Hacker Cinema
Despicable Me
2010 · Film · 95 min
Part of Despicable Me Collection
Directed by Chris Renaud, Pierre Coffin
AnimationComedyCrimeScience FictionFamily
Determined to prove he's the world's greatest supervillain, Gru hatches an audacious plan to steal the Moon. To pull it off, he adopts three orphaned girls—Margo, Edith, and Agnes—intending to use them as pawns in his scheme. But the unexpected bond they form forces him to question the criminal life he's always known.
4 positive3 negative9 neutralfrom 16 commenters
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17 comments on Hacker News
I was really pissed when Alexa tried to sell me "Despicable me" movie as the first thing when I announced good morning. Never tried that again.
I think that's unfair and definitely being too cynical. I'm pretty skeptical about LLM-AI in general too, and yet can readily admit it's highly effective at certain limited tasks such as.. summarizing things. And I'm sure the author did at least some cursory quality control to make sure it was doing what he expected. Hell, this is LLM-AI being used exactly as it should - to automate away the skutwork it can do well to free up the human for synthesizing something good out of it.
Frankly, my "input" related criticisms are more around IMDB rankings and whatever criteria ended up with "Despicable Me" being considered a science fiction film.
Interesting, all these years I just assumed Despicable Me was a Pixar property. Never heard of Illumination before but I enjoyed their work on The Super Mario Bros Movie.
I just did a quick search on Walmart.com for DVDs <= $6 and found plenty of mediocrity but also:
- Shawshank Redemption - Despicable Me 1 & 2 (for $5 total) - Scream 1-3 (again $5 total) - Beverly Hills Cop 1-3 (same) - Tombstone - Unforgiven - ET - A Star is Born (2018) - Sleepless in Seattle - The Thing (1982) - Seabiscuit - Once Upon a Time in Hollywood - Titanic
I would say any of these movies is better than 95% of the movies available for streaming on Netflix (conservatively).
Was Encanto the one they dumped on Disney+ real quick? It might have strongly affected popularity of the song (which is catchy as all hell, and can stand with Let It Go) since that was perhaps the peak.
None of the recent Disney animated movies have been “direct to DVD” terrible but they haven’t been exceptionally better than everything else.
It used to be that everyone basically considered Disney (and upstart Pixar) to be at the top of the class, and even extremely successful movies like Despicable Me to be a tier or two below.
I'm not sure I still buy that. Super Mario was great. I think the Troll movies are very well done and entertaining. Despicable Me, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, Rio, Klaus, Iron Giant, and Studio Ghibli films are pretty good and competitive to the low-mid tier Pixar.
Interesting, I’d never seen comparisons between Megamind and The Incredibles, but it definitely did suffer from being released so soon after Despicable Me.
My favorite overlooked animated film is Iron Giant. People didn’t yet generally appreciate that an animated film could be as much for adults as kids, and WB seemed to have no idea how to market it.
Lets see... the most recent comedy movies I've seen...
Knives Out (2019) was probably the one I enjoyed the most.
JoJo Rabbit was trying too hard IMO, but I still smiled/laughed throughout it. WW2 is kinda overdone at this point (though serious films like Downfall are worth revisiting)
Free Guy was fine? Apparently "The Suicide Squad" also counts as a comedy. I guess Deadpool and Deadpool 2 were also fine. Maybe other people are tired of comicbook / superhero movies, but really I'm personally only tired of the "Marvel Formula" (and Deadpool / The Suicide Squad strays pretty heavily from the formula). Going back a bit further is "Jumanji"...
There's a lot of flicks / comedy films out there. Nothing is quite as good as Airplane but I'd say Knives Out is on-par, maybe even better than Clue (1985).
I don't really like the "Despicable Me" series, but my nieces really wanted to watch "Minions: Rise of Gru" and I actually enjoyed that one. (My nieces love this series, so I can say that I've watched all of it and its mostly trash. But Rise of Gru actually got me to laugh)
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I'm no critic. I enjoy just a basic flick now and then. Honestly, I'd rewatch "Knives Out" more than any Adam Sandler movie from the 90s or even Austin Powers. 90s era comedy just didn't mesh well with me, despite me growing up at that time. I do have a soft spot for the dry 80s stuff with Leslie Nielsen, and I guess I really liked Jackie Chan's action/comedies through the 90s and 00s.
