Hacker Cinema
Harry Potter
2026 · TV series · 1 season
Science FictionFantasyActionAdventureFamily
There is nothing special about Harry Potter - at least that's what his Aunt Petunia always says. On his 11th birthday, a letter of admittance to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry opens up a hidden world for Harry: one of fun, friendship and magic. But with this new adventure comes great risk as Harry is forced to face a dangerous enemy from his past.
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297 comments on Hacker News
"Show don't tell" has been a disaster for mankind. I'm sick of authors turning every scene (especially openings) into a puzzle because just telling the reader what's going on would be too low-brow for them. If telling, or even summarizing, your story in a straight manner makes it bad, you just have a bad story. Part of the reason why Harry Potter was so ridiculously successful even before the movies is that it broke this rule. Intended as a children's book this was probably deemed necessary, but in reality it's just better writing, period.
Watch any movie, typically the protagonist is good looking and antagonist is ugly. That's the whole answer.
In Game of Thrones director had a chance to make the dwarf (protagonist ) really ugly, like in the books, but they chose a good looking actor.
Same for Harry Potter, Hermione was supposed to be meh.
> No normal, reasonable person reads Harry Potter and thinks "Jew" instead of "wacky fantasy creatures".
It was a pretty obvious thing for us Germans when the movie came out. Caricatures of Jews that were used in the time leading up to 1933 are taught and analyzed at schools here. Crooked noses, deal with money, hoard money... it's not that far away. There's a pretty good blog post with actual imagery, if you want to read further [1] - although I admit that JKR just used existing folklore as a foundation, just as with other elements of worldbuilding.
That shofar however, now that's intentional. HL came out many, many years after I read about the issue the first time. And 4chan, inevitably, immediately identified the goblins as jews.
[1] https://jewitches.com/blogs/blog/goblins-jews-and-antisemitism-1
> It’s ok to appreciate a work even if you disagree with its creator’s morals or ethics.
In the case of Harry Potter... the perception of the work tends to follow the perception of the author. There's a bunch of issues with the original books that's widely seen as problematic today - character names seen as racist [1], enough problematic gender stereotypes to warrant half a dozen of academic papers of various quality, and last but not least antisemitism that continues even into modern works such as the shofar in Hogwarts Legacy [2].
I won't deny it, I enjoyed both the books and the movies, but it's ... not something I'd just hand over to my kids one day without having a serious talk with them beforehand. Back when I was young nobody cared too much (although I do member that at least in Germany, the goblins-jews analogy was discussed a bit), but nowadays...
[1] https://7news.com.au/entertainment/harry-potter-fans-call-out-jk-rowling-over-cartoonishly-stereotypical-character-names-after-return-to-hogwarts-reunion-c-5178042
[2] https://theconversation.com/how-hogwarts-legacy-video-game-reinforces-antisemitic-scapegoating-with-goblins-202710
Harry Potter became a billion dollar business after the movies and toys and so on were created - again, it takes waayyy more people than one to actually produce this amount of money. The initial idea that Rowling herself came up with is of course a significant part of that - but still only a small part of it, in the grand scheme of things.
It's also important to note that Harry Potter making billions of dollars also prevented any other similar books or ideas from making any large profits. The entertainment industry is very much a winner takes all industry. HP didn't hugely grow the children's entertainment market, it just outcompeted other works. This is extremely important to understand, because it directly implies that a huge part of the value is simply that media execs decided to bet big on HP instead of trying out many other possible properties. The money would have happened either way, more or less the same - they just would have been distributed to one or many other authors instead, if JK Rowling hadn't hit it out of the park. People would have bought a roughly similar amount of books for their children to read, a roughly similar amount of toys, would have taken them to a roughly similar amount of movies.
> system akin to film classification age ratings
I am pretty sure that most parents let their kids watch movies that are rated for a higher age group then their current age.
For example a lot of marvel movies, harry potter or pirates of the caribbean are usually in this category.
My conclusion the parents are not lazy they care to be breaking the age restriction. A lot of parents even go out of their way or get aggressive to make sure they can age rated movies to their kids as they think the age ratings are bullshit.
I would suspect age verification to have similar effects in practice, and there is the additional hurtful factors as well leading to a net negative. Not just for minors but also for adults that now have to deal with this crap.
> As long as you're not directly copying things like characters, dialogue, etc., it's not a derivative work.
Define a character. Is another lion prince named Simba the same character? Is a lion prince named something else the same character? Is a human prince named Simba the same character? I'm no copyright expert, but from what I know about fanfics and fanart, the US courts ruled all of these violate copyright (you can win a book plagiarism lawsuit even if the other book has all names changed and every sentence went through thesaurus). The few cases where the obvious stand-in was ruled non-infringing were on the grounds of parody exception, not on the grounds of being non-derivative.
The many Titanic movies are not each other's derivatives because none of them are based on each other. They're all based on the historical events directly. Now, if the original Titanic was fictional like the famous Nautilus, then yes, the 1997 movie would be derivative, but not of the 1979 series.
Which part of Harry Potter is directly rips off Teen Witch the way Lion King directly rips off Hamlet? I'm not familiar with that movie.
> made the movie of Project Hail Mary without paying one dime to Andy Weir.
and is there anything really wrong with that?
I personally would have liked to see fan made movies of various IPs like star wars, and harry potter, but it is impossible due to the long reach of copyright infringement.
It was in one of those Netflix documentaries - I didn't realise it at the time but there was an 18 month period from 2003 to 2004 during which no new Harry Potter or Star Wars movies came out so sales of the licensed IP sets was down.
Don't worry. The courts have consistently sided with huge companies on copyright. In the US. In Europe. Doesn't matter.
Company incorporates GPL code in their product? Never once have courts decided to uphold copyright. HP did that many times. Microsoft got caught doing it. And yet the GPL was never applied to their products. Every time there was an excuse. An inconsistent excuse.
Schoolkid downloads a movie? 30,000 USD per infraction PLUS armed police officer goes in and enforces removal of any movies.
Or take the very subject here. AI training WAS NOT considered fair use when OpenAI violated copyright to train. Same with Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, ... They incorporated harry potter and the linux kernel in ChatGPT, in the model itself. Undeniable. Literally. So even if you accept that it's changed now, OpenAI should still be forced to redistribute the training set, code, and everything needed to run the model for everything they did up to 2020. Needless to say ... courts refused to apply that.
So just apply "the law", right. Courts' judgement of using AI to "remove GPL"? Approved. Using AI to "make the next Disney-style movie"? SEND IN THE ARMY! Whether one or the other violates the law according to rational people? Whatever excuse to avoid that discussion is good enough.
Just to try to understand this, do you think anyone should be able to make, say, a Harry Potter movie right now paying nothing to the author?
> Harry Potter is played out.
Is that why they're doing a remake?
* https://www.hollywood.com/news/a-new-version-of-the-original-harry-potter-movie-is-coming-before-the-hbo-harry-potter-remake-61030626
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_(TV_series)
The people who were kids when the original movies came out are now parents themselves: they're going for nostalgia and new audiences.
Interesting that the runners-up were much more conventional choices, Pride and Prejudice and To Kill a Mockingbird.
I've never read Mockingbird; I gotta say that it doesn't sound like a fun read. I really admire Jane Austen, though I find her books a bit of a slog even now. (I really hated them when compelled to read them in high school, though with the aid of some film adaptations I have a much better understanding of what those books are about.)
Hunger Games does nail a sweet spot of Young Adult fiction: compelling, easy to read, but not completely dimwitted.
The first Harry Potter book might have been a good choice, but it's really a juvenile rather than YA, and that narrows the audience somewhat as a "favorite book". Later Harry Potter books are more appealing to older readers, but no single one of them quite captures the lightning of the first one.
Somewhat less true in english movies, or movies set in england. I don't think any of the kids in Harry Potter were the villains
I suspect that studios, within possibly a film cycle or two, are quite aware of what makes a good return on investment and what doesn’t. One problem is that Hollywood pays (far) more attention to international sales than before and what sells “there” might be less interesting “here”. So if they make stuff that fails to sell anywhere they’ll give up on that kind of thing.
So it comes down to what the international return of “family” movies are vs what’s being made now. If you want mild stuff, throw lots of cash at the box office or streaming service. And you have to outspend the rest of the world.
Oh, and Lord of the Rings had a lot of violence and discussions of Evil. And that’s ok? What about the Harry Potter flicks, as I recall lots of people thought them inappropriate at the time (witchcraft)?
I don't think Adams is talking about how reluctant the hero is but about failure and misfortune.
Frodo definitely doesn't want to be there but he is far from being a failure. He saves Middle-earth, goes home to the Shire and saves that too, and is regarded as such an incredible mortal that he's invited to live in Valinor with the elves (this is a very big deal and I believe has only ever happened for Frodo and his buddies).
The same goes for Harry Potter. He's a loser at the beginning but after going to Hogwarts he's very much a hero that saves the day by being good at everything and exceptionally brave.
Also, I'd say there are plenty of reluctant heroes in American literature and film. Luke Skywalker hesitates to go save Leia in the first film, Spider-man straight up quits being Spider-man multiple times, John McClane just happened to be there when terrorists attack.
I think it could just be that America is a much bigger market with much higher production values in TV and Film, so British people get their fill of competent, triumphant heroes from American media.
America has plenty of beloved sad sacks too. Charlie Brown, Donald Duck, Goofy, George Costanza, Eeyore (originally British but very popular in America and popularized by Disney) to name a few.
British media has carved out a bit of a niche for itself, but British people are also consuming other English language media.
And you also have plenty of British media where the hero is competent, triumphant, masterful, and autonomous with (frequent if not ubiquitous) standard happy endings. Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Who.
> Cut copyright to 15-20 years by default.
This alone will kill off all chances of that ever passing.
Like, I fully agree with your proposal... but I don't think it's feasible. There are a lot of media IPs/franchises that are very, very old but still generate insane amounts of money to this day with active developments. Star Wars and Star Trek obviously, but also stuff like the MCU or Avatar is on its best way to two decades of runtime, Iron Man 1 was released in 2008, or Harry Potter which is almost 30 years old. That's dozens of billions of dollars in cumulative income, and most of that is owned by Disney.
Look what it took to finally get even the earliest Disney movies to enter the public domain, and that was stuff from before World War 2 that was so bitterly fought over.
In order to reform copyright... we first have to use anti-trust to break up the large media conglomerates. And it's not just Disney either. Warner, Sony, Comcast and Paramount also hold ridiculous amounts of IP, Amazon entered the fray as well with acquiring MGM (mostly famous for James Bond), and Lionsgate holds the rights for a bunch of smaller but still well-known IPs (Twilight, Hunger Games).
And that's just the movie stuff. Music is just as bad, although at least there thanks to radio stations being a thing, there are licensing agreements and established traditions for remixes, covers, tribute bands and other forms of IP re-use by third parties.
My pony’s doing just fine.
At a friend’s birthday last year, I wrote in the space of 8 minutes - then performed - a 3-minute long verse about said friend and their puppy. I didn’t get the verse from ChatGPT. I had it help me find rhyming words that fit the rhythm, had it help me find synonyms, and find punchy ends to sentences.
I made a xylophone iphone app way back in mid 2024 by copy pasting code to Claude and errors from Xcode, just to show off what AI can do. Someone asked to make it support dragging your finger across the screen to play lots of notes really fast - Claude did that in one shot. In mid 2024, 6 months before Claude Code.
I made a sorting hat for my sisters’ kids for Christmas a few weeks ago. I found a voice cloning website, had Claude write some fun dialogue, and vibe coded an app with the generated recordings of the sorting hat voice saying various virtues and Harry Potter house names. The cloned voice was so good, it sounded exactly like the actor in the movie. I loaded the app on my phone and hid a Bluetooth speaker in a Santa hat - tapping a button in the app would play a voice recording from the sorting hat AI voice. The kids unwrapped the hat and it declared itself as the sorting hat. Put the hat on a kid’s head, tap a button, hat talks! With a little sleight of hand, the kids really believed it was the hat talking all by itself. Laughing together with my whole family as the hat declared my cheeky niece “Slytherin!!!” was one of the most humanising things I’ve ever seen.
I’ve made event posters for my Burning Man camp. Zillions of dumb memes for group chats. You always have to do some inpainting or touch it up in an image editor, but it’s worth it for the lulz.
And right now I’m using Claude Code for my startup, ApprovIQ. Dario Amodei was right in a way: 99% of the code was written by Claude.
But sorry, no multi million line vibe coded codebases. For that my friend, you might be waiting until after the next AI winter.
It is an interesting thought experiment, but would pretty much make standalone copy able creative work like photography, books, music, or movies impossible to sell. Works could be created on commission, but there would be a strong disincentive for producing any work without commission.
1. People who make money from GPL software typically make their money from support contracts or from running a service. Unlike software, photography, books, music and movies don’t require any ongoing maintenance once created to keep them running or up to date. There is some value in the distribution of physical copies, but digital distribution would have almost no value.
2. Math is pretty much in this boat already. Most math work is either directly paid for by a company that consumes it, or is academic work with incredibly high barriers to entry and constant hustling for grant funding. I wouldn’t wish that on any field, would you?
3. Take for example Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings. While the characters are new, they draw upon a rich mythology from the public domain (eg dragons, goblins, wizards, witches, etc).
It is an interesting discussion, but I expect removing the freedom to use public domain works outside of the public domain would was to very bad outcomes.
I don’t find much value in these kinds of analogies. First, I have to rewatch all 8 Harry Potter films to remind myself who’s who, and by then the models will have updated and it will be out of date.
I've gotten fooled by these fake-movie trailers before, ones made by AI and ones made of "fan edits" using the actors from other scenes. It's definitely annoying, especially when you're anticipating a film and excited to see the new trailer, it's weirdly bad or off and then you realize it's a fake trailer!
> Screen Culture had created 23 versions of a trailer for The Fantastic Four: First Steps by March, some of which outranked the official trailer in YouTube search results. More recent examples include HBO’s new Harry Potter series and Netflix’s Wednesday.
Also this is interesting:
> Our deep dive into fake trailers revealed that instead of protecting copyright on these videos, a handful of Hollywood studios, including Warner Bros Discovery and Sony, secretly asked YouTube to ensure that the ad revenue from the AI-heavy videos flowed in their direction.
https://deadline.com/2025/03/youtube-ad-revenue-fake-movie-trailer-screen-culture-1236354143/
IMO, HDR mostly suffers from two things:
1. Poor color grading / mastering. For example, many of the Harry Potter movies have an “artistically” dull color scheme and don’t take advantage of HDR much. So they don’t look that different on a good display. Plenty of other movies don’t even try to take full advantage either. (Lots of movies where black isn’t actually an inky black, or where shiny things don’t translate specular highlights into brighter HDR)
2. Marketing shitty HDR displays as HDR. My monitor is “HDR” but is only HDR400. This really doesn’t look that good. Also, HDR fundamentally doesn’t really work that well if the TV doesn’t have enough local dimming zones. If you only have a single backlight, you can’t really make a diamond ring look sparkly. On an OLD, just the diamond will be displayed brighter, making it look shiny.
However, for media that is graded well and published in a high bit rate (4k Blu-ray), it looks outstanding on a good HDR display (like a Samsung s90c)
Anyways, I’m pretty confident I’ll be able to get a better TV in the future. For example, handling motion without jitter, handling reflections with high ambient light, simply getting brighter and handling burn-in better… and besides that, the display technology that looks the best (QD-OLED) has yet to make it into cheaper models most people buy.
Telling a detailed story is different than telling a compelling story.
Andor isn’t as compelling as the original movie or significantly longer than the Harry Potter series of movies. Babylon 5 is probably the poster child for a long running space opera series with a planned story arch, but they added plenty of filler because you don’t actually need that much time.
If anything movies tend to be better than TV shows because of the time constraints rather than the budget.
> Disney? Meh - they've got Andor and that's really it.
I like this post about how The Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Mad Max and Harry Potter are all valuable IP written by somebody that appears to have never heard of Marvel comics, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, The Simpsons, any Pixar film, Avatar, The X-Files, or The Bachelor.
Not that the music business has had some very shady business in the past, but my guess is that the movie industry is even more shady. Didn't the Harry Potter movies make a gigantic loss on paper? Steve Jackson had to sue the company to get his Lord of The Rings money, if i'm not mistaken.
Well, possibly I miss something, because I wouldn't recognize a Deathly Hallows logo if I see one. (I assume this is rather from the movies?). But there are occasional references to Harry Potter I have seen.
Apart from that, I would say Harry Porter represents some things.
The glass eyed bullied nerd, that steps into a magical realm to become a superhero. In general, the concept of a fantastic magical realm hidden besides this dull concrete reality. But those are old tropes I would think and unlike with Matrix(blue pill, red pill), Star Wars (may the force be with you, the dark side), Lord of the rings (The ring of power that corrupts), I don't see such strong concepts coming from Harry Porter that
"supplies metaphors and narratives through which nearly everyone today interprets the world around them"
Just my impression, I don't have a strong opinion here, rather curious what I might miss.
I was alive at that time and I loved the Redwall books, Enders Game, LOTR before the movies, and some Heinlein. Never read Harry Potter, which came out when I was in middle school. And I was a girl.
Characterizing girls as only liking Harry Potter and Orlando Bloom is like saying boys only liked WWF and Jackass. It's a mindless stereotype.
I was alive in that time and girls did not like those books, at all (of course WOMEN may be a different story). They liked Harry Potter, and LOTR after the movies came out because Orlando Bloom.
Loved the LaserDisc era. Still have a huge collection. Watching the Abyss for the first time with all the extras was amazing.
My player eventually wouldn’t take the discs. Would go in the player and pop back out. A few tries would work for a while and then it eventually wouldn’t take any disc.
HD DVD was really cool. Even today, putting in a movie like Harry Potter on HD DVD really catches people off-guard on how amazing it looks. Never got that reaction from Blu-ray.
> Is film grain a nostalgia effect?
Film grain simulation can be an effect, but that's not the primary application being described here. As @ricardobeat succinctly put it elsewhere in this post, this process usually supports "a reproduction of the original grain pattern, compressed separately from the underlying image content. The result is closer to the original picture than the denoised/compressed version".
> If kids grew up without seeing film grain, how would they feel about it?
Film isn't quite dead yet, with ~7% of features in 2025 still being shot on film and maybe 1% more taking the digital→film→digital (a.k.a. "analog intermediate") route. Unless their media diet is all super-recent and low-quality, even today's kids will have most likely seen many movies shot on film with visible grain. Popular candidates would include the Harry Potter franchise, most episodes of the Star Wars franchise, early Marvel movies, many animated Disney and Studio Ghibli features, etc.
> And they debunk it by pointing out that classic literary fiction is still being read
Not at all.
Classic fiction is still far out of the most sold books nowadays which is entirely non fiction. That’s in the first half of the article by the way so I might not be the one with reading comprehension issue. I can somehow excuse you because the article author constantly confuses fiction and non fiction readership and fails to comprehend what should be seen in absolute numbers and when proportion actually matters for most of the article.
To address specifically the unconvincingly point that classic sell in absolute numbers, this should be unsurprising to anyone who has gone to school: contrary to modern fiction classics are actually studied and are part of various curriculum.
The other points against the influence of internet (and television before) are equally empty and hinge on a confusion between absolute number of readers (stable) and actual readers of serious fiction (vanishing).
I have little interest in actually commenting the virtues of the article to be frank - it’s garbage. The author opinion that postmodern authors are somehow written for critics is laughable. It’s so devoid of substance. It ignores both the actual critical consensus around those books when they were written (far from universal praise) and what they contain. The rest of the arguments are barely better sadly. And let’s not talk about what the article entirely fails to address: the rise of YA, book tok, the modern fiction bestsellers from Crichton to Dan Brown, the impact of movie adaptation (ever heard of Harry Potter, yes me too).
Anyway, I was merely replying to the comment above mine.
Fiona Shaw is one of the greats. I've been lucky enough to see her on stage a couple of times.
For those of you who don't recognize her name, she's Maarva in Andor, and some minor character (I don't remember) in the Harry Potter films - neither of which roles get even close to challenging her range and power.
If I give you a vision algorithm that, given every other frame of a Harry Potter movie, can accurately predict the interstitials - would you say that half that Harry Potter movie is "in" it?
It seems like a pretty reasonable argument and easy enough to make. A human with a great memory could probably recreate some absurd % of Harry Potter after reading it, there are some very unusual minds out there. It is clear that if they read Harry Potter and <edit> being capable </edit> of reproducing it on demand as a party trick that would be fair use. So the LLM should also be fair use since it is using a mechanism similar enough to what humans do and what humans do is fine.
The LLMs I've used don't randomly start spouting Harry Potter quotes at me, they only bring it up if I ask. They aren't aiming to undermine copyright. And they aren't a very effective tool for it compared to the very well developed networks for pirating content. It seems to be a non-issue that will eventually be settled by the raw economic force that LLMs are bringing to bear on society in the same way that the movie industry ultimately lost the battle against torrents and had to compete with them.
Unless a specific piece reaches critical mass. Most people have an opinion on Harry Potter, A Song of Ice and Fire or 50 Shades of Gray. Granted, if they aren't an avid reader it might be an opinion based on the movie adaptations instead of the books, and for some their opinion only reaches as far as the reason they haven't engaged with that specific title yet. But those are still opinions you can engage with
Personally when I notice the acting the movie has already failed at something else. The Lighthouse’s acting stands out to me because the movie’s attempts at suspense fail. I quickly found it hard to avoid engaging with nuances of the films creation as an intellectual exercise rather than the film itself.
At the other end of the spectrum there’s a ton of movies with child actors where the kids are just vastly less talented, so the film simply demands less of them. It’s just as true of Let the Right One In a low budget foreign film as it is high budget films such as Harry Potter or classics like The Shinning. Characters come to life not through great acting but because all the elements line up so you forget you’re looking at puppets at the puppet show.
IMO, Great movies are all about understanding the limitations of the medium, the audience, characters, budget, script, etc. That’s why the snap at the end of Avengers: Infinity War was spectacle but didn’t have the emotional impact of a single deer being shot at the beginning of Bambi.
/soapbox
Again not that you’re wrong, but I was thinking about your response for a while.
I don't really assossiate harry potter's rise with that of the internet. By the time it lit the internet ablaze was in the 2000's, after the first few movies aired.
It certainly wasn't the writing that elevated it. I think it was as simple as tapping into an audience who for once wasn't raised as some nuclear family. a Cinderella esque tale of being whisked away from abuse mixed with a hero's journey towards his inevitable clash with the very evil that set this in motion.
The movies definiely helped too. The first few were very well done with excellent child actors. Watching many other fantasy adaptations try to replicate that really shows just how the stars align into making HP a success.
There are quite a lot of people who make money from Harry Potter apart from JKR. People running cinemas, bookshops, making the movies, running the studio tour and so on.
You're allowed to draw IP and share your drawings. You're allowed to screenshot and photoshop IP. You're allowed to sell tools that help others draw and photoshop IP*. You're not allowed to sell these drawings and photoshops.
I don't see why an AI can't generate IP, even if the AI is being sold. What's not allowed is selling the generated IP.
Style is even more permissive: you're allowed to sell something in any style. AFAIK the only things that can be restricted are methods to achieve the style (via patents), similar brands in similar service categories (via trademarks), and depictions of objects (via copyrights).
Note that something being "the original" gives it an intrinsic popularity advantage, and someone being "the original creator" gives their new works an intrinsic advantage. I believe in attribution, which means that if someone recreates or closely derives another's art or style, they should point to the original**. With attribution, IP is much less important, because a recreation or spin-off must be significantly better to out-compete the original in popularity, and even then, it's extra success usually spills onto the original, making it more popular than it would be without the recreation or spin-off anyways. Old books, movies, and video games like Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Sonic have many "recreations" which copy all but their IP, and fan recreations which copy even that; yet they're far more popular than all the recreations, and when Warner Bros, Disney, or SEGA release a new installment, the new installment is far more popular too, simply because it's an original.
* IANAL, maybe there are some technicalities, but in practice this is true.
** Or others can do it. As long as it shows up alongside their work, so people don't see the recreation or close derivation without knowing about the original.
>"they're being evil for the sake of being evil, just like in my manchild Marvel/Harry Potter/Star Wars movies"
The amount of times I've seen people on reddit reply to (presumably real) Ukrainian redditors with a show of solidarity composed of some slogan from a Hollywood movie or to try to explain/compare their situation in Ukraine / on the world stage to an Avengers movie is honestly baffling. I genuinely can't believe that people live framing their existence and perspective of the world without the context of cheap power fantasy fiction. It's so cringingly out of touch that I'm almost far more willing to believe people talking like that are the Russian bots people are constantly harping on about trying to make Western public support look bad.
