Also my binge-watch of the Best Picture nominees continued tonight with Darkest Hour, and it's probably the weakest of the nominees I've seen so far. I mean it doesn't suck, but...whatever. Last year was a weak field, and unless I'm strongly pleasantly surprised by the few remaining nominees that I haven't seen, I think we're looking at a clear power ranking of 2016 >>>>> 2017 >> 2018.

Well said.

I think the moral element is a bit more than marginal, but you're definitely correct that it's a thing that pushes me over the edge.

Glad I brought this up here.

Haven't gotten to all the BP nominees yet, but could not agree more with this review of Phantom Thread.

I really hope it's not actually DDL's last film. He deserves better.

Yeah, and for what it's worth I don't mean to suggest that the outrage isn't legitimately strong, but we just have a tendency to apply mental gymnastics to minimize it on a selective basis that isn't to do with legitimate mitigating factors that would actually make one bad act less severe than another.

Again I fully plead guilty to being probably about as bad as anyone about this. It's an impulse I fight against, but with limited success. The best I can usually offer is to resist the urge to actually go into bull**** defense mode; I'm more likely to openly concede the point and then shrug and go on consuming <whatever> anyway if that's what I really want to do.

Seems like Call Me by Your Name is the only possible theater outing I have left of the BP nominees, and I can't tell if it's actually going to come to a theater near me or not (one that takes MoviePass, preferably...there is a theater I could see it at, but it doesn't take MoviePass, isn't a great theater, and is a farther drive). It looks like it's only been in wide release for a few weeks, so I'm hoping it's just going to make its way to the local Regal or AMC eventually.

I thought that I, Tonya was already phasing out, but thankfully it's suddenly getting a bunch of screenings locally to me, so I'll probably hit that up this weekend.

Where do you fall in boycotting the NFL as a whole and to a more general extent, contact sports in general? I watched no NFL games this year, though I did catch a bit of the Super Bowl (up until that heinous helmet to helmet hit that went unflagged because the receiver had now turned into a runner or some bull**** like That, at which point I stopped watching.) And I've stopped watching wrestling pretty much full bore (again, small exception made for the rumble.)

Do these exceptions lessen the effect of the overall idea of the boycott, or is the general pulling of support still intact? It's hard to get past some of those more culturally relevant moments even if the idea of the league as a whole kinda disgusts me now.

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Sort of depends on the goal of your boycott, really. As the average citizen I'm sure you realize that you have basically no ability to meaningfully hurt the bottom line of the NFL or WWE or any other number of massive corporations, so doing it on that basis just feels entirely pointless to me. If you generally stay away but will still pop in here and there, the difference felt by that corporation is essentially invisible, so I don't think making occasional exceptions matters at all on that front since the boycott didn't really have that sort of effect to begin with.

The only way, IMO, that it makes sense to boycott those who can't feel it is the moral benefit that you derive from it. If watching football or wrestling makes you squeamish and generally makes you feel worse about yourself, obviously there's a personal benefit to avoidance. And really, there's something to be said for doing the right thing just for the sake of doing the right thing, both in immediately assuaging your ill feelings on that issue and also as a broader practice of keeping your own conscience/morality from deteriorating across a number of other issues as well.

I guess, more to the specific point: I don't think it's reasonable to hold yourself to a standard where you have to leave the room if someone else puts the NFL on, or where you don't go patronize a bar while it's showing the games, or where you turn down an invitation to a Super Bowl party that you would like to attend for social reasons because the content of the game is morally problematic for you.

I definitely think youth football should be banned.

I haven't given that issue much thought, but my snap-reaction is that I likely agree.

I think there's a gulf of difference between the NFL/WWE and say a Michael Jackson/Lost Prophets situation. That difference boils down to "they're doing it to themselves". I can't get any more worked up about that than I can about using electricity from a coal plant.

While I wouldn't ban youth football outright, I would strongly hope that it would die off on its own (or that real safety improvements get made right soon now that people seem to care, which is a possibility).

Really I have a hard time just lumping football and wrestling in together, despite their overlap in possible detriment to the performers. I realize that both took a path toward a profession that involves concussions without realizing the extent of the detriment arising from concussions, but a person pursuing a wrestling career always seems to me like someone who was willing to give up their bodies to all sorts of self-mutilation and destruction that a football player never would have reason to expect.

If the extent of the long-term damage to football players was what we once thought it was - that many of them end up with terrible knees and general damage to body parts that can be replaced - I would have no moral qualms with the game at all really. As it is, I understand where master is coming from, but there's no part of me that has seriously taken up the idea of quitting watching myself.

I'd say I have a lot more sympathy for the football players of 20-40 years ago than I do for the ones now, if that makes sense. They didn't know, whereas today's players do (or at least, should). Of course, because nobody knew it's also hard to assign particular blame for it rather than shrug and say "well, that sucks".