I dunno, if I think "90s comedy I enjoyed", I think of Men in Black or Aladdin? Nothing in the list that this author wrote.
This isn't uncommon in Google results. The other day I wanted to double check that Steve Carell was Gru in Despicable Me because I'm awful at remembering celebrity names. The search "despicable me cast" got a list where he didn't show up until you scrolled way down, past someone else (who appears to be a dubbed version's lead) credited for the role. I'm guessing the issue is really in whatever dataset they source movie casts from.
That's great! I'll be sharing that site with my homestay family, who have kids aged 6 and 9. On Monday this week I asked the older one to read a Wikipedia list of Disney films and Dreamworks Animation movies and here's the list she made, which you can compare with the ones on your site:
Alice in Wonderland; Toy Story 3; Incredibles; Pinocchio; Lion King; The Tale of Despereaux; Winnie the Pooh; Maleficent; Cinderella; Frozen; Frozen II; Moana; The Santa Clause; Coco; Pirates of the Caribbean; The Princess and the Frog; Brave 2012; Beauty and the Beast; Born in China; The Boss Baby; Abominable; Trolls World Tour; Gift of the Night Fury; Shrek (all); The Grinch; Book of Dragons; Kung Fu Panda; Puss in Boots; Dawn of the Dragon Racers; Marooned ; Prince of Egypt; Peter Rabbit; Aladdin 1992; Aladdin 2019; Shark Tale; Wallace and Gromit; Chicken Run; Bee Movie; Turbo 2013; Home 2015; Captain Underpants; Tangled 2010; Harry Potter; Despicable Me; Despicable Me 2; Minions; The Secret Life of Pets; The Little Ghost; Waking Sleeping Beauty; Cleopatra in Space; My Neighbour Totoro
That's not true, but why let the facts get in the way?
6/10 highest-grossing movies last year were not comic book movies: Dunkirk - Original property Fast & Furious 8 - non-comic franchise based on original property Despicable Me - non-comic franchise based on original property It - remake Beauty and the Beast - remake Get Out - original property Star Wars Episode 8 - non-comic franchise based on original property
The most profitable movie of 2017, Get Out, was an original franchise. This follows on the heels of 2016s most profitable movie, Split, a sequel to an original property (The Sixth Sense/Unbreakable universe).
> Back in 2011-ish I saw a poster for an animated sci-fi movie, I think aimed at kids, but sadly can't remember the name of it. A picture of a vaguely humanoid-looking alien, over-sized head, holding a stylised laser blaster, with the tag line 'This is the smartest creature in the universe'.
Megamind, perhaps? That was an animated comedy/superhero movie featuring a super-intelligent alien super villain, and is from the right timeframe (released late 2010).
Megamind is an excellent movie, but was overshadowed by Despicable Me, which came out a few months earlier, because they both had as their major theme the villain turning into the good guy.
> Obviously the film, and the poster, were not made by the smartest creatures in the universe, but the poverty of expectations inherent in the juxtaposition of the words and image were depressing.
If it was indeed Megamind, of course he has a blaster: he's a stereotypical alien super villain. The movie is a spoof/twist on the superhero/villain relationship, so starting with a stereotypical villain is quite reasonable.
Doom was the last video game I played regularly. Obviously, I am not a gamer. Strange, but I have spent more time with If (interactive fiction) these past few years, and any games that have more 'artsy' or abstract visuals. Hell, I even like the demo Breakout clone on the Pythonista app more than realistic games. I was into viewing Machinima at one time, and I think there the realism works better than in games, although there were some really cool Machinima works done in a zany forced-perspective, or cartoon style that were fantastic.
I think the point is that we have focused too much on high frame rates and realism, and drifted away from the creative, storytelling side. I think that's why the animated movies, like The Incredibles, or Despicable Me and Zootopia do well. They use the old animation tricks that don't actually mimic real physics, but our cultured sense of movement. I don't have much interest in the second wave of VR either; I am trying to continue to find awe in the real world around me, and would prefer to be in an immersive world of crazy Bugs Bunny and Jessica Rabbit!
> Movies are probably the most easily justifiable for DRM. They aren't the sorts of 'products' that people watch over and over again (unless they get a cult following).
Children watch movies VERY MANY TIMES. They also manage to destroy the physical media.