> Every other fantasy-type movie in a modern setting I cannot take seriously...Avengers, Harry Potter, Star Wars, etc.
> Like, just use a gun. Whatever you were going to attack with, put that in a gun, and attack at 45rpm, 3000 ft/s.
This is one of the many reasons why I like the Dresden Files universe. Wizards wield incredible power, but a wizard can still be brought down by a sniper.
Force-field was innovative.
Every other fantasy-type movie in a modern setting I cannot take seriously...Avengers, Harry Potter, Star Wars, etc.
Like, just use a gun. Whatever you were going to attack with, put that in a gun, and attack at 45rpm, 3000 ft/s.
Yesterday I watched a Harry Potter movie with my GF. I was a huge Potter-head back in the days, she haven't read the books. So I tried to explain to her the huge discussions around the acronym RAB in the books, and how the Norwegian translator had guessed on RAS to match how other character names were translated. Led me down to this article which has a whole section on "difficulties in translation" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Harry_Potter_translations
So how the mirror of Erised had do get a proper backwards name in Norwegian, the O.W.Ls needed a fun acronym as well, Tom Marvolo Riddle is translated as Tom Dredolo Venster to make a matching sentence akin to how it in English is I am Lord Voldemort. Gotta make the songs and poems rhyme, etc.
The Norwegian translation is a work of love, and the translator Torstein Bugge Høverstad got quite famous here for his work.
I guarantee monopoly is fine, but does JK Rowling really need another billion dollars off of book she wrote 30 years ago. She would be just fine if Harry Potter was public domain after a modest 25 years. Keep in mind that would only apply to the original book, if Warner Brothers makes another movie that would be under its own 25-year copyright. What we have now is this weird system where so much of our collective heritage is basically walled off.
Mega Corp doesn't like a movie they made 40 years ago, so now no one can ever watch it again?
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.
Aren't only the books in Harry Potter cannon? The movies are segregated, if anything from the overlap period fed back into the books it was probably a mistake.
Whilst I understand your point, if you wanted to watch 2 & 3, you would have had to go walk to your video shop and either rent or buy those next two movies anyway.
I don't know how interested I'd be in watching movies of old if I needed to go and fork out more money to rent or buy the movies.
Heck if I wanted to go rewatch Harry Potter all of the movies are there on Netflix. I don't need to go and buy the boxset of hire each movie individually.
This is more like the moving "still" pictures in a Harry Potter movie. Not a 3D world.
Big boots to fill if they go ahead with the Harry Potter TV series.
> t having watched the movies and talked to my son who has read the books a few times, the magic system seems entirely inconsistent and capricious,
I agree. The magic in Harry Potter is used almost purely as plot armor.
Why does this $MAGIC work but not that $MAGIC? Because the plot requires it.
It's not a good example of universe building at all. The approach in the discworld novels is a lot better.
As an aside from your core point about tech, I don't think Harry Potter's universe is particularly well-designed or thoughtful. I mean, I haven't actually read Harry Potter, but having watched the movies and talked to my son who has read the books a few times, the magic system seems entirely inconsistent and capricious, and is one of my bigger gripes with the story coming from more mature authors like Brandon Sanderson that build out much more consistent and believable fantasy worlds.
I have no idea whether this will affect the work's longevity, but it sure affects my desire to read it.
> I don't think Harry Potter will stand the test of time that well. In the world of Harry Potter, there are no cell phones, no internet, no Google and no AI.
Books and stories that stand the test of time do so in spite of aging.
By that, I mean that $FOO is just so damn good that it captures the imagination completely and fully.
There were no television sets in Grimm fairy tales, and they're still being retold. There were no cellphones in Shrek, the last movie was made in 2019, and those ears are still recognisable to my child, born after 2019!
For books and stories to age well they don't need to be very relatable to the reader (although it helps), they need to be good!
A further argument is that, to be relatable, technology is not needed. There is not problem, right now, reading a book or a story written in 2024 that is set in (for example) 1960. Some very popular recent books/stories/movies/series were set in the 60s, 70s and 80s.
Being relatable is neither necessary nor sufficient to aging well.
I am not the content I see. I don't watch movies or shows, I don't watch Douyin (TikTok), don't keep up with social media, I haven't read Harry Potter or watched Star Wars. I only watch a few small channels on Youtube, and I play Rocket League, and work on personal hobby projects (coding, photography, ceramics).
There are lots of people who I would consider myself to not be strangers with. You should be able to connect with people over things besides "tentpole" pop culture artifacts. You should be able to connect with people without any common cultural artifacts. People are interesting.
Something that used to be popular was the concept of the Western Canon: a core reading list of timeless works for the ages, around which our collective culture revolved. But I don’t think such a thing exists or can exist any more, in our hyper-diverse, hyper-content-stuffed world. As the amount and availability of TV, music, books, films, etc. increases, the odds of meeting somebody who’s had a similar set of cultural inputs as you tends towards zero.
Tentpole stuff like Harry Potter is the only thing saving us from complete societal atomization where everybody is a stranger.
Alien, Jurassic Park, The Harry Potter films
just vectors that represent pixel relationships
Ask DALL-E 2 for Mona Lisa and it will produce something clearly derived from the original work. The ability to recreate items from the training set depends on how these systems are trained, but they are clearly capable of retraining enough to be problematic.
The Harry Potter the movies aren’t the original books, derivative works don’t imply something is the same just that it’s directly derived from something else.
> If I splatter paint on a canvas, does jackson pollock have a copyright claim?
If you’re trying to copy him then actually yes he would. Being inspired by a technique is fine, but the difference is less subtle than you might think.
Copyright cares how something was created, if you end up with ‘random’ patterns that happen to look suspiciously similar to another work it’s extremely unlikely that you came to that point randomly. What’s the odds you would pick the same 12 colors as someone else and apply them in the same order? 12 factorial isn’t a small number and that’s before considering the color selection.
The "pleb" part is specifically about consuming music like one does McDonald's. And the problem isn't eating McDonald's, it's eating only McDonald's.
I've always found strange that judging musical taste (or lack of it) is so controversial compared to other forms of art. If you say that people who only watch MCU movies or haven't read more than Harry Potter/Twilight are "plebeians" (or whatever less offensive word you want to use... philistine?), you'll get way less outrage than by stating something similar about music.
In the end, I think the disagreement may stem from two points: "plebeian" is automatically seen as an insult, not a possibly accurate (if condescending) descriptor and the usual extreme relativism that caring about music is should as universal as caring about tractors.
This is largely an issue of trust and priority, not attention span, right?
The same people who fly through TikTok videos also regularly sit through a two hour movie or read the entire Harry Potter series.
I think that people can pay attention if they want to, and the cultural shift is _what_ we expect to give attention to.
It would be great if my kid was into the video games I was into as a kid, but I've kind of resigned myself to the fact that she's a different person, grew up in a different environment, has different expectations out of video games. You can't force someone to like something. Same with movies and music. I tried to get her into Harry Potter and Star Wars and the kid/teen movies I grew up with like The Goonies and Flight of the Navigator, but those movies just so old to this generation, and there's nothing in it for them to relate to.
It's like trying to get "11 year old me" into The Howdy Doody Show.
It has something to do with it. The internet enables control over what you talk about and share even with those close to you. We seem to like controlling others where we can. It doesnt seem al that bad but our benevolent corporate overlord dont represent the true madness of our kind. They havent categorized an untermensh nor refer to people as animals, we get to complaint about and mock our leaders. We have an elaborate system of law. One day people will no doubt wake up and it is all gone or it will gradually errode away.
Laws that require changing our entire civilisation and culture are not your friend. You dont want to search everones house to check if they own a radio or tv. If that happens depends on who is asking. It isnt a static group. It might begin with heroic crime fighters but we can expand or replace the effort with new business logic. First we need to prevent you from reading a harry potter registered in someone elses name, then we need to be able to take your music purchases away from you until eventually we need to lock you up for subscribing to the wrong youtube channel 30 years ago.
It isnt actually as absurd as not having video on websites in an afordable way.
All those people working at youtube and all of those giant servers. It takes a truly monumental effort to use the wrong technology.
I have to watch ads to pay for it? Advertisers have to influence content to pay for it? Our best men to keep the eyeballs on ads to pay for it?
I have over a thousand yt subs to deleted channels for a laundry list of resons. There use to be threaded discussions and video replies. It all had to go to pay for it?
All the horrors of central planning without the nice things the communists prommised us?
All that to make sure some people get paid for things other people did 70 years ago?
If that is what it costs they should not be paid. I hope little jimmy downloads all of their movies, every tv show, all the video games, all of their music, all of their books and all of their published papers.
They wanted little jimmy to pay for singing happy birthday on video. Imagine the money they lost that day. All of those birthdays!
We could have had birthday inspection squad teams. Fight the crime at the source.
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> ... except they're History graduates who went to Eton
For the non-British readers here, Eton is a boarding school [0] west of London. It's where nearly all the elite members of British politics and society attend from ages 13 to 18. Like, all the royalty go there. And Harry Potter is like just cribbing from what these boarding schools do. When you hear some British actor in a movie or something say '... Old Boy, ...', they are referring being very wealthy and graduating from one of these boarding schools.
Somewhat unsurprisingly, they are nearly all child abuse nightmare zones, Eton especially. Like, there's a wiki page dedicated to the controversies there [1].
I got into looking into Eton when I was researching the history of the various football codes. Eton was the birthplace of two of the nascent footballs: The Field game [2] and the Wall game [3]. I'll skip the history lesson here and the rules briefing. The thing that stood out to me about the Wall game was the ceremony around it. Specifically, that it's played on St Andrew's Day (November 30th) by the Collegers (rich boys) and the rest of the school (slightly less rich boys). Now, the Collegers have this tradition (500+ years old) where they all get roaring drunk the night before and are trying to play this wall game really hungover, which makes it all a bit more 'fair'. They traditionally get so drunk that the little headmater-y person in charge just up and leaves for the night. So, you have 13-18 year olds, all drunk as hell, all alone, all night long, and they all kinda hate each other. Like, come on dude.
That little bit alone is just astounding to my non-British eyes and condemn the whole enterprise. But then you read a bit more about the place and it's just ghastly. Then these tortured and abused kids go on to repeat the cycle onto each other, for like hundreds of years, because tradition.
Oh, and then they all go on to run Britain.
So, next time you see some mention of Eton, just imagine Hogwarts but with just brontosaurs levels of abuse and abusers.
Britain is mental my dudes.
[0] The Limeys call them 'public schools', because something something Anglican (?) church something
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eton_College_controversies
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eton_field_game
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eton_wall_game
I think it becomes intrusive into the storytelling when it becomes a constant chain of "and then yet another, even crazier thing happened to this one character". Especially when the character started as an everyman.
It's a problem many book series have - one character keeps being the centre of the universe and surviving insurmountable odds repeatedly to the point of incredulity and usually the ante keeps ratcheting up as well so your original ordinary-human character ends up with some kind of godlike powers.
To me, Harry Potter is actually fairly good in this regard, as the character development is at least not utterly unlike 11-18 year olds at school during the re-outbreak of a traumatic civil war, and from the start, there's a clear, in-universe reason why the main character is always the one near the action in the depicted timeframe.
Star Wars did this quite well originally ("why is this rando farmhand at the centre, oh, cool, that's why"). The prequels did a little worse ("here's how the farmhand's father got to the centre, ok well maybe it's awfully convenient the ship broke down right there and a simple blood test reveals The One, but ok") and the recent films rather worse ("these people are at the centre...how? Why? Genetic predestination?"). Notably, the less you explain the Force, the easier it is to keep the story believable and consistent. Again, Harry Potter's vagueness over the specifics of magic helps it.
Something that seems to be getting more common, though it's not new, as series lengthen in real-world time is to do a Star Trek: TNG and start an in-universe subseries where you can have things happen to someone else entirely for a change, but as part of the overall universe's story. It can be tricky if the universe is very predicated on one person, like Harry Potter is. Star Wars has not done well at this, but have tried. I think they keep trying to bootstrap interest from existing fans by character reuse, but the better series like Andor pick a whole new story to tell.
Iain M. Banks was especially good at this and didn't even really have a main narrative, as he'd hop all over the Culture in time and space so you could have the cool stuff happen that he wanted to show the reader, but didn't need to keep powering-up one person (or ship) endlessly. But space opera has the advantage that you can just go and be somewhere and somewhen else very easily. It's a bit harder if you need the subseries to be nearby without constantly dragging the other main characters in, especially when they're further along their upgrade path as you need to explain why they don't just pick up the phone, pop round and stomp the "mortal threat" flat and it's another kind of deus ex machina. Doubly so if the threat is very obvious and world-ending, because surely they'd turn up to that!
I don't really think it's a gender thing, my friends who were boys and I talked about books pretty frequently. They were pretty much the same as videogames, comic books, movies and shows to us so we'd talk about them in the same way.
I specifically remember that when the first Harry Potter (I was a child cut me some slack) came out I bounced off it because I didn't like it, and then one of my friends at school couldn't stop talking about it and got me interested enough to pick it back up.
And don't even get me STARTED on the LotR books. Or Star Trek novelizations (which I still consider books).
I'm convinced those who think LLMs are just hype haven't used them, or don't know how outdated most back office processes are, and don't realize how limited we are in terms of content. I would say the bubble is just barely forming, not about to burst for several more years.
Reasons:
- OpenAI lobbying trying to get open source competition banned
- Apple releasing the M4 with those hardware specs
- Big brands like Adobe finding early success
- Industries are ripe for disruption: Medical, legal, procurement, communications of various kinds especially around documentation, support, summarizing, education, media, art, music, film and other entertainment, I can imagine a lot of disruption.
What would this do to Netflix:
render a 100-hour Harry Potter film that follows every detail of the books exactly Or:
render a Tom Cruise sci-fi movie starring Sigourney Weaver in her prime and Bruce Willis as the villain How could Netflix or even YouTube keep up with scripts that render any video you can imagine? They'll have to offer it too, or go the way of Blockbuster. I imagine record labels and film studios will sue and try to get certain models banned that imitate celebrities or film styles, but people will just illicitly share models with torrents. There's going to be a whole era, I think, because the tech will need to be captured by the big boys but it's not there yet - so part of that is letting the market come up with ideas before they absorb it all then burst the economy.
Our search engines and websites will have LLMs imbued into their functionality, smartphones will have them, kiosks IRL will have them, SaaS will use them to replace representatives and online order forms.
IMO AI models are potentially more disruptive than social media and crypto because it's not just the sharing of content unrestricted, it's the unrestricted creation of content and information itself - giving basically anyone the ability to do it.
It's not fizzing, you're going to be able to say:
render 40 hours of Harry Potter film based on every detail of all books or:
create a sequel to Titanic where Leo DiCap comes back from the dead and rezzes Godzilla and you'll be able to watch that. Imagine that in every content vertical, we haven't even scratched the surface.
The fact that you have enough reading comprehension to summarize my comment, deconstruct its arguments, and formulate a counterargument puts you in an extremely small minority. You and I spend time around people who read, who have reading comprehension. Of those, a shrinking minority occasionally read actual books.
Most people never, ever, ever read paper or e-reader books. They struggle mightily in school to read the things they are _forced_ to read, and then say "never again" for life when they graduate. This is true even for intelligent people who have "good jobs" with disposable income and time set aside that they could conceivably spend reading paper or e-reader books. Seriously, if half of your friends have read a single paper or e-reader book in the last year, you are in a very very small minority.
Media that people regularly consume: Cable TV, Streaming Services, Instagram and TikTok, Movies, Sports, Reddit/Twitter/the news (CNN, etc), paper or e-reader books. What is your intuition about how large each of these categories is compared to the others? If you say "books" is even 5%, you are off by an order of magnitude.
What I am saying is that this holds true, even for a fandom like Harry Potter, which is ostensibly based around reading a book!
> There are gems coming out today that will be considered great works by our descendants.
Wow. Can't wait for the next Harry Potter / Avatar / Celebrity book / Spiderman movie !!!!11!!!1! Great works!
> but isn't right now pretty amazing too?
No.
“Influencing” is not the same as “manipulating” or “controlling” in this context.
Some kid in eastern europe watched Kobe Bryant play and got inspired to sign up for a local basketball team and took it seriously - that’s influencing. People in some countries outside of the US that never had Halloween as a holiday now unofficially observe it (due to the holiday’s portrayal in western media and it being almost a staple for a sitcom series to have an episode dedicated to it) - that’s influencing.
But you are right, it isnt the type of an influence you are thinking about, with an evil man twirling his moustache and trying to manipulate people on the other side of the globe to do his bidding via harry potter movies.
> My comment was specifically about the use of tens of thousands of copyrighted books which had been pirated and distributed illegally, for which the authors - most of whom receive quite a small amount of money for their work as it is - received nothing and weren’t asked for permission.
I'm sorry, while true you've made to much of a heart warming story from it. It is an ongoing conflict between sharing and not sharing books, published papers, video, audio and perhaps patents should also be part of the scope. On both sides we have both small and large efforts that range from deserving to not deserving our sympathy.
The main beneficiary of not sharing the content of books are the publishers. For the most part they have proven not to care about authors. Much like the recording industry. They will not stop pushing for more and more control if it benefits them.
They really want (and have) my government adopting/creating/preserving/copying(lol?) laws that cant realistically be implemented. They wont be satisfied even if they can get a scheme like the TV license circus with random assholes searching peoples homes looking for a radio or TV (while even the police has no such rights) You already cant play music in public places without paying various kinds of protection money.
They are already scanning your uploads in various places looking for anything that vaguely resembles something else. When they think they've found it you will be punished. They don't care what life will be like after losing your proverbial google account over a false positive. Oh and Google has to pay for it which means you ultimately have to pay for your own investigation and persecution.
People got enormous fines for tiny offenses. There are efforts to filter out websites at the ISP level. Bittorrent is portrayed as a tool for pirates while it is simply a much superior sharing technology.
Many enormous data centers had to be build just so that we can use inferior means of distribution. You ultimately have to pay for that. You got asymmetric internet connections because hey, you don't need to be uploading anything now do you? We are retooling the entire civilization to protect Harry Potter, Shakin that Ass and Plan 9 from outer space and you get to pay for it.
The industries want to sell new works. That agenda also opposes the distribution of existing works. We have a rich history of book burning so that the old may make room for the new.
Personally, the most worrying part is the desire/agenda to breed a population of illiterate consumers who can barely tie their own shoes but should some how run a democracy.
It should be that if anyone shows an ever so slight interest in a topic we ram all the relevant books, published papers, patents, documentaries and tools in their hands and shout: HERE, READ THIS, WATCH THIS AND HERE IS YOUR FISHING ROD.
This is worth twice the military budget. We can find a way to pay authors. It doesn't seem a very hard problem. I'm not sure there really is a need but plenty of people want this so lets make it.
> There is a very big difference between knowingly downloading and using illegally distributed copyrighted works vs scraping the internet in general.
Not really, you cant look inside peoples head. If I buy something knowing it was stolen or pretending not to know it is still a crime.
Good for you. That's a data set of 1.
I based that on empirical observation of my kids' friends. They don't make up stories, they just replay the star wars or Harry Potter movies. So I don't know, a dozen kids or so. I haven't done a nation wide study yet.
JK Rowling exploiting workers is a straw man and sidesteps the point.
To some people what I wrote will be a truism and to others it will beg the question.
I see what side that fell on for you and that's good, I'm not citing anything, so definitely question my reasoning. But don't think for a second that producing a handful of books people ended up wanting can generate that amount of value.
In the case of Rowling, she was also executive producer of several Harry Potter films and was no doubt a benificiary of motion picture accounting to a greater or lesser degree. She controls charities and who knows how many shell companies and trusts to hide and manipulate wealth. That's what you have access to at that scale of rich.
Furthermore, if she wasn't cooking the books, hiding and differentiating wealth for tax benefit, placing herself in position to extract more wealth, then she would be the stupid one among her rich peer group and would quickly find herself like one of those lottery winners who are back to being poor and none the wiser 5 years later.
Another truism is that it sounds fun to be rich, but it probably isn't very.
Another truism is that I'm sure we'd all rather suffer being rich than be poor.
Good books, good music, good movies are absolutely scarce.
Idea about kid getting into wizarding school is probably not that unique and you still can write your own flavor of it there is no copyright on that. It still is that somehow Harry Potter story is single best one out there.
The same with all the love songs you can make new one any time you want but it is not like everyone makes "Endless love" like Diana Ross with Lionel Richie.
I'd argue otherwise. With electronic self-publishing, you are completely free to experiment, and have an audience potentially all over the (English-speaking) world.
But it's not going to make you world-famous, save for unique exceptional cases. It will likely will not directly bring you wealth from sales, or actually any considerable money. Ah, and the printed book is a gimmick that only a part of your audience would still appreciate; literature and paper are much like music and vinyl.
You can still become truly world-famous and well-off if your book becomes a basis of a movie, or ideally several; see e.g. Harry Potter or The Song of Fire and Ice. Granted, they not a completely realistic, but neither is Moby-Dick, or Hundred Years of Solitude, or, say, Don Quixote, which basically started the whole "novel" thing.
If you memorize all of harry potter word for word, or some famous solo vocal track from memory, are you committing a copyright violation? Or only if you then recreate it and try to redistribute your copy?
The scenario where AI training is locked down doesn't result in 1,000,000 individuals getting paid. (What would they get paid, and by whom?) It results in Disney, Adobe, etc.—massive companies with existing licenses to use content just about however they want—training their own models and locking everyone else out of the large AI model training game, until AI gets good enough to start generating human-quality creative work on its own (the same kind of progression as alphago/lee to alphago/zero), perhaps with the addition of a small set of purely copyright-free material.
Excluding all copyrighted material would be tying an AI model's metaphorical hands behind its back, since humans, although capable of producing great works through much iterative effort in isolation, all rely on having learned from some copyrighted work. Find an author who hasn't read plenty of recent books as well as older classics, or a musician (other than classical) who hasn't listened to plenty of modern music, or a director or editor who hasn't watched tons of movies and films. Recall Newton, "[I]f I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Many of those "shoulders" are copyrighted.
I grew up in a family of fantasy nerds and it still took a while for me to get around to LOTR. My main interest was I vaguely remembered a WIRED interview with the creators of Riven (the sequel to Myst) where they said it was an inspiration. I don't remember in what way since the setting is very different, although looking at it now I can see some thematic similarities (a formerly pristine world set on a doomed path by an evil figure with a god complex).
Anyway, I did read the trilogy and the Hobbit and held them in high regard. The movies (mainly the Return of the King) actually did _significantly_ "cheapen" the idea of the LOTR in my eyes at least because the "Return of the King" movie left out plot points that I felt were vital to the message of the books. Primarily that even after the "big bad" was defeated, people were still evil (see the Scouring of the Shire). Much like the real-world war that must have inspired Tolkien given his participation in it, it was a major victory to celebrate but nevertheless not the end of every struggle.
Tangentially I'd also say that even the original Harry Potter brand is cheaper than LOTR because although it's fun and palatable, it doesn't have as much to say about the real world or challenge us in how we live our lives.
A major theme throughout the book trilogy had been that everyone, even Gandalf, has a "shadow" that corrupts their good intentions, except for hobbits which made them ideal ring bearers since the Ring would twist ambition/pride/etc to its own ends. It's basically a morality play for the post-WW2 generation, where the demons are not just external monsters but internal temptations. The movie trilogy's ending was much "neater" and also much less true to life.
But on the other hand, the RPG "The One Ring" does right by the source material by making the shadow a mechanic in the game that mirrors the theme in the books.
So LOTR seems like an excellent example of licensing gone both right (The One Ring) and wrong (admittedly the movies weren't all bad, but most could probably agree the Hobbit movies did cheapen the source material).
There is nothing more insincere then me "being interested" in Harry Potter, Taylor Swift and superhero movies. As in, if insincerity is the worry, the common interest us the worst possible platform. Because, partly I am not interested in stuff teenagers are into now, which is normal for someone of my age. And partly because teenagers seeks to create own identity so me going into there would kinda destroyed it for them.
We do rarely. Two reasons: One, because we watch Harry Potter enough and it wasn't worth buying the set on demand, and Two, I usually cannot keep track of which service we bought a particular movie on.
I also have a Roku and a large USB thumb drive, so if I have time, I rip a movie onto the thumbdrive, thus, creating our own little on-demand service.
The song is distinct from an artists performance of that song, but let’s move outside of music to books etc.
Suppose A creates an epic poem, B does a poetry reading aka a performance of A’s poem. C plays that recording back in public. D reinterprets the poem making a new public performance. B can successfully sue C but not necessarily D if it’s sufficiently distinct. A however can potentially sue D, C, and B if none of them got the rights.
