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There's also a very real problem of Lucas not really caring to get the best out of them, and for the younger actors it's disastrous. Natalie Portman is generally a bit better at picking solid projects than elevating them (IMHO), but she's every bit as bad as the Anakins in the prequels. Only the veterans who could draw on prior experience, and especially the British-trained theater actors, could work with the abstractions of the set and chew the scenery convincingly without a lot of helpful guidance.

On ANH, George was still a young Turk in naturalistic New Hollywood, and anyway he had exactly one mainstream success under his belt, so people could push back; there's also the sometimes exaggerated but very real contributions of the editing team picking good takes and splicing them together in a way that feels right, certainly in the moment. On ESB he did his best work by going with scriptwriters and a veteran director who'd done a dozen films. Even on ROTJ, the non-guild director was a guy who'd done a lot of intimate character work on British TV, and if the plot was straining under its weight, you still got solid line readings and some convincing emotion.

Valerian. Recast both leads if you can, but in a pinch just DeHaan. Give Valerian himself a single iota of charisma and the movie ends up a slight but interesting lark instead of a slog.

There’s a line I’ve heard a couple times that if you swapped the pairs from Valerian and Passengers, both movies end up better, if maybe not quite “good.”

Trump on immigrants in late 2023: “They let — I think the real number is 15, 16 million people into our country. When they do that, we got a lot of work to do. They’re poisoning the blood of our country.”

Kobach just last month on the Coldwater case: “It still effectively takes the vote away or cancels the vote of a U.S. citizen.”

Most town residents voted for these men. Whether they realize it or not, they’re getting what they wanted. On Election Day, they chose cruelty.

The worst part of this is that the actual guy getting deported should be the reason these yahoos see the light, but instead they just want to be special and not have their preferred "illegals" suffer the consequences they have brought down on so many others. Consequences are for the big city where the brown people are all evil and lazy drug-selling job-stealers, not Coldwater where the one brown guy is a sweetheart who makes sure to vote how his friends do. He seems like a genuinely decent, if utterly dim, person who's simply never known anything except this shitkicker town actually being fairly nice to him, and indeed if you "know your place" and don't present an economic threat or make them feel insecure about either of those first two things, many MAGAs will be perfectly pleasant to you.

She was his special education teacher in school [apparently he was very far behind and had poor English skills in a school that had no proper ESL program, and he was not a uniquely talented intellect who could overcome that]. This mess actually started, she said, when she took Ceballos and her other special education students to the Comanche County clerk’s office on a field trip. And there, she said, she actually played a role — which she now regrets — to get him mistakenly registered as a Kansas voter....

“That’s right,” Dennis Swayze said. “I was the one who drove him to Wichita when he was still a kid, to get him that first green card. He saw those words, ‘permanent resident,’ and thought that made him a citizen, and that was not true. So I partly blame myself. We should have brought this up and said it wasn’t enough. But there’s others who also should have been more on the ball. Where was the county clerk when he raised his hand about registering? The clerk should have asked too.”

[from the other article] After all, as Kobach pointed out: Elected officials in Kansas are required by law to be legal electors — meaning legally registered voters.

Then the guy's lawyer is giving everyone false hope, talking about how he didn't have intent to break the law. Unfortunately, that doesn't matter. There are two cliches you'll hear from Lawyer TV: "You have to have intent," and "Ignorance of the law is no excuse." They are not in contradiction, though it turns on lawyer hairsplitting. If you push a button that says "free candy" and it instead shoots an investment banker in the face, you haven't committed a crime, assuming the "button" wasn't suspiciously trigger-shaped or anything. If someone tells you that it's not murder to shoot an investment banker in the face, you still go to jail for murder if you shoot an investment banker in the face, because regardless of what you know about the law, you intended to shoot an investment banker in the face. You have other defenses, like entrapment, but that isn't nearly as easy to claim as people like to think, and getting back to this story, it has to go way beyond somebody else being stupid and herp-derping your illegal voter registration because a white guy was with you.

I think the Kansas Reflector writer actually summed it up very well:

As sure as if every Republican voter of Coldwater lined up to cast a stone at Ceballos, their choices at the ballot box in 2024 and 2022 had the same traumatic effect. They did this to their friend. They did this to their mayor. They did this to their beloved town fixture. And until they figure this out, our country and our state is not going to get better.