Hacker Cinema
Hellboy
2004 · Film · 122 min
Directed by Guillermo del Toro
In the final days of World War II, the Nazis attempt to use black magic to aid their dying cause. The Allies raid the camp where the ceremony is taking place, but not before they summon a baby demon who is rescued by Allied forces and dubbed "Hellboy". Sixty years later, Hellboy serves the cause of good rather than evil as an agent in the Bureau of Paranormal Research & Defense, along with Abe Sapien - a merman with psychic powers, and Liz Sherman - a woman with pyrokinesis, protecting America against dark forces.
1 positive1 negative7 neutralfrom 9 commenters
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10 comments on Hacker News
Hehe, not that that hard pressed. IMDB has a whole horned-demon category keyword: https://m.imdb.com/search/title/?keywords=horned-demon&explore=keywords. And those results don’t even include South Park, nor Hellboy. If I Google image search for “Satan” I get nothing but red horned demons for pages.
There have always been wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing stories about The Devil too, it’s just a separate category.
The Crow
The Machine (if you like Ex Machina, try it)
Alien
Prometheus
Fight Club
Secretary
Casablanca
Kill Bill
The Emperor's New Groove
Star Wars Episode IV - The original goodness, not the CGI horror-show.
Star Wars: Rogue One
American Beauty
Dredd.
Hellboy (directors).
Blade Runner (theatrical).
Chocolat.
Noise (Australian film, 2007. Love that one).
I try not to watch films too many times in quick succession. The repetition dulls the experience for me.
I roll BJJ with a man formerly stationed there - when speaking of it he goes with the “obvious” American way where the “th” sounds like the “th” in “the” with the “ule” a bit like the German “öl” as pronounced by an American, rather than the suggested Swedish-style pronunciation suggestion by other HNers.
I’m not finding it off-hand, but if you’ve ever seen the Hellboy movie I believe it sounds as the professor pronounces the “Thule Occult Society.”
Perhaps I need to finally learn the IPA for this comment...
I thought Hellboy was a bad movie, because it’s more tell than show. I think voiceover is appropriate in special cases like Dexter’s inner monologue, because it shows separation of his public and private persona. I wouldn’t mind exposition scene at some point if it fits in the story, like for example someone telling a bedtime tale.
I've been doing vfx for 20+ years. So...
- watch a movie :
2020 Upside Down Magic
2017 The Fate of the Furious (visual effects artist)
2015 San Andreas
2015 Avengers: Age of Ultron
2013 R.I.P.D.
2011 Happy Feet Two
2011 Mars Needs Moms
2009 A Christmas Carol
2008 The Tale of Despereaux
2007 Enchanted
2006 The Shaggy Dog
2005 Constantine
2004 Hellboy
2003 The Matrix Revolutions
2001 Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
- or a more recent TV show:
Another Life
Gabby and the Unsittables
Charmed
There's certainly other things I've worked on, but they're lost down the memory hole for good.
Dozens of hollywood movies from Hellboy (2004), Constantine, to R.I.P.D.
Absolutely, and it tracked along with technology and my ability to just cram more particles in the simulation or use new structures entirely like VDBs or Sparse Volumes. But the basic use of many (many many) layers of sculpted Perlin noise never changed.
I use an Ad blocker and I kinda regret it sometimes. Most of the time the blocker keeps me from seeing annoying, repetitive ads for things I have zero interest in learning about (trucks, loans, cash back, etc.)
However, I have realized that by blocking all Ads I am missing out on some cultural things, events that I want to know about. Movie information (Avengers, Hellboy, etc.) is one thing that I don't get informed of anymore. I didn't even see the latest Spiderman Homecoming movie in theaters because I had no idea it was even out until it was too late. I'm sure there are other things that I'm missing out on, but it's hard to know what you don't know.
Anyway, I think Ads are not evil or bad but they do need to be targeted better. If the Ad companies can figure out how to tell me about things I care about, or will possibly care about in the near future, then I'm OK with being exposed to them. If anyone should be able to do this it would be Google (they know everything about me). So I turned of uBlock Origin and started using Chrome's built-in blocker. So far it's been terrible; I'm seeing all kinds of Ads for things I just don't care about. I think I'm going back to my blocker. :/
> I notice in Ebert's reviews an appreciation of films as mere entertainment in cases where is what they intend to be, and an appreciation of films as art if that is what they aspire to. In fact, one of my annoyances at his (often excellent) reviews is that he seemed to apply consciously lowered standards when he thought that a film wasn't aiming too high, which led to him recommending films that were close to mediocre, because they hit the mark they were aiming for. There is a certain integrity in this, of course.
I think he did a great job voicing his own standard, which I think makes a lot of sense, in his review of Shaolin Soccer (https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/shaolin-soccer-2004):
> "Shaolin Soccer" is like a poster boy for my theory of the star rating system. Every month or so, I get an anguished letter from a reader wanting to know how I could possibly have been so ignorant as to award three stars to, say, "HIDALGO" while dismissing, say, "Dogville" with two stars. This disparity between my approval of kitsch and my rejection of angst reveals me, of course, as a superficial moron who will do anything to suck up to my readers.
> What these correspondents do not grasp is that to suck up to my demanding readers, I would do better to praise "Dogville." It takes more nerve to praise pop entertainment; it's easy and safe to deliver pious praise of turgid deep thinking. It's true, I loved "Anaconda" and did not think "The United States of Leland" worked, but does that mean I drool at the keyboard and prefer man-eating snakes to suburban despair?
> Not at all. What it means is that the star rating system is relative, not absolute. When you ask a friend if "Hellboy" is any good, you're not asking if it's any good compared to "Mystic River," you're asking if it's any good compared to "The Punisher." And my answer would be, on a scale of one to four, if "Superman" (1978) is four, then "Hellboy" is three and "The Punisher" is two. In the same way, if "American Beauty" gets four stars, then "Leland" clocks in at about two.
> And that is why "Shaolin Soccer," a goofy Hong Kong action comedy, gets three stars. It is piffle, yes, but superior piffle. If you are even considering going to see a movie where the players zoom 50 feet into the air and rotate freely in violation of everything Newton held sacred, then you do not want to know if I thought it was as good as "Lost in Translation."
The "making" sections on Tested are really interesting. Adam Savage is a prop-maker, and so items tend to be cosmetically interesting, rather than having interesting tech. He takes a nice big wooden box, paints it, applies decals, then distresses it. It's nice, it looks (to my uninformed eye) genuine (it has big NASA logos on it), but it's entirely fake.
It reminds me of "pretty face" - a fake shirt collar attached to a jacket so poor people in communist China could maintain decorum. (http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/hsc/evrev/mao_suit.htm)
There's a movie gun replica (hellboy?) where a bunch of glass tubes and valves are sourced to get "accurate" versions of what was used for the movie. And he knows, because he used to work in the industry, that it could be tricky to source the parts because prop-makers just use whatever is available that looks "right". So a prop maker could buy some stuff from a junkstore and rip it apart, which makes it hard for people years later to reproduce it.
EDIT: And this article is full of interesting domain-specific knowledge about what casts what and why.
What movie was it? If it was Pacific Rim as it sounds like, then that reaction could make sense. Guillermo Del Toro (Hellboy, Pan's Labyrinth) is directing it.
It might not be that movie though. Still, have you seen the top raved about films on HN (there was a frontpage show hn on this recently)? Pretty obvious, typical choices. And there is nothing wrong with that. I'm cool with your reddit opinions. Just weird to use comments about a movie as an example against reddit and then swing over to endorsing HN.