This is why JK Rawling got paid by the people making Harry Potter movies, she could sue if they didn’t pay. Trademarks may also be involved, but even without that if you want to make an MMORPG based on The Dresden Files or whatever be prepared to fork over cash. Unless you follow the Disney approach and use public domain works.
15fps already looks kinda cool on eink, even with the ghosting artifacts. Not that I'd recommend watching movies like that, but still. Harry Potter newspaper in reach. :)
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I cannot even finish watching the Lord of the Rings movies. Extremely boring to me.
Harry Potter, on the other hand, I read and then watched just a few years ago in my 30s, and I found it very entertaining.
Everyone has their own preferences.
This was interesting, although I feel the author was making two separate points here. One point was about the popularity of young adult (YA) fiction with adults, and the other was something to do with a book about queer kids being criticized and an attempt to remove it from a public library because children might find it. The thread that connects them was supposedly that the library system circulates 135 copies of 50 Shades of Grey, but how exactly that related to YA lit I'm not sure. The link is certainly weak, or lost on me. (The author started writing fan-fic for YA novels?). Smut has existed forever, certainly before the arbitrary transition period the author of the article has come up with, so I'm not sure I understand the link.
Anyways, of the two points, I find the latter one boring and tired, and so I'd prefer to talk about the first one. The author states:
> My husband and I spent several years putting on pleasant faces when talk over cocktails drifted to “Which Hogwarts house would you belong to?” It all felt so juvenile and regressive. And I believe it was.
I was unable to escape this feeling at the time when Harry Potter was sweeping through the world. I'd just finished Lord of the Rings and, while I picked up a Harry Potter book, I just found it tough to get into. Then I watched the same thing happen with series like Eragon, Wheel of Time, Twilight, Song of Fire and Ice, Hunger Games and more (might have the order mixed up). I've read at least a single book from all those series (except Twilight) and while I've gone back and re-read Lord of the Rings 4 times since, I've never felt compelled to read those series, or watch the movie/TV adaptations.
I've spent actually a not insignificant amount of time wondering why those books never clicked with me, while watching them become sweeping, generation-defining cultura phenomena. It's bothered me, because I've been left out of a lot of "which Hogwarts house are you" type of conversations. But the thing that's really strange is that I kept waiting for everyone to outgrow those books and move on. On the one hand, I understand mass appeal, and I understand not understanding mass appeal. Not everything is truly for everyone, and it never bothered me that those books missed me, but what bothered me was that we never let go of them as a culture. I still know people who call other people "muggles", for instance, even though we're all well into our 30s by now.
There are a lot of things I liked in my youth that I look back fondly on now, but realize they aren't for me as an adult. Music, movies, TV, books (I had my own YA novel preferences), that, at some point, I just walked away from. Some of them were quite good, some of them were of broad appeal, but eventually, I outgrew them. What confuses me so much is society's inability to outgrow a lot of these recent YA novels. The same way I'm confused about how Taylor Swift is still so popular with her original demographic.
There used to be a certain strategy that if you paid attention to, many media companies (especially Disney) would employ: They'd release some media series, say, Star Wars. Then they'd wait until the people who originally were kids/young adults got older, had their own kids, and they'd re-release the property, or release sequels/prequels, etc. (Star Wars being a good example because they've done this 3 time now, with the originals in the 80s, prequels in the early 00s, and the latest batch in the 2020s). You could see clear generational gaps between surges in popularity. But that seems to have just gone away now.
All in all, it's not a real problem. I'm still just as tired of these media properties as I was a few years after they came out, but it's not like it really affects my life. It's just really strange to see the level of persistence, and I can't find any historical comparisons.
Yes, the same thing is happening for movies and TV shows. Practically every major movie is either a boring superhero movie or a remake. It’s because movie studios don’t want to take a risk on something new and creative that could flop. They want dependable profits.
I just pointed out Watchmen as a rare example where the producers took a big risk by making it about racism and violent extremism. Even though it was a superhero show, it felt fresh due to the new take and ideas.
It rankled a lot of feathers in the process, likely reinforcing Hollywood’s desire to continue making cookie cutter shows instead.
And about Harry Potter - it did a great job of evolving throughout the series to stay fresh. The kids grew up, learned new types of magic, and had constantly changing relationships for one thing.
Also, the series constantly introduced new and interesting characters or killed off extremely popular characters as well.
There was even an installment that heavily made use of time travel, which I thought was depicted in a really cool and satisfying way.
Lampshading something is different than parody it’s goal is to push suspension of disbelief just a little bit further, where parody doesn’t try to maintain it.
You can’t watch “Are We the Baddies?” as a war story. It introduced such elements simply to establish who’s getting made fun of. They remain in character but that’s it, the war story plot doesn’t progress the skit just keeps hammering the parody. Some parody has a more complete story but “Scary Movie” progresses the underlying plot to make fun of different elements of the movies it’s making fun of.
Harry Potter on the other hand calls out many of the tropes it’s using. House of the lions vs house of the snakes, guess who’s supposed to be the hero and who the villain. Except the characters once introduced are telling an actual story.
Snow Crash is between those extremes but focuses too much on the underlying story and its characters to be an actual parody. Over the top elements exist in the world, but they are played straight more Gulliver's Travels than Spaceballs.
I'm not understanding how it's different. For example, if I specifically set out to make money by creating and selling a parody of Harry Potter by reading all the Harry Potter books a bunch of times, does that make my parody a violation of the spirit of existing copyright law?
Edit to add another example because someone is going to say that parody is its own thing and exempted. If I want to make money by writing a film in the same way Tarantino does I go and read all his screenplays to understand his style, pacing, character archetypes, etc. Should that also not be ok?
What was hacked for you in the LotR movies? The only egregious hacking I noticed in the movies was the character assassination of Faramir.
I must disagree on Harry Potter. All the moves after Columbus stopped directing them were bad. From angry-American Dumbledore, to Fiennes’s bizzare Voldemort, to Hermione being bolstered at the expense of Ron.
I'm not sure that's really true. Take, for example, the Harry Potter movies. They were great, but imperfect, and were really well received. But they are still being readapted into a TV series.
I felt that the Harry Potter films kind of missed out on what made the books so special. In the books, besides the slowly building adventure/mystery story, all the episodic, mundane day to day drama in the life of the school really felt like living through a school year in a surprisingly realistic way. The movies I saw focused on the adventure and lost a lot of that charm of feeling like you’re back in school alongside the characters.
I don't think the original Lord of the Rings trilogy would really be filmable as a 1:1 book to film adaptation. As a book fan I think Peter Jackson did a pretty good job with it in general; the behind the scenes footage really shows that they did care about the source material. Fellowship particularly I would still say is great, Two Towers and ROTK have some moments that are either downright ridiculous or against the spirit of the novel but they're still okay as films.
The Hobbit on the other hand really feels generally awful. I watched a fan-cut of it that cuts all 3 movies down to about 4 hours of content and it felt just about watchable.
>The Harry Potter movies were fabulous in my opinion because the stories were not hacked by directors who felt they knew better than the original author. I may be wrong on that but that's my understanding - that largely the Harry Potter movies are true to the script.
I think you can attribute this more to JKR being still alive and in control of her creation than well-meaning production studios / directors.
Honestly I think any LOTR fan should be so grateful for those movies. It could have gone wrong in so many ways. At one point it was supposed to be a single movie. It could have deviated completely from the books, it could have been super cheaply made. Remember, the books didn't have a big pop culture presence at the time. Fortunately, Jackson and others involved were really passionate about doing it right, and convinced New Line to take a big risk on it. Maybe they should have changed nothing, but I think that's unreasonable. It's a different medium, where storytelling and pacing are just different, and also we live in reality, and people are looking for returns on their investment.
The Hobbit movies are different story. I don't know if we'll ever know entirely what happened, but from what I can deduce, there were too many studios involved looking for huge returns, and they made big changes too late, including moving expanding from 2 movies to 3, and switching directors.
The Harry Potter movies are pretty faithful, but they remove tons of content. The books get much longer as the series go on, but the movies don't, so 4, 5, 6 are really flying through scenes just to get through the main plot.
The Harry Potter movies were fabulous in my opinion because the stories were not hacked by directors who felt they knew better than the original author
They gutted Rowling’s clever ending that tied everything together neatly to replace it with a laser gun fight.
It saddens me that the Lord of The Rings was commercialised.
It was one of the happiest parts of life - to be able to read the books and venture into that world.
It's been spoiled for me by the ridiculous movies like The Hobbit (holy god, Peter Jackson turned Dwarves into ridiculous comedy clowns, covered Radagast with birdshit) , the endless licensed garbage and whilst The Lord of The Rings movie was quite good it hacked the story instead of treating it with reverence. The movie should have changed nothing, regardless of what "modern audiences" expect.
The Harry Potter movies were fabulous in my opinion because the stories were not hacked by directors who felt they knew better than the original author. I may be wrong on that but that's my understanding - that largely the Harry Potter movies are true to the script.
Thank goodness there's a single example in this world of a great work not being commercialised - Calvin and Hobbes.
I think the problem in Denmark is re-buying things: You bought Harry Potter on VHS, now again on DVD, again on BlueRay, again through Blockbuster, and again through YouTube. In the end that is one expensive movie!
In the end it is less unfair to just download the movie you already paid for.
I mean, sure. I like Harry Potter and I also liked HPMOR. Although imo it goes off the rails in the second half or so and kinda fails to live up to its promise.
Satire / parody doesn't necessarily have to be a merciless polemic against the target - and as a matter of fact, it would be pretty hard to read HPMOR and not come away with the feeling that the author was a pretty big Harry Potter fan.
Another thing that comes to mind is the horror movie Cabin in the Woods, which sends up lots of horror tropes but is still fun and enjoyable for fans of the genre.
> Harry Potter had phenomenally good source material such that they would have had to try really hard to mess it up.
I wish that were true, but there's too many terrible movies with outstanding source material.
Harry Potter had phenomenally good source material such that they would have had to try really hard to mess it up.
I'll hold my breath for the TV series...
Jurassic Park had two books, from which they've now made five (or is it six? Jeez who cares by this point) movies.
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Not only that, but a lot of British films will make british-only casting decisions, eg the Harry Potter series. I've never heard of a major American film making that choice, and it would probably be blasted as xenophobic if it did.
It is good at inferring the correct people into a story. But the story many times leaves something to be desired.
Other times though I did have a lot of fun having it spit out SCP stories. As those can many times have a ton of template like logic to them. Due to the nature of SCP being written in a tone of a formal report. Plus well over 2000 different examples.
Also some of that could be due to lack of training data. Like a TV show might be 4 seasons long and a particular character may have had 3 or 4 lines total. It would be like asking it to write a story about Boba Fett given the original 2 movies where he showed up and had maybe 1 or two lines. There just is not enough to extrapolate anything. But you ask it to write something about Harry Potter and it probably could get the style close enough as there is more training data.
My biggest grip is sometimes it just gets stuck in a loop. Once you are in one, the thing just will dump out the same hallucinations over and over.
>that movie runtimes - even though they're getting longer - just aren't a good medium for complex stories like this that rely on heavy background and backstory
Peter Jackson would disagree. If you can't get it done in a single "getting longer" movie runtime, just make it into 3. Harry Potter did it in 2, Twilight did it in 2, etc. So the precedent of using multiple movies is there.
The courts are going to always be obsessed with one practical scenario. I take e.g. Harry Potter, put it through an LLM with the prompting of essentially writing the exact same thing with slightly different characters, locations, and phrasings. And then put it up for sale (or free download), making no secret of the fact that it's essentially the same book.
If an LLM reaches a sufficient capability that this can be achieved while maintaining a roughly comparable level of readability, then you'd have just completely legalized 'piracy by proxy'. And the same would come to every single medium from movies to software. This is going to make it an extremely difficult question to answer.
I expect what it come down to is determinism. LLMs are completely deterministic - same model + same input + same seed = same output. And so any seller will be obligated to retain any model composition/data, and any copyright holder of an input training item will have a copyright claim on any output item. In other words, you can only train on stuff you already have the copyright to, or rights to.
The kinds of individuals who are willing to do what it takes to rise through the ranks in a bureaucracy -- i.e., bureaucrats -- have a long history of staying in line, following orders, and engaging in mental gymnastics to rationalize their behavior when their bureaucracy is run by an authoritarian who pushes it in evil directions. Every two-bit strong man and authoritarian dictator in history has presided over a bureaucracy.
BTW, the "Harry Potter" series of books do a good job of showing how this happens -- that is, how otherwise decent people end up falling in line -- at a large bureaucratic organization called "The Ministry of Magic." The movies based on the books don't do as good a job; they skip most of the bureaucratic details.
Overall I feel pretty disappointed in all of this. It seems like they've been dropping all the original stuff like Raised by Wolves or The Nevers and just making a bunch of spin off/remakes of existing stuff like a Harry Potter TV show and GoT spin offs. Just seem dedicated to only taking what they think are safe bets.
I know, right? This line in particular got stuck out at me:
> They are mortally offended by the suggestion that Marvel might be somehow less good than Chris Marker, or that K-pop might be worse than Rimsky-Korasov.
Never heard of Chris Marker or Rimsky-Korasov, had to look those up. Chris Marker looks like an indie French filmmaker who 60 years ago made a 27 minute time travel film called La Jetée, using only still photographs, that William Gibson apparently considered one of his greatest influences. So yeah, this sounds like something that most mainstream people wouldn't be aware of or into and exactly the type of thing a film nerd or film hipster (who he said in the opening paragraphs were all killed because of how annoying they are) would be into.
And Rimsky-Korasov is a Russian classical music composer who's been dead for over 100 years. Someone that only a music nerd would probably be aware of nowadays, or go see a concert for.
If he didn't want to be such a hipster about it, he could have used like Martin Scorsese or Stanley Kubrick and Mozart or Bach or even Debussy or something, a name most people would probably recognize, instead of these less recognizable names, especially in an article where he's making fun of nerds for being into obscure shit (while "their" movies have been dominating the box office for well over a decade at this point).
I'm not trying to defend Marvel here either. I don't think they're the best movies ever made (I thought Everything Everywhere All At Once was the best movie I've seen since Parasite, and considering it pretty much swept the Oscars this year, and Parasite did a few years before that, critics seem to agree with me there).
Another quote that stuck out:
> The culture we produce on Planet Nerd has nothing to do with desire whatsoever. Everything is sterile, mercilessly unsexy; no eroticism, not even visual pleasure.... Nerd culture, meanwhile, is basically quite boring to consume. Instead of the sadistic fantasy of being a superhero, doing fantastic things that ordinary people don’t get to do, the Marvel movies are about nothing more than themselves.
Sounds like someone needs to watch The Boys or Invincible. You'll get your sadistic power fantasy there. (I mean, just watch The Boys episode about 'Herogasm').
Marvel can't do that because it has to get parents to take their children to see them to make all the money. You don't see sadistic power fantasies about being a wizard in Harry Potter either, or overly sensual things with any Disney movie, barring the hidden 'SEX' in flower petals in Lion King.
> Autopilot is advanced cruise control, apart from regulatory authorities saying it’s safe compared to competitors, Tesla releases quarterly safety reports since 2019 counting the incidents with Autopilot.
So what did you do to fix the issue? Why did a second person die in the same exact way as the first person after 3 years? Were you working on the fix at all? Or did you do nothing? Just admit it if you did nothing in response to that decapitation.
You say "It's Autopilot, not FSD" as if that absolves Tesla of anything. Your marketing does not change my opinion of your technologies. It doesn't change that FSD and AP both have glaring technological flaws, doesn't change the fact that FSD is beta-quality hardware and software being tested on the general public, something the public did not agree to. It doesn't change the fact that even though they didn't agree to it, you unilaterally decided it was okay to conduct a beta test involving us. That's a huge ethical problem, and the fact you don't even see it as such blows a hole in your insistence that your colleagues take safety seriously.
It doesn't matter. I understand why you think it absolves you; because you feel that the technology is similar enough to others out there, that it's just an incremental step, and so how can Tesla be held responsible when people make a career out of fucking in their car using that technology? How can Tesla be held responsible when multiple people lose their heads due to poor choices in sensor design? Correct me if I'm off base. Why is the AP/FSD distinction so important to you?
How do you not realize it's your entire company's fault there was no other orthogonal sensor to see the tractor trailer? How do you not realize it's your entire company's fault people out there feel safe enough to use your product to watch Harry Potter or fuck while while flying down the highway, using what you call "glorified cruise control"? That's what you say it is to me, your peer, but to them you've said it was "AutoPilot (TM)". Why didn't you call it "Glorified Cruise Control" or just "Cruise Control"?
That's not on them, that's on you for unleashing this technology on us. People are always going to watch movies and fuck. That they're doing so in your beta-quality robot menace to society is not their fault. Your company specifically conditioned them to think it was okay to do this in a Tesla.
> It is shown to be safer than humans behind the wheel by quite a margin.
The passive voice is doing a lot of work here.
> There is a risk of users being too careless with FSD, which is why people we put quite some effort to getting rid of such users quickly.
Again, this just goes to show how Tesla, in fact, is not concerned about safety and security, but instead are laser focused on market dominance and pushing technology on us as fast as possible. Tesla is a look before you leap, shoot first and ask questions later kind of company. Or as I said, move fast and break things (or in this case, "put quite some effort" to patch them up after the fact).
This is a brand new technology and Tesla is rushing it out to the public as fast as humanly possible, selling it in beta quality before the technology and software is even ready. And you're telling me now that you screen users for bad behavior and ban them after the fact. It just goes to show you're treating this as some grand social experiment.
Yes people are going to watch movies in their cars. They're going to fuck. Yes they will be drunk and asleep. The problem is that you don't seem to care that your customers are using your products to do all these things, and it's over the course of years.
"Frozen" drew a fair amount of complaints in right-which Christian circles for being pro-gay. They see the "Let It Go" song as about coming out. Also the sauna at the trading post. There was a man and 4 kids in the sauna, and the only other person we saw who wasn't just someone stopping in to trade was the owner, also a man. So apparently that clearly makes the two men a gay couple with some adopted children.
An interesting place for movie reviews, regardless of your political or religious leanings, is the entertainment section at christiananswers.net. I'm an atheist but find it quite helpful.
In the reviews themselves they rate the movies both on moviemaking quality and moral quality, and cover both aspects in the review. They are quite willing to rate a movie 5 out of 5 on moviemaking quality and praise its story, acting, cinematography and so on, while at the same time rating it as extremely offensive and telling you in detail why seeing it might put your soul at risk.
There are comments there too which are almost never useful, but are often quite amusing. For example on one of the Harry Potter film reviews one of the commentators went on about how the film is actually promoting real witchcraft, and explained that before she became Christian she was a witch, performed real spells that worked, and the Harry Potter books and movies are an accurate portrayal of that real witchcraft and the spells that she use to use.
> the culture that made those days happen
Literally one movie, that was an unexpected hit is your contender for better culture?
In 2001 the highest grossing movie was Harry potter, and right below lord of the rings was monsters inc and jurasic park.
In 2002 Lord of the rings, Harry potter, Spiderman
in 2003 lord of the rings, matrix,nemo and pirates of the caribean.
Like how is that any different to now when you have pirates, spiderman, some children disney movie and fantastic beats which is just more harry potter?
> the old skills are no longer there.
Dune had more practical effects than lord of the rings. In 2001 the TV golden age had not started. Shows like the sopranos and the wire where struggling to find an audience. Friends and CSI reigned. Nowadays House of the Dragon and Last of US two high quality shows, with good use of practical effects are doing better than comparable mediocre daytime tv.
Even blockbusters are in many ways better. Andor is a million times better than anything from the 2000s prequels.
Actually, the comic itself has more recently become more political and has been accused of being racist/bigoted. If you haven't been reading the strip since its heyday in the 90s you'd probably be none the wiser.
For example, it introduced its first black character for the sole purpose of wading into identity politics: https://boingboing.net/2022/05/08/dilbert-creator-introduces-first-black-character-with-a-trans-joke.html
Separating art from artist is something that is easier or more difficult to do depending on the artist.
For someone like O.J. Simpson, the separation is quite clear. His football career predated and had no relation to his alleged infractions in his personal life. Plus, there's no real way to financially support a retired player. Going to the Buffalo Bills game today or watching old highlight clips doesn't financially benefit O.J.
For someone like Woody Allen, it's hard to ignore that his art that he directs and writes happens to include some pretty gross plot-lines, like in one his most critically acclaimed movies Manhattan where his 42 year old character dates a 17 year old.
Another "fun" fact, Woody Allen hit on the actress who played Tracy and invited her to stay with him in his hotel room: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariel_Hemingway#Personal_life
The fact that the general population was just sort of ignorant of how problematic this was doesn't really change the fact that Woody Allen is very obviously attracted to minors and that his actions were never okay.
So, really, for some of these people there is not much separation between art and the artist. Some are more of a blurred line. For example, arguably, the art of Harry Potter doesn't include much damning content, but many people have made connections between some details of the Wizarding World and the way the author's voice portrays them, and how problematic they might be in the context of her public opinions. I think this is why there's such a split on opinions on whether to continue to consume Harry Potter content amongst fans of her work.
For Scott Adams, it's clear to me that the artist is intruding on the art much more than J.K. Rowling ever intruded on her art. Adams has joined the right wing white nationalist cult and it leaks into the comic strips all the time. It's very much a political strip.
Let me finish off on the topic of "cancel culture." Let's say you walked into a candy store and the owner called you a shithead. You probably wouldn't buy candy from that candy store, right?
Well, Scott Adams did that to all Black people just now. You walk into his candy shop and you look a certain way, and he categorically dislikes you before you even say hello.
Scott Adams categorically called an entire group of people shitheads based on the color of their skin alone, not thinking twice about whether that group of people might be in charge of editorial decisions at newspapers or whether that group of people might be customers of his product.
The truth is, it's not very hard to treat everyone with respect and dignity regardless of their ethnicity or personal background. It's not hard to treat people the way you would like to be treated.
People like Scott Adams are actively going out of their way to hurt people's feelings, so they can't act like it's an injustice for their feelings and bank account to be hurt in return.
If boycotting assholes is cancel culture, long live cancel culture.
Well ... lead is dangerous for completely different reasons. And anderson's toy soldier was of tin!
I read perrault too, including bluebeard, and enjoyed it. The only book I can remember being really scared of was an illustrated version of 'the spider and the fly', which is not a fairy tale at all (though it is rather lovely). Movies tended to be scarier ('wallace and gromit' comes to mind), likely on account of the more vivid imagery. And we see now how dangerous video can be, especially for small children, in the form of youtube and tiktok; worrying about how scary a story is seems like trifling nonsense when the real danger and harm take a completely different form.
That said, my little sister seems to have been much more sensitive to scary things than I, at a given age. At ~10, she gave up partway through both the lord of the rings and harry potter, despite being rather taken with both (whereas, I read lord of the rings at ~5 and harry potter at ~12 with no problem). So I don't know; maybe I was unique. n=2; draw your own conclusions :)
Don't forget the struggle session that results from nathan, the server's owner, admitting that he was unaware of the alleged bigotry[1] in the Harry Potter books/films. The resulting taunting of him for his ignorance by another (who, I am willing to wager a very large sum of money, was no more aware of said bigotry when originally consuming the works) ought to appear in the dictionary as an example in the definition for "struggle session".
[1] My understanding is that the alleged bigotry is said to be anti-semitism
Inception and Tenet both do not follow this (you can try and stretch Cobb's narrative _a bit_ there but "in familiar situation and now not" is definitely not the thing).
Harry Potter is not this.
Despite what you might think, I think most Marvel movies don't really follow this! Sometimes a single character follows this and they end up being the tragic character.
Not a movie but I think we get to Romeo & Julliet and this doesn't work.
Jurassic Park is not this. Terminator is not this. The Terminal is not this.
Avatar _is_ this I think! Kind of.
There is some kind of explanation (in a nutshell: the audience of the book is way smaller and niche than we'd like to admit and to be successful the show has to hit it with a larger crowd) :
> I have over the years talked to a few (quite successful) Hollywood screenwriters, just through an accident of what I do for a living (I am a college professor who researches topics that sometimes get me in the same room as said writers). I had a very nice conversation once with one of the guys who had written one of the more modern Planet of the Apes films (I forget which one) about the difficulty of making films that were true to source material. This was in the context of World War Z, whose film is literally the opposite of the book in many ways (the book is about how there aren't singular heroes that are going to save the world, the film is about how Brad Pitt saves the world, to put it bluntly). Anyway, he made the point that the only way in which an existing form of IP has any chance of guaranteeing some fidelity is if the fan base is very large and very important to the marketing or acceptance of the film. So Harry Potter had to be (perhaps painfully) deferential to the original source material. But World War Z did not, because the imagined audience was several orders of magnitude larger than the people who had read the book.
