Hacker Cinema
Ghost
1990 · Film · 127 min
Directed by Jerry Zucker
After a young man is murdered, his spirit stays behind to warn his lover of impending danger, with the help of a reluctant psychic.
1 positive6 neutralfrom 7 commenters
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8 comments on Hacker News
The military stuff is a McGuffin-type subplot. The real plot is the main character's obsession with seeing Lillian's vision of the afterlife.
The author of the screenplay, Bruce Joel Rubin, is a self-described spiritual teacher, and "transitional journeys" is kind of his thing. His three most well-known films (Brainstorm, Ghost, and Jacob's Ladder) are all about characters experiencing the afterlife in some way.
I still have a hard time believing that the opening of the script was auto-generated. Did GPT-3 really generate the part about the movie Ghost? If so, it has a surprising amount of understanding of what it's generating.
Wow, I was sure, from listening to the first few minutes, that the script was written by a human trying to be funny. The part about the NeXT Computer and the three applications was just too funny. Edit: Not to mention the reference to the movie Ghost.
Check out Youtube's Free with Ads movies. Seriously. They've got a good selection of great movies (especially comedies) from the 80s and 90s on there.
Naked Gun series, Oh Brother Where Art Thou?, Raising Arizona, Idiocracy, The Terminal, Major League, Top Secret!, Hot Shots!, Beavis and Butthead Do America, The Terminator, Delirious, Robin Hood Men in Tights, Captain Ron (crap, it's not free anymore), original Robocop, Secret of Nimh, Ghost, I'm Gonna Git You Sucka, Silence of the Lambs, Teen Wolf, to name a few.
It's a smaller selection and they don't seem to stay Free for more than a few months, so you have to keep checking it, but there's some good stuff on there.
> Then there's "it's all remakes now"—but 1) it's not,
It really is, if by "remake" you mean all ways of leveraging existing IP. Here are the top ten box office films of 2020:
* Bad Boys for Life (sequel) * Sonic the Hedgehog (videogame) * Birds of Prey (comic book) * Dolittle (book) * The Invisible Man (book) * The Call of the Wild (book) * Onward (original) * The Croods: A New Age (sequel) * Tenet (original) * Wonder Woman 1984 (sequal, comic book)
Two originals. Now go back 20 years:
* Mission: Impossible 2 (sequel) * Gladiator (book) * Cast Away (original) * What Women Want (original) * Dinosaur (original) * How the Grinch Stole Christmas (book) * Meet the Parents (remake) * The Perfect Storm (book) * X-Men (comic book) * What Lies Beneath (original)
Four originals. Go back another 10 years:
* Ghost (original) * Home Alone (original) * Pretty Woman (original) * Dances with Wolves (book) * Total Recall (short story) * Back to the Future Part III (sequel) * Die Hard 2 (sequel) * Presumed Innocent (book) * Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (comic book) * Kindergarten Cop (original)
Five originals. Another ten years to 1980:
* The Empire Strikes Back (sequel) * 9 to 5 (original) * Stir Crazy (original) * Airplane! (original) * Any Which Way You Can (sequel) * Private Benjamin (original) * Coal Miner's Daughter (original) * Smokey and the Bandit II (sequel) * The Blue Lagoon (book) * The Blues Brothers (SNL sketch)
Five originals again. I'm going by top box-office gross here because I think that's a good proxy for what is successful. You can look at other years, but there is a very clear (but not overwhelming) trend towards movies based on familiar content. It's not clear whether studios are leading audiences or vice versa. Probably some iterative process of both.
There's also a clear trend away from dramas. I think that's because drama (and non-slapstick comedies) tend to rely heavily on specific cultural norms for their effect which makes them translate poorly. There is a very clear trend especially in the last decade or so of Hollywood focusing on movies that will also do well in China in particular.
I don't see the public interest angle here. This is merely entertainment. If even entertainment is something the government should be butting into because of unspecified "public interest" considerations, then what is outside the government's role?
Goodfellas, Dances with Wolves, Edward Scissorhands, Total Recall, Ghost, the Hunt for Red October, Back to the Future III, Pretty Woman, and the Godfather Part III were all released in 1990, 29 years ago. These were all created by a group of individuals, and studios spent millions of dollars paying those people to make those movies. The government had nothing to do with creating any of those movies. Why should the government be able to take those movies and release them for free?
I can't find the transcript or quote, but Jon Stewart said that all the work he does and all the voice he has doesn't have real power; it's the politicians that have the power. He likened his crusade to get the NYC first responders health coverage to the movie Ghost where Patrick Swazye spent a ton of energy and effort to the point of draining him for hours to just move a penny a few feet.
With their constant crying wolf and manufactured outrage, the US media has all but neutered themselves.
> Asking them five times is almost certainly harassment.
Yet this behavior is romanticised is popular culture, and has been from the dawn of time up to and including the present: Oddyseus and Helen of Troy, Shakespeare's "The taming of the shrew", tons of Fred Astaire movies, as well as modern movies like "Ghost", "Life is beautiful", "Chasing Amy", TV shows like "Sex and the city"... I could go on. Lucikly I don't need to, since TVtropes has a site dedicated to this character (the "dogged nice guy"). And note that many of these are targeted at, and very popular with, women (who are usually at the receiving end of the initially-unwarranted attention). Apparently this behaviour can walk a thin line between illegal and very very romantic.