Hacker Cinema
Beasts of No Nation
2015 · Film · 137 min
Directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga
Based on the experiences of Agu, a child fighting in the civil war of a West African country. Follows Agu's journey as he's forced to join a group of soldiers. While he fears his commander and many of the men around him, his fledgling childhood has been brutally shattered by the war raging through his country, and he is at first torn between conflicting revulsion and fascination.
7 positivefrom 7 commenters
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10 comments on Hacker News
Contemporary:
- Beasts of No Nation (film, shot in Ghana, starring Idris Elba, on Netflix)
- Gold Coast Lounge (afro-noir Black/White film, on Netflix/Amazon)
- Burial of Kojo (movie, on Netflix)
- Azali (movie, on Netflix)
Classic:
- Deadly voyage (1996 TV film starring Omar Epps, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQiaTWT_YYI)
- Heritage Africa (movie, 1989, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xg4UrYJKA_Y)
- Love brewed in an African pot (movie, 1980, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRze5uaNpVw)
- Things we do for love (early 2000s TV series, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1sQd4BV0lI)
Unrelated to "Dogme 95", but a couple of low-budget films I enjoyed, were high quality, and did well in reviews. "Beasts of no Nation" was made for $6M, but it barely avoided losing money. "Upgrade" had a budget of $3M, and fared a little better with a $17M box office draw.
Ah, yeah that's a terrible analogy for what's happening at Netflix. The complaints aren't about low production budgets. They are about the end result. "Beasts of No Nation" was a great low budget film, for example. They haven't produced something cheap, but good like that for some time.
Roma? The Irishman? The Two Popes? Marriage Story? Mank? Beasts of No Nation? Power of the Dog? Tick Tick Boom?
Can't really take a comment seriously that puts Apple's film output over this. Besides Coda has Apple produced or even just distributed anything of comparable quality?
My wild speculation is that the longer time people spend in the menu the more likely they are to close the app, and the more likely they are to cancel a subscription next month. The streaming services are all about reducing churn.
So for daily content. Show ends, you go back to the menu. Do you pick the next thing to watch? I don't know - but they've tried a number of "daily" or "weekly" shows before, and they haven't appeared to be successful. I suspect it's because they didn't improve metrics. Versus say releasing a show all at once - people binge for 3-4 hours and come back the next night to do the same thing.
I think going with amateur youtubers who produce lots of cheap, short content would be smart for like, Snap or Instagram but very bad for Netflix. Netflix's original content hit it off in terms of quality, long form narratives with dramas like House of Cards, while syndicating shows after air gave them second life (Breaking Bad, the Office, Friends) and absolutely crushing it with "must see" films (recently, the Irishman, Marriage Story, but also in the past stuff like Beasts of No Nation).
Conversely, their cheap shows from nobodies tend to die in the womb, and I don't think Netflix does that without good data to make such a decision.
Netflix definitely found greenfield with their business model, however the next few years will be decided by who can create the best original content. Netflix has spent billions on content: signing popular writers / show runners to long term contracts and picking up movies in the indie scene for distribution. However I still don't think they've had a massive hit, nothing Netflix has made can touch Game of Thrones or the Sopranos for cultural impact, and critically even Amazon Studios has had an Oscar nominee (although I think Beasts of No Nation was robbed for not getting a best actor nom).
Disney is rolling out their own streaming service and I'd bet that eventually they will roll ESPN+ into the deal and maybe even ESPN entirely itself. I think once sports gets into the mix the entire streaming domain will radically change.
Right, and I am differentiating films from TV/shows because they're completely different markets.
However, with respect to Icarus, it was not produced by Netflix; only distributed by it. Hollywood studios also bid on the distribution rights but Netfix simply outbid them. (Per reports, it was the most ever paid for a documentary.) Similarly, both Beasts of No Nation and Mudbound, the only two well-regarded films in Netflix' lineup, were both produced by indie studios. Netflix simply outbid Hollywood studios for the distribution rights. Netflix has never actually made a good movie on its own. (Though in Netflix' defense on my thesis about the crap quality of their movies, Cloverfield Paradox was a Paramount production; Paramount got the better end of the deal.)
My experience is definitely different from normal because I live in Tinseltown a few blocks from one of the theaters where they hold movie premieres and from an Alamo Drafthouse, but I could never see Netflix replacing Hollywood.
The business models are fundamentally different. All Netflix cares about is eyeballs and giving customers the barest reason to continue subscribing. This means that they focus on quantity over quality, as evidenced by their last 3 years of films: each worse than the one released the week before it, with extremely rare exceptions like Beasts of No Nation and Mudbound. (It's curious that their films are so horrifically bad when their TV series are generally watchable, though Lost In Space and the recent seasons of OitNB and HoC suggest that the malaise affecting their film department has spread to the show department.)
Hollywood, for all the moaning about sequilitis and mass-market crap, at least makes crap that's good enough to draw people out of their homes, drive a few miles, and plop down a few dozen dollars for seats and maybe food. There's a strong incentive to maintain at least a minimum baseline of quality and a stronger incentive to make a commercially viable movie.
Think about the films people will remember from the last decade: you won't find any Netflix films among them. But the cultural significance of films like La La Land, Star Wars, even the the Fast and the Furious franchise will outlive us all.
That was just bad execution. The Academy Awards only requires that a film be screened for at least 2 weeks in LA and that it not be available for streaming prior to the screening window, however concurrent streaming is acceptable. (Straight from the horse's mouth: http://www.oscars.org/sites/oscars/files/89th-general_entry_guidelines.pdf) For example, Netflix' Beasts of No Nation was available for streaming the same day as its premiere in LA and was eligible for Oscars, though it was not nominated for any.
I used to feel that way, but not so much anymore. The difference for me is that I think reading good literature or maybe even watching a good film can help make you a better person, depending on how you define "better". Sometimes literature can bring up ethical or philosophical issues: consider how "Antigone" makes you think about the relationship between citizen and state, "Cat's Cradle" discusses the dangers of technology, or "Less Than Zero" sheds light on the alienation and social dysfunction of the wealthy suburban middle class. It's easy to think about the tragedy of child soldiers in Africa, but it wasn't until I read "Beasts Of No Nation" by Uzodinma Iweala that I realized just how horrific things really are. Reading classics like "The Odyssey" or Dante's "Inferno" will help you understand Western culture in general. Certain novels are important from a historical point of view, e.g. "The Jungle" or "Uncle Tom's Cabin." This is one of the reasons I prefer reading to most other forms of entertainment: a movie or a video game can be fun to watch or play, but beyond that, there's usually not much else there.
I'm not suggesting that people only read fiction for self-improvement or to make you better at conversation: there's nothing wrong with reading something for it's own sake. Is reading something for its own sake better than watching a movie or playing a video game for its own sake? Probably not.