I'm not sure what the law is about making a backup of the disc (is backup exempted, or am I circumventing an effective copyright measure?) but morally I think it's okay to make a back up of a DVD.
Having said that, I'm on my 3rd DVD of Despicable Me.
I've been confused by Netflix's business strategy for a while. I'm not much of a business guy, so maybe I'm just missing something.
I've made do for movies with the channels that came along for the ride when I subscribed to the minimal cable TV package that got me the nerd channels (Science, Discovery, Nat Geo, History, and so on). I've got quite a backlog of movies I'm waiting for.
Recently, I caught a movie (How to Train Your Dragon) on TV that I liked so much that I simply had to go buy a copy on Blu Ray. This also necessitated buying a Blu Ray player. I picked a Blu Ray player that also plays streaming content from the internet and supports pretty much everything other than iTunes.
I then started researching the streaming services (both subscription and rental), seeing how well they covered the movies I'd seen in the last couple of months on TV (HTTYD, Star Trek, Kung Fu Panda, District 9, Watchmen, Shrek Forever After, Happy Feet, Tangled, Bolt, Despicable Me, Monsters vs. Aliens, Fargo, Fantastic Mr. Fox), as well as how well they covered movies still on my backlog, plus assorted movies I'd like to rewatch.
Here's what I found. Neither Amazon nor Netflix subscription streaming provided good coverage of the movies I'd recently seen, the movies on my backlog, or the movies I want to rewatch.
The streaming rental services were a bit better, but still missing a lot.
Netflix's disc subscription service, on the other hand, covered pretty much everything.
So here is where I get confused. Netflix seems to think their future is in their streaming subscription service. This seems to me to be a pretty risky basket to put all their eggs into, because it seems to me that Amazon will have an easier time fixing their weaknesses compared to Netflix than Netflix will have fixing their weaknesses compared to Amazon.
Amazon's weakness compared to Netflix is that Netflix apparently has more content (that's what people tell me, although for the movies I'm interested in they seem about the same). To fix that, Amazon just needs to make some licensing deals. They don't have to build out a lot of new infrastructure or enter a new line of business or anything like that. It's a "write a check" problem for them.
Netflix's weakness compared to Amazon is that Amazon subscription streaming is part of Amazon Prime--and there are good reasons to have Prime besides the streaming. I got it for the shipping savings, and I'm also enjoying the Kindle lending library. (Brick and mortar retailers, like Barnes and Noble, and Best Buy, seem to be doing their best to drive people to Amazon, and so I see Amazon Prime becoming more and more common--but this is best left for another rant).
This makes the question for a lot of people "Netflix in addition to Prime?" rather than "Netflix or Prime?". That's a much harder case for Netflix to make. As I said, for the movies I've checked there are very few on Netflix that are not on Prime--it would cost me less to simply rent those movies. As Amazon closes the gap on content, "Prime plus rental" will become a better choice than "Prime plus Netflix" for more and more people.
It seems to me that Netflix's best weapon against Amazon is their disc subscription service. It provides the most content (both recent and older). It provides the highest quality content. It provides extras (commentary, deleted scenes, and all the other nifty things that come on disc besides just the movie).
Yet Netflix treats their disc service almost as if it is an embarassment. There's no link on their main page for it. It only seems to be mentioned in their FAQ, where they imply that it is an add-on service to the streaming service, and give no link to details.
My 2c. I have a 3D TV and I buy 3D blu-rays. Its the only reason I buy blu-rays now. Otherwise I buy online on Amazon or iTunes. We don't go to the movies ever. I do, however, enjoy the kind of silly, action movies, such as Transformers, that many of my clever friends turn the noses at. Not coincidentally these friends don't see the value that 3D adds to a movie. "The Piano", or "Withnail and I" probably wont ever benefit from 3D treatment. OTOH, action movies like Transformers, and gag movies like Despicable Me, are ideal for 3D and we now have about 10 glasses in our house for like minded friends and sleep-overs. I sincerely hope that there are enough of us to keep the 3D market going.
Paying $5-10 extra per person for 3D is overrated, especially for movies that aren't shot explicitly for 3D. Animated films like Toy Story and Despicable Me are ideal, and possibly worth an extra few dollars. Alice in Wonderland was not.
The novelty has worn off - it's a premium experience for some films, and a detractor for others.