(Yes, I am generally aware of some of the attempts to hide/influence concussion research by the NFL and such, and **** them for that.)

For me, the onset of CTE and recognizable brain damage has crossed the line from "sport I can enjoy" to "sport that makes me feel terrible for even considering enjoying." Like you said, when it was terrible knees, bad backs, and fractured femurs, yes it was bad but its moved from those things to literal matters of life and death, not just for the players but possibly for their loved ones.

I tried to ignore it for a long time. After Benoit, I continued to watch wrestling and chalked things up to a monstrous man doing monstrous things, but holy **** the more and more that is discovered about CTE and the impact that concussions have on the brain... the less I feel that the situation was as black and white as a monster coming out and self destructing his family.

His brain was broken, quite simply put, and I find it difficult each day to distance myself of what kind of responsibility I as a fan had to his brain breaking the way it did. I cheered the headbutts. I stood on my feet at home watching WM XX and cheered as he completed german after german, dropping himself on his head and neck in the process. Am I culpable? Am I culpable for the people that Aaron Hernandez killed, even in some small part?

I know I think about **** like that a bit too deeply, but seeing the things I used to cheer for kinda makes me sick. I was a huge Devils fan in the 90s. Nothing was more exciting to me than Scott Stevens laying somebody out with a (clean, legal) hit across center ice. It makes me sick now. I have to wonder if Eric Lindross might someday take a hatchet to his family because of it.

I dunno, Im rambling I know. It probably wouldnt have struck me to talk about at all, but seeing the guy laid out on that play in the super bowl really got to me. I hadnt watched all season and the game I tune into has a guy get pulled from the game for a concussion... ugh.

I also think you have to consider that many of the NFL players come from underprivileged and marginalized areas of society and this is their only chance at having a "good life". They've gone to school based on a scholarship, and now their family is dependent on that potential income. It's hard for them to just drop or not even attempt participating in the sport because of a possibility of a brain injury, so to not have sympathy for them because "they have a choice" is painting the whole situation with a pretty broad brush.

The reality is, until the socio-economic culture of the United States changes for the poor and marginalized, there is nothing but incentive for people to take a potential life-threatening risk to try to make it big in a simple game which is sure to cause some form of head trauma. Quite simply, some families can't afford NOT to put their children's skulls at risk.

Get Out was okay I suppose. I was into it, but the final act fell flat for me and retroactively downgraded my opinion of the rest of the movie.

Not a BP nominee, but just got out of Molly's Game. Pretty good. Was very intriguing from the start, hit kind of a lull where I began losing interest, but got good enough again toward the end to make me happy enough with the experience. Idris Elba is always a treat.

Thoughts on this, LKJ? From ESPN's "The biggest remaining hole and a solution for all 30 teams" article.

Seattle Mariners

Hole: Rotation

Targets: None

First base is actually a potential problem, as the Mariners rank 29th in projected value there, but Jerry Dipoto acquired Ryon Healy early in the offseason. He just isn't very good. Dipoto also indicated recently that the team isn't going to pursue another veteran pitcher to give youngsters such as Ariel Miranda, Andrew Moore and Marco Gonzales a chance at the back of the rotation.

I haven't put much study into this year's team yet; when Ohtani picked Anaheim I threw up my hands in despair and have only caught bits and pieces on Twitter. I'm also perpetually uneducated on the rest of MLB since I really only watch the Mariners and am often watching them on MLB.tv condensed games in the morning before work since they're often finishing weeknight games at or after 1 a.m. on work nights.

Though I watch almost all of the games at least in condensed form, my fanhood mostly consists of:
1. Watch the M's.
2. When they make a personnel move, go look up the smart baseball people to see what I'm supposed to think of it.

In any case, I can't imagine mustering much preseason optimism this year. I assume that we're still hovering in that "not terrible, but not a playoff team" zone.

Call Me By Your Name was very well done.

Is that to say it was good? I'm hoping that one comes to a closer theater to me. That one and Dunkirk are the only BP nominees I haven't seen, and I'm assuming that Dunkirk is not going to be some sort of home run with me, so CMBYN is the last one I actually hold out any hope of being really strong.

Very good I'd say.

Easily the best of the 5 BP nominees I've seen thus far, but that's not really saying much.

It would be 2nd for me behind La La Land last year, and middle of the pack two years ago.

Which of the other four have you seen?

As I've gotten through most of the field now, I now find myself understanding better why Shape of Water is in such good standing among such a weak field. It's probably currently #3 for me behind The Post and Three Billboards.

Nah wait, Lady Bird, that would be #3. Shape of Water would be my #4.

1 Call Me By Your Name
2 Lady Bird
3 Dunkirk
4 Shape of Water
5 Phantom Thread

We're the same in terms of our overlap then.

1. The Post
2. Three Billboards
3. Lady Bird
-gap-
4. Shape of Water
5. Get Out
-smaller gap-
6. Phantom Thread
7. Darkest Hour