Hacker Cinema
Inglourious Basterds
2009 · Film · 153 min
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
In Nazi-occupied France during World War II, a group of Jewish-American soldiers known as "The Basterds" are chosen specifically to spread fear throughout the Third Reich by scalping and brutally killing Nazis. The Basterds, lead by Lt. Aldo Raine soon cross paths with a French-Jewish teenage girl who runs a movie theater in Paris which is targeted by the soldiers.
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16 comments on Hacker News
If you are not awake, you are asleep. American Cinema has been all for defeating nazis since before the war ended. Band of Brothers, Saving Private Ryan, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inglourious_Basterds
All we have seen so far is white kids shooting people in red states.
Is DHH trying to legitimize a stance that fascists are some how good?
GPT-4o already one-shots Leetcode hard with just a screenshot. I know, it's trained on the answers. But it clicked in my head that if you give the LLM a very detailed specification + tests to the level of detail that Leetcode does, you might actually be able to one-shot any code you like.
Over the weekend, I made a game. It's heavily dialogue based. I wanted a screen and game content that centers around this gameplay. It's not a classic VN, more customized like Ace Attorney.
It's a free game so I need an intro that hooks people in the first 30 seconds. What examples are good for this? Since there's few games like this, I look into movies. I don't want that scene from Inglourious Basterds, that's too fresh. There's a lot of good stuff in classic film, before the 80s that nobody has seen. These movies had to carry themselves on content because they didn't have special effects.
And that's where DeepResearch comes in.
I'm looking for specific films that fit the tutorial of the game that I'm trying to build. Without going into details, there's 4 mechanics I want to squeeze into the tutorial level. I'm looking for specific scenes that capture these mechanics.
One intent is "How do I get players to not skip dialogue like they would with a VN?" AI's interpretation of this is "scripts that encourage impatience". I didn't even know what question to ask, and it helped to rephrase my intent into the right questions then find examples of those.
It wrote a 6000 word essay, plenty of citations, some with clips. I don't have to spend a couple nights watching Psycho or The Night of the Hunter. I can just jump straight to the clips I want. I can skim 24 different movies in the same two nights.
So, I mean, I know that not everyone loves The Lord of the Rings movies. But I just need everyone to remember that Peter Jackson did them. And I mean, I thought Heavenly Creatures was really interesting, and I think I'm one of the dozens of people who really liked The Frighteners (yes, I'm a hipster Frighteners fan.) But if you'd asked me, "Viking, should we trust Peter Jackson to make 11 hours and 21 minutes of The Lord of the Rings (extended editions)?" I would have said, "No," and I would have, in my humble opinion, been totally completely wrong.
I mean, I just need to remind people that great movies exist. LA Confidential. The Matrix. Hell, even the Fugitive is a lot of fun (for what it is.) Mr. Robot is simultaneously amazing and also boring as shit for huge stretches - but man, they committed to that vision, and when the big moments hit, they hit hard. True Lies. True Romance. The Abyss. The Fisher King. Good Will Hunting. Inglourious Basterds. Hell, even Hackers. And Sneakers.
I think Daemon and Freedom could be done wonderfully.
Just imagine ending the series with a nice cackle...
"I do so enjoy my vork..."
It's easy to kick up at the US and its spectacularly disreputable IC, but it's worth recognizing that totalitarianism is a virus that preys on the morally weak and subordinates them to dissolving their own socities and cultures. These movements operate as trivial pyramid schemes of betrayal and suffering, and that's what makes them stupid enough to scale. The communist flavour of these movements is by every measure as evil as the nazi one the allies had only just defeated, and a few extra casulties against its instigators to prevent them from taking hold and instituting their policies of mass starvation, mass imprisonment in labour camps, confiscation, and executions seems like an act of both charity and mercy.
