Hacker Cinema
Megamind
2010 · Film · 96 min
Directed by Tom McGrath
AnimationActionComedyFamilyScience Fiction
After Megamind, a highly intelligent alien supervillain, defeats his long-time nemesis Metro Man, Megamind creates a new hero to fight, but must act to save the city when his "creation" becomes an even worse villain than he was.
5 positive1 mixed2 neutralfrom 8 commenters
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10 comments on Hacker News
They recently broke YouTube search even more. Go to a channel and do a search within that channel using the search field that is on the far right of the options below the channel information. You may have to click the ">" on the right to make it visible.
What is supposed to happen when you search using that is that it shows you just results for that channel. It still does that for some searches, but for other searches it seems to be doing a normal site wide search.
Whether or not a given search term works correctly seems to be a function of the search term, not a function of the channel being searched.
For example, let's say you are on a channel that reviews movies, and you want to see if they have reviews of some family friendly animated moves.
Search for "zootopia", "trolls", "cars", "coco", "dragon", "stitch", or "panda" and it gives just results from that channel, or tells you the channel has no matching content.
Search for "luca", "soul", "moana", "puss", "megamind", "ratatouille", "rio", "croods", or "lilo" and you get site wide results.
For multi-word searches order matters: "lilo & stitch" gives site wide results and "stitch & lilo" gives results for the channel so it is not the case that certain words trigger the problem.
I assume this is a bug, since I can't see any connection between the words that break out of channel search. They were all movies in my examples, but similar things happen with words from other categories. Example: "soprano", "tenor", "countertenor", "mezzo-soprano", and "bass-baritone" work correctly, and "baritone", "alto", "base", and "contralto" do not.
Curated list of favorite underrated movies:
#1 pick for HN Crowd: The Man From Earth // must see, especially if you like philosophical movies (don't recommend the sequel by the way)
Runner's Up:
Being There // absolute classic and must see for every person, at least once
Peaceful Warrior
The Lion In Winter // one of the best dramas ever made, and unbeatable cast with young Anthony Hopkins
Predestination // incredible drama about time travel paradoxes
The Interview // Hugo Weaving
Vitus // amazing story about a piano prodigy who fakes losing his talents to have a normal life
The Perverts Guide to Cinema // documentary, Slavoj Zizek's tour de force psychoanalysis of cinema as an art form; addressing the philosophical and psychological question of whether cinema (and other art forms) fulfil your desires, or rather teach/train you both to desire (and what you should desire), thus the sensationalistic and polemical invocation of it as "perverted"
Le Professionnel (French film, not to be confused with the one with Natalie Portman)
Revolver // Guy Ritchie's quote "It took me three years to write this film whereas Snatch took me three months". It is a masterwork metaphor about the ego, ego death, consciousness, meditation, spirituality, and the nature of reality. Recommend reading an interpretation of the film either before or after viewing to better appreciate what is happening in the story as it is most metaphorical.
Rest of the List: The Big Kahuna, Tao of Steve, Crazy Stupid Love, Megamind, Eyes Wide Shut, Dead Poet's Society, Before Sunset, Gambit, Five Minutes of Heaven, Temple Grandin, Croupier, The Good Guy, 3 Idiots, Limitless, Drive, Whiplash
Interesting, I’d never seen comparisons between Megamind and The Incredibles, but it definitely did suffer from being released so soon after Despicable Me.
My favorite overlooked animated film is Iron Giant. People didn’t yet generally appreciate that an animated film could be as much for adults as kids, and WB seemed to have no idea how to market it.
The animated movie Megamind.
Many reviews state something like 'Why even bother, The Incredibles, Despicable Me, etc did it already, and are way better, etc, etc', but I think they're completely wrong. The other movies are rather blunt in that Hollywood way, whereas Megamind is full of subtle humour.
Sure, but Pixar / Disney make their movies in a way that the kids have what to giggle at and adults are given some food for thought (or emotions). I find that formula to have worked with crushing success in Kung Fu Panda parts 1 and 2 in particular. Also Megamind.
Sounds like something from the movie Megamind.
So your weakness is ... green tea?
I'm enjoying story analysis a lot now. I've gone beyond watching movies and reading books to know the plot. My hobby now is finding all the possible plots based on the introduced characters and situations.
What makes it fun is that multiple people have invented a lot of rules around what a good story should be. Aristotle has written what's closest to the Newton Laws. It's badass that Newton's Laws still hold up with astrophysics and it's badass that something someone wrote in ancient Greece still holds up in the modern era of cinema. It's flawed, but it says things straight, instead of lots of maybes, so it's easy to prove true or false.
Megamind is an interesting beginner's analysis. It's very formulaic but doesn't look anything like that. It's subtle too, his cloak changes color according to his progress as a character.
