Hacker Cinema
Men in Black
1997 · Film · 98 min
Part of Men in Black Collection
Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld
ActionAdventureComedyScience Fiction
After a police chase with an otherworldly being, a New York City cop is recruited as an agent in a top-secret organization established to monitor and police alien activity on Earth: the Men in Black. Agent K and new recruit Agent J find themselves in the middle of a deadly plot by an intergalactic terrorist who has arrived on Earth to assassinate two ambassadors from opposing galaxies.
4 positive5 negative1 mixed41 neutralfrom 51 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
54 comments on Hacker News
Movies like Forrest Gump, Return of the Jedi, Men in Black or Harry Potter 5 all managed to lose money, according to "GAAP".
If that's not creative accounting, I don't know what is.
Remember that scene from "Men in Black" where K watches surveillance video feed of his ex? In the movie it was meant to be wistful and cute, I guess. Now that such systems are getting closer to reality, you realize the potential for abuse in enormous.
If hypothetical uber-classified goons actually existed, the Trump administration would not be inventing bullshit reasons to misuse ICE under the pretext of immigration enforcement. They'd just disappear people even more secretly.
Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, and at least to this point, the Executive Branch cannot get away with "classified" actions within the United States that can't be defended in court under the color of unclassified black-letter law. Even FISA is, in fact, a Federal court. And all the ooga-booga supposed uber-secret SOF units that allegedly exist are military units (to the extent they actually exist), which can't be used domestically under Posse Comitatus. Domestic law enforcement is the FBI's job. No ooga-booga secret CIA unit would have any remit to operate in the US against Americans, especially given the well-known FBI/CIA rivalry.
There are no "Men in Black." It's a fun movie premise, that's all.
The "Men in Black" thing predates the comedy films and the comics they were based on. They are (true or not) a persistent element in UFO abduction stories.
"The term is generic, as it is used for any unusual, threatening or strangely behaved individual whose appearance on the scene can be linked in some fashion with a UFO sighting."
Some stories dont even posit them as being from the government, just designed to give that impression. Some reckon alien hybrids. Even in the MiB films they were separate and just controlled the government largely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_in_black
Its a general fear of government intervention.
If you are asking on what legal basis this fear is founded. I don't think there needs to be one. Lots of governments do illegal stuff. Suits are the classic G man look. They dont need "Jurisdiction" to dress in a suit and harass SETI.
And yet no one is ever able to describe what agency or jurisdiction these "men in black suits" will work for.
This basically is just demonstrating how people very very good in their field can still fail Civics 101. Men In Black were some funny movies back in the day, but they were just movies.
1997 was an absolutely phenomenal year for movies. Life Is Beautiful, Boogie Nights, Jackie Brown, Titanic, Donnie Brasco, The Fifth Element, Good Will Hunting, As Good as It Gets, Austin Powers International Man of Mystery, Gattaca, LA Confidential, Men in Black, Liar Liar, Amistad, The Game, Con Air, Contact.
There was a lot to do in 1997, just not as much to do without leaving home. We went to movies because they were affordable and great movies were being released.
Also, that was the era where new multiplex theaters were being built with great sound systems, so it was worth going to a theater for the high-quality experience. While quality consumer electronics are more readily available today than ever before, I feel like the vast majority today only watch media with headphones, TV speakers, or maybe a 2.1 stereo+sub setup.
Damn, I would not have guessed that Men In Black was actually a documentary...
> I am curious what the world would be like now if Silicon Graphics had made a model that was less than $2,000, but still ran Irix and had some amount of the 3D processing stuff with it.
I'm not sure it would have made much of a difference as the low end of the market was driven by gaming and multimedia (i.e. movies on PC screen), and the high end of the graphics market was driven by rendering for expensive video and film production. In short, what you needed to play Fallout (1997 release) at home was an order of magnitude less than you needed to render CGI for Men in Black (1997 release).
> if they had released something in 1997 for "prosumers", before OS X came out, would Apple have its same market position now
I believe Apple would have been just as successful as they are today. Software availability (e.g. Adobe and Microsoft Office) and ease of use were very good on Mac, and not so good on workstations like SGI. There was a very small, very demanding market for SGI's workstations (rendering super high quality graphics), and there was a huge market for what Apple supplied (business, print, web graphics, music production, video production). In short the software ecosystem wouldn't have happened. Apple did a great job when OSX came out of making it easy-ish for app developers to port to OSX and allowed users to run their old mac software on their new OSX powered mac.
> Would we all be using SGiPhones?
Probably not. System V unix was very expensive to license (hence Android being Linux based and iOS being based on BSD and Mach) and would have added considerable cost to each mobile device based on licensing at the time. A lot of what made it possible to package up a modern smartphone was open source software + low cost components with ridiculous capability (for their cost). None of this was of interest to SGI where they were focused on high-end equipment with little commodity appeal.
The best quote I've seen to explain this is from the Men in Black movie: a person is smart, but people are dumb.
Group dynamics and identity politics are massively underestimated by many as motivating forces to get people to act against their interests.
Also remember: half of all people are below average intelligence.
