Hacker Cinema
Gladiator
2000 · Film · 155 min
Part of Gladiator Collection
Directed by Ridley Scott
After the death of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, his devious son takes power and demotes Maximus, one of Rome's most capable generals who Marcus preferred. Eventually, Maximus is forced to become a gladiator and battle to the death against other men for the amusement of paying audiences.
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79 comments on Hacker News
> I don't really care for Musk
I'm laughing so hard right now. You resoundingly do care about Musk; you're obsessed with him.
Second, who said anything about me alleging that "they depicted a roman army that was no entirely Rome-inhabitant looking"? Those are your words not mine, and if anyone is looking for the king of strawman arguments, we have a winner with you.
Rome was a very ethnically diverse place, including the demographics of its slaves, contrary to America's slaves.
The only thing I said was that they recast the Gladiator as black, not being true to the original MOVIE character. If you didn't understand that, the solution is not to put words in people's mouth. The solution is to work on your reading comprehension.
>One thing that the multiple entertainment industry unions did is raise quality by ensuring continuity by ensuring livable pay.
Was the pay not livable back then for the people who made the likes of The Matrix, The Gladiator, The Dark Knight, LoTR trilogy, Tropic Thunder?
> the rise of streaming
Streaming still needs workers to make movies and shows. Rise of streaming means an increased demand for movies and shows. Does not explain the fall in quality.
I struggle to even think of many post-2010 films that stand up to the casual flicks of the 1990s, never mind The Matrix, or Gladiator, or the others you mentioned.
> I never thought Gladiator was a historically accurate movie.
Plenty of people do, though. I recall a friend many years ago who genuinely believed “the people ruled Rome” because he heard it in Gladiator. He was an otherwise intelligent, educated person but there was nothing I could say that would dissuade him.
The same sense of muddled analysis (which I also found to be extremely off-putting) comes through in this interview:
> There's a lot of myths that you need to bust about the gladiatorial games, particularly in the center of Rome in the Colosseum. I think everyone's image of that is in some way based on modern movies on "Gladiator I," "Gladiator II." In some ways, I think those were rather impressive, but they got some things terribly wrong. And I think the thing that, for me, the biggest mistake they made is to imagine how the audience behaved. We do tend to think that somehow the audience must have gone wild, they were there because they wanted blood lust, they were erupting in passion, in anger, saying "Kill him," or "Save him," or whatever. Everything that we can tell about the audience from Roman sources themselves suggests that actually it was much more controlled than anything you see are in the movies. For start, it was completely sex-segregated, the women sat separately from the men. But more than that, everybody came dressed quite posh, you had to wear a toga to go. Now a toga is the official Roman dress for Roman men, but it's worn when you are doing something official, you don't wear it to the local bar in the evening. To go to the gladiatorial games, that was kind of official, and you had to wear your toga. Everybody sat not just segregated by sex, but they sat in rank order. Senators by law, the top rank of Roman society, on the front rows, and then the next rank down just above them, until you got to the very back where you found the slaves and the women. Now I think that we somehow have to just overturn our sense that it was kind of mad, "losing control" going on. I think it was probably more like an evening at the opera than an evening at a football match.
If you're going to make an assertion that seems absurd on its face ("The large crowds of wine-drunk plebs were subdued and mild mannered whilst observing blood sport!"), you should offer up evidence that actually supports your assertion. Her reasoning appears to have been: Men and women sat separately. The rich got preferred seating. You had to dress up (in a toga). QED, the atmosphere was like an evening at the opera. Huh?
I never thought Gladiator was a historically accurate movie. How could I expect that when I went into the theater to be entertained for 1-2 hours?
I think if someone wants to know more about ancient Rome, it's on them to spend the time learning about it outside of an entertainment venue.
"The counterfeit man" episode (they show a picture) stars David Hemmings who went on to star in "Blow Up" with Vanessa Redgrave in 1966, and in 2000 was a dissolute political player in "Gladiator" alongside Russell Crowe and Oliver Reed. He had an amazing career acting, directing and producing. He died in 2003.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hemmings
What are your thoughts on James Earl Jones giving license for his voice after his passing for Disney to use for Darth Vader? Or Proximo having a final scene added in the movie Gladiator upon the passing of Oliver Reed during production?
I see both of these as entirely valid use cases, but I'd be curious to know where you stand on them / why you might think recreating the actors here would be detrimental.
Good timing. My local cinema just ran Gladiator a couple nights ago and I popped by, it still rocks.
And yes, that's what he scrapes off his arm right after being captured by slave traders.
No, they are different things. Physicists of today are technically much better than those of 50 years ago; basketball players, soccer players, musicians, they are all better, on average, than their colleagues of decades ago, for obvious reasons.
I was imprecise when using the term "creativity"--what I wanted to say is that the human experience is varied but not infinite. How many more Mission Impossible, special agent, whatever, can be perceived as "original"? The interesting part of the James Bond movie is who is the next Bond, the costume, maybe the Bond-girl or the location, but the plot is of very little interest; it is all already watched.
I have seen 2,000 kidnappings in movies, one million people dying in all sorts of ways (and never seen a shooting irl), I don't know how many affairs, failed marriages, aliens coming and going I have watched; it becomes increasingly difficult over time to propose plots and ways of narrating that don't evoke a "already seen" feeling.
After the peplum films of the 1950s, there was a hiatus in terms of ancient Rome settings. Then came Gladiator, Rome, and Spartacus, which were exciting. Now, when you watch Gladiator 2, it feels like you've seen it before, at least to me. Maybe if they stopped making these films for a couple of decades, they would become novel again.