I don't see how anyone who laughed and cheered watching the movie Inglourious Basterds (which was undeniably fun) could really object to any similar operation against the vanguard of their communist equivalents. The countries that failed to stop the expansion of that movement are remembered for their killing fields, their famines, their mass executions of people trying to leave, their national bankruptcies, and their meth dealing god emperors.
Another very important aspect to understand is how Russia has weaponized falsified historical narratives. Claim that Estonian government attempts to rewrite the history was also very prominent Russian propaganda claim during the 2007 riots.
Russia's most important historical narrative revolves around the victory in WW2 against Nazi Germany.
In fact WW2 does not exists in Russia. Everything starts in 1941 with the attack of Nazi Germany against USSR. How the Red Army was in Poland and why it was in the attack position is not discussed. To be honest, contradictions on the level of schizophrenia are rather rule than an exception in the Russian narrative.
For example there is claim that Hitler betrayed Stalin. But you can only betray your friend or allay, yet Stalin and Hitler were never friends or allies. The existence of MRP is either not discussed or is downplayed as "just" a non-aggression agreement. Its additional protocols where the spheres of influences were agreed on is denied, especially the division of Poland and attack against it in alliance is denied most fiercely.
Immediate repressions on the occupied territories are naturally denied too. The fact that almost all the military and in large part also police officers were murdered in Baltic states and in Poland, is denied. Deportations of large part of the population, including women and children, into labor camps is also denied. There are two notable things I would like to point out. First one is that the men were mostly directed into labor camps especially designed to kill prisoners through forced work and malnutrition. The second one is that also large proportion of the Jews were arrested, murdered or deported. For example 200000 Polish Jews were deported into Gulag labor camps. This was also the reason why not all the Jews on the Russian occupied territories did evacuate before the German advance and fell prey of Nazis.
The horrors continued when Russians returned after Germans left.
These horrors are then presented as glorious liberation what of course is not an acceptable narrative to the survivors of the horrors but are not understandable to the brainwashed masses who do not have any understanding of the human suffering it caused.
Every nation between the Germany and Russia has its own specific story but none of them is favorable toward Russians, except the Serbian story.
The worst part is training of the Russian population to react strongly to the trigger words. Have you watched the movie Inglourious Basterds? I could not make myself to watch it because of the level of dehumanization it creates. Yet Russian population has been trained to react to the Nazi keyword with strong hate. Keep this in mind when you see another Russian spokesperson to call somebody a Nazi.
Russian narrative about Ukraine has one additional important detail. In this narrative Ukrainian People's Republic never existed. In Russian narrative the history of Ukraine starts with the Russian puppet state - Ukrainian SSR, yet like every nation under the previous rule of Russian or Austrian empires managed to create their own nation state after WW1, so did Ukrainians. Yet the existence of this democratic state and its destruction by Russia is denied.
Why is it so important? Because Crimea and large parts of then Ukrainian populated areas of current Russia belonged to this state.
Next falsified historical narrative is Russia constantly being under attack for 1000 years yet constantly growing from small principality to vast empire over two continents. In this narrative Russia must constantly protect itself and is constantly suffering. This is basis for the Russian Christ of the nation concept that has been developed into perfection by Ivan Ilyin and is the main basis for the current Russian expansionist and imperialist ideology. Being attacked by Nazis and then expanding by protecting itself fits perfectly into this narrative.
This leads to the Russian minority narrative. Nation that has large numerical dominance is considered somehow repressed by the nation that is ten to hundred times smaller in numbers on its own territory. It is not the Russians who have forcefully moved in large numbers into occupied territory that are the oppressors, it is the other way around.
Like I mentioned, schizophrenic understandings are rather rule than an exception.
There are of course more such false narratives but these mentioned form the basis of the Russian imperialist narrative that current regime has weaponized.
So talking about Russian minority in Ukraine, or Russian majority areas in Ukraine, this has to be seriously taken into account.
