Hacker Cinema
Creed
2015 · Film · 133 min
Part of Creed Collection
Directed by Ryan Coogler
The former World Heavyweight Champion Rocky Balboa serves as a trainer and mentor to Adonis Johnson, the son of his late friend and former rival Apollo Creed.
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7 comments on Hacker News
Movies screenwriters seem to have found the perfect balance.
A character description looks like this: "APOLLO CREED. Creed is twenty-eight years old. He is a tall, smooth-muscled Black with barely a scar on his light coffee-colored face."
It includes everything important for casting this guy. It doesn't say what he's wearing, hair style, things like a wedding ring. Once they cast an actor, the actor fills this up.
Fight scenes are designed to be as fast to read as the action. Poor writing is something like, "Terrorists B and C fire RPGs at the van. The van makes evasive maneuvers. After the third rocket, the van flips off road." It doesn't make the story nor the scene clearer.
The better script: "The van takes evasive maneuvers to dodge the RPGs. BLAM! BOOM! BANG! The van flips off road."
Maybe when filming, they realize two rockets make more sense. Leave the implementation details to the experts.
However dialogue forms a large part of these scripts. Dialogue is engineered by writers, right down to the syllables. (Funny enough, AI screenwriters often forget syllables exist, and you can tell because they're difficult to actually speak)
What's the purpose of the spec? Instructions? To iron out risks and roadblocks? The document should aim for the bare minimum for that. What's your "dialogue" part - the thing that you need analysts to plan out precisely?
I dunno, 2015, I'm a little weak on this year: It Follows, Creed, Ex Machina, Max Max: Fury Road, Sicario, The Hateful 8. I'd watch those again with someone any time, and recommend all of them often. Several on my to-watch list most of which I expect to be good, like Queen of the Desert, While We're Young, Slow West, and The Overnight, just haven't made it to them yet. Not an exhaustive list, just gleaned from some titles I have at hand.
2016: Green Room, The Nice Guys, Hail Caesar!, The Neon Demon, Swiss Army Man, Hunt for the Wilder People, The VVitch, Train to Busan, Shin Godzilla, Moana (hey, I like this one), Arrival. Moonlight's on my to-watch and is supposed to be really good.
2017 (I've done OK on catching up with these!): The Lost City of Z, Dunkirk, Low Life, Good Time, Logan Lucky (absolutely slept on, kills it as a feel-good lightweight small-stakes heist movie), Blade Runner 2049, The Death of Stalin (I liked this less than a lot of folks, but given how widely-loved it was, I'm probably the idiot here), One Cut of the Dead, You Were Never Really Here. The Planet of the Apes movie from that year, plus Phantom Thread, and The Little Hours are to-watch for me and come highly recommended.
2018: Annihilation, Isle of Dogs, Upgrade, Sorry to Bother You, High Life, Eighth Grade, the Suspiria remake. To-watch that I expect to be good include Champion (Korean arm wrestling movie—there's another movie by the same name that year), First Reformed, BlacKkKLansman, The Favourite, The Wolf House, Climax, and some others.
2019: HUGE year for the particular (small) set I'm seeing on my list, including a ton to-watch but a bunch I've seen. Uncut Gems, The Lighthouse, Knives Out, Little Women, JoJo Rabbit, Ready or Not, Parasite, Midsommar, The Art of Self Defense, maybe Marriage Story (but if you've seen one Baumbach movie, you've kinda seen them all, and I'm not sure I'd put it above The Squid and the Whale). Midway's a well-above-average war movie and pairs great with Tora, Tora, Tora! as a crazy-long double feature in a really fun way. To-watch list is nuts and I really need to dedicate a month or so to filling out my watched-list for this year: First Cow, The Irishman, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Bacurau, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, The Farewell, The Souvenir, Blow the Man Down, The Vast of Night, Her Smell, Funan.
It basically just keeps going like that, year after year, and I've barely even tried to dredge up good movies for most of those years, the bulk of it's just stuff that's risen to my attention one way or another, and I'm terrible at keeping up with foreign film especially. I also left off some that a lot of folks would probably include, like at least one Mission Impossible (aside from MI2, I think these are all pretty good action movies, though quality varies a bit) and Avengers: Endgame which, opinion on the rest of Marvel aside (I think it's mostly kinda lazy crap? But was basically entertained for most of them regardless, so I guess I can't complain too much) was a hell of an event. Also Black Panther, which everyone loved but I was pretty meh on (I hate the entire end fight, and it's looooong)
> I meant pacifism is promoted as the only recourse for the general citizen
What media are you consuming? Take a look at any list of top-grossing films of the past few decades and it's riddled with non-state lone wolf actors using violence to solve their problems.
You're saying that John Wick, Creed, Spider-Man, The Fall Guy, Furiosa, Venom, etc. are teaching Americans to be pacifists?
>Actors showing range are not doing big movies because big movies mostly don't ask for range.
They don't explicitly ask for it but I think it's a little more subtle than that.
Taking an example you gave, I don't think Michael B Jordan will ever reach the star power of peak Will Smith simply because I don't think he's as talented an actor frankly.
Willis in Die Hard, Smith in Independence Day, Cruise in Top Gun-- they all exhibit more depth to me than Jordan in Creed or the Rock in whatever.
> I think this can only be taken to a point before you realise you'll be wasting your time.
If a waste of time is lack of progress towards a desired outcome, you'd first need to define what the desired outcome is. Arguments on the internet almost never have the effect of persuading the person you're debating of your opinion when they didn't previously hold that opinion already.
But for those on the side lines who merely read through a thread without participating because they simply hold no opinion on the matter at all, or maybe encounter it years later when searching for some information on a search engine, there often is value when both sides of a debate carry it on for as long as they have new information to provide and their time budget will allow.
The termination criterion that's actually in effect most of the time is that a debate is broken off when the overall tone has veered away from civility by too much. That's why we rarely get to see good debates on the internet. They are broken off exactly when they should be getting interesting. ...so that's why I say: It's lack of civility that deserves downvotes, not opposing viewpoints.
Debating, after all, is almost a bit like a sport. Now imagine someone challenges a boxing world champion to a fight, and the world thinks that the fight is worth watching. Now the champion turns it down, thinking to himself "It would be a waste of my time to fight this person who is just so much worse of a fighter". ...that would be unsportsmanlike. And what's the worst that could happen? Either the champion reaffirms his position and the fight is a bit boring (but still good "training"), or it's a Creed vs Rocky kind of thing, where everybody gets an unexpected retune of their respective perceptions. ...either way, if it's a fight the world wants to see, I'd just give it to them.
If by "they" you mean big-studio Hollywood, then there've been about 1500 of those movies in the last 15 years. There are another 600-700 or so non-major-studio films that see a wide release per year, which I think includes foreign films with US distribution, but also US productions outside the major studios.
Yes, at least a few of those 1500 major Hollywood studio movies are quite good.
Looking at the last few years of MGM's output, Creed and The Cabin in the Woods were both good. I didn't like Skyfall but mine seems to be a minority opinion, and AFAIK it's considered one of the best Bond movies by many people (for whatever that's worth). Stretching back closer to the 15-year mark... The Mist is pretty good. Casino Royale sneaks in right at the 15 year mark, and it's really well-regarded.
When was the last time MGM did something truly creative? They pretty much just churn out the same formulaic franchise films every 2-3 years (James Bond, Rocky/Creed) or do pointless reboots (Robocop, Legally Blonde, Pink Panther). The studio has already gone through bankruptcy and layoffs and is on its last legs. There isn't too much left for Amazon to ruin.