Hacker Cinema
Gifted
2017 · Film · 101 min
Directed by Marc Webb
Frank, a single man raising his child prodigy niece Mary, is drawn into a custody battle with his mother.
3 positive5 neutralfrom 8 commenters
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8 comments on Hacker News
Now there's a coincidence - just watched Gifted https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4481414/ last night, quite enjoyed it. This system is featured. Also of note, Terence Tao is credited as "technical advisor: mathematics"
To be fair, Google is usually pretty good about answering movie questions. It guessed Gifted in your case, is that right?
This is hilarious- now when I google "90s movie about a boy prodigy that goes to an event with other prodigies and then shouts out an answer to a math question from the audience" the top result is the IMDb page for Gifted!!
The actual movie is Little Man Tate, yes? I've never seen it but that's what ChatGPT tells me. Zero Google results point there, but it is the #5 result for "related searches." I hate Google and even I am shocked how bad this is.
> - I'm trying to remember a 90s movie about a boy prodigy that goes to an event with other prodigies and then shouts out an answer to a math question from the audience.
I love that movie! I had the same experience a few years ago of trying to remember its name.
This is a great example of something ChatGPT does amazingly well at. I did almost the same thing myself recently, trying to find the name of a show featuring an actor in a different show or something. A straight-up search returns nothing for it; you have to look up the actor's name, then look at his shows, then try to remember the name. But a search with ChatGPT found the result easily.
I tried a "similar" thing now. I was thinking of the movie Gifted, and wanted to see if I could get ChatGPT to pick it up, here's my query:
> I'm trying to remember the name of a movie about a child, featuring an actor that was in a marvel movie.
And the result:
> There are many movies featuring actors who have appeared in Marvel films, so it's a bit difficult to pinpoint the exact movie you're thinking of without more information. However, one possibility could be "Gifted" (2017), starring Chris Evans, who is well-known for playing Captain America in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In "Gifted," Evans plays the role of a man raising his young niece, who turns out to be a child prodigy. If you could provide more details about the plot or other actors, I'd be happy to help narrow down the list further.
This is obviously a tiny use case, and really not worth thinking about. Who cares, right? I thought the same thing about search in general 20 years ago, and that turned into one of the biggest businesses of all time.
This is the search that I did that made me the most afraid for Google.
In the movie "Gifted" a girl calculates the approximate square root of a 4-digit number in her head. Here the scene on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37meAwQqPsE
Later, it is said she is using the Trachtenberg system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trachtenberg_system
The square root method seems to be described in the book "The Trachtenberg speed system of basic mathematics", the text is available on archive.org: https://archive.org/stream/TheTrachtenbergSpeedSystemOfBasicMathematics_201803/The%20Trachtenberg%20Speed%20System%20of%20Basic%20Mathematics_djvu.txt (search for "square root").
By the time they achieve their aim, if they do, many realise they have lost out on social skills, ability to communicate easily with others (an attribute now known as soft skills), and of course, some part of their youth.
Reminds me of movie https://yts.mx/movies/gifted-2017
Commenters here gave great recommendations. I'll try mentioning the unmentioned.
- Gifted (2017):
Drama about a single man raising a genius girl. Some small bits of the film explore about the responsibility of extraordinary people vs their right to feel like normal human, but most of the film is about the human aspect of it.
- The Wind Rises (2013):
The Ghibli Studio film dramatizing the story of Jiro Horikoshi, the designer of Mitsubishi A5M fighter aircraft and its successor, the Mitsubishi A6M Zero. This is one of Ghibli film that is more grounded to reality than the others.
- Sorry to Bother You (2018):
Black Comedy Drama about a young black telemarketer who are really good at his jobs, gets involved in a huge corporate conspiracy where he must choose between profit and joining his activist friend.
- Don't fuck with cats (2019):
Documentary about people over the internet brings down the infamous murderer Luka Magnotta.
- The Great Hack (2019):
A great documentary for the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
- Justice League (2017):
Please don't flag, I'm not joking! The film itself didn't change anything. It was a little under my expectation. What happens following the release of the film, though, is the gem. The snydercut movement is a very rare phenomenon where a significant amount of people actually take action against disappointment from a change in a film's direction. Long story short, fans investigate how it could be and uncovered a great deal of what they think a miss-handling of a film production. It opened a window where we can see how moviemakers and everyone involved has their own political agenda and some actually falls for what they do. The movement is actually successful considering it has the power for the film industry to react and the fans seems to get what they wanted.
Actually there are lots of strong female leads now. It all started, I think, with Joss Whedon (Buffy) and Robert Taper (Xena). Women used to watch that much more than Hercules etc.
Now here is the thing... this is all wishful thinking. And the strong female lead is very much exceptional and stereotyped. She is just really strong and skilled somehow. Nearly all the other women are still weak. Once in a while her skill "rubs off" on her companions but the average woman is still weak.
And this is just about strength and/or fighting skill. How about intelligence? There is a movie now called "Gifted". Same thing - a fictional story about a lineage of women with exceptional gifts in math. None of the other women are portrayed this way.
In other words, whenever a woman is portrayed in fiction, even if she is stronger, more skilled, more resolute, more intelligent etc. than men, she is an exception.
There are a few exceptions, such as Fast and Furious, who just cram their movies chock full of two really exceptional women. But then they also cram them chock full of feats, explosions etc.
Where are the popular movies or literature where nearly all the women are routinely stronger or more intelligent than men at things?