Al Gore's Desperate Bid to Keep Keith Olbermann

[michaelsean]

Where's the outrage over Keith's $10 million salary? It comes down to two 1%ers battling it out. The DUmp should hate both of them.

[Odysseus]

That is tinfoil. Just like the kind of DU talk about radio prior to Air America (even after in some cases). If it would make them money, they would do it in a heartbeat. I don't care how often The Simpsons makes fun of Fox, that network isn't going to kill a cash cow. Same with Southpark (although that is more libertarian than conservative in the modern sense ... which is pretty much Jesus, Guns, Israel and fuck you asshole, I want my tax cut).

Funny how you can cite tinfoil while wearing it.

Air America was kept on the air through massive infusions of cash before it collapsed. Most networks or studios won't even entertain a conservative pitch, so any conservative project either gets in via stealth, or is stillborn, and there is a long history of Hollywood tanking shows or movies that make them uncomfortable, while promoting crap that makes them feel good, but is doomed at the box office or on the tube. Proof of this is the string of expensive post-Iraq antiwar movies that tanked, one after the other, and yet the studios kept churning them out. Meanwhile, movies that showed us in a good, or even less evil light, like The Kingdom, did far better, but were not emulated.

Some of the Hope & Change is good but it is mostly of the kook variety. You have to buy the narrative and I really don't. Sometimes, it looks stale.

Especially if you emphatically hate the message.

Rush is self satire, if anything.

No, Rush is quite adept at skewering the left. His song and commercial parodies are particularly funny.

Don't know the others but there is more than one political cartoonist that can skewer the President without descending into Kenyan Mau Mau cliche.

You don't know Mark Steyn or PJ O'Rourke? Seriously? There are lots of political cartoonists, writers and the like who can skewer the president without going birther, but I also know that you won't be able to point me to one. Meanwhile, Michael Ramirez tears him a new one almost daily.

Whatever.

Whatever=I don't have an answer, but I'm not going to admit it.

Where's the outrage over Keith's $10 million salary? It comes down to two 1%ers battling it out. The DUmp should hate both of them.

No, they only hate our 1%ers. Their 1%ers are just fine.

[AmPat]

Rush is self satire, if anything.

Don't know the others but there is more than one political cartoonist that can skewer the President without descending into Kenyan Mau Mau cliche.

Whatever.

And this is why your opinion carries so little weight. Not only are you wrong 99% of the time, you follow up with blatant dishonesty like this. Are you seriously convinced that Rush is merely "Satire" or is he THE MOST LISTENED TO AND INFLUENTIAL talk show host ever?

I personally believe this is your lame attempt to minimize the devastating damage Rush does to Libertardians on a daily basis.

[Arroyo_Doble]

Proof of this is the string of expensive post-Iraq antiwar movies that tanked, one after the other, and yet the studios kept churning them out. Meanwhile, movies that showed us in a good, or even less evil light, like The Kingdom, did far better, but were not emulated.

Didn't The Hurt Locker win the Academy Award for best picture?

[fettpett]

Didn't The Hurt Locker win the Academy Award for best picture?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...he_Hurt_Locker

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hurt_Locker

Summit Entertainment took The Hurt Locker wider to more than 200 screens on July 24, 2009 and more than 500 screens on July 31, 2009. As of March 21, 2010, the film grossed $40,016,144 against its $15 million production budget, and the domestic total of $16,400,000 places it at number 117 of all films released in the U.S. in 2009.[1]

According to the Los Angeles Times, The Hurt Locker performed better than most recent dramas about Middle East conflict. The film outperformed all other Iraq-war-themed films such as In the Valley of Elah (2007), Stop-Loss (2008) and Afghanistan-themed Lions for Lambs (2007)

It didn't bomb

[Apache]

Didn't The Hurt Locker win the Academy Award for best picture?

Oh yes, the Academy Awards really takes into account what a good movie is...

[Odysseus]

Didn't The Hurt Locker win the Academy Award for best picture?

I didn't say that it didn't. What I said was that it tanked at the box office. It grossed $12,647,089 in the US. It's budget was about $11 million, and that doesn't include distribution or advertising costs.

The decision to make the Hurt Locker made no financial sense. Every previous anti-Iraq War movie had lost money, in some cases, spectacularly so, and it's not like the director or cast indicated any hope of reversing that trend. The other antiwar movies had Tom Cruise, Tommy Lee Jones and a host of other big names, but still tanked, and the Hurt Locker was a cast of relative unknowns. Redacted was directed by Brian DePalma, and it sank like a stone, and De Palma's movies have usually made money, while Bigelow's track record as a director is uneven, at best. Bigelow's only commercial success was Point Break. Near Dark is a great action movie, but Strange Days is an incomprehensible muddle, and even with Cameron's name attached, it lost money. Again, not exactly an indicator of financial success.

From an artistic point of view, the movie is utter crap. The characters are caricatures of Soldiers and the EOD procedures are utter BS, but they serve to make the lead look like an idiotic adrenaline junkie. It's a run of the mill antiwar flick, with an obscure cast, over the top performances and an unlikely plot.

So, why would a studio put money into a movie whose genre had already demonstrated no box office appeal, with a director whose movies almost always lose money? And how did the lowest grossing movie ever to win best picture become the darling of the Academy Awards crowd in the first place?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...he_Hurt_Locker

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hurt_Locker


It didn't bomb

Oh, yes it did. In order for a movie to make money, it has to generate at least four times its production budget. Half of the gross for any movie is taken by the theaters at the box office. Half of what is left goes to the distributors. That leaves one-fourth of the gross for the production company/studio. The movie had a production budget of $11 million, which means that its break-even point was $44 million. IMDB had its domestic gross at $12,647,089, so the studio got back roughly $3.15 million on an $11 million investment.

The irony of making a box office bomb about a bomb-disposal crew speaks for itself.

[FlaGator]

Didn't The Hurt Locker win the Academy Award for best picture?

The Hurt Locker costs $15,000,000 to make and took in, according to www.boxofficemojo.com a lifetime domestic amount of $17,017,811. Not a resounding success. It's foreign take was $32,212,961 which is the only thing that keep the picture from being classified as a failure.

[Odysseus]

The Hurt Locker costs $15,000,000 to make and took in, according to www.boxofficemojo.com a lifetime domestic amount of $17,017,811. Not a resounding success. It's foreign take was $32,212,961 which is the only thing that keep the picture from being classified as a failure.

The IMDB numbers vary a bit, but it was still a loser. The boxofficemojo total gross was $49,230,772. The theaters got half, and the distributors got half again. At most, the studio got back $12.5 million on a $15 million investment, which means that they lost $2.5 million. That's a failure. Now, compared to some of the other antiwar movies that did just as badly (or worse), it might have been less of a failure, but being the least catastrophic failure in the genre isn't exactly something to crow about.

[Arroyo_Doble]

Ah. I see the disconnect. If it isn't The Green Berets, it is "anti-war."