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NYT: UFC loves Trump.

NYT: Trump at UFC

NYT: Trump at UFC

Sixteen thousand people erupted into rapture when Donald J. Trump walked into the Prudential Center in Newark at 10 p.m. Saturday to attend an Ultimate Fighting Championship match.

UFC doesn’t appeal to me, and this article about Trump’s attendance isn’t illuminating, but it did get me thinking about other presidents. 

Where would Joe Biden go to revel in the embrace of his most avid fan base?

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Godzilla Minus One is more than a monster movie. 9/10

When was the last time a Godzilla movie was a good movie?  Not good for a monster movie, but a good movie?  Godzilla Minus One is a good movie and is available on Netflix.  It won an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, has a 7.9 on IMDB and 98%/98% on Rotten Tomatoes. 

Godzilla Minus One cost $15 million to make and pulled $56 million at the domestic box office.  For comparison, Godzilla x Kong has an IMDB rating of 6.2, cost $150 million to make and pulled $196 million in domestic ticket sales.  Godzilla x Kong turned a profit, but is a forgettable movie.

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NYT: Star Wars Acolyte will not be good.

NYT: Will the Force be with The Acolyte

NYT: Will the Force be with The Acolyte

In two days, a Star Wars spin-off TV show, The Acolyte, will premier on Disney+.  The eight episode season will cost $180 million.  It’s hard to believe anyone thinks this show will be successful.

This is how Leslye Headland, the show creator, pitched her idea for the show to Kathleen Kennedy, the president of Lucas Films.

Headland described her concept in the meeting as “‘Frozen’ meets ‘Kill Bill.’” Kennedy bought it on the spot.

That’s why the Star Wars IP is trashed.  Kennedy couldn’t resist a sister drama crossed with a woman’s revenge fantasy. 

Stenberg, the show’s star, said “Leslye really is driven by emotion and heart and relationships. So even though our show is within the ‘Star Wars’ universe and set in outer space, in a galaxy far, far away, it’s really a family drama.”

Star Wars fans don’t want that, and everyone else knows that Star Wars is a deteriorating IP, so aren’t going to get on board now.

There was a way that the Star Wars universe could have thrived if the people in charge were competent and didn’t despise the original fan base.  Instead, they tried a bait-and-switch.

Make the three pre-quels and sequels for the original fans.  Tell those masculine stories by staying true to the original trilogy.  Knock out a few TV shows in the same manner, like Mandalorian .

With a well-developed universe, be honest about a TV series that is going to be less action-oriented.  Say you are making a family drama, love story or children’s adventure in that universe.  The original movie, Star Wars: A New Hope was described as a Western in space.  There are plenty of family-oriented Westerns like The Big Valley or Bonanza.  Make sure that original fans know that you don’t hate them and aren’t going to destroy legacy characters.  Emphasize quality, not diversity.

NY Mag: Don’t worry about Trump’s convictions.

NY Magazine: Trump conviction

The author of the commentary, Jonathan Chait, describes himself as a liberal hawk.  He is a committed anti-Trumper, but has criticized liberals and conservatives.

Chait talks about Trump’s conviction on 34 felony charges.

The case was always marginal, the kind of charge you would never bring against a regular first-time offender. It was the sort of charge you’d concoct if the target is a bad guy and you want to nail him for something.

The Trump case is marginal.  At it’s heart, a rich guy paid of a hooker who wanted to go public about a one-night stand from 18 years ago.  It is less than a victim less crime because privately settling a dispute happens all the time.

Chait says it’s the sort of charge you concoct.  So, pull some trivial shit together to throw it at a wall.  Maybe it sticks. 

In the liberal view, Trump is a bad guy that liberals want to nail for something.  Does anyone actually believe that if Trump were a Democrat, any of this would be happening?  Consider that Senator Kennedy crashed a car into the water, and left a woman trapped inside to die.  He was not charged.

In Trump’s case, it’s likely that charges would have been dropped if he withdrew from the presidential election.  That sure sounds like the DA is tampering with the 2024 presidential election.

Trump is polling well, and has a very good chance of being elected president again.  Progressives are willing to go to any extreme to stop that from happening.  They see their actions as justified, no matter how much America is damaged, because they feel so strongly about their beliefs.  That’s dangerous.

Disney’s Star Wars hotel was never going to work.

Disney spent a quarter billion dollars to build, Star Wars:  Galactic Starcruiser hotel, and it only remained open for a year and a half.  This girl spent $6000 to be immersed in the experience.  Fortunately, she’s cute and made an engaging 4-hour video about her Star Wars adventure that’s been viewed by 7 million people.  She should recoup her expenses.

Disney is a big company, with a net profit of 1.7 billion dollars last year.  They can’t keep making big mistakes like this.  How did they screw this up so bad?

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Trump trial was a miscarriage of justice.

The Trump conviction was a partisan hit job by a rogue prosecutor and a corrupt district attorney.  Every thing you need to know is in that headline.

We are expected to believe that 12 fair and impartial jury members came to a unanimous decision 34 times?  That isn’t even remotely plausible. 

You’ve seen courtroom dramas.  The jury deliberation is fraught with tension as they discuss a couple of days of testimony.  After 5 weeks of testimony, the Trump jury deliberated for 6 hours to talk about 34 charges.  That’s like 11 minutes per felony.

Pray you never get arrested.  The process is the punishment.  95% of criminal cases never go to trial because a plea bargain is reached.  When a person is arrested for a crime, the DA doesn’t file one charge, but as many as can be plausibly applied.  The avalanche of charges and potential for a long prison sentence are meant to intimidate the defendant into reaching a plea bargain. 

Prosecutors know that anything can happen in a trial, so it’s safer to take the easy win.  Getting a conviction on every single charge the DA could think up, is just not credible.  We are supposed to believe that the DA didn’t go overboard on any of the charges?

AP: Democrats have to solve their own problem.

AP: Democrats Plan

The Democratic National Convention, where the president would otherwise be formally nominated, comes after Ohio’s ballot deadline of Aug. 7. The party’s convention is scheduled for Aug. 19-22.

For over a decade, the DNC knew that Ohio had an early deadline for presidential candidates to get on the ballot.  The DNC paid no attention to the deadline, so Biden wasn’t going to be on the ballot in Ohio unless someone did something to fix the problem.

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