> you can't have practical skyscrapers without inventing the elevator
There are a ton of apartments in China, Hong Kong and Singapore exceeding 10–20 floors or more without a single functional elevator. Skyscrapers have more to do with steel framing technology than peoplemoving. Regardless, elevators have existed from 200BC and you can see one in the movie Gladiator
>you can't have practical automobiles without inventing the windshield wiper
Streetcars operated for 20+ years at speeds up to 30mph with no wipers. You would just open one half of the windshield. Or use water-repellent glass coatings (similar to today)
I agree with some of the sentiment in TFA, but I think the author goes way overboard and ends up disliking some of the movies "just because".
I do agree that the dialogue from Gladiator II is awful, but what did we expect? The movie shouldn't have been made at all, Gladiator didn't need a sequel.
As for literalism: it's always been there in mainstream movies, I think. That we got so many (non-auteur) movies that are not so literal is surprising, actually.
Devereaux's objection is that Scott is to some extent trading off a reputation for making "historically accurate" movies. As TFA points out, on a "historical accuracy scale" Gladiator gets about a 2/10. So in that sense it's false advertising.
I am led to believe Ridley Scott is over being told he isn't historically accurate. He knows. He also does care about some things, and doesn't like being nitpicked about others. He really cares about a visually beautiful, historically "acceptable" framing, colour matched and evoking a mood. "But the Germanic people didn't wear braes at this time and wolfskin wasn't worn with laminar armour" makes his temper show.
Bret Devereaux isn't wrong. He's also not in the film business.
Ridley Scott thinks "acceptable" means he may at least ask a historian to suggest things. He won't give Russel Crowe a raygun, he may misuse ballista freely and reinterpret gladiator school freely. They didn't die usually? Pshaw.
"nitpick" is the kind of pejorative he'd use I think. I don't think Devereaux is nit-picking, the battle scene and a shitload of other stuff is about as a-historical as you can get without Kirk Douglas and Ray Harryhausen.
"The Duellists" which is Scott's movie of a Joseph Conrad story is beautiful, "Barry Lyndon" (by Stanley Kubrick) levels of attention to detail. I have little doubt Historians of Napoleonic era rip it to shreds. Harvey Keitel and Keith Carradine .. just wonderful.
Your pedantry probably requires a rewatch.
I also think "masterpiece" is a heavy term to throw around but the emotional impact of the this series and the complexity of its narrative as it catalogs a hero's journey from reluctant participant to true believer with an epic story arc can be held up next to most film and historical epics like Laurence of Arabia, Ben Hur, The Matrix, the Original Star Wars trilogy, Dune, Kingdom of Heaven, Gladiator, The Handmaid's Tale (series), The Odyssey (epic poem). His personal journey which leads to his persecution and enslavement, his role in leading a slave uprising, rescuing his friends from the aftermath of a rebel uprising, building the foundations of a rebel army, risking his life countless times and ultimately sacrificing himself to prevent his enemy from having an insurmountable edge.
The series makes the very popular "Avengers" film series look like trite dogshit and does the same for most of the "Star Wars" sequels and prequels so I don't fault people for using the term "masterpiece".
A bit tangential, but I wonder if anyone else (in the US) discovered they had a big hole in their knowledge of the "old world" and its history?
I feel like I understand these pictures a bit better after learning some history
I discovered this hole recently, in my 40's ... I thought I had a good education, but I don't recall learning anything about Europe or Asia past some very cursory stuff in 8th grade. Like "Genghis Khan created the largest land empire", and that's about it
I feel like I didn't understand movies like "Gladiator" because I didn't know who any of the peoples are, but maybe you're not supposed to understand it, and are just watching the fights
---
I have mentioned Fall of Civilizations of before, and the latest episode is nearly 7 hours on the Mongols!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdFwMDuAnS4
One primary thing it impressed on me was the thousands of years of conflict between "settled peoples" and "nomads". I didn't realize that was such a huge theme lol
i.e. how steppe nomads rose and fell in cycles, over thousands of years, e.g. from the Xiongnu to the Huns to Tatars and Mongols - probably in accordance with weather
Regarding the Mongols, it's a bit crazy how they intersected with the Chinese, Persians, Arabs, Russians, and Europeans in such a short time period
And when their technological advantage eroded, all those civilizations basically "started" or started again
I think the geography was one of the big missing parts, and how that affects agriculture and the nomadic lifestyle
And how that gave them a devastating advantage in war (killing soldiers almost like killing animals)
But then that advantage disappeared, and over hundreds of years, they had to retreat into the most undesirable land.
I also find it interesting how easy it would have been to lose knowledge of all these peoples
I have a famous person anecdote I enjoy telling.
More than 20 years ago now, my brother (who was maybe 9) had his friend over for lunch and the night before my brother had spent the night at his house.
So my mother asks what they got up to, and the friend says they were playing water pistol fights with his sister’s boyfriend, “Wa-kin”, who was visiting.
We then ask what the boyfriend does, and he responds that he’s an actor. (Just be aware now that we live in Johannesburg, South Africa.)
So we say, cool, has he acted in anything we might know?
And friend says something like “Oh, lots of movies, Gladiator, Signs, others…”.
At which point I remember thinking, “no way!” and “so that’s how Joaquin is pronounced” (as I’d only ever seen it written).
Turns out the friend’s sister was a model living in New York which explained the situation I would never have guessed.
The only one I've ever noticed on my own in a long life of watching movies is the compressed air tank to overturn a chariot in Gladiator (2000).
I was told about the pole that causes the truck to flip in Raiders of the Lost Ark and now I can't unsee it.