> Similarly I don't think Gibson fans were the imagined audience of The Peripheral show, since there aren't as many of us as we'd like to imagine, and even most people who have read some Gibson haven't read The Peripheral (such is my experience, anyway; I know a million people who have read Neuromancer and that's it).
> I was a little stunned last week when my exercise trainer guy told me he was watching The Peripheral, because he doesn't read books at all from what I can tell. (He's a super great guy, and great at his job, but reading is just not really his thing.) Which on the one hand is a huge success by Amazon — they penetrated the jock-bro market with this series — but also explains, maybe, why they made so many changes. Which, again, I think is unfortunate, because I think you could have had something that was more interesting (and, incidentally, truer to the book, which is more interesting than the show) and still had a fairly large market. Because as you note, there is actually a lot of reasons to think that more complex shows resonate with many audiences more than "more of the same" shows. Sigh.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/WilliamGibson/comments/zawucs/comment/iysyxrh/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
I used to subscribe to Netflix, Disney+ and Prime Video. The other day I wanted to watch Harry Potter (so not some obscure movie) and couldn't watch it anywhere in my country.
I bought a Plex lifetime pass the day after and cancelled all my subscriptions, except for Apple Music and Crunchyroll (for animes) who both fit their role for now. I can't justify paying +30€ per month for not being able to watch what I want.
I subscribe to 4 different platforms (Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+ and Crunchyroll) and every fucking time I want to watch a specific movie it’s not on any of these. Last week I wanted to watch Harry Potter which I know was on Netflix and/or Prime Video at some point, now it’s not available anywhere. So I went back to piracy. 2023 will be the year of Plex+NAS for me because I can’t justify paying for so many subscriptions if there’s not even the things I want to watch when I want it. I’ll just keep Crunchyroll as it’s giving me the best value so far.
If you ever come to London I would highly recommend a visit to that area[1]. take the district line to "Temple" and walk into temple court. This is a set of interconnecting pretty courtyards surrounded by buildings used as offices for lawyers working at the nearby high court. These courtyards have a feel similar to an Oxford/Cambridge college and have been used as settings for "Harry Potter" and other films (to give you a flavour). As you wander through, eventually you will come across a statue of two knights on the back of a single horse, symbol of the templars. Next to this is the Temple Church[2], with it's distinctive round medieval tower where the templars themselves are buried. This is a lovely place to listen to concerts etc. I used to deliberately get the tube to temple every day so I could walk through this area to work because it's really lovely.
[1] https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=18/51.51245/-0.11150
[2] https://www.templechurch.com/
due to a decreased sense of imagination and wonderment
I don't know about that. I didn't read the Harry Potter series until my 30's and I absolutely loved it. Full of imagination and wonderment, I was utterly captivated. I've also re-read The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings multiple times throughout my life and it seems to get better every time.
I'm pretty cynical about big budget movies and TV shows in general though. I prefer shows where all the emphasis is placed on the writing and acting, such as Better Call Saul.
Anime is a very broad genre, aiming at small kids, teenager to young adults; and since some decades more and more also older adults. Ghibli for example is more family-orientated than just children. So it highly depends on which anime you enjoy and for what reasons, and what you make of it. Comparable here are Harry Potter-, Marvel- or Star Wars-Movies. Nobody would say liking these makes you unattractive, but most people would also not say it makes you attractive (fans of those franchises/genre are the obvious exception).
The actual thing is, you probably got it the wrong way. Not anime makes you unattractive, the lack of anything attractive makes you unattractive.
Must've been a trip for the Haaretz staff writing that puff piece given the antisemitic stuff in the Potter movies: https://www.google.com/search?q=harry+potter+bankers
From the book: "about a head shorter than Harry [...] swarthy, clever face, a pointed beard [...] very long fingers and feet”, indeed.
I lol'd at the "Jewish culture" tag.
Do people really talk about movies? It seems you do. Do you talk with your friends? Online? On some specific forum? With your significant other?
I'm so surprised that there are memes from big hits, but no real talk about them.
I mean there's relatively a lot of talk about how Harry Potter feels good but doesn't make sense, and of course lots of critiques, reviews, "reaction videos", but somehow it seems actual people stopped talking about movies with each other (beyond the very shallow have you seen it? yes/no. was it good? yes/no.)
maybe I just miss when people talked too much about the Matrix? :D
also I find it strange that it's still so hard to find good movies/books/series/games that I would like.... despite all the data, metadata, taxonomy, folksonomy (tags! unstructured data! big data! bad data, bad!)
for example, IMDB knows what I like, Netflix too, yet the recommendations are pretty bad.
let's take Mindhunter. "CSI done well", right? but I still haven't found something that is similar to it. (not that I looked very much.)
I think people object to the bad faith with which these actions are done:
- sharply criticizing the US on race, but hiding black characters in Chinese movie posters (eg, Star Wars)
- sharply criticizing the US on sexuality, but removing gay scenes from Chinese and ME versions (eg, Harry Potter)
To me, it’s like men who beat their wife because they’re angry someone at the bar was rude — but are too cowardly to confront him, so they take out that aggression at home.
Similarly, movie companies aren’t standing up to real bigotry in China or the ME — they’re coming home to abuse us domestically, over things we don’t even do.
I think that abuser mentality is abundant among the “Wokerati”.
Seems too easy to game.
If I were a far-right provocateur, I would claim to burn a Koran but have it be an empty book. Or simply burn a book without saying what the book contains.
Or, if the ban is on burning a religious text, I would use a paper shredder, or chain saw, or drive nails through it.
> “History has taught Jews what can come next when you start burning books,”
I'm from the US, where book burning is surprisingly common.
"Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, church youth groups coordinated book burnings and music bonfires to purge their world of evil art." points out https://religionnews.com/2020/06/17/evangelicals-perfected-cancel-culture-now-its-coming-for-them/ .
A college roommate of mine was one - he burned his SF/fantasy books after a visiting preacher to his religious group encouraged them to get rid of an earthly thing they loved, to spend more time with God.
Here's a pastor recently "encouraging parishioners to toss books like "Harry Potter" and "Twilight" into a fire to denounce what he described as "demonic" materials. " - https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/pastor-holds-bonfire-burn-witchcraft-books-twilight-rcna14931
There's been several Harry Potter burnings, like "In 2001, people held a bonfire in New Mexico to burn the [Harry Potter] books because they believed the novels perpetuated the idea of satanism." - https://www.polygon.com/2017/2/1/14474054/harry-potter-books-burning-jk-rowling-twitter
In Poland too! https://people.com/books/harry-potter-books-burned-by-polish-priests/
It seems that what can come next when you start burning books is have some Hollywood movies made about the books.
BTW, if people really believe the Harry Potter books are Satanic, then doesn't that make them religious texts?
When kids read, they read Harry Potter et al. When they see movies in theaters, it's Pixar stuff, or again, Harry Potter. When they watch movies online, I think they have decent access to kid friendly superhero stuff, much of it old. So I think the kids just became much less accessible to the industry.
We're already having precedence for enforced FRAND licensing with patents relevant for standards (particularly in the telephony, networking and codec world). It should not be too hard to adapt these as regulations for the media world, especially when anti-trust regulations come into play - and given how much control Big Mouse has, it's time to do so.
Alternatively, break up Big Mouse or force them to divest from certain assets to make sure there is room for healthy competition. Currently, Big Mouse can pump out massive amounts of work that drown out indy filmmakers - people only go to cinemas four, five times a year, and when all of that is reserved for the MCU and Harry Potter (which is about the only major franchise that Big Mouse does not yet own) and cinemas are forced to extend runs for their movies despite almost no audience left simply because Big Mouse demands it by threatening to cut off cinemas from future blockbusters, who is left to watch movies by other studios?
I think two things are going on, everyone remembers movies they watched as a kid/teen and thinks they where unusually good. It’s not that there was a golden age of movies, it’s that you personally had seen fewer movies.
That said, the ratio of original movies to sequels/franchises changed. Fast forward 20 years from Star Wars to 1997 and sure yet another Titanic, Jurassic Park 2, and a James Bond film but also, Men in Black, The Fifth Element, Liar Liar, As Good as It Gets etc so still mostly original movies.
But fast forward to 2017 and the top 10 movies included: Pirates of the Caribbean 3, Harry Potter 5, Spider-Man 3, Shrek 3, National Treasure 2, The Simpsons Movie, and Transformers. I Am Legend based on a book and 300 based on a comic. So only Ratatouille was actually new.
I either watch a netflix series that I've seen multiple times before (Office/Parks & Rec/Superstore/Arrested Development) or read a book series I've read before (flip flopping between Harry Potter and the Discworld series). They're not boring, but they don't stimulate me as much, and if I miss a chapter, or a half an episode, so be it.
> but I can't just close the book and forget about it.
When I'm reading for sleep, It's closer to reading to the point of dropping the book rather than closing it and deciding to go to sleep fwiw!
The algorithm is dogsh*t. It somehow got it in its head that I was a Harry Potter fan (I’ve never read a book or sat through a film - no interest at all). It kept pushing HP fan groups at me. Constantly. I would hide all from them, but there are thousands. It felt like I was going mad.
In the end I just Social Fixered the hell out of it all - bye bye ads too. I can’t imagine what it must be like it wasn’t something so innocuous.
Violence is more harmful than pornography but movies with violence are considered ok for children as low as 6 years old. See Harry Potter series.
Generally Harry Potter and Star Wars (and recently Marvel movies) are the biggest culprits. There's a subreddit dedicated to making fun of the phenomenon: https://www.reddit.com/r/readanotherbook/
>Brown Windsor soup is a hearty British soup that is said to have been popular during the Victorian and Edwardian eras. //
Perhaps to say something like "Brown Windsor soup appears to be a fictional foodstuff referenced in British comedies from the mid-20th Century. Some people insist it is a real foodstuff and recent recipes founded in fictional universes, such as the Harry Potter cookbook, include an actual recipe (with no evidence that it is in anyway historic)."
The quoted part you give would be like saying "Endor is a moon planet orbiting the Outer Rim planet of the same name, said to have been a forest moon a long time ago." without mentioning that its origin is [as far as evidence suggests] in fiction.
Couple of links with a little more but mostly the same as has been covered in this thread: https://www.lovefood.com/news/57860/the-curious-tale-of-brown-windsor-soup https://delishably.com/soup/The-Mystery-of-Brown-Windsor-Soup
It would be interesting to see what Keith Floyd (Floyd on Britain & Ireland, By Keith Floyd, 1988 includes a recipe https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/91F2K-ZRDxL.jpg shown in the Amazon preview) has to say about this. I wonder if the BBC have any details in their archives if the recipe was in the TV series https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1720675/?? [fwiw https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03gprry seems to me to be the most likely episode if any mention it?]
Yup. FMA: Brotherhood just hits the classic hero tropes and tells it to you straight.
I don't think its a bad thing. The Hero's Journey / Monomyth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey) has been told again and again in almost all media across all cultures.
Its just a storytelling style that's somehow got permanent, widespread appeal. Since its a "familiar story", I definitely think it plays to the advantage as a "starter anime". It gives a sense of familiarity to the audience, especially if they aren't used to anime yet.
Since the Hero's Journey / Monomyth is so popular, of course there's tons of animes that follow that style (and most "starter" animes IMO are a large-scale hero's journey).
Given the shear number of choices: Naruto, FMA, My Hero Academia, Demon Slayer, Bleach, Dragonball Z, Soul Eater, Sailor Moon, etc. etc... there's a lot to choose from. FMA: Brotherhood just so happens to be the one I think is best.
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I'm mean... we're into what? The 14 year of Marvel movies following the Monomyth formula? This Monomyth / Hero's Journey is hardly unique to anime. The few other mainstream shows that come out with widespread appeal (John Wick, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, etc. etc.) are just more of the Hero's Journey formula.
Its not a bad formula, not by any stretch of the imagination.
I read a fair amount and am often frustrated that nobody o talk to had read the same stuff as me, and I can't really discuss it with them, or even make allusions in conversation to any effect. Meanwhile, I don't really participate in pop culture, so when people are talking about a popular tv show (or one of the few mainstream books like Harry Potter), I have nothing to say and can't participate.
I'd say, if you want to have common ground with people, make sure to at least stay abreast of the popular stuff. And of course keep reading stuff that is interesting to you, just make sure you're doing it for yourself.
> Frankly, we have little real idea what's psychologically appropriate for kids.
You must be joking. Look at parental guidance for movies and games for example. Violence is good and appropriate. Just show no blood. ( Harry Potter). Sex is not good except when in Disney movies and preferably between a prince and a princess. Scenes of normal life are borring just like story costruction. Children must learn that they have to reach the goals as fast as possible, no matter what means are employed. And did i mention violence ? Maybe they don't have it at home but it must be introduced somehow in their lifes. They also need to speak more hysterical. TV and politics have shown that if you speak in normal tone noone will listen to you.
When I was doing undergraduate Engineering in India, There were several students who didn't have English as their main language in school and so struggled a bit with the course text as it was not only in English but mostly by Western authors. English movies were one of the main source for improving the language skills for them, I remember one playing Harry Potter movies on loop every single day in the dorm room. Almost all of them are having a great career in a Western country now.
Many like them and parent use entertainment media to improve their vocabulary and other language skills, There have been couple of need-gaps[1][2] on this posted on problem validation platform with several solutions like Youglish.
[1] 'Teach me vocabulary without spending extra time' - https://needgap.com/problems/169-teach-me-vocabulary-without-spending-extra-time-language-education
[2] 'Show meaning of words in a video' - https://needgap.com/problems/201-show-meaning-of-words-in-a-video-language-movie
Hmmm. Harry Potter movies ? ~Lord of the rings ? Dune (even though I didn't enjoy it) ?
Thanks for that perspective! I think about this all the time, and though my tastes are different I think you're exactly right.
I think of narrative as a combination of several elements: character, plot, world-building, execution (word choice, visual choices and performance for film or games), concepts and ideas. I tend to be drawn to strong characters first, but not always. Some examples off the top of my head:
Clerks: strong characters, mediocre almost everything else
Reservoir Dogs: strong characters, strong execution, minimal plot and world-building
Portal: strong characters, plot, world building, concepts, and execution
Brazil (the Terry Gilliam movie): strong world-building and execution, weak characters and plot
Lolita (the book): strong execution and characters
Harry Potter: strong characters, world-building, and concepts, goofy plot and execution
Primer: mind-bending concepts, good execution, weak characters and plot
Don’t know why, but I could go on and on thinking about it.
Edit: this list would imply I have pretty narrow tastes but really I like a little bit of everything; these are just some notable examples that came to mind as being particularly strong or weak in certain areas.
It was also a perfect storm of nostalgia, a gap in the market of "epic cinema" (LoTR / Harry Potter were ending), and a huge library of IP to run with.
Children getting whisked away by a handsome protagonist and his magical sidekick to fight against "cool things" like pirates and mermaids in a world unlike our own?
Its an Isekai.
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Isekai is this modern trend in anime (and US movies sometimes!! Like Ready Player One), where characters are sent to another world. Sometimes due to death explicitly ("Reincarnated in a New World" plotline: like "I'm a Spider So What"), sometimes just "temporarily" transported (Sword Art Online / Ready Player One, they are "just" playing a video game).
From an "Isekai" perspective: people want two things.
1. A world very different from our own. Completely different "physics" or rules. So magic systems, history, culture, etc. etc. that's nothing like our world. Neverland easily qualifies.
2. A character who explores the new world from our perspective. The main character is always someone "like the audience", who can be ignorant about the new world. (The various characters the protagonist meets are therefore given an opportunity to explain the world to the newcomer, allowing the audience to learn about the world in a natural manner). In Peter Pan, Wendy is the Isekai protagonist.
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Alice in Wonderland, Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Wizard of Oz, A Lion, A Witch, and the Wardrobe. The concept happens again and again as a pattern, because its a good framing device. I'm not sure if Peter Pan can be seen as an allegory of death necessarily, any more than "I'm a Spider, so What?" (2021 Anime) could be.
The children are... children... because the main character often should match the profile of the target audience. Not always, but its a good rule of thumb to keep. Children stories will therefore have child-protagonists more often than not (Polar Express, Lion Witch Wardrobe, Harry Potter). There are exceptions (Peanuts has child protagonists but is largely written for an adult audience), but its just the rule of thumb authors seem to use.
It just says a lot about your “taste”. You may not like the lack of character building in Jurassic Park but you can’t deny the amount of work that went into practical effects in order to make that movie (same with Every single Harry Potter movie by the way).
Same thing with Starship Troopers which by itself is also quite a funny piece of political satire apart from creative use of gore and trashy characters.
What is arthouse for you? A man and a woman speaking french and driving into the sunset?
Harry Potter is probably the biggest exception, but American cinema is the vast majority of movies. If I now go look at the foreign films that are being shown here, there are 18 films that originate from the US and 5 films that originate from the UK based on IMDB details. And three of those films were actually credited to both the UK and the US.
Peppa Pig also is probably the worst example of people learning English from the British since you are not watching Peppa Pig in English unless you already live in an English-speaking country. It's a children's show, it's dubbed absolutely everywhere since children can't read subtitles.
And even though the GTA games are technically British games, they all take place in the United States, they are written to have (satirical) American dialogue and are pretty much fully acted out by Americans. Even European characters named Niko and Roman are voiced by American dudes named Michael and Jason.
Also, all of the new Tomb Raider games are actually American/Canadian productions.
Tell that to Mila Kunis (Baywatch at age 11) the Olsen twins (Full House as literal babies) Kaley Cuoco (first film appearance at 11yo) and thousands of other sucessful people who got thier big breaks as children. Children are part of the entertainment industry and always have been. An industry without them would look very strange.
Harry Potter, but Harry is 18yo on his first day at Hogwarts. Every family sitcom disappears. And what about work entirely created by kids? I guess highschool drama clubs are out too. This gets very strange very quickly.
Well I was talking about a different time, where film distribution (literally) was still done by a lot of players, and movie theaters actually had several owners (before they closed down or got bought by big chains). A time when local theaters didn't have access to the movies for some months as well.
With that said, the majority of people won't forget it, especially with the media budgets used for advertising - promos, appearances, going on the talk shows tours, PR to news/magazines/, etc that's all coming out of the promotion budget. You probably don't realize it but you get in contact with movie promotional material several times before it launches.
Maybe you like just a particular set of movies, so the majority leave you little impression. I have movies that are completely oblivious to me, others that stick and leave me curious, but probably with so much content, noise and distraction it's normal to don't recall it all.
In my youth I recall that The Matrix, LOTR, Kill Bill, Harry Potter, all left me with big anticipation to watch them, for months if not years.
Why should we value greatness more than morality? Should the magnitude of someone's impact overshadow the morality of their impact?
Opinions of celebrities don't exist in some sort of extra-dimensional cloistered thought bubble; they influence other minds and affect society in very real and measurable ways. Amplifying the celebrity status of these individuals by cherry-picking their acceptable works will in turn, unavoidably, also amplify their less-acceptable opinions -- though probably not by the same magnitude. But in general the masses are terrible at sorting out "oh, this is a righteous opinion that I should listen to" vs "this is a despicable one by the same person, but I have the intellectual & emotional maturity to be able to compartmentalize it". We're too tribal a species, on the average, for that. Our brains, societies, and cultures have not evolved to effectively handle multiculturalism well, ivory-tower internet freethinkers notwithstanding.
The flipside of cancel culture is moral nihilism, in which speech has no consequence and exists purely as a form of harmless intellectual exercise. But that's just not how it works in the real world. Speech has consequence, and for those wishing to prevent those consequences, sometimes ignoring the speaker and refusing to amplify their voice is the only realistic option they have, if they have no power to censor them outright or sufficiently amplify contrary opinions of their own. A canceled author isn't really very different from a boycotted company; it's a moral vote by a like-minded mass of humans who together value their version of morality more than that author's impacts. It's really not that difficult to not be an outspoken asshole.
Saying "I don't want to read this book" or "I don't want to play this game" because you don't like the author's values is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It's very different from, say, government ban lists. So what if someone doesn't want to read Harry Potter or watch Weinstein movies anymore?
Back to the first question: why ought greatness be the measure of a person, instead of righteousness? Our species is largely full of mediocre apes with mediocre thoughts who nonetheless manage to coexist and thrive to some degree, yet are all too often led astray and into peril and evil by the "great" Machiavellian few among them. How does that help anything at all?
I happen to like the Harry Potter series. Yes, they are children books. There was a point when I wondered if it was worth reading the next one, but once I started reading it was immediately really fun to read.
The movies are also amazing. Most movies that are based on books are really inferior to the books. But the authors of the Harry Potter movies did an extremely good job.
Just remembering Alan Rickman for his role as Snape does not give him full credit. He played in a lot of other movies [0] and he did a lot of theatrical work of which there is no real record.
[0] https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000614/
You ask a good question, and to be honest: I don't have a good answer to it yet. I'm still trying to work out a consistent position on the whole topic. Therefore I'm going to give you a rather tentative view.
I currently feel there's a spectrum of cultural importance on media. On the one end, you have your sonnet, that few people even know exists. On the other end, you have Game of Thrones.
At some point a piece of media becomes so widespread that it becomes a part of shared culture. It could meaningfully affect everyone[0], like Harry Potter or even Game of Thrones (I'd expect everyone to be at least aware of its existence). Or a subculture, like Star Trek or Star Wars for people with even passing interest in science fiction (or STEM), or StarCraft for people into PC video games. These works weave themselves into the fabric of society - people lift phrases from them, make metaphors referencing them. Hogwarts is the modern Troy. Being unable to access these works - especially at the same time everyone else around you is perusing them and talking about them - becomes cultural isolation.
With books, we have it solved, thanks to libraries. Almost anyone can get legal access to almost any written work - where they don't have the money, they can substitute it with effort, to get to a library (and possibly convince the library to buy the work, or fetch it through inter-library loan, etc.).
With music and movies, we had it solved in the past too. You could be exposed to popular works through radio and TV, both private and public. This worked better pre-Internet, because while media distribution was regional, the culture was also regional. Not so today - with the spread of the Internet, the culture became international almost overnight. With Internet, enough of us in Poland can enjoy Game of Thrones simultaneously with the rest of the world that it becomes expected of everyone to enjoy it in lockstep with the whole planet.
Videogames gained mainstream popularity around the same time Internet did, so there was never an equivalent of a library, or public broadcasting, for games. You either buy one or pirate it. If a game suddenly gains worldwide popularity[1] and every one of your friends is playing it, you'll either buy it or pirate it, just so you can feel included in their conversation.
And that's ultimately the main justifying factor I'm currently exploring: entertainment media are social objects. One of their most important roles is to glue communities together, by giving people shared experiences to talk about. Once a work becomes popular enough, I can't really blame people who pirate it because they too want to be a part of the conversation.
The sonnet from your example? It isn't popular at all, it isn't part of culture, so I'd consider pirating it as an act of malice. My view would change if I suddenly started seeing it mentioned on the news.
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[0] - Not everyone everyone, as there are plenty of people with little to no access to Western media. It's much less than 50% of the planet, but much more than "the West", so I don't feel writing the latter would be right either - so where I say "everyone" in this thread, it is to mean "everyone within the broadly understood sphere of influence of the Western culture".
[1] - Which doesn't happen by accident; a lot of money and effort goes into marketing, in order to make this happen. And piracy was historically a part of it, too: few people actually bought originals of Diablo or StarCraft or Red Alert in Central and Eastern Europe, and yet they were hugely influential there, all thanks to folks with CD burners in their trucks.
I'm jealous of sooo many of you. I didn't like so many mainstream hits. Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, the Bourne and Bond series, all the Marvel / DC movies probably a lot more I've forgotten to mention.
I can’t tell if you’re being serious or sarcastic.
Not sure if you’re seriously claiming that the “blurb” for any book or movie should never mention anything outside of the first fifteen minutes.
Eg, would you promote Harry Potter as nothing more than a story about “a bullied boy struggling with his adoptive family who make him sleep in a cupboard” because the revelation of magic is a major spoiler?
You are not allowed to create derivative works from another person's creation, regardless of whether you are making money from it. You can't go and make a Shrek III flick, for example, or write a book set in the Harry Potter universe. Likewise, you can't adapt music from a film (IANAL, there are things like fair use, but in general this holds).
https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ14.pdf
Absolutely worth it, however I'd offer a few short tips:
1. Try to stay in one place for a few months, minimum. If you can stay a year or two, do that. Jumping from city to city every week seems exciting at first, but it quickly makes everywhere feel the same.
2. To quote Lao Tzu, when your work is done, forget it. If you work remotely, actively disconnect at the end of the day. It's too easy to be constantly plugged into the English-speaking media world and ignore what's right in front of you.