Ukrainian SSR was formed on basis of Ukrainian majority on its territories but still many territories with the Ukrainian majority like Kuban were left out. How was it then possible that Russians gained majority in many Eastern Ukrainian areas?
There are three answers to this: Holodomor, deportations and Russification. Killing large part of Ukrainian population by man made famine, deporting native Ukrainian population into other territory and populating the territory with large number of Russians. Genocide and ethnocide, two imperialist tools of Russia over centuries.
Therefore when somebody talks about oppression of Russian minority in Ukraine then this person is directly advancing Russia's imperialist policies.
If somebody claims that this area has Russian majority in Ukraine then this person is again is directly advancing Russia's imperialist policies.
If you are against imperialism then you will not do that.
If you are against imperialism then you would try to advance policies that will try to heal results of previous imperialist actions.
If you are against imperialism then you do not support any Russia's action against Ukraine.
If you can't do that then you are not against imperialism, you are perhaps against US, but not against imperialism.
Two instances I recall in movies/TV where the wrong gesture lead to problems:
1. In Inglorious Basterds, when British undercover agent Lt. Hicox's cover is blown after he orders three scotch with the British three (index, middle, and ring fingers), rather than the German (thumb, index, and middle fingers) [1].
2. In the TV series Tehran, when an Israeli undercover agent posing as a Persian at a Iranian checkpoint gives the thumbs-up gesture, which, as covered in the article, is not a good thing in Iran. (Frankly, that stretched credulity. I don't think the Mossad would overlook something so basic.)
[1] https://screenrant.com/inglourious-basterds-tarantino-3-fingers-hicox-hellstrom-theory/
"Inglourious Basterds is an abomination, a deliberate cognitohazard."
I have to strongly disagree here. Since it was soo absurd, it was obviously a work of fiction. A surreal funny one at that. A gang of jews that blows up Hitler? Yes, a movie can do that. Anyone taking it literal, has definitely other problems in life.
But I do have a problem with movies, that pretend to be historical authentic - but are not. And are therefore effectivly rewriting history. And sadly most, if not all "historic" hollywood productions fall into that category.
This is where I see the problem - when the lines get blurry.
Any reason you're singling out Inglourious Basterds in particular?
Embellishing stories has kind of a social function: to sugar-coat our vision of life. Reality is scary.
When the author presents a blatant lie just because, it's only annoying. At least for me, that movie and the last one are a scam. Sure, there must be a "profound" explanation of director's intentions.
How can you "discredit" a fictional drama film? (Family Romance, LLC). Has "Inglourious Basterds" also been thoroughly discredited?
EDIT: Nevermind, apparently there exists an actual, real company named "Family Romance", that's what parent poster's quote is referring to.
Related: I really enjoyed the movie Inglourious Basterds. It was especially original and interesting, as it relied heavily on languages and accents for the plot.
However, what killed my suspension of disbelief (as a native French speaker) was the fact that the French actress spoke with an unmistakable early 21st century accent, definitely out of place in a second world war movie.
This was a big letdown, considering how much attention had been given to accents in the rest of the movie.
The syncing is done automatically, at least mostly.
TL;DR: ScreenplaySubs fetches the subtitles from Netflix, parses the PDF-formatted screenplays into JSON, and syncs by calculating the sentence similarities between subtitle and screenplay dialogue.
In particular, we use the Universal Sentence Encoder for deciding whether a subtitle matches with a screenplay dialogue. If a screenplay dialogue is similar enough with the subtitles, the former will be tagged with the timestamp provided by the latter.
A lot of the underlying problems presented with each step sounds deceptively simple at first, but turns out to be quite challenging and fun to research. E.g. Parsing PDFs in general are not straightforward (https://filingdb.com/b/pdf-text-extraction), and there’s only a handful of resources on parsing PDF screenplays beside a handful of research papers (https://github.com/drwiner/ScreenPy/blob/master/INT17_screenplays.pdf), which lead us to create our own open source repo for this (https://github.com/SMASH-CUT/screenplay-pdf-to-json).