—Warning to those who enjoy 2001 A Space Odyssey with their blinders on...—
2001 made a big impression on me as a kid and I've seen it many times. There was a point when watching for the Nth time in middle age that I first noticed that all the anti-gravity shots show the actors bodies carrying their own weight. Especially in the aisle scene with the floating pen, which itself is rotating about the center of the sheet of clear plastic it's attached to rather than its center of mass. Later in the same sequence, food trays are brought to the bridge after the long scenes of a flight attendant, who picks up trays as they slide downs from a dispenser, and as she hands the trays to the crew, one of them instinctively puts his hand out under the tray to helpfully catch its weight. In the next scene an officer joins other crew by coming up from behind them, leaning over and resting his arms on their chair backs as the scene cuts to details of anti-gravity meal consumption. Finally Floyd stands in front of a toilet reading a 1000 word hard-printed list of instructions after the viewer has been shown electronic displays used everywhere else. The self-consciousness of that clip provides a lovely relief from all the previous cognitive dissonance. I'm not able to unsee any of this now and it detracts from the spectacle. But at the same time, it makes the orchestration and ideas of the movie seem all the more artistic, so nothing lost except innocence. There are many other oddities to find in the movie working on different planes of awareness, including proprioceptive assumptions about reality, intelligence, progress, and spirituality.
I don't really see how this is any different from a videogame or tv show set in some historical time period - it's clearly fiction and there are always historical inaccuracies, often egregious (a newspaper in Gladiator? )
that's the mindset that I'm trying to challenge. "new" depends on your perspective while you are enjoying the content. The second and third watch you can appreciate different aspects: scenes that were missed, subtleties in the performance or the writing, set design.
Learning how to continue appreciate things that you've already experienced gives you the power over the experience. You don't have to depend on an a constant influx of "new" content.
I've seen Interstellar, Matrix, Gladiator, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings 20+ times. They are even more moving now when I watch them because I can see how I've changed and related to the movies in a new way.
For convenience, I asked ChatGPT to create this table, which summarizes how many times each movie has been mentioned in this conversation so far. It got a few counts wrong (as usual), but it still gives a good sense of the frequency. I hope it can be useful to someone:
| Movie | Number of Mentions | |-------------------------------------------|---------------------| | The Matrix | 9 | | Lord of the Rings Trilogy | 8 | | Pulp Fiction | 8 | | Alien | 7 | | Fight Club | 7 | | Ghostbusters | 6 | | Die Hard | 5 | | Back to the Future | 5 | | Inception | 5 | | Star Wars Trilogy (original) | 5 | | Groundhog Day | 5 | | Terminator 1 & 2 | 5 | | Jurassic Park | 4 | | The Thing | 4 | | The Fifth Element | 4 | | Monty Python and the Holy Grail | 4 | | Ghost in the Shell | 4 | | Interstellar | 4 | | Casablanca | 3 | | Office Space | 3 | | Shawshank Redemption | 3 | | The Godfather Trilogy | 3 | | The Blues Brothers | 3 | | Blade Runner | 3 | | Mad Max: Fury Road | 3 | | Unforgiven | 3 | | Total Recall (1990) | 3 | | The Crow | 3 | | The Princess Bride | 3 | | Akira | 3 | | The Big Lebowski | 3 | | Guardians of the Galaxy | 3 | | American Psycho | 3 | | Indiana Jones Trilogy | 3 | | Kiki’s Delivery Service | 2 | | Ratatouille | 2 | | A Clockwork Orange | 2 | | Mission Impossible (various) | 2 | | Casino Royale | 2 | | Skyfall | 2 | | Ferris Bueller's Day Off | 2 | | Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan | 2 | | Apocalypse Now | 2 | | The Shining | 2 | | Groundhog Day | 2 | | Donnie Darko | 2 | | Dune (2021) | 2 | | Gladiator | 2 | | Predator | 2 | | Seven/Se7en | 2 | | The Dark Knight | 2 | | Snatch | 2 | | Prometheus | 2 | | Schindler’s List | 2 | | The Wolf of Wall Street | 2 | | Dr. Strangelove | 2 | | Silence of the Lambs | 2 | | Kill Bill | 2 | | Real Genius | 2 | | Top Secret! | 2 | | Tenet | 2 | | Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy | 2 | | The Adjustment Bureau | 2 | | The Expanse | 2 | | Pulp Fiction | 2 |
You don't understand why I would point out that Gladiator is unapologetically fiction in my reply to your comment?
I'm not sure why you're denying that you implied that diversity is fine in movies that don't do well. What other conclusion am I supposed to draw - especially in the context of this discussion - from your assertion that "no one cares about Macbeth" ?
I'm puzzled why your points are all now strictly based on how well the movies have done at the box office. You were talking about artistic and stylistic judgments before. Now it's about the business?
I'm not sure you know what you're trying to say.
> Ridley Scott is on record as being extremely exasperated with historians when it comes to his historical films. So I'm not quite sure what you're getting at.
This is a bizarre non-sequitur. You might as well have said "My friend Mike likes pizza, so I'm not sure what you're getting at". What's the point?
> These are very bizarre claims you make very confidently.
https://www.imdb.com/find/?q=macbeth -- count them.
The latest ones were flops. For instance Macbeth 2015 grossed $16 million worldwide against its production budget of $20 million. So yeah, I make the claim "confidently".
> I don't see how both of these aren't equally applicable to Gladiator 2
You brought up Gladiator 2! And speaking of bizarre claims, for Gladiator to have been "done to death", it would have needed a sequel!
> It was fine to make Macbeth black because no one was going to see it anyway?
No. This has to be a weird projection because I did not say anything near that.
Whitey Macbeth has been done many times, no one's being deprived of Whitey Macbeth. My answer to those who complain is: if you're watching, it's for you. If not you're not watching, it's not for you. Producers are banking on someone watching.
> It was a good idea to make Macbeth black because controversy?
Probably.