3. Try to blend in and adopt local clothing, culture, foods, etc. Read books by local authors, watch local films. A bit obvious, maybe, but I've met many people who insisted on only eating Western food, reading Harry Potter, and watching Netflix while abroad. At that point, why even bother traveling?
It reminds me Harry Potter movie
He was great in those Harry Potter films...
This seems pretty crazy to me - you're saying that if I happen to enjoy anything that also happens to be enjoyed by racists/sexists, you would be concerned? Guess what? Racists and sexists like Harry Potter, and Star Wars, and Marvel movies, and Coca-Cola, and everything else that people who aren't racists and sexists like. I guarantee that you enjoy many, many things that are also enjoyed by people who have detestable beliefs, because people with detestable beliefs sometimes like things that have nothing to do with those detestable beliefs. Racists don't spend all their time reading Mein Kampf and watching Birth of a Nation, they also read the same books you read, watch the same movies and television shows you watch, and, yes, read the same blogs you read.
If the blog has sexist/racist content that attracts sexists and racists, sure, that's a problem, but if the blog had such content, the NYT article wouldn't have resorted to pointing out the commenters, they would have linked the content.
> As to the feminism issue, in the full context, he criticizes feminism with respect to specific points and texts from feminists (which he is 100% entitled to), but then ends with the sentence in question that to me whichever angle you look at it from says, feminism and pure evil are not too distant. As I noted, he could have backed away from the statement easily by saying his statement is wrong (if he thinks so), but claiming it's out of context is dishonest and a diversion.
Specifically, in context, he said "People who go out of their way to be horrifically mean to other people who are pretty unfortunate and unhappy and don't understand why, just for asking why, are pretty much pure evil", it wasn't an attack on all feminists ever, it was an attack on people who he specifically thinks are doing something extremely terrible. That's the context.
It isn't really a true finale in the same way as those two examples, but I would throw out Infinity War and End Game as a joint example. The Marvel Cinematic Universe was able to successfully put a capstone on a cinematic project on the scale that had never even been attempted before. It was impressive enough to end a single story like Harry Potter in a satisfying way. The MCU was able to do the same for a wide variety of stories, dozens of characters, and over twenty movies.
Also it doesn't hurt the MCU's legacy that there is the obvious comparison with Game of Thrones that magnificently failed a very similar task the exact weekend that End Game came out.
I’ve wanted this approach for the Harry Potter Series. Trying to do it in theatrical film was a mistake I think.
> Are people really going to stop writing books, composing music, painting pictures, etc, without copyright protection? Not a chance!
Yes, authors who make a living selling books would definitely stop writing books if they couldn’t get paid for it.
Hobbyist art will never die. But the definition of professional involves being paid.
Open source software is not a meaningful comparison to Harry Potter books or Marvel films.
That's true, but not relevant to the point of the comment you are replying to. Taking a copy of an existing work, and simply replacing words with synonyms and renaming characters would still count as copying. Maybe there would be enough creativity in your choice of synonyms to make your work separately copyrightable as a derivative work, but that would still require permission of the existing work's copyright owner.
Producing a new work that happens to be similar to, or even word for word identical to an existing work, if you truly created it yourself from scratch without taking anything from the existing work, would not be copying.
As a practical matter, unless you had extraordinary proof that you really had never read Harry Potter books, watched the movies, read the plot summaries on Wikipedia, attended a party shortly after one of the books came out where everyone was talking about it, you would lose in a copyright infringement lawsuit. If you work is very similar to Harry Potter and you had access to Harry Potter, that's sufficient for the plaintiff to make their case, switching the burden to you to prove that you did not copy it.
It is not bad, it is annoying. People these days don't read a new thing and try to express the issue in it, they HAVE to relate it to something they saw or read.
I had written a scifi short story and people told me "Oh yeah it was predictable, very much like the movie X"
Sure harry potter too was predictable, Harry was going to win and Voldemort was going to die, but the same peop don't say that to HP!
There is a social contract, an implicit one to praise famous books. A person I knew got mad at me for pointing out obvious flaws in HP like why don't they use time turners more before they're broken during Order of Phoenix or a somewhat gray area
Elder wand is the most powerful, Dumbledore had all 3 deathly hallows at a point in time and despite being a master of death, he didn't kill voldemort.
The last one is a bit vague yes, but instead of discussing with me and saying "maybe Voldemort hid from Dumbledore for that reason" this person went like "you are posting this to get attention"
There was another idiot who kept on bugging me that I don't write good English, I think in my mother tongue and translate it to English
And this moron didn't even know common idiom I had used was also a common idiom word-to-word in English as well
He kept on insisting me to think in English. I studied in a convent school so I know how to not think-translate mother tongue into English
As a novelist who was trying to write for the first time, the man was toxic, as were almost all morons I met on the site. They didn't encourage, didn't have any single constructive criticism, "oh you don't know x y"
Thanks for the encouragement.
I selected Harry Potter because I know the stories decently (read the books whenever book 7 came out, saw all the movies at least once each, maybe twice for a couple). But I’m not familiar enough to be able to read the Spanish version and really just be recalling the English version (why I’m avoiding translations of my favorite authors, I know the books too well).
And yeah, I’m skipping the dictionary while reading. I tried that, it was awful. I’m identifying words (sometimes asking my wife) and looking them up after finishing a chapter. I plan to reread the book (possibly restart before completing) to see how much of what’s new has stuck. I already have homework since I’m working through a college Spanish textbook and have signed up for online courses (weekly, but it’s practice and I’m getting to hear the Argentine accent which is the one I need to understand most, my wife is from there).
After this book, I’ll probably continue picking up the rest of the series (we want a bilingual library anyways for when we have kids), and then some non-fiction. Ideally I want to find some non-fiction histories or technical content in Spanish by native Spanish writers. I’m also trying to read Spanish-language news, but I haven’t made it a regular habit yet.
>It always amazes me that normal people like journalists still use such a strange website.
Well a lot of it is because it makes content production so damn easy. Take a real example which reached the BBC front page a while back [1].
The entire story is :
1. A Korean actress was cast for some role in something Harry Potter related.
2. Some people on Twitter were unhappy about this
3. JK Rowling defended the casting (also on Twitter).
4. Then there's some mention of some other story about Dumbledore not being shown as gay.
5. A couple of still photos + a clip from a movie
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-45666350
OK, this is entertainment "news" so it's a pretty low bar but the reason this stuck in my mind was what a non-story this all was - even by the standards of the subject matter. There's not even an attempt to gauge whether these complaints represented a decent chunk (or the majority) of the Harry Potter fanbase - it's just a quote from a couple of random people annoyed about it. Imagine if national broadcasters could get away with quoting random people they overheard in the pub and this would constitute a story.
Of course, the thing giving the story some legitimacy is that Rowling has responded to this alleged controversy. And that's the other main reason (which is kind of reinforcing) - enough companies/famous people use Twitter as their method of communicating with the public (and by extension the press) that the press continue to use it.
"Yeah, the argument that creative works wouldn't have been created without current IP laws is rubbish. "
I didn't say that 'no works would have been created' - I said Harry Potter would not have - and certainly not the films.
I am not denying that some content will be created - but the anti IP people are sadly denying the very stark reality that most of it would not.
Harry Potter is definitely an example of a work that would not have been created, given the authors personal history during writing her works.
The sheer arrogance of those dismissing but the humane aspect of content creators not being able to make a living from the works, combined with the ignorance of the material reality of what this would mean for content creation and massive industries is missing from the argument.
"I find the notion that the number of times your book is read should be proportional to the income you make from it, to be entirely antithetical to the point of creativity and art."
Spoken by someone who has never actually created such work I can assume?
Have you ever actually made any 'art' or tried to do this full time?
Because your treatise speaks entirely and fully from the perspective of the consumer, who naturally, doesn't want to pay anything.
"I want everything for free because that's the way I feel about art" is not an argument.
Harry Potter would not have been written and published, and made into a global phenom without IP laws in the ballpark as they stand.
There is zero chance the Potter films would have been made were the Studios not able to protect their distribution.
There are other parties in the system, the content creators, who are pretty strongly affected by these rules - it's an equilibrium, you can get the same kind of output when you change the to empower one side.
I've tried, it's really hard though. At one point I started reading him a chapter from Harry Potter per day in the hope it would get him hooked on reading like it did for me. Well, it did get him hooked on the story, but since his reading skills were so low he would never read on his own so instead he begged his mom to rent the movies, and he promptly binge watched all 8 movies and proudly announced all the spoilers he knew. He also wasn't interested in hearing me read to him from Harry Potter anymore after that despite me hinting that the books were far superior to the movies.
Even so, Harry Potter is a broader phenomenon than just that.
That should have been clear already in the early 2000s, after the first few movies.
There is an interesting question about where the line gets drawn. I'm inclined to exclude works such as 50 Shades of Grey, but that was also tremendously popular (although not nearly the scale of Harry Potter) and I could easily see someone call me a snob for drawing that distinction.
On the other hand, if 50 Shades won some kind of award I wouldn't be inveighing against it, so there's that.
« Kids certainly don’t give a damn about them either. »
Well I guess it depends on how you educate them.
While I’m here eating my (late) breakfast, both are in their room reading.
They are 9yo (10 next spring). My son is finishing season 2 of Erin Hunter’s warriors (he loves cat) and my daughter finally catch up on Harry Potter and is reading no2 (they are not allowed to see the movies until they read the book)
Time Warner has the Harry Potter license, Nolan's Batman movies and Joker, The Hobbit, Lego Movie, Wonder Woman, and all of Turner Communications, including CNN & Adult Swim / Cartoon Network.
Ace Ventura was the first time I noticed differences in a movie. When they showed it on regular TV they did a whole bit about star trek when he was in the pool looking for clues. Everyone thought I was nuts, but years later I learned that when they edit a film for commercials sometimes they use deleted scenes to make up the time differences. Harry Potter is like that too, but I can't remember the specific scenes.
Yes. The original soundtrack is underneath, so if you watch Terminator, you can hear Arnold Schwarzenegger's German accent, not some other actor. It's mostly a matter of what you are used to. For Polish people, the full dubs as they do in Western Europe feel weird and fake, we only dub cartoons and teenager movies such as Harry Potter series.
I'd sooner credit Sam Raimi's Spider-Man with starting the modern big-budget superhero movie trend. That movie beat Harry Potter's box office record. It was a big hit and I think it proved the concept.
... And the myth of the unique, special, superior, holier than thou culture.
The truth is that youngsters in Catalonia eat the same hamburgers, drink the same german beer, wear the same Nike shirts and pasta glasses, play the same world of warcraft, drive the same brands of cars and bikes, enjoy the same pop, rock, rap and flamenco (inherited from the Andalusian inmigrants), read the same Harry Potter books, watch the same spiderman's hollywood films, use the same smartphones and operative systems, celebrate Halloween (probably dressed as Franco, or maybe Lady Gaga), study the same english, science and maths, culture the same peruvian potatoes and tomatoes, farm the same cows, sheep and chicken, and share the same religion, mythology and culture, the same... as any other occidental people.
Their grandpas are from Andalucia, Murcia, Castilla and Asturias more often that they would prefer to admit.
They eat onions entire and make castles in the air with people that climb over other people. Two nice apportations to the planet diversity, nobody denies that.
They dream that everybody, except they, are Franco (forty years after Franco death) and they behead the dragon with a flamiger sword in from of a bunch of grateful ladies. hurrah
And they have TWO languages, not one. Spanish, with 600 millions of native speakers that everybody understands and uses (even if they choose to hide this fact and feel ashamed for it), and a different language that uses the same latin alphabet (A,B,C... we are not talking of the invention of Lord of the Ring's runes here) borrows a lot from french, spanish and maybe italian; and is used as political weapon all the time.
They aren't the only european with two languages (or the only spaniards that suffered with Franco) and they do exactly the same things as any other european in the 99% of their journey.
If we talk about their culture, maybe they should be nationalised US citizens directly, as millions of other people in the planet.
Yeah, I think the person who made the cultural imperialism point was trying to say more or less that: that there are a lot of countries that speak English because English is the culturally dominant language. Personally I think there's a less sinister way to phrase that than "cultural imperialism," though. And I'm not sure it's caused by cultural dominance so much as economic dominance and pragmatism. I don't think many people learn English to watch American movies or wear American blue jeans.
Further, I'm not sure to what extent it affects the market size for books. I would guess, not being privy to any actual information on the topic, that the vast majority of English books are consumed by majority-English-speaking nations. There are probably exceptions for outsized blockbusters like Harry Potter.
Derivative works aren't fair use and aren't really related to fair use. Derivative works are like writing a new Harry Potter book or making a new Batman movie.
> I want to watch films like Harry Potter, The Dark Knight, and Lord of the Rings. Unfortunately, they are either scattered across a dozen different services or simply not there at all.
FWIW, Netflix has had a scattered selection of The Dark Knight and Lord of the Rings off-and-on recently. I guess that might be your point, though…
Agreed, I like Spotify quite a lot. But for movies, Netflix simply ins't cutting it these days. Try searching for any movie from 2000 - 2010 [1] that made more than a million in the box office on opening weekend. Most of them are not there. I want to watch films like Harry Potter, The Dark Knight, and Lord of the Rings. Unfortunately, they are either scattered across a dozen different services or simply not there at all.
What I would like is a rent-on-demand method. Xbox almost gets this right: they have plenty of titles you can rent for up to 24 hours. You typically pay between 3 - 6 dollars per film. More recent films are more expensive. However, I would like to see the cost go down, especially for older titles. Basically match any Redbox prices (1-2 dollars), and provide a way for me to stream it on-demand.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s_in_film
I stopped following GoT since S05E04 or around that so i did not see nor do i understand what's all this noise; but from the writing lessons i took years ago i learned that foreshadowing is NOT character development. If you use foreshadowing, especially if it's not subtle, you still have to "earn" your twist (see: Frodo if front of Mt Doom, Gollum).
You can only foreshadow and drop hints about a character changes if you do those change away from the action (the protagonist that will change is away from the limited narrator), or if the spectator do not know the character that well (he is one of the antagonist).
Let's compare to other "masterpieces" with a lot of public love. Does the character change feel as justified as Darth Vader's one in Return of the Jedi? Or even as Severus Rogue (Harry potter) change? Those change are not really well written imho (a bit too rushed for the 1rst one, a bit forced for the second, but that's only my opinion). If the character change in GOT is not at least on this level, i would understand why people are disapointed.
The error GoT have done for me is from way back. The first few seasons used realistic plot, few plothole, believable and clever characters, pretty realistic choices and political stuff. My suspension of credulity bar was set pretty low. Season 4 was weird regarding time and distance, but still mostly believable (and the dialogs were really good too). But S05 broke my suspension of credulity almost every 10 minutes and that made the show a bit boring (imo).
That's the issue for GoT: they did set the bar too high at first, then couldn't reach the same level again.
It's a shame - in 2008/9/10 it was really something to see, but as a few other commenters have said, it's (and a lot of the maker movement for that matter) have declined a bit.
I personally think this is due to the infantilization in part of a lot of media outlets, where the emphasis has been placed on getting the ideas into the most hands possible instead of folks who'd actually benefit. Focusing the faires around 3D printing geegaws and cosplay items is fine if you want to make numbers, but you get consumers and the followons, and not creators from that.
You can think of it in the same vein as Marvel movies or Harry Potter books - low content, low thinking media that raises insane amounts of money based on appealing to the mass market and the wannabe 'geek' crowd that doesn't tend to do much innovating except in consumption methods.
IMO we will see the biggest change in how books are written after copyright abolition. We sort of kind of do already, with the big titles like Harry Potter, Star Wars (I know, it started out as a movie) etc. We have the canonical, original books, but we also have a lot of fan-made titles. Some of them create a specific narrative based on the original work, i.e. Harry Potter and the Medhods of Rationality[1], and then people create other fanfiction based on that. 99% of it is fourteen-year-old girls with no writing skills, but there are nuggets that could make great money if not for copyright. I think living, breathing universes made by fans, possibly coupled with chapters released as they're being written, fan voting etc. is the future. Even post copyright, it could make authors money, think crowdfunding or "Character x will either murder y or have sex with y, depending on what option gets more money".
[1] hpmor.com [2] se [1] or https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12461030/1/The-Tinkerer
My now 12.5 years old daughter started to learn English on Duolingo when she was around 9. She didn't complete the full course, but has around 100-150 days of lessons. It definitely helped her starting to understand the language.
She loves Harry Potter so much that after reading the whole series in Romanian, she started to read the first volume in English. Didn't finish that either, but managed to read about 100 pages of it and she said that after 30-40 pages, it became substantially easier to understand.
Now she's among top 3 students, if not the first, in her class at English, outpacing colleagues who take 2-3 hours weekly of extra English lessons, without having a single paid English lesson.
Duolingo might not teach you how to speak a language fluently, but it definitely can give you a headstart in learning one.
She's not able to speak English fluently yet, but she's able to watch TV series without subtitles and she's able to actually communicate with other English speaking people when visiting other countries.
Amazing visualization. I didn't know that MCU > Star Wars + Harry Potter. Also thought that DC had completely messed up the movie franchise but looks like they still clawed out $2B. Not that bad in my books.
Quite ironically, that is how many people in America feel about Silicon Valley, especially when they hear about the offices filled with arcade games and pinball machines and meditation rooms and on-site concierge chefs...
Marketing is a skill. Just because it doesn't appear valuable to you doesn't mean it's not valuable to someone. For examples on the importance of marketing, see the histories of Tesla, Tinder, most big-budget movies, nearly all triple-A games, Wool, Harry Potter, Twilight Saga, nearly all restaurants, most tangible goods purchased in a store, cars and trucks, airlines... The point is that just making a good product isn't enough anymore; there are plenty of good products. Marketing is what makes people aware that your product exists and/or makes it the preferred option the next time they are in need of that type of product.
I always feel sorry for all the Alexas. And the Harry Potters who were living their lives just fine before the books.
My friend is named Tressa Green. Her dad assured me he had no idea that most people pronounced Tres-sa as Tree-sa.
[edit] this is a fun read: https://www.radiotimes.com/news/film/2018-03-22/meet-the-real-life-muggles-named-harry-potter/
I don't think Star Trek isn't a similar franchise. It's not centered around a single storyline like Star Wars or Harry Potter.
Star Wars is a similar franchise, but I think it shows the opposite, because the fandom was strong during the 16 year gap between movies from 1983 to 1999, which shows that once successful, a fandom like that will stay intact for years, whether or not anything new gets added to it. Harry Potter fans can ignore the new stuff that's coming out. A lot of Star Wars fans disliked or didn't pay much attention to the new movies but remained part of the fandom.
They are still making movies in the potter universe. The current one has grossed 150 million in a month. I bet universal studios and Harry Potter legos aren’t doing too bad either.
I can't imagine it matters much since the core mechanic has proven to be so popular and it's really a squeeze of the IP tit.
I bet a Harry Potter skin will be even bigger than Pokemon Go. I'd wager most people are on no more than can-recognize-pikachu terms with the Pokemon franchise yet Pokemon Go was a cultural phenomenon.
Meanwhile most people I know have at least seen most Harry Potter movies. I know 30- and 40-somethings that have gone to Universal Studios' Harry Potter exhibit... dressed up. And the Harry Potter world has a particularly popular faction system (the Hogwarts houses).
Certainly curious to see if Niantic can pull it off again.
"Best" these days is all about sensory stimulation to the max. Over-stimulation till you feel like you need to go sit some where quiet to calm yourself down.
So if I know you are going to feel pain/love/respect/fear/doubt based on certain triggers and I am competing against others who are triggering you the same way what are my options?
Turn the dials up on all the triggers. Maximize stimulation as much as possible. This is happening from porn to sports to politics to news to games. To TV.
But when everyone is doing it you start seeing the patterns. There aren't that many. The dictionary of all possible patterns is more or less complete.
The cancellation is for the same reason, they can't really keep making more Star Wars or Avengers or Harry Potter movies for too much longer because they have exhausted all possible ways in which one guy can kill another guy. The audience has seen it all.
They just have to start again with a new different looking slate to produce the same stimulation.
:).
But the truth is, that makes Harry Potter and Game of Thrones much more of a "classic" than Shakespeare.
Shared cultural context is something I believe we're losing anyway, or at least it's not scaling well with population size and civilization - these days they're just so many books being published, along with movies and TV series, that it's increasingly difficult to find things you've both read/watched with random people. Schools in a given country are forcing the same set of literature on people partly in order to ensure a shared cultural context, but as we all know (and as is discussed elsewhere in this comment thread), this only makes people know the titles but not read the books themselves.
An interesting word I learnt from listening to Daniel Dennett: synanthrope. Such creatures include pigeons, rats, barnswallows, bed bugs. They benefit from living around humans without providing much in the way of return service.
There does seem to be a trend for embracing and celebrating animals which formerly have been considered ugly or pestilent. For example my son was recently introduced to a tarantula named Miss Fuzzyboots. In parody we have Hagrid of the Harry Potter films trotting out dangerous and/or repulsive beasts for class appreciation ("They're seriously misunderstood creatures...")
Is this a sort of moral/aesthetic inversion or are we genuinely expanding our 'circle of empathy'?
http://adami.natsci.msu.edu/blog/2013/04/the-evolution-of-circle-of-empathy.html
Of course there are instances where copyright and/or patents have helped an economy.
You don't think that popular books and movies like the "Harry Potter" series helped the economy? People pay for the licensed content and entire industries are born that don't hurt anybody, and nobody is coerced to partake in it.
> So many video game movie projects are missing the simple question, "why?" So many of these games are inspired by movies in the first place, and their stories are mostly just cliches based on their source material.
I agree.
> It's fine in the context of the game, because the player is doing something, but when you put that into a non-interactive medium, the flaws become obvious.
All forms of art are inspired by other forms of art, this is no basis to write them off. Would you dismiss Michelangelo's work because he was influenced by Giovanni? Or Giovanni because he worked under Donatello? Should we just write off all fantasy novels post Tolkien? What about D&D? Or Warhammer? The Matrix was obviously inspired by the cyberpunk universes created by authors like William Gibson, do we just dismiss it?
There's nothing wrong with taking inspiration from other works and you can successfully create something new and wonderful when doing so.
> If you take Indiana Jones, turn it into a game with a sexy woman as the main character[1], and then try to make a movie out of it, then of course the critical reaction is going to be "Indiana Jones but not as good."
The Nation Treasure movies were pretty well received despite being "Indiana Jones without a whip or Nazis". Apart from Indiana Jones being an archeologist tomb raider, the similarities with the Tomb Raider franchise are minimal. The reason the first Tomb Raider movies were so poorly received is because they just bad 90s action movies skinned with Tomb Raider IP, lipstick on a pig.
Looking at the new Tomb Raider movie's trailer, I'm betting it's going to fail as well. It might actually be a decent movie but fans of the game will hate it for rebooting the story and people who don't play video games will avoid it for being a video game movie.
In my opinion, successful adaptations work when they're loyal to the source material and improve upon it.
The Island of Doctor Moreau is a great example. The book itself is a bit dated with 19th century science about vivisection that is preposterous to even the layman today. The premise though is sound and 1996 movie adaptation remains true to it while updating the science and as a result it is a wonderful adaptation.
The the Marvel Cinematic universe has been so successful despite plots that beat a dead horse, you could even argue that they repeat their own plots in subsequent movies. Despite that they're a resounding success because they're loyal to the source material and improve upon it by bringing the action to life in a way that's impossible in comics.
There are plenty of video games that have interesting characters, stories, or even premises that could be adapted into films, I think the main problem is that Hollywood is uninterested in making a good movie, they just looking to cache in on the IP.
> It's an issue that comes up in most adaptation, whether it be a book, or a comic, or even a song. There needs to be some reason to do it. Some idea that the source material does that hasn't already been done to death in film.
I agree with your sentiment but disagree with your assertion that the innovation must come from the source. The play Romeo and Juliet inspired West Side Story in 1961 and was adapted into at least 10 films since yet the 1996 movie Romeo + Juliet received critical acclaim despite retaining almost all of the dialog from the original play.
> "This game/movie/book is popular" isn't a good enough reason.
Why not? The Harry Potter series seems to have done pretty well for itself despite not really bringing anything really new to the table in terms of story telling or worlds. What makes the series so beloved?
I think there are plenty of video games that could inspire a decent movie. The universe that the Portal and Half-life games exists in has so much potential. I could see a compelling film being made about Barney, Alyx Vance and the City 17 resistance fighters prior to the events of Half-Life 2. Or maybe a story about some aspect of Aperture Science Laboratories as alluded to in Portal 2's various levels.