Our screenplay-pdf-to-JSON converter is able to contain all dialogues, transitions, actions within a particular screenplay scene. With this, we’re treating scenes as atomic, being able to detect changes in scene ordering based on the tagged scene timestamps. This also means if dialogues are swapped within a scene in the movie, there will be some syncing inconsistencies.
Some scenes do have little to no dialogues, which would pretty much cause the extension to work on a best-effort basis. E.g. The opening scene of There Will Be Blood has very minimal if not no dialogue at all. This is the case where I need to jump in and sync up the screenplay manually. OTOH, the opening scene of Inglourious Basterds will work very well, since there are tons of dialogues in it. This is the reason why I can’t just add movies and instantly upload it to the site.
Would you be interested for me to get into more details? I was thinking of writing a series of technical blog posts if there are enough interests!
Would be an interesting case. After all, 'Inglourious Basterds' was allowed to show them and it seems hard to argue how that movie is different from a Wolfenstein game.
>From my experience "symbol X is offensive" doesn't actually help distinguish between malicious and non-malicious people because the thing that makes someone malicious is their actions and views, not the iconography they use to express said actions and views.
I completely agree with this.
I think most content creators make a conscious effort to make their intent known through the work.
For Example, movies like "Inglourious Basterds" or "Downfall" are clearly using Nazi iconography to build the aesthetic of their world without suggesting they support the ideals of the real-world Nazis.
Perhaps a more poignant current example is youtube personality JonTron. The basic gist as I understand it is: He occasionally makes off-color or insensitive jokes that could easily be considered offensive but are generally regarded as OK because the intent is understood to be a place of comedy. Now after defending some racist remarks, his past statements are seen in a new light that makes their original intent less clear.
I do think it's something important to discuss and we clearly can't have a discussion if what we want to talk about is a banned taboo. But I also think it's clearly wrong to treat any hate-speech/iconography as if somehow doesn't have all that extra cultural baggage.
With the exception of Star Wars: The Force Awaken, I haven't seen any of the blockbusters mentioned, though I wonder how much this article cherry-picks, given that the 2 top grossing movies this year (Civil War, Zootopia) [0] seem dialogue-dense based on their trailers despite being summer entertainment. Also, I would have attributed the disappearing of dialogue to our increasingly dumbed-down short attention spans, something that has been evident in Jerry Bruckheimer films. Also, Avatar, which had such shit dialogue that I found it hard to believe until I looked it up that James Cameron had written the screenplay for his Aliens, which has timeless (if brief) dialogue.
That said, it's completely believable to me that the cost of making universally clever dialogue is much harder than just doing it in one language, and will be the easiest line-item to justify cutting with international audiences being increasingly prized. I've always been OK with reading subtitles but it wasn't until Inglourious Basterds did I realize how jarring and unusual it is to have foreign languages hold equal screentime to your own native language (which makes me respect IB even more for its artistic achievement).
It'll definitely be a shame if plots themselves become increasingly dumbed down for international reasons. One thing the OP didn't mention in terms of the Chinese-market effect on Americans is the seemingly higher frequency of Chinese locales making cameos...though this is something I welcome, as the Chinese-based set pieces in movies such as Skyfall as Pacific Rim have usually been spectacular.
"So what have they done lately?"
Not even counting foreign films, here are some darn good productions from the past five years:
Midnight in Paris, Hugo, Drive, Warrior, Black Swan, Inception, Inglourious Basterds, Up, Whatever Works, The Limits of Control, The Dark Knight, WALL-E, Gran Torino, The Wrestler, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Into the Wild, Ratatouille, The Departed, and The Prestige.
Except for the thrill of seeing a movie in a large crowd.
A good crowd is worth more than most of the inconveniences of the theater. Inglourious Basterds has to be seen on the silver screen to be really appreciated.