Gladiator is fiction that is extremely loosely based on historical people and events. Gladiator 2 must necessarily be even more inaccurate if it maintains continuity with the first movie.
Ridley Scott is on record as being extremely exasperated with historians when it comes to his historical films. So I'm not quite sure what you're getting at.
> a) Macbeth's been done to death > b) no one gives a damn about Macbeth
These are very bizarre claims you make very confidently.
I don't see how both of these aren't equally applicable to Gladiator 2, the sequel(!) to one of the worst Best Picture winners in history.
> So in fact you aren't likely to see this done for every film set in a historical period all the time, and the minor controversy and trolling if anything helps create buzz for a film that will otherwise flop anyway. Were you going to see it in theaters? Statistically, not likely.
So... what are you saying exactly? It was fine to make Macbeth black because no one was going to see it anyway? It was a good idea to make Macbeth black because controversy?
The clearest point you are making is that you cannot see outside your own point of view when it comes to race in cinema.
> This is exactly the sort of dumb reactionary politics that I don’t want in my life
Hey, that's what I thought when I read your comment!
What about the fact that the treatment of women and slaves is almost certainly significantly toned down from what we know to be the reality?
Also there was almost certainly way more gay sex going on among any number of historical personages. Commodus (Gladiator's main villain) in particular was said to have "defil[ed] every part of his body in dealings with persons of either sex." Where is your outrage at this lack of accurate representation?
The implication here is that it's really your own baggage that ruins the immersion for you. You suggest that you can't watch a movie now without cataloguing and mourning the places where a character was more likely in your opinion to be white, male and/or straight.
This is not something anyone can help you with.
White actors have dominated in Hollywood since the beginning, and I don't remember anybody complaining that Mickey Rooney's character in Breakfast at Tiffany's ruined the immersion. Or that literally all of the ethnic Asian characters in the Manchurian Candidate were played by white actors.
I thought it was pretty bad. It made Napoleon out to be uncharismatic and a total "simp" as the kids would say towards Josephine. He just comes off as a war monger Dictator who is ruining Europe for his single-minded vision of personal grandeur.
That's not the read I get on the man from my reading, so I found it very disappointing from a historical perspective.
From the "is it fun to watch" point of view... it was middling for me. Some of the battle scenes were cool, and there were some funny lines throughout that made me laugh, but overall as a story I found it pretty uninspired. Like, Gladiator had tons of historical inaccuracies as well, but it stood on its own as a really fun movie to watch and I can't put Napoleon in that category.
> Also, I have heard of "Carthage" from all those movies like Gladiator ... Somehow it escaped me until my 40's that Carthage was founded by people from what's now Syria, and the city was in what's now Tunisia
At least accordingly to myth Carthage was colonized from Tyre, which is today in Lebanon.
Ha I just watched a documentary that mentioned this pigment.
Fall of Civilizations 17 - Carthage: Empire of the Phoenecians
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dbdVhVSat8
This whole channel is absolutely amazing. I watched almost the entire thing over the last 3 months -- 17 episodes of 2 to 4 hours on various civilizational collapses.
There were a bunch I didn't know about at all -- like medieval civilizations in Cambodia, Burma, and Jordan. They were wealthy, and built huge things, and then disappeared.
Also, I have heard of "Carthage" from all those movies like Gladiator ... Somehow it escaped me until my 40's that Carthage was founded by people from what's now Syria, and the city was in what's now Tunisia :) I guess being American I have a fuzzy picture of that side of the world, and what it looked like in ancient times.
I read andrew roberts napoleon front and back three times and I still love the new movie. must be the odd one out.
then again I love gladiator and walked into that one knowing it's not gonna be a real representation of historical accuracy. i am always curious what other folks interpretation of Napoleon (and other rome emperors for that matter) and it's very interesting to see this is what Ridley thinks of him. Definitely a new perspective worth dinner table chat.
At the end of the movie Gladiator(2000), Maximus has a vision of being reunited with his family as he walks through a field of wheat. However the wheat is clearly a modern dwarf variety. These weren't developed until the mechanization of agriculture in the 20th century. Ancient varieties would have been taller because the stalks were used as a building material.
The movie doesn’t assume or require any understanding of nuclear physics, which may explain why so many non-physicists enjoy it.
One doesn’t need to understand marine biology to watch Jaws, or Roman history to enjoy Gladiator.
Gladiator was shot by Ridley Scott, just like Blade Runner. Kubrick (who i love) is so legendary, he really should just get credit for every great movie in existence ))
It could also just be the emergence of algorithmically curated playlists simply makes it easier to start playing a mood-appropriate playlist of classical songs.
When I was in school I used to play a lot of orchestral movie soundtracks while working because it was no lyrics and usually somewhat energetic. The main reason I didn’t go with classical was just because I didn’t know any of it well enough to make a playlist for myself. It was much easier to just pick the Gladiator soundtrack and go. But now I can pick “Classical Focus” and get the same.
Much ink has been spilled on how the feature films that see broad release are more dominated by blockbusters than ever before - where "blockbuster" tends to mean "violent conflict resolved by blowing shit up or punching or shooting things into submission." Is that "virile" or "masculine?" It's not not those things.
Where is this universe where, to use the first example from the article's top image, Maximus from Gladiator would no longer be presented as a hero by Hollywood?
(Not that the article is even about that, OP here clearly didn't read much)
As a fan of post-modern movies, I would love if this was the case. However I’m afraid that you are misremembering history a bit here. Postmodern movies heydays have long passed. I’m afraid the reached their peak in the 90s with e.g. the Danish dogma movies (pun intended), independent American movies like Clerks, etc. In fact Pulp fiction was a counter punch to the scene by taking elements of postmodern movies, telling a pulp story and dressing it in a Hollywood film. Ironically it is a long running joke among postmodernists to over-analyze Pulp Fiction with a postmodern reading.