RISE visual effects studios | Midlevel/Senior Pipeline Developer | Python, QT, SQLAlchemy | Berlin, Stuttgart, Munich - Germany
RISE was founded 10 years ago on the idea of an artist driven visual effects company, creating the highest possible standard for cinema and television. To date we have contributed visual effects to some of the most successful movie franchises including Avengers, Captain America, Iron Man, Guardians of the Galaxy and Harry Potter. And we are moving forward ...
For the pipeline developer position, your responsibilities will include developing, maintaining and troubleshooting VFX pipeline tools to assist the production team. Your focus will be on improving existing features and extend the feature set of our inhouse database frontend for managing projects, shots and tasks into scheduling and reporting. You will work closely with the Head of Pipeline and other tools developers to bring our VFX management system to the next level and also integrate it with standard software packages.
Your skillset should include:
Very good knowledge of Python and QT
Good UI/UX design sense for none technical users
Experience using databases, preferably with SQLAlchemy
Expert problem-solving and troubleshooting skills
Experience with Houdini, Maya and Nuke a plus
Communication & Time management skills
This is an ONSITE position. You will be free to choose between Berlin, Stuttgart and Munich as were we may set up your desk. We are mainly looking for EU citizens. If you are the perfect candidate, we will assist you with the blue card VISA process.
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I have seven kids, and they are all voracious readers. One of the kids read all of the Harry Potter books when he was 8 years old. I honestly didn't think he could comprehend what he was reading (i.e., I thought the books would be beyond his reading comprehension level), but when we asked him questions about the books he always knew the answers.
What we learned works is:
1. Take them to the library a lot. Let them check out whatever they want. Let them check out as many books as they want (up to the limit allowed by the library - ours only allows 100 books per library card and we frequently run up against that limit).
2. Let them get their own library card as soon as the library will let them. When they are older let them ride their bikes to the library (obviously this depends on your location and situation) so they can check out things on their own.
3. Read to them from the time they are young, a lot.
4. Check out audio books from the library and let them go to bed listening to stories when they are too young to read. When they are older make sure they have a flashlight or two so they can read after lights out.
5. Greatly limit access to TV and game systems. We don't have cable or streaming subscriptions. We only use our TV for movies or TV shows on DVD from the library which they can watch on occasion when their chores and homework are done (unless it's a nice day outside then they have to be outdoors playing or reading in the hammock).
6. Fill the house with books. We have thousands of books across all age groups and topics. There are books everywhere in every room just in piles. The kids beds are covered in books.
7. Don't be a book snob. If they want to read comic books, let them read comic books. It doesn't matter what they are reading, as long as they are reading. Like any skill, the more you do it, the better you will get at it and the greater success you will have at reading more advanced material when the time comes.
8. Let them see you reading. Talk to them about what you are reading. Recommend books to them.
9. When they are older, get them jobs at the library. Libraries always have a need for people to help shelve books! One library in our area has a service night when the library closes early and volunteers help clean the library. There is pizza and soda and the kids absolutely love this night.
10. Listen to books on "tape" in the car. Get them used to both reading and hearing things being read to them.
The Earthsea cycle is very, very different from Tolkien and GRRM.
The first three books are a classic "bildungsroman"--a coming of age story--both as a whole and individually. The point of view character in each novel is a young person, passing through late adolescence and into adulthood. In this respect it is more comparable to Harry Potter or The Dark Is Rising or perhaps His Dark Materials fantasy series.
The world LeGuin builds for the story is incredibly rich and unique, like Middle Earth and the world of ASOIAF, but the structure of the stories are considerably simpler.
However, the "inner life" of the stories are richer. Like the Dune series, the novels of Earthsea spend a lot of time deep in the perspective of a few key characters. I think it is one reason these novels are so hard to film in a satisfying way.
That said, where Earthsea really distinguishes itself from almost any other fantasy series, is the fact that LeGuin came back to the series much later in her life and added two more books. These are set in the same world but regard it with different perspectives of age and gender.
The original trilogy is classic fantasy about Our Heroes who are uniquely gifted and ultimately save the day and pass into legend. The final two books are about what happens to those people when they face the complicated and unsatisfying future: their personal gifts are no longer powerful, and their beliefs and assumptions are challenged by a new generation... and ultimately found to be not only flawed, but awful. Some of the things they defended were not absolutely good after all, but the lasting artifacts of earlier selfishness, bias, and bigotry.
I resisted reading these later two novels for a long time because I enjoyed the purity of the stories in the original trilogy. But now having read them all, I find I can enjoy them in related but still somewhat separate ways.
If the later two novels don't sound like your kind of thing, you could read the first three now, and then visit the last two books a decade or two (or three) later. That would align your perspective with LeGuin's when she wrote them.
A Harry Potter TV show would be better. The movies didn't do the books justice, there is enough material there to make it into several seasons, and a different cast could do well with it too.
When looking at ancient texts, there's a continuum between "fiction" and "documentary". The biblical texts are not fiction in the same way that, say, Harry Potter is fiction, but they are also not very accurate documents and in the way that Will Durrant's The Story of Civilization is a documentary work. You need to read the bible much more critically if you want to use it to learn about history (absolutely fine to read it uncritically if it is an important part of your faith, of course).
I am in the opposite camp with regards to The Expanse. I consider the first season a very, very good trailer for the first book.
I also consider the Dark Tower movie a somewhat okeyish trailer for the series. I just finished the second Dark Tower book, and in the books the man in black always speaks like McConaughey.
However, I understand your feel. I can't read Harry Potter, it's just not interesting enough, even after the movies.
>You can easily grow an economy without consuming more raw materials and a simple thought experiment will prove it: consider that you buy some paper and a pen and write a book. What is the economic value? Well it could be zero, or negative because you've wasted perfectly good paper and the time of everyone who read it. Or it could be billions because it's the next Harry Potter.
Isn't that dependent on the economic school of thought you subscribe to? While that may generate economic activity, unless you're exporting it won't generate economic growth, as no new tangible value has been realized. As per the current trope of selling houses to each other at ever-increasing prices.
A billion dollars flowing from thousands of people to a few, all within a single economy, doesn't seem like growth, it just seems like activity.
Now, foreign market sales or flogging off the international film rights to said book - That's growth.
Did the same with my first son with all Harry Potter books, which came out as he grew up. When my second son was born he caught up with the early books by watching the movies then participating to our reading sessions. I acted all voices when reading, and we sometimes would re-enact a complete scene all together, improvising lines to fit with the story and acting with any kind of props we could put our hands on.
My sons are grown-ups now, how I miss these times.
In this case it wouldn't really matter. From a copyright perspective, he might as well as copy the source code line for line. Wouldn't matter if the guy created it on a desert island having never heard of the original game and claimed it all a coincidence. It still infringes the copyright in the character, story, graphics, etc. But if the game is shareware or the code is, then it's fair game.
Just like I can't reverse engineer a Harry Potter novel from watching the movies and claim immunity from copyright.
People using cleanrooms are not worried about copyright, they're worried (primarily) about violating NDAs or license agreements. They have to prove that the engineers figured out everything on their own. Especially important when the thing you're copying is from a company that you may have had NDAs or license agreements with in the past. Or employ engineers who may have worked at the competitor and have trade secret knowledge in their head. You may end up with similarities of implementation, but have the clean room logs to back up your story. Even a clean room won't protect you from patent infringement if you end up with an infringing technology.
And there is where you are wrong. If you cannot get them because they are "not free" and this bothers you, then you have to recognize that those bits have some value to you. You want them, and want is value. If they had no value they would be free and you would care less that you didn't have them.
I demonstrated this physicality to a friend by showing them a pad of 580 pages, a bottle of ink, two pieces of cardboard, and some slightly heavy paper stock. All totaled up they represented about $8.30 worth of material. They had physicality and they clearly had a production cost, we agreed they were "worth" $8.30. Then I pulled out the same material except that the ink had been spread about on the paper such that it told the story of Harry Potter's adventures during one of his years at Hogwarts. Now it was valued at $34.99. What changed? It had information on the pages now that it didn't have before, and that information has some value.
I've spent quite a bit of time trying to understand the economics of information, what gives it value, how is that value captured, and how is that value lost. I can tell you unequivocally that digital goods should no more be free than automobiles, and for the same reason. It takes an action to create useful or desirable information, and that effort is an economic action which we reward by sending capital toward it. When people get stuck in the mindset that the 'bits are free' they for get that the order of the bits is not free. It is that ordering that has the value, not the bits themselves. Most people agree that the value of a DVD full of zeros is different than the value of a DVD with a movie on it. They won't agree on what what the value is, but I've yet to find people who don't think there is at least some value[1].
Digital goods should not be "free" and appropriating them without economic exchange is theft, but how 'not free' they should be is an interesting discussion.
[1] For the pedantics, yes some movies could be zeros.
I've mused on this idea elsewhere, but it's applicable here too:
I can't help but feel today's absurdly draconian copyright laws and lengths are going to make our century a terrible cultural black hole for our future-human descendents.
The vast, vast majority of creators who produce culture--books, movies, music, visual art, etc.--don't see widespread distribution, success, or fame in their own lifetimes. This is true today and it was true in the past too.
Today, we have people like Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, and others, volunteering their time and energy to lovingly archive, curate, and distribute out-of-copyright works. Many of these works get a cultural second life: people today can freely discover and read a book published before 1923, whose author might have died penniless and unknown in their day. Their work, their name, their ideas, and their legacy lives on 100 years after their death, even if the world they lived in overlooked them, because volunteers can freely update and distribute those works.
Can we say the same about the vast majority of work produced today, for whose creators don't attain widespread fame or cultural influence? Everything anyone produces, from a smudge on a piece of paper to the Great American Novel, now automatically gains a copyright that can last over a century, and that has almost never failed to be extended. As one of the many everyday creators who never see significant success, how would you feel if your work was not only ignored today, but for all time too?
Our future-human descendents are going to think culture from 1923-2100 consisted of almost nothing but the 400 comic book movies, the 75 Star Wars movies, and Harry Potter. Everything else will be too unprofitable for a megacorporation to distribute, and illegal for anyone else to.
Immersion helps.
But outside of that, there are some great suggestions. A few things I have to suggest:
Get ahold of some of the books and workbooks for adult learners. This is an easy way to learn grammar and common phrases. I'd use these in conjunction with other things.
Next, watch children's cartoons. Here (Norway), adult films often simply have subtitles and leave the English audio, but children's shows are dubbed with simple words and clear language. It is a bonus if it is a crossover - I watched many hours of "Spiderman" cartoons in Norwegian.
Read books, especialy ones you've read in English. Harry Potter, for example, is available in multiple languages. It'll be difficult at first, but you'll increase vocabulary from the repetition in the book. Terry Pratchett is another choice for German, at least (I can find some in Norwegian).
For speaking, Skype is popular for tutoring and speaking practice, though you might have to pay for this.
Good luck :)
I graduated from art school and am now a software engineer. I went because when you're really good at drawing in high school--everyone tells you that you should be an artist, regardless of what else you may be good at.
I believe my degree was worth it. If you want to learn technical skills, this article is spot on and has some great advice. There are some great resources he gives for learning this stuff fairly cheap.
What I learned in art school was critical thinking, problem solving, perception, and observation. The most important things you get out of art school that are applicable to software:
1. How to critique work and talk about your work with others. Most studio classes are basically just a long critique of everyone's work. I use these skills everyday in software in code reviews and in my role as a manager mentoring others.
2. Problem solving. We regularly had assignments like "Draw a sequence of images defining density" or "Create a sculpture that defines the space between an architectural space and your body" or "Create an invention and build it with only brown paper lunch bags." It takes some novel thinking to come up with creative solutions to that shit.
3. How to deliver. You need to get stuff done and produce a volume of work to get good.
Of the good friends I had in art school:
- One is a paper sculptor and has made work for Facebook, Apple, Google, the Queen of Jordan, and has been a guest on Sesame Street. He also works with research scientists on solar cell development. - One has been the visual effects supervisor for the Harry Potter films, the Dark Knight, and Star Trek Beyond. - One is the director of a glass blowing school. - One is a executive creative director at a large design agency.
I would guess that every one of them would attribute part of their success to the art school they attended.
> Learning Spanish outside of a few areas in the US brings little direct benefit.
I'm originally from Indiana, and lived there until 3 years ago, upon which I moved to Norway. I lived in small to medium sized towns, and would have found it to be a benefit for many jobs, especially low-paying or lower-management jobs. I imagine it is the same for much of the midwest, the south, and the southwest. You are correct on the immigration from mexico, however, and it may bring dimishing returns as time goes on.
> The amount of material available only in English dwarfs the material available only in spanish. You don't need the same amount of material, nor do you need only available in spanish. You just have to find the material. Harry Potter is generally a good series to read when learning a foreign language because it is available in so many, for example. Outside of English, however, spanish language television and reading material is one of the easier to obtain in the US. Norwegian, for example, is a little trickier to find as it isn't nearly as widespread.
English is one of the 'special' languages, and a lot of languages don't compare - it is used as a unifying language in a lot of professions. It really, really helps me here in Norway, especially since there is a high fluency rate here (Console games and adult movies generally aren't translated, for example). I'm pretty lucky that English is my primary language.
Sidenote: I generally think the advantages to bilingualism are greater. Especially if they teach people a different way of looking at the world, which is somewhat the main benefit of a second language. At that point, however, it doesn't matter which language one learns. Klingon would probably work just as well for such cognitive effects. This sort of thing really shouldn't go away, even if the language was forgotten.
> this is the first incident where autopilot was involved with an inattentive driver
The other (fatal) crash involved an inattentive driver watching a Harry Potter movie:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/01/tesla-driver-killed-autopilot-self-driving-car-harry-potter
1 point by pseingatl 1 minute ago | edit | delete [-]
First Preston Tucker, now Elon Musk. Dear Investors, One of the purchasers of our cars decided to watch a Harry Potter movie while operating the vehicle and used autopilot while speeding. The SEC thinks that this irresponsible behavior somehow affects the viability of our company in the marketplace. Sincerely, Elon Musk reply
First Preston Tucker, now Elon Musk.
Dear Investors,
One of the purchasers of our cars decided to watch a Harry Potter movie while operating the vehicle and used autopilot while speeding. The SEC thinks that this irresponsible behavior somehow affects the viability of our company in the marketplace.
Sincerely,
Elon Musk
Is it really accurate to take the very limited and incomplete data of this self-driving feature and compare that to all of the world's accident rates? Think about the long tail here...
Have they even released this data for examination? I am thinking that many people have approached this feature with caution, in that its a novelty but they aren't "trusting" it or relying on it like you would a human driver to safely get you somewhere. It would be also interesting to see the types of roads and conditions where the feature is enabled. In the rain? Snow? At night? Poor visibility? Traffic conditions.
Just a single number paints an incomplete picture of the data. Why has no one mentioned this? People are sheep that are quick to declare victory after seeing a single number without questioning where or how that number came to be.
My thoughts are this: give this feature to your average Joe driving a Honda without much guidance and we'd have a lot more mechanized death.
Youtube is full of Tesla autopilot fail videos where the driver had to take quick action to avert disaster. What if we let this into the hands of a lot more irresponsible people who think they can tool down the highway watching a Harry Potter movie, blind faith and trust in a "feature". How many Tesla owners here would honestly trust the feature that much with their life at this point?
You know very well what he meant.
Just because this technology MAY[1] save lives in the future doesn't mean you can sacrifice others for greater good.
This is also the reason why we don't allow for experimenting on humans in the medical field.
[1] This is something that while I am fan of Tesla I'm still convinced Google is doing this properly i.e. build autonomous system from the scratch. What Tesla offers is an autonomous system that is good enough to make driver confident about it and pay less attention (e.g. watching Harry Potter movie while driving), but not fool proof that it would prevent accidents that regular driver could easily avoid.
Here's a Facebook page on the phenomenon: https://www.facebook.com/SpottedKidlington/posts/1279050525453590
And this is the Daily Mail article: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3676849/Residents-baffled-coachloads-Chinese-tourists-descend-unremarkable-Oxfordshire-village-ask-selfies-told-used-HARRY-POTTER-films-rogue-tour-operator.html?ITO=1490&ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490
Wait, what? Do you mean that buying a Tesla makes you a good driver, or the kind of driver who watches Harry Potter movies while tooling down the highway?
Google's self-driving cars is collecting a lot more data than Tesla is --- it has many more sensors that Tesla's cars. So it's not just how many miles you have driven, but what is the quality of the data. More importantly, it's not just having more data, it's how you use it, and that's what Google has been doing for the past five years.
The other reason for the caution is that people's lives are at stake. Google's self-driving cars are significantly more advanced in terms of the sorts of situations which they can handle ocmpared to Tesla's. But one of the things which Google has found is that there is an uncanny valley in terms of driver safety as self-driving cars get more capable. People will tend to trust them more, even shouldn't, and that paradoxically, makes them less safe.
The first generation self-driving cars were lent out to Google employees, where they would be told that the driver would be video'ed for research purposes. And people were found reading e-mail, newspapers, etc., even though they were told to be ready to take over at any time. After all, what do you do if you lose a tie rod? Or you suddenly have a catastrophic tire blow out at highway speeds?
That's why the second generation car has no steering wheel, because it's been shown that it's hopeless to depend on the human being. Instead, you need to have dual redundancy for everything (much like in aircraft design), so that even if you have a hardware problem, that the car can always bring itself safely to a stop at the side of the road, even if the driver is asleep or totally not paying attention because they are too busy watching Harry Potter or some other movie.
Caution is good, when human lives are at stake. Even if they are doing something that they were emphatically being told Not to do, if they do it, maybe the designer of the Autopilot has at least some moral responsibility, even if the lawyers have carefully protected Tesla from any legal liability?
Darwin award. He was watching a Harry Potter movie. No sympathy at all. This is why we can't have nice things; some idiot will inevitably bollox things up.
A new smartphone enhances your capabilities, though. They are tools. So the guy waiting for a smartphone instead of waiting to see Harry Potter is going to come away from the experience with more capabilities than he had before. New entertainment like movies just wastes your time and money.
They are also powerful status symbols, like having an expensive Rolex. Someone who is first in their circle with a new iDevice is like a minor celebrity and gains attention and status. Depending on their position that can be converted to things like enterprise sales, intimate partners, etc..
Marketing for the new, US-focused Harry Potter movie? :)
On a related tangent, I am reminded that the extraordinarily successful Harry Potter series of movies made a loss on paper. As you suggest, these people laugh in the face of the law.
Another recommendation: Stephen Fry. He's also a famous British comedian. He has narrated all of the Harry Potter books and the first Hitch Hiker's Guide. Some of the best audiobook narration I've encountered.
(The second HHGTG is narrated by Martin Freeman, I think. It was part of the 2005 HHGTG movie release. )
I mostly just know of the usual comedy sync-tracks like MST3K and its successors in Rifftrax and Cinematic Titanic.
Also, if you're at all a fan (or not) of the Harry Potter movies, there's a great alt audio track called "Wizard People, Dear Reader". For that one, you either turn off the audio in the movie (or at least turn it way down so you can still sorta hear the music) and play the alternate narration. The premise is kind of the story as told by someone who's never heard the actual narrative, but I think the humor shows that he was at least a bit familiar with it.
> I've read that Rowlings let Rickman in on it fairly early so he could understand the motivation and avoid just being a rock-monster.
I read that too. I just went and found a source for it too: http://herocomplex.latimes.com/movies/harry-potter-alan-rickman-looks-back-on-decade-of-dark-magic/#/0. It contains this amusing tidbit:
> “It was quite amusing, too, because there were times when a director would tell Alan what to do in a scene and he would say something like, ‘No I can’t do that – I know what is going to happen and you don’t,’” said “Potter” producer David Heyman. “He had a real understanding of the character and now looking back, you can see there was always more going on there – a look, an expression, a sentiment — that hint at what is to come … the shadow that he casts in these films is a huge one and the emotion he conveys is immeasurable.”
Markering, social engineering. Hot or not, learn from it!
Everyone in the marketing business should learn how it's done from such premieres (other examples are Bond, Hobbit, Harry Potter).
I think those strategies would not work with a completely new title. Here you have a series that spans over 2-3 generations and through marketing you can create this illusion that this is an incredible cultural phenomenon, and that everyone is waiting, and that it's a part of the saga, and that without watching it you cannot call yourself a member of the polite society, or a middle class.
Look closely at what kind of arguments are used in the marketing messages. "This episode fits to the style of the other films". Now do reverse engineering on that statement - they took focus groups, sociologists, cultural anthropologists, ask people questions: "what are you most afraid of with the new episode", they say: "that it will spoil the style and mood of the previous movies". Now take 2-3 most repetitive statements and construct the smart message that will cover these problems. This is how it's done.
Another element is that the screenplay is written in such a way, that this episode has to be both - relating to the previous episodes and satisfy the fans, but also has to have a self containing story, that will be understood by those unfamiliar to the series. From the marketing point of view the Star Wars fans are not really the target group, they will go to see it no matter what. The real challenge is to broaden the fan base, attract those uninterested. Make the girlfriends go together with the boyfriends, and parents together with the children. Big bucks rule.
I particularly like the way they insert the information into the news reels. Of course the TV stations are being paid for it and the message is well tailored, but goes seamlessly well with other pieces of news. Very few movies are honored like that.
On a technical level - I think Episode I in 1999 was the last one shot on 35mm film. But actors spent most of the time in the blue box, so the editing deserves applause. Episodes II and III were shot on video making the composition with the CGI much much easier. But this time they went back to shooting on film, natural scenery and models. Interesting development. It's also interesting how they are able to release it on all different formats, 2d, 3d, IMAX etc. all at once (like games on different consoles).
I'm slightly critical from the point of view cinematographic art, but I'm admiring it as a global social engineering masterpiece and a business enterprise.
I'm not sure we're social enough though.
Content industries have killed themselves by selling content as objects-you-own (or rent briefly.) Even Netflix etc work on this model. And torrents are just objects-you-steal.
If the content industries had done more to sell content as an element in a social network - share with friends/family, meet strangers, enjoy relationships of all kinds - they wouldn't be so threatened by P2P. The breakout franchises - Star Trek, Harry Potter, Star Wars - all have this personal and social element. Direct-to-DVD crap movies totally lack it.
Ironically - or maybe not - P2P provides more of that social element. People make requests, comment on uploads, build reputations, and sometimes organise private sharing clubs.
I'm sure torrenting wouldn't have become as popular without that social sharing element.
sigh
right, first things first, none of this is new.
lets start with the more obvious stuff, what you see in film isn't real. No really.
Just look atthe harry potter series; all those kids went through puberty, it was as equally unkind for them as it was for us.
An entire generation of VFX people cut their teeth painting out the pimples on many a potter face.
Then there is the making older people look young. You know those actors(male and female) that always seem to look around 30, despite pushing 55? that almost exclusively digital. I used to do night shifts with a bloke who's entire job was to remove crows feet (and a lot more) for a very successful British chick flick.
then you have the other extreme, you know those shots where people have arms missing? or facial disfigurement?
James bond: http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/jamesbond/images/0/01/Silva's_disfigurement.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20130329141917
board walk empire: https://vimeo.com/18275127 (1:44, however the rest is worth a look)
Dark knight, Twoface: https://vimeo.com/3852161 (0:59) (fun fact, the tube bit for the cronicals of nania, I sent back to be re-rendered because I though the renderer had fucked up(I was only looking at the matte, and flashing mattes are normally bad))
As for body doubles, thats been going on for decades. pretty much any shot that involves the back of some star, there is a 50% chance that its a body double, or a stand-in. Mainly because its cheaper.
Look here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHRLX8jRjq8 You see Daniel Craig zoom around riding a motor cycle like a pro, except you don't. Its either a bike welded to a trailer (0:34), or a face replacement. The first Digital double is at 0:42 (there are lots more.)
So you can see that actually it happens a lot, and frankly there is nothing wrong with it. In fact there is a whole achademic field devoted to it, (fun thing, google "digital doubles framestore")
Its basically a case of some dickhead wanting to see tits, and feeling cheated because he can't command someone he's never met to do a full frontal scene for the price of a movie ticket (or less)
I think you're reading too much into his words. I don't see it as any different from a trainspotting enthusiasts lamenting the fact that the Harry Potter films used a CGI locomotive instead of a real 19th century steam train.
If they believe that something is lost from the use of CGI in the film, that's their prerogative. As with any works of performance art, shouldn't television and cinema come under the same level of critique?
It's similar to asking why I think Malfoy in Harry Potter is portrayed as a bad person. There's nothing subtle about the GGR character. I recommend watching the movie, primarily for the performances.
