It's easy to lose the larger point when you use so many air quotes.
Do you have anything to actually "contribute"? So far, you've assured me who the "really bad guys" are, because none of us would know that, and you've critiqued my writing style.
I just want to know if I should just "ignore" you, or if you actually have something to "say".
Whether it's a bad film or not has absolutely nothing to do with it. They caved to (cyber) terrorist demands, one that had no merit they would commit violence. Maybe they had something else that Sony was afraid of, who knows. But nothing was going to make the company go out of business. That's not what matters here anyway. This sets a terrible precedent for some mindless group of losers to make demands thinking they'll get what they want by hacking.
No merit? You haven't been following the story. You do realize who perpetrated this, right? And that someone got inside to make it happen? Like, actually in the Sony offices?
It had a lot more merit than some kid calling in a threat to a school to get out of a test, which we "cave to" all the time.
But as has been explained yet folks simply do not comprehend, there simply was no choice - all the major chains refused to show it (which make up almost the entirety of screens in America, very, very few independents are left because the digital divide has put them out of business). Studios have nothing to do with theaters - that's actually by law. They have no control and cannot force them to show anything. If no one is going to show it, the decision was kind of made for them. The same would be done for any film that failed to get theaters to show it.
Regardless, if you think that wasn't it and it was simply all about the threat -
how would YOU react if a foreign country had possession of all your personal data, names of your children, their medical histories, untold amounts of personal information about you and yours - and
specifically threatened them with harm - would you be so quick to put your family at risk for a piece of garbage film that probably would have flopped in the first place? Think real hard before you answer that one, if you want to be honest.
And yes, the Jennifer Lawrence thing IS comparable because the hackers illegally HACKED into a secured network and stole property that didn't belong to them and used it against them. It was not a public email, no matter if it was corporate.
I specifically addressed that. No, they were not public, but as a corporate record they weren't private, either. They are property of the corporation. A publicly held corporation, which has very specific standards for information retention. The computers it was written on were owned by Sony, by Sony employees, on Sony company time. As such, it was especially stupid of them to say the things they did.
That is far different than a private citizen's privately owned cell phone.
And sophomoric jokes are little reason to be upset. Pascal is very talented and is a flawed human like anyone else. That's life. The total lack of privacy and reality of how vulnerable security is now is way more frightening.
Again, don't think you have been following the story. When it comes to Pascal, it's extremely disappointing that she was stupid enough to say those things on corporate email. Hopefully this is a wake-up call that email does not equal "water cooler". (Not that those things were appropriate even for that. If you have never worked in a corporate environment, you may not understand that.)
We are also talking about far more than sophomoric jokes, we are talking about things that were said that will affect careers and livelihoods of many folks who they derided, judged, and otherwise maligned. If you don't think their "sophomoric jokes" are going to cost them big time for years to come, you didn't read or understand what was said.