Postmodern films got a tiny resurgence around 2007, but never with the same popularity as the pomo scene of the 90s.
So Lord of the Rings is made between those two modes. The movie industry is living in the wake of the unexpected Titanic success, and the studios are trying to create the next big hit. Movies like Gladiator, Pearl Harbor, Cast Away, Meet the Parents, The Mummy, Moulin Rouge! or Chicken Run etc. is what most people are seeing. The themes of the post modern movies is indeed far away.
I disagree. While challenging and a definite technical marvel these issues are relatively deterministic based around the amount of resources a movie has to throw at effects, cinematography and art direction.
I feel pacing is the hardest thing to accomplish, and a lot of times it's the luck of the draw.
Ridley scott in general, his movies have below average pacing. He got lucky one time with Gladiator.
Blade runner is great, I love it. But I can't deny, among all of cinema and among ridley scotts filmography, Blade runner has pretty horrible pacing.
Agreed. But also no denying the fact Blade Runner had horrible pacing.
Pacing is hard to get right in a movie. It is a separate pillar of measurement for a movie. A movie can rate 10 out of 10 for setting and character development and 3 for pacing. Blade runner is such a movie.
In general Ridley Scott isn't very good at making well paced movies. Pacing for him comes as a bit of a lucky draw. Gladiator is one of his movies that had incredible pacing, but in my opinion that was mostly luck as most of his movies don't have good pacing.
Ridley Scott isn't a director that just does contemplative movies all the time. A lot of his stuff flat out just average (Prometheus for example) and he even does raw action blockbusters like gladiator that are very far away from being as thematically engaging as BR.
If ridley scott did Gattaca, there'd definitely be more of a budget on the sci-fi setting. It'd be more grounded and gritty with less of an 80s aesthetic.
As for whether it'd be as good as Andrew Niccols' version well... that's hard to say given Scotts hit or miss track record.
I agree, and Blade Runner is very dated (80s fashion and music). Alien on the other hand hasn’t aged a bit, and along 2001 and Star Wars really defined scifi movies. The same guy reinvented peplums with Gladiator, and war movies with Black Hawk Down. I think it’s enough to justify all the misses.
You can download IMDB’s database as flat files. It is interesting to see the evolution of imdb ratings over a director’s career. Some are remarkably stable like Woody Allen or Martin Scorsese. Some others falter like Brian de Palma. Ridley Scott has some ups and down but is fairly stable over a long career.
Very nice. And that track reminds me of the Gladiator movie (2000) OST with Lisa Gerrard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbHPTPUpQ1I
> At least in the 90's, most movies were around 90 minutes. Nowadays, if it's less than 2.5 hours, it's a minor miracle.
I didn't even notice this inflation in movie length until I went back to try to watch older 90 minute movies. They feel short now, almost unfulfilling. Gladiator (2000) at 2h35m feels like the right pace.
I think after Game of Thrones (ex the last 2 seasons), I'm used to more drawn out scenes and development
This reminds me of the Gladiator movie scene after the first death in the colosseum “Are you not entertained!!”
The grotesque disinformation internet is a mirror of our humanity.
> 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’m not sure who “Maximus” is—if the author is talking about the movie Gladiator, the whole premise of that story is that Maximus is a loving family man who kills the illegitimate Emperor who had his wife and son killed. Achilles had a son who fought in the war against Troy. Hector, who Achilles fought and killed, also had a family, and that’s a key part of his portrayal by Homer. He’s the loyal soldier who fights to protect Troy without any impure motive of seeking glory or power. The whole Odyssey is about Odysseus returning home to his wife and son.
With only one foreign conflict[0] at Rome's behest, Neros reign was remarkably peaceful too.
The other day I was casually reading the wikipedia article for Commodus[1] the baddy Emperor from the movie Gladiator and noted how peaceful his rule was. His only wars were when he was co-emperor with his father Marcus Aurelius, and ended when Commodus became solo ruler. By contrast, Marcus Aurelius[2] entire reign was at war and and he is marked by history as the last of the Five Good Emperors.
Wonder how much we think of Roman Emperors comes from the writing and propaganda of their contemporary elites. Rome had an economy based on the back of slaves [3] captured in war after all, so it would not surprise me that elites would praise hawkish Emperors and deride the doves.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nero#Military_conflicts
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodus#Solo_reign_(180%E2%80%93192)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Aurelius#War_with_Parthia_(161%E2%80%93166)
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Rome#Trade_and_economy
> How was a city allowed to develop with almost no green space?
Siena, like other Tuscan hill towns, was first settled in the time of the Etruscans (c. 900–400 BC)
Siena was built on a hill surrounded by some of the greenest valleys in Tuscany, the most notable one being the Chianti valley, home of the popular wine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chianti
Trivia: the movie "The Gladiator" was shot in Pienza, in Val D'orcia, in Siena province.
This is a shot of the famous Cypress trees road.
http://www.clickalps.com/stock/blocks/image.php?id=81499
Interesting that Marakkesh is listed as 1070CE. Marakkesh is where the 'gladiator' Maximus fights, and moves to Rome from, in the movie. That's during the reign of Commodus, which places it at around 190CE.
People complain about dictatorships, but the absolute best form of government is actually a dictatorship, because it's efficient and looks out for the interests of the people. Of course, this means it has to be a "benevolent dictatorship".
The problem with dictatorships is either your dictator isn't benevolent, or you have a great dictator but then he dies and his son takes over and he's terrible. There's lots of examples in history of excellent dictators/authoritarians: Marcus Aurelius of Rome, and Elizabeth I of England, for example. Of course, with Marcus Aurelius, there was a movie made about what happened there (Gladiator, 2000) when he crappy son took over.