I think you're dramatically overestimating the number of people who don't want to see demo reels in the cinema. In our tight technical circles, sure, I agree that most people don't. But our tech circles are such a small percentage of the audience of hollywood films. There are plenty of movies that aren't drowning in VFX released every year, yet the numbers don't lie. Avengers, Harry Potter, Avatar, Pirates of the carribean (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films for more)style films blow others out of the water. It's extrememly clear that people want films that are knee deep in VFX. If they didn't, then they'd stop spending 1.5 billion dollars on going to see the avengers, and see something else instead.
I can tell you the steps I used to learn German -- it took about 6-8 months until my only remaining hurtles were sheer vocabulary. Granted, I have a background in Ancient languages, so learning an inflected language like German (or Russian) is much easier for me than it would have been, already understanding gender and case and such. BUT, the methods I used to learn Classical languages did not work for German. I was not a believer in the "practical methods", but they really do work if you do them right, in my opinion.
1. Started with Duolingo. I did not find it useful whatsoever.
2. Started reading Harry Potter in German. At first it took me like an hour to get through a page, I would just look at the English if a sentence was too complicated to figure out with the dictionary. I started to notice patterns, and would read grammar blogs and help sites for stuff that was reoccurring, (e.g. looking for "relative pronouns" on mydailygerman and german language stack exchange). After making it through about 20 pages in HP, the improvement was dramatic. Reading is most important for thinking in a foreign word order. Now people tell me that I use some very sophisticated words and constructions, and it's definitely because I learned German from reading. I've read three books in german now, and can read HP-level stuff without a dictionary.
Btw, I got a kindle for this purpose, but I think that part of the slowness of having to type the word out yourself in an online dictionary helps with memorization. Also, translations are never 1:1, so often the kindle dictionaries are not very helpful. I would go to the park and use my phone to look up words.
Also -- translated books are way easier to read than books originally written in a foreign language. Natively written stuff has too many idioms or strange constructions for a beginner. So reading translations of books you already know is much, much easier (you can also follow the story and not miss an important detail because you don't understand a sentence and have to skip it).
3. Did Memrise for vocab, 1000 Elementary German words. This is huge for speaking confidence (and therefore, speed) -- that you know the gender of the word you are using. They also have sets that teach you which cases and prepositions verbs take, etc. (e.g. In german, you say "I am proud ON you <you in the accusative>". These are hard to learn from just reading) The important thing is to say it out loud, just like the example. Eventually, you'll just use the right gender without even thinking about it! (Something I thought was impossible)
4. Watched all the Harry Potter moves dubbed in German, with German subtitles. Twice. First time, I paused when I didn't know a word, and used google translate to translate the sentence. So it would take me like 5+ hours per movie. But, this was one of the most dramatic things that helped my listening comprehension. In the two week period where I did nothing but vocab and watched these movies, I would say my german understanding at least doubled. I also re-watched the movies without subtitles (understanding much less), because it forces comprehension speed and really listening. But the subs are important at first so you know how to spell things ;)
Now I watch movies in German, and always have German subtitles on if the channel has them. If there is Russian Netflix, you can use a VPN and watch your favorite movies subbed/dubbed. You just really have to get high-quality productions, or the subs are too different to be helpful. The news is good non-subbed because they enunciate very clearly. Nature documentaries are also great, because they speak slowly and clearly. Never be afraid to pause/repeat/look up a word!
5. Writing. If you can get someone to write to, it's great, because you have time to carefully express stuff you would want to say every day. So you effectively learn to write phrases that you will later want to say in conversation, but you have the time to research some more about how to do it correctly (and get in good habits).
6. Obviously, speaking. Though I have relatively little speaking experience (my job is in English), I am very capable of expressing myself. If you don't have a native speaker to talk to every day, it also works to talk to yourself and try thinking in the language! Better if you live alone, so only you know that you're crazy :)
So, in a summary: Watch movies and read books. If you see a pattern, research it. Look it up again and again until you memorize it (by seeing it in context). Tools like memrise are great for stuff that is hard to get from movies/reading, like genders. And of course, you need to find someone to talk to! Above all, realize that you will never know what is going on with 100% confidence :D
To give you some realistic expectations: I've lived in Germany since Jul. 2013. It took me 6 months to be conversational, and 8 months to read HP/only really need to improve vocabulary/expressions/comprehension speed. Interacting with German every day cannot be understated as a motivating factor -- you should visit Russia :)
Printed books can be uneven but they're also fairly limited in what they can present.
Your basic concept is a page full of type. I actually care a lot about footnotes or endnotes (I read a lot of nonfiction), indices, and bibliographies. Books lacking in any or all of these get strong demerits.
It's virtually impossible (and very expensive) for books to present distractions. Static black-and-white or color images are about the limit, pop-ups or fold-outs are possible, and as a novelty, perhaps an electronic gizmo pasted to a page or cover, though I cannot think of a single published book I've got which has such. Some technical books that came with CDROMs, but that's almost a completely passed phase now.
There are aspects which speak to age and printing technology -- the slightly blurred type of most pre-1950s 20th century books, and increasing sharpness of type and copy since (starting up-market). Typeface, though modern and sans-serif faces pretty much always annoy me. Large-print books for seniors. Different styles -- picture, comic, and children's books with lots of illustrations. College and high-school textbooks, increasingly almost useless with their call-outs, images, and other visual gimicks. Flashy, yes, but not all that informative.
Or look at Harry Potter and the animated magic newspapers. If I were to run into that I'd scream -- looks fun for a second on a movie screen. Rage-inducing in real life.
Your eBook suggestion is possible. It's really easy to overdo, and a little bit goes a long way. You're also limited by technology, and would likely find that you're getting noise at two levels -- the pseudo-analog noise (see LaTeX's coffee stain macro: http://hanno-rein.de/archives/349 http://texblog.org/tag/coffee-stain/), plus accumulated digital noise -- bad pixels or damaged e-ink.
Websites which use background images under text virtually always get it removed by me locally using a personal stylesheet manager.
Well the Congressional Cinema Club could put on some special showings and ask for sponsorship
- Car Manufacturers Lobby: Bullit
- Anti Car Lobby: Duel
- Trans-Atlantic Airlines Lobby : Titanic
- Construction Lobby: Bridge over the River Kwai
- Elon Musk : Iron Man 1 or 3 (but not 2)
- The Hamptons Tourist Board: The wicker man
- The Banjo Players association of America: Deliverance
- Tesla Car Showrooms: Death of a salesman
- Climate Change Deniers Lobby: Some Like It Hot
- Liberal Atheists for a kinder America: Any Harry Potter
> It's about control. It's about the studios always having a seat at the bargaining table when new products/devices are being floated. They fear becoming a commodity supplier.
The only way the studios would become a commodity supplier is if there were numerous other sources of content people would pay money to watch. That's what it means for your product to be a commodity. E.g. consumer PCs are a commodity because if you don't like Dell, you can get an identical product from HP. But with movies, if you want Harry Potter, you have to play ball with Warner Bros., because consumers want that specific movie, not some generic equivalent.
The studios want DRM not because they don't trust consumers, but because they (rightfully) don't trust the tech industry. It doesn't matter that Harry Potter isn't a commodity if you can pirate it without doing business with Warner Brothers. The tech industry sells hardware and software services for consuming content, and it helps its bottom line if piracy is easy and prevalent. See, e.g., Youtube's being built on the back of infringing Viacom's copyrights. DRM gives the studios a toe-hold in the process to deter products that blatantly promote copyright infringement.
It's a bit pedantic of me, but I think your argument has presented has a lot of holes. You can always write original work that doesn't depend on existing cultural references, and the ability to reference things is not as limited as you suggest. I can write an publish a book tomorrow in which a character reads a Harry Potter novel and muses on the content. What I can't do is write a book featuring Harry Potter, boy wizard, as a character, unless it's some sort of parody - but in that case I may well have to expend money and legal effort on defending against a lawsuit while a court decides whether the derivative work falls within some permissible exception.
Incidentally JRR Tolkien died in 1973 so you'll be able to recycle characters from Lord of the Rings to your heart's content in 29 years as long as the law doesn't change; you just won't be able to use the footage from the movies or quote the script insofar as it differs from the novel. A literary parody has been around for a few decades already, I think it's called Bored of the Rings.
I was channel surfing on TV yesterday and flicked onto one of the Harry Potter films, to hear Hermione saying she researched something in the library and couldn't find a single reference - my immediate thought before moving on a channel was that (assuming I don't have her magical skills), I would have no idea how to research something in a library without either the internet, or asking other people who might know where I could find the answers.
(I say no idea - obviously on a basic level it wouldn't be hard to start by finding all books on the rough topic, reading them, etc.... but to do it with any sort of efficiency as opposed to so slowly that I'd end up beating myself to death with a hardcover.)
You can find token examples of Americans who think that Harry Potter tricks children into being Satanists. You can find Americans who think that Schindlers List is jewish propaganda. You can find Americans who believe that Brokeback Mountain should be banned under obscenity laws.
These are fringe beliefs. As a general rule, movie studios do not shitcan movies just because a couple of dumbasses think that the movie goes too far.
Seriously, if Harry Potter was released despite the controversy it caused, there is no way in hell that "controversy" around The Interview is the reason behind this decision. You'd have to be incredibly out of touch with American society to think otherwise.
Controversial with who? American audiences? I doubt it. What little controversy might exist over the film with American audiences is dwarfed by the controversy there was over even mundane family films like Harry Potter.
Sure, the North Koreans hate the film, but why do these cinema companies give half a shit? They weren't going to get North Korean ticket sales regardless of the movies content.
This could make a good movie plot. The all powerful AI analyses your characteristics, gets it all wrong and assigns you to the wrong line of work (Harry Potter?) :)
I think there are a couple of factors here. This is a popularity contest, which means it's mass-market by default. If you listed the "favorite artists" or "favorite songs" from Facebook, it would be similarly easily accessible pop music that can be played on the radio when children are in the room. The average person is going to like a lot of easily accessible books and a few outliers in specific genres. So while you might get 95% of people liking Harry Potter, you gets 15% liking the Mistborn series and maybe 12% liking Snow Crash and 4% liking The Martian. There is likely a long tail that Facebook won't show you.
So people like pop literature, which means pop literature is going to be written so the mass market can read and enjoy it. I've read quite a few books where I've said "I liked it up until..." or "I like it but this part annoys me". I can't say the same about Harry Potter or The Hunger Games. They're inoffensive and appeal to everyone (or at least the 95%).
Social factors also play into it, such as the appearance of The Holy Bible so high in the list. Is the Bible actually so many people's favorite book? No, of course not. That would be like saying my favorite book is Learn Python the Hard Way. It's a textbook, really, something to study and learn from. But it's a way to easily identify with a group. If you want people to know you're serious about your religion, you say the Bible is your favorite book. Another social aspect, The Great Gatsby is known at The Great American Novel and also a popular movie recently. Did this many people read it? No. They watched the movie or they heard it's a great book so they "like" it in order to appear smart and well-read. Nobody likes Hamlet as a book. No one. Because it's not a book. But you were probably forced to read it like one in high school, and it's one of the few books you've ever read, so let put it on the list too. In fact, I would say most of these books are on there because they're the some of the only books the 95% have ever read.
To clarify, the difference you aren't seeing between the groups is the incompetent managers define "sit next to" as "sit next to at the nudie bar" or gaming table or harry potter movie premier or frat house or pretty much any place other than work. AKA young inexperienced white frat boys only need apply.
In comparison, competent managers define the same "sit next to" as "sit next to during an emergency bug fix" or while hashing out a new feature idea or optimizing a slow task or automating a process or just gossiping about a new technology. These are the kind of managers who "dare" to hire non-white people or women or older than 25 yrs old etc. Usually their company is much more successful for obvious reasons.
Surprised / pleased that I'm a quarter of the way there (well, 24/100).
Didn't expect quite that much young adult literature - Harry Potter, Limony Snickett, Golden Compass, The Giver (plus Lord of the Rings). All major film franchises (well, The Giver under production).
Was amazed to see The Phantom Tollbooth. One of my favourite books of all time, though I haven't read it since I was a child and honestly have never met another person who'd heard of it!
You have no idea what you are talking about because you do not understand copyright law. It just doesn't work that way.
You can't make a new version of something and not have it be a copyright violation, even if it is significantly different from the original. I'll give you an example, the movie Blade Runner was an adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The movie was very different from the book, but rights still hsd to be secured to use the source material and characters and money was paid. I can't even make a completely different movie and have Harry Potter come in my movie because J.K. Rowling, etc owns that character. The exception is for parody.
Plus the burden of proof is on the defendant in a copyright lawsuit - the copyright holder can still sue even if its fair use, now you gotta defend yourself in an expensive lawsuit.
Another example that just came of my head, the movie Apocalypse Now was an adaption of Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness however the setting was changed from The Congo to Vietnam.
I'm originally from France, and I used three methods to improve my english: 1) Reading in english. back in high school, when I was still a beginner, my go-to books in english were the Harry Potter series: not because I have a particular fancy for the books, but because I'd already read them in French so I could guess the meaning of most words without a dictionary. I actually extended this method to Spanish and Latin, pretty successfully.
2) Watch movies. I started with french subtitles, then switched to english subtitles. I stayed with english subtitles for quite a while as I thought I wasn't ready to remove them. Then I spent 6 months abroad and did not have access to subtitles, so I was forced to watch movies in english without subtitles. I had to replay a lot of scenes on my first couple tries, but picked it up quickly.
3) The single most important thing I did to improve my english is .. to stop speaking french. That's right. I've been leaving in the US for about 2 years now, and I avoid french speaking people like the plague. And if for some reason I can't avoid it, then I speak english with them. No french. See, a lot of the foreigners I've seen who struggle with the language tend to stick with other foreigners from their country. That's the worst possible thing to do if you want to improve your english. I've seen people who've been in the US for 8 years and can still barely speak english: they don't need to since they almost never actually speak it in their community.
Now I don't know if that works for everyone. I've met a couple other people who've used a similar strategy, and obtained similar results, but that's still not a very large sample.
It honestly looks like the photos from the Harry Potter movies. Love it! Great work!
> It's all fine and well to say that, but there's actually the meta-problem that Americans don't really want to watch non-Americans
Is a lack of exposure to Canadian television really a problem? Americans listen to quite a bit of Canadian music. And a sizable minority also watch a significant amount of British television (Downton Abbey, tons of Murder-Mystery stuff). Not to mention the huge amount of European literature we're exposed to in our education system or that we read for pleasure (Harry Potter). But that's just western culture. Looking East, you can also look at the huge impact Japanese Animation and Chinese Film has had on our culture as well.
Americans will voraciously consume any media that's 1) Made available to them (Most Canadian TV fails this test) 2) In English.
Now I maybe speaking out of my ass here, having never been in David's position. Shouldn't his future designation have been part of the contract?
As an example, admittedly unrelated to this, when J.K.Rowling agreed for Harry Potter movie to be made, she negotiated and put a condition in the contract for the entire cast to be British or Irish.
>Many people want a-la-carte cable where they get to pick what they want - why not video services?
I think the difference is that with cable you're picking genres a la carte, as opposed to picking based on production/distribution companies.
For example, if I'm into sports and news, a la carte cable would let me subscribe to, say, CBC, CNN, TSN, RSN, CTV NewsNet, The Score, etc. A la carte video services like WB is doing here don't give me such options. If I like the Harry Potter movies, I have to subscribe to WB's service to watch them. This costs $9.99/month and includes a bunch of other stuff I might not want. Then say I want to watch House Of Cards on Netflix, that's $7.99/month and includes a bunch of other stuff I might not want. So it starts to look a lot like the current cable setup people complain about: you're buying bundles of stuff you mostly don't want to get at the stuff you do want.
You couldn't really make it work in 5 or 6 2-hour movies. There is much more material in ASOIAF than there is in Harry Potter or something similar, and they had to split that into almost 10 full length movies.
Indie Games are safer; small budget, small sales, still success. AAA games are gambles; huge budgets, great sales, are failures, they must have psychotically high sales numbers. I predict AAA titles will be fewer and fewer. Hopefully our gaming consoles will be augmenting that with smaller titles in the future.
It will be just like the movie business, usually you pay a little to rent decent movies run of the mill movies and watch them at home, and every once in a while you will pay theater prices to see Avatar or Harry Potter or whatever is hyper big budget and popular.
Gaming is still a young industry that needs time to find itself.
A Kickstarter campaign wouldn't come close to covering it.
Your average cable TV drama costs upwards of $2M/episode, with Game of Thrones costing $4-$10 million/episode. Harry Potter has a big following, so it might make $10M all up - enough for a set and a pilot, maybe.
I think if someone wants to use that excuse, they should produce a substantially different adaptation of the source material, like some of the crazier variations of Shakespeare.
LOTR was mostly well done (yes please, cut Tom Bombadil and that whole pointless detour), but they also made changes for no apparent reason.
The Harry Potter movies were perhaps the worst offender, substituting perfectly decent dialogue from the books with cringeworthy kids movie crap. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
There's a difference between generic blocks and the non-licensed theme sets. I've got a couple Lego stores nearby, I know that the generic blocks are available, and that's definitely great. I was talking about, e.g., a fancy castle set, but just with a generic "knights" theme, rather than something from the Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter movies or whatever.
However, I realize it's working out for Lego, and if the licensing is what's necessary to keep them going, then I'm not faulting them too much.
My beef is that Lego have become so highly branded. I would rather my kid play with generic space and castle and pirate blocks, than with Star Wars and Harry Potter and Pirates of the Carribbean blocks. As a product of the 80's I can say I spent a lot of time playing with highly branded and marketed toys, so it's not necessarily a bad thing; but there's something special about Lego that makes me feel like they should be above film tie-ins and in a special airy realm of pure imagination.
> He quotes a part of the copyright law that is giving examples of the kind of things that might be fair use, and then cuts it off before it gets to the part where it lists factors to be considered when deciding if a particular use is fair use. He seems to think that anything that falls under the examples is automatically fair use.
This is a frequent misunderstanding...and one that seems to keep escaping TechDirt writers over the years. "Fair" in this case does not mean "noble"...as in, "well, educating inner-city schoolkids is noble, so it's OK for me to torrent the latest Harry Potter movie as part of our fiction reading unit."
That may be indeed a noble use, and I bet you could get any number of people/companies to donate you the DVD for it, but it's not a "fair use."
If kids really don't have any spending power, we wouldn't have Fruit Loops, Spongebob Squarepants, Barbie, Disney movies, or Harry Potter.
Children drive an enormous amount of consumer spending. Their usage patterns matter.
If anything, extracting money from an adult may be easier indirectly by their children than directly.
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.
Lego sets based on movies are such BS. It should be about your own imagination not just recreating star wars and harry potter crap
Right. You say "We have laws against 'copyright infringement', a wonky idea that essentially nobody understands or cares about, but not against plagiarism, which is what most people actually are against and will work to combat."
Plagiarism does not have a legal definition. It is based on moral/ethical principles which are specific to a field of endeavor. For example, academia has very strict rules against plagiarism while in artistic fields ... well, to quote Picasso, "Good artists copy, great artists steal." People are against plagiarism in the same way that they are against bad art, excessive noise, and foul manners - because by definition plagiarism is something people are against.
"So that's what the law should prohibit, now isn't it?" My point isn't tossed away so lightly. Current copyright law says that my scenario is illegal. Let's suppose then that we change the law. Can you tell me in a non-wonky way what that new law might be?
Under this moral law, can I take the text of Harry Potter, replace "Harry" with "Henry", and redistribute the modified text? (Crediting Rowling, of course). Why or why not? Can I translate Harry Potter into another language? What about fan-subs? Make my own MST3K-like version of the movie? Replace Potter's head with my own? Project the movie onto my garage for my neighbors to watch? And charge them money for it? There are people who would say "yes" to all of those. And people who would say "no." What is your guiding principle?
How would it affect the decision in Dastar Corp. v. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp.? Do you consider Dastar guilty of some sort of moral right which is punishable under the law? If so, then what is your view on Scalia, writing for the 8-0 Court: "A video of the MGM film Carmen Jones, after its copyright has expired, would presumably require attribution not just to MGM, but to Oscar Hammerstein II (who wrote the musical on which the film was based), to Georges Bizet (who wrote the opera on which the musical was based), and to Prosper Mérimée (who wrote the novel on which the opera was based). In many cases, figuring out who is in the line of “origin” would be no simple task." When does one give up figuring out the line of origin?
I think anything you come up with will be as wonky as copyright law.
Do you realize that the GNU GPL is based on strong copyright law, and that removing it means the free software movement, who can enforces freedom through the GPL, would be almost powerless under your proposal? Does that affect your thoughts?
It couldn't possibly be that those titles that you want to see are not being developed because few people want them?
http://vgsales.wikia.com/wiki/Video_game_industry#History_of_video_game_industry
You do not get to define market demand for particular types of games. People are willing to spend money on games.
The music industry is figuring out that, unlike the 90's, they can't put out a cd with 1 or 2 hits and expect people to buy the whole thing. So yes, sales are down. How much are they saving by shipping fewer CDs?
Book sales may be stagnant or declining, but units are up, and a similar argument applies: how much of the falling gross revenue is offset by reduced distribution costs?
How will any position on copyright enforcement cause people to forego watching the latest Twilight movie, or buying Harry Potter books, and instead buy the sort of high art or higher art that you seem to think they should be buying?
There is no shortage of people willing to buy the FPS clones, pulp fiction books, and popular music that you would decry. Your complaint lies with those people, not pirates.
Tips like yours makes me wish I had studied a lot more of the classics, drama, etc.
One "trick" that drives me bugga is the plot device.
Like all kids of an age, my son devoured the Harry Potter books. Trying to be a good dad, shared interests, and all that, I tried to read those books. As far as I got, Rowling would write the protagonists into wedge and then throw in some awesome new power to get them out. Like a bad Star Trek TNG episode or pretty much all of Dragon Ball Z (which was still fun to watch with my kid). Haha. Never thought of Harry Potter as manga before.
Anyhoo.
Compared to Neil Gaiman's efforts. Especially his children's books. They're perfectly formed spheres, without flaw. His stories are internally consistent and conflict resolution happens in a (suspended belief) believable way.
"For instance, reading all of the Harry Potter books is getting something done too. Flipping channels on the couch all day, not so much."
I've always found it interesting that reading, as a form of entertainment, always seems to be held on a pedestal compared to television, cinema, or videogames. It's a kind of elitism that the literati hold over everyone who doesn't find reading as enjoyable as them. Consider this: one person reads the entire Harry Potter series and another reads the entire Twilight series, both are reading but the quality of the material is completely different. Assuming that literature is de facto superior to any other form entertainment is completely ignorant and wrong.
In this case, swap "flipping channels all day", which could include watching informative shows such as Bill Nye, How It's Made, or Mythbusters, with "watching Jersy Shore all day" and confusion about entertainment quality preferences are removed.
I don't really get this at all.
I saw Star Wars when it came out, at the cinema, and it was great. But that was 35 years ago. There have been a ton of films made since then and the original Star Wars is OK, but nothing great. It should just be one film among many that children get to see.
If I were a teen today then I'd likely think of the Harry Potter films as the defining films of my childhood and maybe when I grew up I'd be deciding on when to tell my children about Harry Potter and working out how to watch them etc. Or perhaps it would be some of the Pixar films.
I enjoyed Star Wars when I was a child; but today's children don't need to be introduced to it as if it were some sacred document.
This is pretty offensive to anyone who actually plays FPS games and isn't just bitching from the outside.
There are some great FPS's with amazing stories that make up a large part of the bedrock that is gaming as a cultural medium.
They are not retellings of the same story any more than Oscar-bait movies are retellings of other stories.
It's like saying "don't look at Harry Potter or Star Wars or Lord of the Rings as separate stories, instead think of them as different interpretations of the monomyth. It's the same story over and over, but if done well it can still be entertaining".
When all's said and done, I'd like to call them separate stories. Identifying the common plots and tropes doesn't make them the same at heart.
One factor here is that the people running Hollywood studios assume that men don’t want to buy tickets to a movie where the main female character is anything but the romantic partner of the main male character. (Yeah, the success of the Harry Potter series demonstrates that this assumption is bullshit, but... well... studio execs have a lot of practice rationalizing away exceptions like this. It’s like their assumption that white audiences won’t watch movies with a black main character, unless that main character is played by Will Smith.)
From my group of friends:
I have a friend who (jokingly) characterizes her boyfriend's amorous advances when he's drunk as "rape-y."
When my male friend mentioned Emma Watson was hot in the most recent Harry Potter movies (when she was 18+), our female friends ribbed him about being attracted to children.
When an awkward guy tries too hard to hit on a girl, we might joke that his advances are "kinda rape-y."
My female friend absolutely hates being tickled. When threatened with tickles, she might say "if you tickle me I'll cry rape god dammit!"
My girlfriend is a bit clumsy and also leaves kitchen cabinets open. She once gave herself a black eye with one, and told all our friends I was physically abusing her.
