Just #3 alone I do not think will do it.

Have only followed the peripherals but this guy needs to go down. I think manslaughter is a better fit but idaf as long as he does significant time. IMO, the only way he gets off if is all three of these things happen: 1) A credentialed medical expert testifies that the fentanyl/opioid levels in his system were high enough to cause his death 2) There is some sort of cop manual that shows the technique he used is part of the training 3) A credentialed medical expert testifies that from the autopsy there was not any swelling/bruising etc on Floyd's neck/throat that indicated that the kneeling actually impacted his breathing I think it is unlikely all 3 are either true or can be proven, but if they are then I think he might get off.