What about films where the original language doesn't match the "atmosphere"? If I understand correctly, you would rather see Gladiator dubbed in Latin than in the original version? Are hobbits expected to speak English?
> If The Great Wall had turned out to be the massive hit everyone was expecting, this process might have continued. But The Great Wall was not a hit. It was a massive flop—in China, America, and everywhere else.
OK, I don't go the the movies a lot [1] so am generally unaware of much of what is in theaters, but I do watch a lot of TV live (as opposed to on DVR) on channels that have ads and on which studios run lots of ads for the movies that they expect to be big, so I'm usually aware of what is opening that the studios are expecting to be big.
I don't recall ever hearing anything about this movie before reading that article. Was there something anemic about their advertising in the US? Or were the ads just so forgettable that I did see them but completely ignored or forgot them?
[1] My complete movie theater history for the last 20 years: American Beauty, Gladiator, second two Matrix movies, the three Lord of the Rings movies, the Star Wars prequel trilogy, Wild Wild West (by accident...was trying for Star Wars and went into the wrong theater), How to Train Your Dragon 2, How to Train Your Dragon 3: The Hidden World, and Avengers: Endgame.
This is exactly the question that came to my mind (and that comes to my mind whenever I hear ‘potatoes’, ‘tomatoes’, or other New World imports mentioned as ‘tradition’ of some European country).
For example: I come from Italy. The number of times I’ve heard/read stuff about the supposed benefits of the “Mediterranean diet” being “recognised as far back as the Ancient Romans” and featuring some photograph of a platter involving fish and tomatoes... it just makes me want to flip.
When I saw sliced tomatoes on the table in the film The Gladiator it made me want to walk out of the cinema.
Marcus Aurelius is responsible for raising and empowering his son Commodus - the emperor depicted in the movie Gladiator.
It's useful to keep this in mind when reading his meditations. Yes, the message can be nice and joyful to read. Yet the man who wrote them created a tyrant and contributed to untold suffering.
I’m trying to remember which service it was on. On second thought looking over IMDB top movies. The list probably is sort of similar. It really is hard to get a conesensus for top movies. Sure my own personal list as a media geek will be different. But no one else is really going to agree with my esoteric specific films.
IMDB does have some films that stick out in the top of their list though. Star Wars being so high, LOTR being so high, Inception, Seven, Green Mile, Gladiator.
No matter though you’re right that consensus is hard to get. And most of the films that I listed as out of place are part of fanboy beloved franchises or headed by fanboy beloved directors.
I can't think of any case where a good director has made a good movie out of a bad screenplay. At best they can distract you with style and spectacle, e.g. Gladiator.
No, RT.
For example look at "Wind River". Rating is at 86%
By comparison, some older movies around or lower than that rating:
"The Big Lebowski": 81% "Gladiator": 76% "The Wolf of Wall Streer": 77%
Really? My personal experience with RT is that during the weeks that the movie is actually playing in the theatres, the rating is over inflated. So much that I stopped trusting it.
Take for example “Wind River”. The current score is 84%. You would expect to see an awesome movie for 84%, but it is nothing more than average.
For comparison the movie Gladiator has a score of 76%, and the “The Wolf of Wall Streer” 77%.
I should have clarified: there's no sampling bias. These are incredibly popular movies. Here are some movies not on Netflix streaming that I've wanted to watch this year: Gladiator. Star Wars IV. Shawshank Redemption. The Wizard of Oz. When Harry Met Sally. The Princess Bride. All Star Trek movies. Goodfellas. Lord of the Rings. Gone with the Wind. All Godfather movies. Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Airplane. American Graffiti. The Usual Suspects. All Jim Carrey movies except a bad one (the Grinch) and one I've never heard of (the Number 23). Toy Story. There's Something About Mary. All Austin Powers movies.
The last time I tried searching for a good movie to watch on Netflix streaming, I gave up after 10 minutes. I'd think of one movie after another after another. Nothing was there. All it could suggest was "related titles," as if that's what I would want.
As this article points out, Zimmer "scores more movies than he actually does" because he's built a kind of film score workshop where dozens of collaborators turn out scores in his style by the bushel.
I first discovered this when Pandora spun up a rousing number from Klaus Badelt's Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack and I swore I was listening to Gladiator. Badelt is a longtime Zimmer collaborator.
It's interesting that Zimmer himself took credit for composing the music for the Pirates sequels once the franchise was an (unexpected) smash.
Where is this data? Are you talking about the hilarious statistic that 94% of subscribers are happy with the service?
I tried to watch a film last night and searched for all of these very popular films.
* Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels
* 28 Days Later
* Go
* Gladiator
* American Beauty
* Speed
Then I gave up. When you try 6 very well known films and none of them are on there it changes how you think of the service from "most stuff is on there" (like Spotify for example) to "I have to search Netflix to find something I like" (like a normal TV channel). It's very different.
And of these 31 remaining almost half are missing in the Swedish Netflix:
5. Back to the Future 6. Gladiator 7. Sunset Boulevard 8. Cinema Paradiso 9. Django Unchained 12. Reservoir Dogs 13. Braveheart 17. Amadeus 21. Trainspotting 24. There Will Be Blood 25. Spotlight 26. The Princess Bride 27. Zootopia 29. Jaws 31. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
And yet Netflix want the same monthly cost for less of a service. Why?
Downvoted for cheesy movie reference.
That's great. We all saw Gladiator. Russel Crowe is incredible. We get it.
If someone watches 'gladiator' the movie then real people are not actually being harmed. IMO, it's harder to suggest that watching fake content is also wrong.
