Hacker Cinema
Emily the Criminal
2022 · Film · 97 min
Directed by John Patton Ford
Desperate for income, Emily takes a shady gig buying goods with stolen credit cards supplied by a charismatic middleman named Youcef. Seduced by the quick cash and illicit thrills, they hatch a plan to take their business to the next level.
2 positive4 neutralfrom 6 commenters
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6 comments on Hacker News
"But I guess a show making that particular social critique isn’t going to get funded by a major studio or tech company."
You've never heard of Breaking Bad? More recently, Emily the Criminal is an absolutely superb movie and great example of exactly this - Aubrey Plaza's best role in fact.
""Saddled with student debt and unable to find work, a college graduate becomes involved in a credit card scam, acting as a dummy shopper and buying increasingly risky products with stolen credit cards.""
For the medical debt angle, the macabre and outrageous 'Repo Man'(2010) is a pitch-dark and fascinating examination of the end-game of medical insurance.
""Set in the near future when artificial organs can be bought on credit, it revolves around a man who struggles to make the payments on a heart he has purchased.""
> I'm an American in my 40s. I've never seen "glorification of scams" in any mainstream culture
Some very popular movies that come to mind (Some of these may not be intended to be glorifying scams, but to many unsophisticated viewers, they absolutely are):
- The Social Network
- The Wolf of Wall Street
- Uncut Gems
- The Godfather
- Scarface
- Ocean's Eleven (and Twelve and Thirteen)
- Emily the Criminal
- I Care a Lot
- Nine Queens
- Punch-Drunk Love
> I've also never seen any sort of "hyper-masculization" shown in a positive light in mainstream culture
More movies!
- The Godfather (again)
- Pulp Fiction
- Fight Club
- American History X
- Gangster Squad
- Django Unchained
- Expendables
- Every Fast and Furious movie
- (Nearly?) Every Arnold Schwarzenegger movie
> it's common to see masculinity referred to as as "toxic" and equated with negative traits or externalities
I think this is (usually?) a misunderstanding. People refer to toxic masculinity, a set of problematic behaviors some men exhibit as part of attempting to appear "manly" that includes traits such as: homophobia, glorifying unhealthy habits (e.g., drinking like a man, don't cry like a woman, mental health issues depicted as "weakness", etc.) They're not referring to masculinity, itself, as being toxic.
> This kind of stuff is the future of film making.
> Imagine adding "yourself" into a scene like this, moving around as you > were/are from a video you just created of yourself. As in: film yourself > walking around your bedroom with your phone. Then use an app like this to > add you and your movement (cropped from the video) to a different > background scene.
> Goodbye, Hollywood elites!
As someone working in this arena, statements like this make me chuckle.
Don't get me wrong-- I think this is really cool. I get that people are excited about new tech, and technical people always overestimate the value of technical advancements in creative workflows, but no: people being able to place a perfect hyper-realistic replica of themselves in a film wouldn't kill the film industry any more than RPG Maker + generative AI would kill the games industry. I'd wager it probably would not even leave a dent.
Firstly, there would need to be a film to begin with, and that requires a lot. A whole hell of a lot.
Secondly, characters matter. A lot. Especially main characters. Do you replace the name of the main character with your name in stories you tell? How about doing a global search-and-replace in the ebooks you read? It's not like we don't have the technical capability. I could see this being a novelty feature in some action movies, especially superhero movies, and more likely in games and porn, but one of the biggest draws a movie has is who stars in it-- and if you look at the rest of the human population, you'll notice that we're not choosing representative samples. The fact that it's someone else with a personality and back story and motives and strengths and flaws-- a character-- is a pretty important part of stories. Their appearance matters, too. Most people don't even like staring at themselves for a few minutes, let alone for an entire feature length film. In most situations, I think it would be distracting as hell. Sure, people might find it amusing to see themselves in Top Gun Maverick, but would they want to see themselves getting bullied by an IRS agent in Everything Everywhere All at Once? Getting a box cutter held to their throat in Emily the Criminal? Would replacing Jon Hamm's appearance with their own really make watching Madmen better? Do most people want to see themselves beat to a pulp in Fight Club? I'd wager that few would.
Thirdly, most people aren't particularly interested in putting in the thought and effort to customize their phones: I'm pretty sure they're less interested in putting thought and effort into customizing their passive entertainment. They just want to hit play and have a nice little escape.
So, no. As long as people will continue to seek entertainment for the reasons they've always sought it, this is not going to fundamentally change the art of storytelling anytime soon.
wow this reads like the plot from https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/862965-emily-the-criminal
Hahaha, I expected the criticism of my comment to be that too much of what I was counting as good is "high brow", in fact. Too artsy-fartsy. Leaning too much toward "The Green Knight" and not enough toward "Jaws".
[EDIT] Here, lemme just list the 2022 movies that I think were worth a watch if you're at all into the kind of thing they were doing:
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever Glass Onion Top Gun: Maverick Bullet Train All Quiet on the Western Front Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio Crimes of the Future Death on the Nile Everything Everywhere All at Once White Noise Nope Prey The Sadness You Won't Be Alone Dual The Northman The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (arguably just a less-exciting RRR, but hey, it makes up for it by also being shorter and non-horror comedy *is* a bit weak lately, so it gets in) Watcher Dashcam (one of the most interesting movies I've seen in a long time—you may hate it, but you'll feel *something*, damnit!) The Banshees of Inisherin
This is just ones I've seen (I usually manage, like, 1/2 of the films in a year that I want to watch, at best) and excluding a few that did in fact suck or that I didn't think quite merited inclusion (e.g. The Menu) or that are good for what they are but are pretty narrow in appeal (Violent Night). Like, I hear Cyrano is great, Emily the Criminal, Bodies Bodies Bodies, The Whale, and a bunch of others, but haven't made it to them yet (and, inevitably, I'll end up never watching some of them).
"Quite a few of those are sequels, remakes, or adaptations! White Noise was a book! Death on the Nile! One of those is a marvel movie!" yeah, I know—good luck finding an era in Hollywood when a ton of the films, and even a ton of the good films, weren't such. I reject that as, specifically, a complaint about this moment in cinema (it has more merit as a criticism of cinema in general)
Well, first of all, this scene is clearly green and yellow, not orange and blue. This is not a common color palette. It's not a completely new color palette, because that's a dumb concept, but it's not common. Green and yellow are analogous whereas blue/orange are complementary.
Second, the orange / blue contrast is more of a film trailer / film poster thing than the actual films themselves. Most people will agree that trailers and posters are more purpose fit to marketing than art
Third, it's not just a lazy trope, it's also because contrast is useful, and alternatives are not as easy to work with. Pink and purple don't fit most natural contexts. Orange has fire and natural light hues. Blue has the sky, water, and is a good way to imply darkness without the content actually being dark and hard to see (when contrasted with orange).
Fourth, it's really not every movie. That's a lazy exaggeration. Googling top movies right now I see fewer than 1 in 10 movies has this color scheme on their promo image if we're willing to extend it generously to bright blue and yellow. Specifically Devotion (white, blue yellow); Emily the Criminal (blue/gold); Spiderman No Way Home (Blue, Gold, Red). It is also true for 0 out the top 10 shows and 0 out of the top 10 movies in the us currently shown on the netflix homepage (although netflix will swap these around for different viewers. I think I've seen some Glass Onion thumbnails that are bright blue/yellow).