It’s always taken for granted that you can take out the huge star and the movie still gets made. It never happens. 

“How many great actors does it take to mask the fact that there’s not a lot going on beneath the surface?”

“Adam Sandler admitted that he absolutely takes roles based on whether or not there’s a free vacation involved.”

Serves them right for... having different beliefs than Sacha Baron Cohen?

“Distant” is a great word. The subject of the movie is not the American comedian hamming it up in the foreground, it’s the Eurovision contest in the background. It’s like they decided to make a sweet, earnest movie about the Eurovision contest, but then concluded it needed to be a Ferrel vehicle to make money. 

Yeah, I don’t fault it for that, other than that it’s not appealing to me. But Ferrel did make an ice dance movie and it was much more of a spoof. 

Blackface mocks black people. An impression of a specific person doesn’t really do that. 

Do we really have to keep eliminating tv episodes until you see zero blackface halloween stories? Yes it happens, but it’s literally as rare as the plague.

I guess your reaction to it was similar to my reaction to Pitch Perfect, which is pretty earnest about its singing competition world, and I liked it. But in this, the constant cutting to people I didn’t recognize doing joke free, straight commentary about Eurovision just seemed like wasted opportunities to me. How…

“it becomes clear that the movie isn’t really out to satirize the melodramatic excesses of competitive pop”

“Virtually every kid I knew owned at least one Batman T-shirt”

LOL. I’m responding to exactly what you are saying and you have nothing. A mixed race character cannot be played by a white person, but when asked if a black person could play that character, you didn’t say no. Different rules for different races.

There is only one race that cannot play a character with only one parent of that race, according to you. That’s treating one race differently than all others.

I love that this is consistently the one romantic configuration we’re allowed to criticize and question. 

You’re treating one race differently from others. Only white people are restricted to playing people of 100% the same race, according to you. 

People are allowed to disagree with you. No one needs an “education” just because they have a different opinion than you. 

People working with their friends seems like how a lot of good stuff gets made. Replacing that dynamic with a casting bureaucracy might sacrifice quality. Do you prefer the Monkees or the Beatles?

Sound is all that matters. Sound is what the actor is delivering. 

This and Heaven Can Wait seem like the most overrated pair of movies ever. They’re both just so... minor, and for some reason are treated like monumental works. I do not get it. I like Reds but the Beatty love fest of this era is baffling to me.

Fiction about US politics always misses the mark because it insists on trying to appeal to both parties. It just can’t be done. All good faith give-and-take, where it happens, happens within parties, and these filmmakers should stop with the general election stories and give us stories about primary fights where all…