Now, extend that to fringe Anime and there is now sick content that's was not harmful to create. I don't see how your suggesting there is an actual difference between movie types assuming all actors are adults and blood was faked etc.
Isn't this basically the plot of Million Dollar Baby or Maximus's first fights in Gladiator? The fighter in both movies wins all their fights very quickly. The difference is that in Gladiator, he is told to slow down and give the crowd a spectacle. In Million Dollar Baby, nobody wants to fight her without extra participation money.
I wonder what kind of pressure is being applied to Rousey by her manager, agent and fight organizers?
I'm reminded of the Roman Colosseum (albeit as portrayed in the movies). We are the mob, ready to boo and hiss and condemn a gladiator to death for the mistake of being on the wrong side of public opinion.
And since the internet does not forget, those convicted in the court of public opinion can never repent, can never reform, and can never make amends. Their lives from that day forward are defined by that history.
In a way, the chilling impact this has on our speech and our actions scares me a bit more than the government's effect on free speech. After all, the government's decisions can usually be challenged. The mob is, as phrased in the movie Gladiator, fickle. You could do nothing wrong and still be deprived of the ability to work, imprisoned by fear, all with no chance of appeal.
This kind of thing isn't at all unprecedented. Oliver Reed died in 1999 during the production of Gladiator, and his face was digitally recreated on a body double for a couple of scenes he hadn't yet shot, for a movie that came out 14 years ago.
GWB wasn't told the important tip of turning the damn thing on which, for a demo, told me the company had no marketing sense. If you get POTUS with your product, you nail the damn demo or just close the company. GWB is a pretty athletic guy and they couldn't get the demo right.
It goes with the Tonight Show appearance that is probably the single best sales pitch except for the Segway rep trying to play nanny with Jay Leno, Russell Crowe, and Sting with Russell Crowe promoting Gladiator and yelling lines from the movie.
We'd like to believe that wasn't his choice.
"The 1964 movie Fall of the Roman Empire and the 2000 movie Gladiator both posited that he was assassinated because he intended to pass down power to Aurelius's adopted son, a Roman general.." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Aurelius#Legacy_and_reputation
I actually like Hans Zimmer a lot more than John Williams - the latter has a very distinctive style that can seem very in-your-face, more like an "Oh hey, this was done by John Williams" than something that best fits the film. Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Indiana Jones are all recognizable as Williams soundtracks, even though they're very different films.
Zimmer seems to vary his music a lot more to fit the needs of the film - it's just universally good, it's not universally Zimmer. The Lion King is very different from Crimson Tide, which is very different from Gladiator, which is very different from The Dark Knight and Inception.
BTW, I think Basil Poledouris (The Hunt for Red October, Wind) was another underrated film composer whose music is much better than his reputation.
Would the two movies be from the same genre?
For example, I would have a difficult time deciding which of the two - "The Secret in Their Eyes" or "Gladiator" - is better.
I get to quote from Gladiator, yeah!
In the movie, Cicero says: "Sometimes I do what I want to do. The rest of the time, I do what I have to."
I love building things and programming, but I love it when it is a process of self-accomplishment, driven by a deep desire to create, discover and learn.
In my job environment, however, these values are irrelevant and what I love to do otherwise becomes what others trample and waste.
So, yes, do what you love to do when you can and do what you have to do the rest of the time. Unless you don't care about living under a bridge.
I'll play the role of devil's advocate / British Royal Navy here.
This article demonstrates a shaky grasp of the entertainment industry's structure, and that shaky grasp leads the author to make unwarranted assumptions and misguided conclusions about the intent of almost wholly unrelated parties.
Contrary to most gut-level consumer assessments of the industry, the industry itself is not some monolithic and homogenous unit. Within the industry are countless different companies and parties, as different from one another as, say, Apple is from Google. (Though Apple's products and Google's products often intermingle, it would be silly to conflate the two companies altogether into one, single-minded unit; this is essentially what the author of this piece does with companies in the entertainment business).
To wit:
"Gladiator, Channel 10....What better time for a giant cartoon helicopter to fly around the screen announcing, "Don't forget, Merrick and Rosso! The B-Team! Every Wednesday night at 7.30!"
I remember every syllable of that ad. Positioning ads like this is, Gruen has told us, is most effective as we're at our most vulnerable. But at the same time this was like the network raising its middle finger at the us...
First of all, more likely than not, this wasn't the "network." This was your local affiliate station (Channel 10). In this case, the station's general manager was the one "raising his middle finger" at you. He purchased the broadcast rights to the movie. He is one person. He is not employed by the network whose programs he carries on the national portions of his airtime. (And this movie airing was likely a local portion).
More to the point: neither he, nor the network with which his station is affiliated, had anything to do with the making of the movie. To be angry at this promo placement is fine; to draw conclusions that the company who made the movie bears any responsibility for this placement is silly. If you don't want to watch "Gladiator" with local promos thrown in, don't watch it on local TV. Watch the DVD, the Blu-ray, Netflix, iTunes, cable on-demand, or any of the other legitimate ways to view "Gladiator" that are at your disposal. It's absurd to make the claim that piracy is your only hassle-free way of viewing the film, or that it's the only reasonable resort left to someone so offended by a local promo in a local broadcast.
At the end of the day, much of this piece is the same, warmed-over and intellectually lazy argument in favor of piracy that we've all heard a million times before. It's an argument that attempts to justify theft by pointing to the supposedly heavy burdens born by legal purchase, and by villifying the producers and distributors of said product. And that argument doesn't hold up. The consumer burdens (some forms of DRM notwithstanding) really aren't that onerous, and the companies behind the content -- while slow to grok the technology disrupting them, and thus highly reactionary -- aren't some evil cabal hell-bent on fucking you over. Let's call this what it really is: piracy is convenient, cheap, and mostly consequence-free. That's why everyone likes it. Let's not add a veneer of moral justification to it.