Toy Story is probably the most interesting because it doesn't really fit in any major format. It's a Comedy, there's a misunderstanding, and things go from high to low to high again where enemies are friends. But that's about it. There's a lot of little highs and lows, as opposed to the usual where it's all ascends to one really big high (e.g. Guardians of the Galaxy). In Toy Story, he's about to get home, then things get worse. He makes another plan, it fails. It just gets progressively worse. There's no fixed mentor character too. Buzz and Woody are both protagonists, antagonists, and mentors to each other, except the story is told through Woody's perspective. The most interesting part is that they hatched a formula from it that works, which is used in all other Toy Story movies and a little in other movies. It seems they didn't follow the classical literature analysis and made up their own formulas and it works.
Possibly. I did try to hunt down the name a couple of years later for a ranty blogpost about the prevalence guns in movie posters (as it happens). I looked at the posters for Megamind, but none matched well with my memory of the image or the tagline.
Understood, and agreed, on plot of Megamind and requirement for stereotypical bad-guy-with-gun origin story, but I think my underlying point survives. Even if this was the movie / poster -- smartest entity in the universe shouldn't require a gun (or at least would be ashamed enough to not be waving it about).
The idea that powerful / influential (regardless of good/bad alignment) people as portrayed in our pop-culture need to be seen to be holding a gun is regrettable. If you haven't already, start taking a note of movie posters and the ratio of guns:no-guns -- obviously ignore the romcoms etc genres.
> Back in 2011-ish I saw a poster for an animated sci-fi movie, I think aimed at kids, but sadly can't remember the name of it. A picture of a vaguely humanoid-looking alien, over-sized head, holding a stylised laser blaster, with the tag line 'This is the smartest creature in the universe'.
Megamind, perhaps? That was an animated comedy/superhero movie featuring a super-intelligent alien super villain, and is from the right timeframe (released late 2010).
Megamind is an excellent movie, but was overshadowed by Despicable Me, which came out a few months earlier, because they both had as their major theme the villain turning into the good guy.
> Obviously the film, and the poster, were not made by the smartest creatures in the universe, but the poverty of expectations inherent in the juxtaposition of the words and image were depressing.
If it was indeed Megamind, of course he has a blaster: he's a stereotypical alien super villain. The movie is a spoof/twist on the superhero/villain relationship, so starting with a stereotypical villain is quite reasonable.
Cars and Cars 2 suffer from some of the same problems that Shrek 2 & 3 suffered from: creating a self-consistent universe based on adult puns based on characters of modern society.Unless it is done with restraint and real skill it soon behinds to feel insincere and contrived (see Sharks Tail, Chicken Run).
Toy Story & Shrek did something far cleverer. Shrek especially is smart, sophisticated humour for smart, sophisticated kids. The references are all from children's literature and culture. Kids know the references and are able to understand the clever puns.
Shreks 2&3 are dumb adult humour forced into the Shrek world. Many of the puns are above children's heads and are not sophisticated enough for the adult audience. Adding plot-lines about lawyers, unions etc just confuse small kids and leave adults slightly cringing.
Pixar and Dreamworks are at their best when they choose their target audience and focus on it. Toy Story & Nemo are for smart young kids; Ratatouille & The Incredibles are for smart older kids. Then enough is added for the rest of the family: everyone gets a clever joke every few minutes; the stories are understandable by all. Wall-E and Up are very adult in the big story (but full of great fun in the small story) I thought they were wonderful but I do understand your point (although they are I no way 'awful'—even if you are 5).
I'm not convinced that Pixar have mad a bad film yet. Cars grows on me the more I see it (and believe me if you have kids you end up seeing these films any times). Nemo (by far the funniest film Pixar have made) still makes me laugh despite having seen it 20+ times.
{I'm told that Cars 2 is relentless: too fast and too complicated for young kids, but as I haven't seen it I can't judge. The fact that I haven't seen it says something: I normally see every Pixar film the week it comes out.}
The problem that Pixar has had is that we have had to judge Pixar by Pixar standards as until recently no-one was making anything as good. This has now changed. Wonderfully for us Pixar now has serious competition. Dreamworks has made a number of films that are as good as Pixar's. Some of them are as good as Pixar's best: How to Train Your Dragon, Megamind, Kung Fu Panda. Walt Disney Animation Studios is back on form with Tangled (Monsters v Aliens wasn't bad either).
How to Train Your Dragon & Tangled are thankfully free of transfer-modern-society-into-cartoon-world puns. Instead you are given a detailed, self-consistent world that complements the story (rather than being the story). This is a very good thing—something I hope that Pixar will move back towards (although I don't hold out much hope for Monsters Inc 2).