Hacker Cinema
Frances Ha
2013 · Film · 86 min
Directed by Noah Baumbach
An aspiring dancer moves to New York City and becomes caught up in a whirlwind of flighty fair-weather friends, diminishing fortunes and career setbacks.
2 positive2 neutralfrom 4 commenters
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4 comments on Hacker News
"""I have an idea for a movie club, where two movies with a tenuously connected theme are watched (separately) and then discussed. If you've seen the movies "XXX", and "YYY", tell me what is similar about them, what's different, what are some possible "connected themes" and who tackled the topic better?"""
...time passes...
"""Now that you understand the idea behind these pairings, recommend five more pairings, but don't give any hints as to their connections, just five bullet points with "A vs B" movie titles. Bonus points if there is at least a 10-year gap between them, and they are both not box-office blockbusters (but make sure they are slightly more popular or recognizable movies, not exclusively low-distribution non-critically-acclaimed indie movies)."""
* Children of Men vs Snowpiercer * Lost in Translation vs Frances Ha * No Country for Old Men vs Hell or High Water * The Prestige vs The Illusionist * Drive vs Nightcrawler
...I know guidance is "don't just post AI output", but this is specifically a human-to-human discussion around novel(?) ways to interact with AI/LLM's. I've found they're _really_ good at conceptual-venn-diagrams.
There's a book "Algorithms to Live By" (ie: look for matching socks via BFS/DFS or whatever). Asking the AI: "you know a bunch of algorithms, what are the top three that should have been in the book?" => "what are the weakest that could have been removed?"
Recently during performance reviews, we had to write our self-assessment and had guidance from on high like: "make sure you talk about people skills, technical skills, customer impact, etc." ...so yada yada: "I'm so amazing, I'm so great" => "Dear AI, I've been given this guidance `...`, please compare my handcrafted storytelling against the guidance `...` and tell me where I have missed covering a requirement" => "...now please give help w.r.t. simplifying or cleaning up the section on $INCREDIBLE_TECHNICAL_ACHIEVEMENT b/c I was focusing on describing my personal impact, but need help making it more digestible for others".
The combination of instant, tailored feedback and the fact that they've read the whole internet, "watched" every movie (read the script, read critics reviews, reddit, forum discussions, etc), read most published books, and that they're 80%+ plumbers, doctors, lawyers, car mechanics, etc. make them an unstoppable research assistant, especially when crossing connections that would normally be "expensive" to do so.
Example: ask a [doctor+lawyer+plumber] about the health and legal impacts of lead solder in pipes or whatever. Instead of needing to schedule 3 people's times, wait for them, pay them, etc, you can get instant "free" feedback, educate yourself, and then have a more solid foundation to branch out from there. Such incredibly useful tools!
Moving read, what it does not touch on is having a moment of hype young and never reaching that level of success again. Plenty of people have one visible successful moment young in their career and never have a notable follow up.
"You always want to be warm, never want to be hot" as the film director Roger Avary (who directed the film adaption of Bret Easton Ellis' Rules of Attraction) said about a career in the arts. He himself winning his only Oscar at 29 for working on the story for Pulp Fiction.
On another note, I just watched Frances Ha and for the first time watching a mid-to-late-20s coming of age story about a young artist trying to make it I found myself just barely on the other side of being older and more stable than the characters in the film. So it goes.
The 70's were a great time for character driven film.
A more recent character-driven film that reminds me of the 70's was "About Schmidt" with, of course, that veteran of 70's films and filmmaking, Jack Nicholson.
Oh, "Frances Ha" comes to mind as well. You'll probably have to pick through the indie films to find character these days.
Another problem is that movies with high average rating can also be really generic. A lot of my favorites are controversial, you either love them or hate them: Lost in Translation, The Lighthouse, even Frances Ha to some extent.
By sorting on average you miss the most unique.