If you allow trademarks on the characters and such, you end up in a worse position than when you started: Nobody can reproduce the original work or create any kind of derivative work without permission. This lasts in perpetuity as long as it is defended, and permission will likely never be given out of a belief that the trademark needs to be protected.
In other words, you're free to do anything you want with the Harry Potter movies, so long as you remove all instances of the name "Harry Potter" and all likenesses of Daniel Radcliffe wearing a robe?
As an anecdote, most of what I know about the Harry Potter universe comes from reading Elezier Yudkowsky's remix. I've never read the original and only seen two or three of the movies.
> And here’s something no one has stopped to consider: Maybe making movies is too damn expensive. Or rather, far more expensive than it needs to be.
Hmm. I went to the theatre (first time since a long time as the experience feels antiquated and overpriced) with friends to see Sherlock Holmes, and the opening scene perfectly exemplifies the point: for about ten second you see a shot of the cathedral of Strasbourg. Half of it consists of a CGI explosion. I live there, and to produce this shot, they locked this part of the city for one week.
Ten seconds. One week. A whole team plus equipment. To the other side of the world. Seriously.
When seeing the scene I found that downright shocking, especially given the 10€ hole burning my pocket.
By comparison it takes Turn10 Studios three days[0] locally to gather enough information on a track to subsequently work on for one year. That's a full-length, five kilometer track.
I know this is not the same, and various other things come into play, but I just can't help but have an alarm bell ringing when I see movie production costs. See for yourself (budget in $):
- 2001 and Star Wars: 10 million each - Independence Day: 75 million - Transformers: 150 million - Kill Bill 1+2: 50 million - Jurassic Park: 65 million - King Kong: 200 million - Blues Brothers: 30 million - Fast & Furious: 90 million - The Fellowship of the Ring: 100 million - Harry Potter: ~150 million each - Full Metal Jacket: 15 million - Jarhead: 72 million - Apocalypse Now: 30 million - Black Hawk Down: 90 million - Terminator: 6 million - The Matrix: 60 million - Terminator 2: 100 million - Casino Royale: 100 million - Quantum of Solace: 230 million - Sherlock Holmes: 125 million - The Godfather: 6.5 million
I know those $ do not mean the same across time, but still, you can see going from simple to double produces crap (CS vs QoS), or produces twice the length at arguably the same 'quality' (whatever that means) for a significantly smaller cost (LotR vs HP). I don't see either why F&F costs thrice as much as BB, and almost twice as much as KB.
Bottom line: MAFIAA, please produce non-crap and control your costs instead of blaming piracy.
[0] http://forzamotorsport.net/en-us/underthehood4/
On the issue of copyright terms, one thing I've not seen discussed much is the idea of having different terms for different copyright rights. Copyright is not a monolithic things--it encompasses several rights. In particular, there is the right to make and distribute copies, and there is the right to make derivative works. (There are other rights, but those are the most important).
I think a good case can be made that different durations are appropriate for these rights, and also that different durations are appropriate for different kinds of works.
Let's start with artistic works. In particular, let's consider the infamous Mickey Mouse copyrights.
The reproduction right should be fairly short. It's purpose is to allow the creator to get paid for their time and effort in creating the work. We maximize creating of new works if creators can get paid for creating. If creators cannot do so, and so have to turn to ancillary methods of making money, they have less time for creating. (This is why the argument that musicians can make their living touring is not persuasive to me. I'd much rather have great musicians creating new music than spending a lot of time playing their old songs over and over and over to make a living. How would we feel as programmers if employers did not pay us to program--they hired us to do tech support, and then told us that we should be writing programs on our down time so there would be something to provide tech support for?).
I think it is quite reasonable for the derivative works right, on the other hand, to have a very long term. That encourages other artists to come up with new characters to tell their stories. I think we'd have a lot less great cartoon characters if everyone who wants to make a cartoon could just make their own Mickey Mouse cartoon.
A long derivative works right also helps preserve our culture, by preserving the artistic integrity of bodies of work. A fictional character, such as a Mickey Mouse, or a Frodo, or a Harry Potter, or a Sherlock Holmes, has a personality, character, mannerisms, morals, etc., developed by the creator. They become in a sense real and part of our culture. If someone else comes along and starts producing fiction with those characters that does not fit in with how those characters should behave, it diminishes the value of the original to society. If you want to write stories about hot boy on boy wizard sex, make up your own wizards--leave Harry and Ron alone.
To summarize so far, for artistic works like films (including cartoons) and fictional books, I'd like to see a relatively short reproduction right combined with very long derivative works rights.
For utilitarian works, such as computer programs, it would not make sense to have a long derivative works right. Programs do not become beloved parts of our culture. (Characters introduced in programs sometimes do--Mario and Zelda are good examples, so I'd argue that while the game code for a Zelda game should have a short derivative work right because it is a program, if you make a game based on it you would have to come up with new characters).
You need to convince millions of people not to watch Dark knight Rising, Transformers, Harry Potter, Star Wars, Twilight, Mission Impossible, and hundreds of other blockbusters and TV Shows, every year.
Then, the hardest part, you need to come up with something that is Waaaaaaaaaayyyy waayyyyy better than all those movies and TV shows combined -- and do it every single day.
Then, you'll kill Hollywood.
On the topic of residuals and the intentions of studios ("Their intention is to keep money on the table of all those creative people. To keep paying residuals to actors who might not find work for years at a time."):
First, in 2007 the CEO of Warner Bros., among others, called for an end to residuals [0]. Second, studios are notorious for creative accounting which results in people with residuals on "net" profit being paid nothing; for instance, one of the Harry Potter movies grossed $938 million worldwide but "lost" $167 million [1], [2] The latter link cites a court saying the way Hollywood determines pay for authors was "unconscionable" (I wish its citation was to a source that's online). And third, I don't have a reference at hand for this one because I heard this on NPR years ago, but there was a trial where a studio accountant was questioned about the accuracy of movie profit statements, and he said that in his entire career he'd never seen a single movie where the accounting was accurate.
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/11/business/media/11cnd-guild.html [1] http://www.deadline.com/2010/07/studio-shame-even-harry-potter-pic-loses-money-because-of-warner-bros-phony-baloney-accounting/ [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buchwald_v._Paramount
In its most simple and irreducible form, the challenge is this: big-screen movies need to offer an experience so preferable to home viewing (or video games, or TV, or other uses of leisure time) that customers will pay time and ticket prices for it.
That's becoming harder and harder, because all sides of the equation have been getting hit. On the pricing side, it goes without saying that higher prices place a greater burden on entertainment value. But on the entertainment side, we now have a) alternatives (Netflix, video games, etc.) that are increasingly attractive, inexpensive, and readily available, and b) movie offerings that have, at best, held steady in their general entertainment value.
Interestingly, the theater-going experience itself has been improving over the past few decades. But at the heart of it all, customers aren't there for the window dressing; they're there for the content. A juicy piece of IP, such as Harry Potter, would drive people to a run-down shithole of a theater if they had to go -- but conversely, a shitty product wouldn't attract people to the nicest theater ever built. So, while we can all applaud the efforts of theater chains to improve their general offerings -- atmosphere, food, dining, etc. -- we shouldn't believe that such improvements are wholly sufficient, or ever could be. (At worst, if the cost of such atmosphere, ambience, furnishings, services, etc., eventually leaks into the ticket prices, then theaters are making the game even harder for themselves).
In summation, I place the burden for the future of the big-screen movie business primarily on the shoulders of the movie studios. Not the exhibitors. Studios can't keep rehashing the same, warmed-over crap each year and expect anything more than a dice roll from the outcome. They need to place bigger bets with breakthrough IP. They need to wean themselves from the largely mistaken belief that uber-expensive movie stars drive box office attendance (overseas, they do; domestically, there's almost zero correlation). And they need to go all-in on the bets they do place. No more licensing, buying, or developing 100 properties to produce 2. Borrow a page from the Apple product philosophy, and launch only the titles you are dead serious about supporting. Fewer, but better.
Finally, as a whole, the industry needs to stop being so stridently anti-consumer. Enough with the war on piracy, the DRMs, the 50 super-uber-ZOMG-uncensored-platinum-edition releases of every title on DVD and Blu-ray, and so forth. Studios, you are product companies. Focus your time, your attention, your budgets, and your people on your products. And make every product count.
Bloody hell,one piece of advice-don't ever use "bloody good" or any other phrase with the word bloody in it.That's the real world,not a Harry Potter movie.Good luck!
Reminds me of the moving photos from the Harry Potter movies.
Indeed, it actually is widely viewed as a genre for 'hacks', so much so that I assumed he was using the old, non-stupid connotation of the word. See: last Sunday's episode of the Simpsons, which mercilessly mocked Harry Potter and its imitators. That being said, I enjoyed McCaffrey back in the day.
Although it's really not that complicated to find a free stream for Harry Potter movies. I found all of them with just a few minutes checking Google-results, although the quality of the stream wasn't too high. Then again I'm pretty sure I'll continue to find ways to stream Harry Potter movies as well in future no matter if this law passes or not (I might have to search a few more minutes then, that's probably about it).
So I've been doing every google search these clueless legislators have brought up in defense of the act:
"You can search for 'free harry potter movie' and watch it for free"
"You can go type 'j edgar' into google and piracy links show up above legitimate links"
"You can watch breaking dawn online right now, and it's not even out yet"
etc...
Try them yourself as they bring them up. They're full of bullshit.
I find the copyright and trademark information to be confusing:
"Harry Potter and Pottermore Publishing Rights © J.K. Rowling. Harry Potter characters, names and related indicia are trademarks of and © Warners Bros. Ent. All Rights Reserved."
So she owns the publishing rights to Harry Potter and she created everything about the series (names, places, characters) but somehow Warner Bros. owns the trademarks and copyright for the characters and names? Seems like she may have had to relinquish (or sell, rather) a lot of rights to get those movies made.
Not a big fan of the Harry Potter series, book or movie, but have plenty of admiration for Rowling. Her execution has been tremendous throughout. She's pioneered so many new markets, at least i think so. I really wish the record labels and movie studios would follow her footsteps and consider a different business model. Its time to give much love, respect and appreciation back to the consumer. (Sorry for going off on a bit of a tangent)
That's called a copyright.
People have disputed the originality of movie ideas including Matrix [0] and Harry Potter [1].
[0] http://blogcritics.org/video/article/author-sues-matrix-writers-over-copyright/
[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/02/18/entertainment/main6219192.shtml
>In each case the learner will learn more quickly and more efficiently than in the classroom. He will learn whatever it is 'just in time' and he won't be burdened by stuff he doesn't need.
Part of schooling is becoming a member of a country's workforce. One must learn some things to be a benefit to society - it is not just about self-directed "hedonistic" learning (ie learning only to meet ones own perceived desires).
Indeed with some forced learning one can come to understand that one's previous desires were short-sighted and wouldn't ultimately lead to the pleasure one imagined.
For example, some who watch Harry Potter movies might not apply themselves to learning to read in order to enjoy the books; even if ultimately this lead them to greater enjoyment of more varied literature and indeed more fulfilment.
Mine are 3, 5 and 7. If mine could vote, they would vote for getting rid of coal plants and gasoline engines. They would vote for stopping commercial fishing and chemical dumping near places where people enjoy the water and beaches. They would vote for mandatory recycling of plastic, and reduction of use in plastic throughout society. They would make those laws absolutely vicious in enforcement, if I can extrapolate from my brief conversations with them about these topics.
They would vote for doubling of social security benefits for grandparents that hung out with their grandkids.
They would also vote for guaranteed daily movie rights for children, unlimited Harry Potter legos and mandatory one-Wii-per-child laws.
At any rate. The article suggested parents wielding the vote on behalf of children in Japan as a way to have a say in an aging population, so we are now well off topic from HN's core goals.
>LOTR is being actively commercially exploited and the commercial exploitations are darn good.
Darn good, but not perfect. We are now denied the right to re-interpret LOTR, perhaps because we want to include the Scouring of the Shire--not because the movie was necessarily worse without it, but because we _want_ to.
And heck, take a better example: the Harry Potter movies are in great need of re-interpretation, but don't expect to see independent film-makers getting a bite at that apple anytime soon.
I loved Avatar, but I've noticed a strong theme from Hollywood for over a decade now of environmentalism. It's either the subtext, subplot in the 90's movies, and now it's become the main context and plot of major movies in the 00's and I'm getting the strong feeling I'm going to be beaten to death with it in the 10's.
I think one of the reasons I've gone from liking the Harry Potter film series to outright loving it is because environmentalism isn't even a sub-subtext in the story. The plot is that humans are doing incredible damage to humans, not that humanities inactions are inevitably going to hurt us by some bullshit catastrophe like 2012 or the day after tomorrow.
This bullshit enviro-paganism has driven me to the point of not giving the slightest damn anymore. If you tell me we've got a program error from monday to friday, but you offer no solution to fix it except to spell check the code (recycling) then I'll tell you to fuck off by the next monday. If you offered a major rewrite I'd buy in. Double-down on Fusion research, go all nuclear with new power plants (it's the only practical and realistic way, if you deny it you're ignorant of the massive wastes inherent in solar and wind systems and the fact that many of these systems rely on the existing coal and gas infrastructure to support it in low-wind or cloudy periods).
We're being told we've changed the world disastrously through our inactions, then we should be showing the world we can change it through our actions. Sequester carbon, go nucelar, build a frigging IR reflector in space, build cloud machines.
I find it more disturbing that environmentalists are flat out ignoring the disastrous effects caused by wind turbines, killing bird and especially bat populations and promoting demineralization of farm land (note this is the preliminary step in desertification). Not to mention that there's already been noticeable wind-speed decreases in areas of heavy wind turbine usage. I think interfering with the wind patterns is going to fuck up the planet far more than a little CO2 as you'll actually be creating high and low pressure regions permanently.
I don't think he spent time making a custom iPad app for his daughter so he could make learning independent enough to not participate. He was merely trying to apply one of his strengths (programming), his background (a startup designing educational games), and background knowledge (knowing his daughter loved Harry Potter) to try to create a better learning experience for his daughter, which is something I think every good educator, whether it's a teacher, parent, or peer, should do. You have to teach people to your strengths and their strengths - if he was an author and chose to teach math to his daughter in the context of elaborate stories and fairy tales, would you call that self-defeating as well?
This reminded me of Randy Pausch's last lecture (if you haven't had a chance to watch it, I highly recommend it - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo). Teaching kids is all about headfakes* - you are't encouraging them to play soccer so they can go and play in the World Cup, but rather so they have a fun context to learn about things like hard work, practice, and teamwork. Analogously, I think this personalized Harry Potter app just teaches his daughter that learning doesn't always have to feel like work, not specifically that she should spend all day trying to get praises from Hermoine and British men answering math problems.
* Disclaimer: I don't have kids and know little to nothing about raising or educating kids.
Absolutely. It's Games Workshop's IP, it's theirs to make sure that they only entrust it to people who will make good use of it and theirs to make sure those projects are well run.
Reminds me about a story about JK Rowling during the early negotiations with Warner Bros about the Harry Potter films. They all sat down and Warners came up with a list of things that they said they were going to chang. JK Rowling stood up, wished them good luck and went to leave. They asked where she was going and she simply replied that they obviously had very clear ideas they wished to follow and that was fine, just not with her characters or books.
Now you can argue that she was being precious, awkward or whatever (I was going to write unrealistic but as she got her way she was being perfectly realistic it would appear) but whatever else she was doing, she was managing her IP in a way many others could learn from.
Pick Harry Potter... recommendation "Mysterious Skin".
Both movies have children, one has boy wizards, the other has boys molested...
Something tells me movie "Ratings" (G, PG, PG-13, R) are not part of the recommendation algorithm.
I suggest you take a look at the direct Continental flight from EWR to BOM. It was very comfortable and they kept feeding you every few hours. I watched all the Harry Potter movies via the in-flight TV system.
Anyone that enjoyed the Harry Potter movies clearly didn't read the books, and has no right to complain.
How is it a special right, the settlement basically grants them a special license. The reason they had to go to court is because no one would give them a license for free publication so they played the 'orphan' card and got the other party to the table for a settlement.
Please don't argue the naive copyright shouldn't exist because my-head-is-stuck-so-far-in-the-sand-I-hit-rock-and-forgot-common-sense angle. With hollywood virtually cloning every successful movie that has ever existed, do we really want to give them a free pass to actually clone every successful movie that has ever existed? As for every successful book/movie/TV franchise to ever exist, well they'd be gone out the window with masses of meaningless fan-wank shot out by every publisher known to man trying to make a dollar. Copyright has an important clause in it of preventing derivative works by unauthorised people, this means that Harry Potter remains being written by Rowling and actually ends in a way fans are likely to actually enjoy rather than see a Harry Potter: Failed To Graduate Again - New Mystery Edition!
By removing copyright you negatively effect the common person more than you positively affect them. For all I know you could be a fantastic photographer, I myself have worked as a reviewer and have sold my work, you as a photographer have all the rights to sell your photographs no matter where you've posted them. Do you really want to give any company permission to take your photographs from your Flickr account and use them in a national campaign without your permission? Or would you prefer to get the $20,000 check that those license purchases usually come with?
The RIAA and MPAA are the problem, not copyright. The better way to resolve this problem is to reform copyright to limit actions taken on the copyright holders behalf without the copyright holders permission. Legally speaking the copyright holder has to be the person to file the claim, however due to the licensing agreements musicians sign with their label they're actually giving license authority to the MPAA too, which they actually don't agree too.
I respectfully disagree. Harry Potter isn't considered "good" among critics, it's not a literature masterpiece. The same is true for other arts, like cinema and music. The top sellers usually aren't considered the best.
"Wanted", as in the audience wants to consume, yes. Maybe good enough; for the mass market.
But it all depends from what angle you approach the conversation. Tastes are hard to discuss.
Your last paragraph ignores the "everything else" that constitutes a product and its surrounding business. Things like price, marketing, design, distribution deals, costs, market share potential, competitors, etc... it's not enough to simply have a good product; or even a perfect one, if such thing was possible.
I agree strongly with your stance on fiction, and am of a similar mind. I was surprised to see someone share it, especially a known "creative" personality, given the tight coupledness of fiction to the worldview and mass-cultural constellation of the technical profession.
Movies and TV shows are principally fiction, sure; I think the salient distinction that people who are prejudiced against "fiction" make is as to the realism and real-world viability of what is involved, i.e. the way that "historical fiction" might stand in contradistinction with Harry Potter-style "fantasy."
I, for instance, as an otherwise ardent nonfictionalist, enjoy Star Trek, but don't enjoy Harry Potter or Tolkien novels. Take that for what it's worth.
That depends on the movie, harry potter pulled in 139.7M over its Wednesday-to-Sunday debut period. I don't see free with advertising adding enough people to make close to that much money.
However, a movie like clerks could be vary profitable online.
oh I agree completely. (And that explains why google is valuable - intention definitely counts.)
My contrast was to TV - when I'm watching TV I'm there to watch a show - (superbowl maybe an exception) - and the ads are an interruption. I can't see how that is much better than advertising on FB - aside from the fact it's been around longer. FB also knows more about me (at least it should - I'm always amused getting ads for dating sites when my profile is kinda clear that I'm married).
To go to your bar example - that depends on how it's done. I've bought beer mugs from a bar/brewery before - I saw the sign that they were for sale. I then had to take an action (click the link) and go to the counter and buy them. Or in terms of taxis - the rank could be there as you go in/out of the bar - perhaps even signs / posters / bar mats / coasters / etc. At the end of the night when I need a cab - then I can act on the info I've been looking at. Now if the cab driver came up to me while talking to my friends and tried to get me into his cab - that's a different story. But branding and well targeted service offerings - that's definitely valuable. And facebook should know that I want to go to the next Living End show in Melbourne, and I want to buy the next Wheel of Time book, and I'm likely to want to go see the next Harry Potter movie. The TV station doesn't know that - and so might show me useless ads for VB or the new Zac Efron movie...
I would take the controversial opinion that if somebody's going to make a Sparknotes for a novel I wrote, they need my permission. Critical analysis is one thing: summarizing what I wrote in bulk is another thing entirely. The lengthy summaries of each Harry Potter novel I see as slightly shady.
Authorial control means you're allowed to give permission, though. If I make a tricky program, it's in my interests to let you write a how-to-X book. But it should still be my choice.
Movie reviews contain very little summary. Most of what's in a review is opinion based around that slim summary. So that's perfectly fine.
I follow the philosophy of 'if it isn't in the book, it isn't cannon' so I strongly disagree with how Rowling actually came out saying Dumbledore was gay. I don't get why it wasn't revealed in a book if the character was actually gay. Aside from the religious wackies (which I didn't presume OSC to be) I think most people in modern society aren't offended by a homosexual character, so it strikes me as moronic it wasn't simply stated. I mean he's like an 80 year old man who has no mention of ever being married, in a relationship or having children, I simply assumed he was gay from the beginning.
I'd argue with you about the maturity of Harry Potter's plot, but I doubt you want a long diatribe about a book series you're not a fan of, so I'll clam up.
I'm aware the plot gets more complex as the series progresses and I've considered reading the books, although I'll likely wait a while after the film series is completed. My opinion of it has changed, possibly because the series does mature as the characters do (which is actually quite commendable), but I believe when I tried reading the first book I think I was already trying to read much more complicated books, it felt like stepping down. I didn't see the reward in reading a book for kids when I was reading adult books, which my opinion now is beginning to change. I respect the YA fiction a lot more now, especially since that's what I'm aiming my first novel for.
So who knows, I might have eventually picked up the first Harry Potter book from a purely research perspective. I mean for all my criticism of Rowling, I do admit she's wildly successful and I forgot who said it but "There's no point in being a brilliant writer if no body ever reads it."
I think my hatred for Harry Potter isn't completely because of the fact that I hate the series. I believe it comes more from the fact that the English school system proposed placing it on the national curriculum's book list and were planning to remove either Of Mice and Men or The Lord of the Flies. Thankfully they completely changed this, allowing teachers to teach whatever books they want as long as they were established texts, which included Harry Potter.
I believe the rest of my distaste for the series came from when the books were initially released. There was such hype over a kids book and in my free time I was reading many of the sci-fi classics, and when I finally got to reading Harry Potter it was just an extremely campy version of Ender's Game. I believe even Orson Scott Card (who's a fan of Harry Potter) pointed this out when J.K. Rowling targeted her own fans for the Harry Potter lexicon for 'stealing her ideas'.
I'm fully aware of all that's wrong with the Twilight novels, but it never really bothered me and I've generally avoided books written in first person. However, I came from the UK so I never read or heard anything until I was ambushed into reading it by my (then fiancee) wife, I'd given her like my favorite book of all time to read The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin and she gave me Twilight, which wasn't exactly a fair trade: 200 page book at like 4x5 vs 500 page at 5x7. Then, of course, the movie came out and her friend just happened to have extra tickets for the opening night. I believe that's the easiest I've ever been tricked.
Although, rather ironically, I believe I've contributed more money to Rowling and the Harry Potter series as I have watched most of the movies and eventually actually paid to see the most recent one, and I've yet to give a penny to Mayer.
Well that was a right ole' waste a' time, eh chaps? Let's get back to discussing how the Harry Potter movies would have been far superior in the colonial lingo, wot?
Be honest: who has never dreamed to become invisible? To go everywhere, to look at everything without being seen, just a dream. The invisibility is a subject of comics (the invisible woman in the Fantastic Four for ex.) and movies (the cloak used by Harry Potter to be hidden from the enemies).
I saw the Harry Potter movies with my family, though.
I went all the way back to the mid 80's, and the blockbuster back then was Top Gun, which apparently didn't even break 250 mil. Nowadays, we have huge blockbusters that regularly surpass 250 mil every season. Even though we have DVDs and can download copies (pirated or not), collectively, we're spending more on movies than we use to.
However, we don't know whether that's due to more people going to see movies, or merely just an increase in ticket prices. It'd be more interesting to see the graph adjusted for this so we can see if more or less people are going to the movies than before.
It also seems that movies that are series get a second hump, like Jurassic Park III, Harry Potter, etc.
IMAX movies have a looong shelf-life, compared to all other movie types. Mysteries of Egypt was there all the way from 1999 through to the end of 2000, when it had a small resurgence before disappearing.
Does anyone here actually look at the NYT Best Sellers List to pick their reading material?
I have always treated it more as a Never-Read-This List. Frankly anything that sells that well is probably some empty self-help drivel or the equivalent to a blockbuster movie, neither of which will ever change your life or say anything insightful.
Of course, I'm also the guy that is waiting until the Harry Potter fad is dead and gone before I even start reading those books. Mainly because I hate fanboys, and especially pop culture fanboys.