People can find post-facto justifications for pretty much anything they like doing. If people found a way to steal gasoline cheaply and easily, they'd come around to the idea that the oil companies were getting what they deserved. If stealing produce off the shelves of Whole Foods were no big thing, we'd point to our least favorite Whole Foods business practices as justification for our actions. And so on and so forth.
Two wrongs don't make a right. Hollywood does a lot of things wrong. No question about it. But piracy predated many of everyone's critiques of the business, and the practices everyone hates so much. Furthermore, piracy has only made the situation worse, by making the entertainment companies more paranoid, more reactionary, and more defensive.
If we really want to change the Hollywood distribution model -- which certainly does need rethinking -- then let's act constructively about it. Let's form startups in that space. Let's support, by voting with our wallets, disruptive and interesting players in that space. Let's not rebel against the marketplace, but rather, let's demonstrate the voice of the consumer in the marketplace by shifting power and resources to the companies making strides in favor of the consumer.
For those who don't get the reference: it's from Gladiator (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0172495/quotes?qt=qt0404384).
Also an image on film is the integration over the time the shutter was open, causing a very smooth motion blur. Games don't naturally have this motion blur, so low frame-rate movement appears choppy.
Sometimes film makers reduce the length of integration (time the shutter is open) to produce a choppier scene. This was prominently featured in action scenes of the movie Gladiator. Many people did not like the effect because, like a low frame-rate video game, it was harsh and disorienting.
Recent movies filmed on digital video have the problem that the exposure time is much less than the frame gap. So action scenes look like flick-books. Gladiator had this issue, as well as most of Michael Mann's recent output. A higher framerate will make action really flow.
>Release movies to audiences in episodes; start by releasing a half-hour pilot, and if it takes off, call the actors and director back to make another hour. This could cut the cost of filmmaking by more than a factor of 2, especially if the first part goes easy on the special effects, the music, that kind of thing
There are a lot of fixed costs in movie theaters that make this impractical - you've got to get people seated and then get them out of the theater, for instance, which takes 20-30 minutes. Given that you can't charge more than $3 for a thirty minute movie, that decrease in utilization-percentage hurts their bottom line. Plus who is going to buy popcorn or a soda when they'll be in the theater for too short of a time to eat/drink it? And who's going to drive to a theater to watch something that's shorter than the average TV show?
Not to mention, who wants to watch 30 minutes of a story and then wait a year to watch the next hour? And I'm skeptical about people being willing to go to a movie when there's a realistic chance it'll get cut off before they see the end.
And many movies are still warming up at the half-hour mark - in "Star Wars: A New Hope", you've only just met Obi-Wan at the 30 minute mark. You haven't seen light-sabers, X-Wings, the word "Jedi", Han Solo, the Death Star, or the Millennium Falcon yet. In "Back to the Future", you're only just going back in time at that point. In the remake of King Kong, you don't even see Kong until like an hour into the film. At 30 minutes into Gladiator, you're still a good 20-30 minutes from seeing the inside of an Arena. At 30 minutes into Fellowship of the Ring, you've still met like half of the Fellowship. You'd have to rework the whole scripting paradigm if you want an accurate representation of what the film's about in that 30-minute episode.
>Instead of a pilot episode or abridged movie, do the first installment of the movie as a comic book.
This will lead to a very biased output, as only a subset of the movie-going population reads comic books.
>Don't spend anything on marketing. Release films in a single theater or a single city. If it takes off, print more copies. If GQ is to be believed, this would cut the cost of filmmaking in half, which would mean you could make twice as many movies.
With this approach, you've really got to hope that word-of-mouth generators like film blogs like the movie or that everyone in the audience is an active Tweeter. And you've really got to hope that everyone in your target audience is an active Web 2.0 user or has a close friend who is.
While I am no history scholar (most of my info comes from reading the Wiki and watching the history channel) I think the 1000 year thing is a bit of an overstatement. The western roman empire (The part that actually had rome in it) only lasted ~450 years (fell in 476), and really it reached it's peak long before that.
As I understand it the Rome that tends to captivate people's imaginations is the era between Julius Ceasar (Rome the TV show) and Marcus Aurelius (Gladiator). Lasted about 150 years.
Rome didn't really fall, it more so decayed slowly over a long period of time, which I think is probably more suited to the point of this article with regards to LJ, and a future vision of Facebook.
You don't need to see uplifting stories about people pursuing their dreams, you need to watch movies about kicking ass, like Gladiator or 300. Or maybe you need to watch uplifting stories about people pursuing their dream of kicking a lot of ass.
Well...
After listening a couple times, I'm pretty sure they're not actually the same set of notes. And even if they were, it's more likely coincidence than not: the musical effect Glass is going for relies on a particular progression which just happens to partially overlap a phrase Mahler once used.
Meanwhile, if you want soundtracks which shamelessly quote classical music...
* That awesome sequence in "The Matrix" where Neo's distracted by the woman in the red dress? The soundtrack gives you Rob D's "Clubbed to Death", but that's just the theme from Elgar's "Enigma" variations with a bass line.
* Listen to the score from "Gladiator". Then listen to "Mars" from Holst's "The Planets". In fact, this works with almost any action/war movie.
* Disney does it too: "Once Upon a Dream" from "Sleeping Beauty" is... well, a melody from "Sleeping Beauty" the ballet, by Tchaikovsky.
* A 1950's musical produced a hit song, "Stranger in Paradise". It's a melody from Alexander Borodin's opera "Prince Igor".
etc., etc.
Amazing - I thought of Hans as well, but a different movie - Gladiator.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFpZPZ_g4Hw#t=2m30s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvTT29cavKo