That's basically how Hollywood accounting works, with some of the highest grossing films and franchises in history not paying a penny in tax due to showing a 'loss' on paper.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007) ended up with a $167 million loss on paper after grossing nearly $1 billion. According to New Line's accounts, the LOTR trilogy made "horrendous losses" and no profit at all. Same as Forrest Gump, Men in Black, and Return of the Jedi.
The Music industry is far worse in its financial machinations.
With some minor exceptions, the companies involved in this are all American.
Of the ~700 movies I've watched (not bragging, just context - actual movie buffs watch thousands by the time they're my age), those I happily rewatch are:
The Thing (1982)
Silence of the Lambs
Alien
Little Shop of Horrors (1986)
Young Frankenstein
Rocky Horror
Raising Arizona
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Men in Black
Primer
But even those I've only seen a handful of times each. It takes a lot for me to want to watch/read/play something multiple times, as I'm the kind of person who always thinks, "but I could be trying something new, or getting something done".
Very interesting, I was with you in the first half of your comment. But Hereditary is one of my favorite movies. And Men In Black is one of my least favorite, for these reasons. MIB is a disgusting film because it is utterly dehumanizing of the other. Aliens, although fully sentient and obviously "human", are fair game for cruelty, casual dismemberment, and mirthful laughter when their bodies are violently splattered onto other characters. Nobody really bats an eye because they're not Homo sapiens; it's literally the color of their guts which makes it okay to explode them.
That's only one example of the kind of depravity that turns me off of a lot of media, including some very fun Star Wars video games. The parallels with racist thinking are obvious to me; if any being can ask you to respect its bodily autonomy, does it really matter whether or not the creature is familiar? I'll probably get (as I always do) some angered responses that I'm taking things too far. I wonder what those people felt when they watched District 9, but perhaps that movie was too obvious about its protagonist for all viewers to generalize their feelings.
(So why am I okay with Hereditary? It's a literal demon. It's not framed as children's entertainment, it's horror; the filmmakers are very clearly not endorsing the violence depicted.)
I mean they must have. It's in Battery Park NYC. The outside at least. I can't find positive confirmation of the hallway location.
https://www.movie-locations.com/movies/m/Men-In-Black.php
it's… from men in black iirc, so if it knows movie scripts, it'd know this.
I wonder if this inspired "Men in Black" or having him in the movie.
In the UK, Men in Black was a PG when released. We had a "12" rating at the time, but that meant 11 year olds couldn't go to the cinema to see it, even with an adult present.
Independence day which came out a year earlier (also with Will Smith) was a 12.
I remember going to see Men In Black in 1997. I had a meltdown because I found the aliens scary, and my Mom had to leave the film early. My dad took my sister and he got to see the whole movie, which my mom resented.
I was 5.
I don’t remember anything from before the first Men in Black movie.
that's not necessarily a good guide. Let's say you make a lot of money. You can pay your executives millions, have lush offices with swimming pools and tennis courts, company jets etc and report razor thin "profits". Not that they're doing that - but you can creative accounting your way out of reporting profits.
For instance, the star wars movies, forrest gump, lord of the rings, men in black and harry potter are all still not technically "in profit": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
That's why money in - money out is a better barometer for insurance and people with star power negotiate different terms these days like percentage of "dollars in". I made a video a couple years ago with a writer friend who is now on strike about this.
(I'm cutting out the first 5 minutes of chit-chat and it's processing on youtube, but if you see this after that happens, just go to the beginning) https://youtu.be/QZBqjZS3hZA?t=296
Peter Parker for one. > Hey guys, you ever see that really old movie, The Empire Strikes Back
As a kid I watched many films from my parent's generation. Mary Poppins (1964) or Great Escape (1963) come to mind as being staples every christmas -- Great Escape on boxing day especially
A generation before that people watched "It's a Wonderful Life" (1946) for much the same reason.
I've subjected my kids to a few old films from well before they were born, but they were films from my youth -- Bill and Ted, Back to the Future, Men in Black, Muppet Christmas Carol etc. And yes they've seen Star Wars, which was from before I was born (just), but that's an ongoing franchise.
I don't see them watching films from the 1960s like I did though, and I doubt they'll make their kids sit through films from the 90s.
First some that I don't see mentioned here yet:
Edge of Tomorrow (2014)
Limitless (2011)
Looper (2012)
Upgrade (2018)
Source Code (2011)
District 9 (2009)
Black Mirror S3E2: "Playtest", S4E1: "USS Callister"
The 7 minute YouTube video "Slaughterbots"[1]
The YouTube series The Backrooms[2]
If you are worried about your son hearing swear words and seeing blood, and not just whether or not he will be able to understand/appreciate the movie, then you probably want to wait with a couple of those.
And then I would also agree with those here that mention Inception, Interstellar, Back to the Future, The Martian, Men in Black, Minority Report, The Terminator, Terminator 2, and The Expanse. I also don't think he should have much of a problem following along with The Matrix.
[1]: https://youtu.be/O-2tpwW0kmU [2]: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVAh-MgDVqvDUEq6qDXqORBioE4Yhol_z
I dunno, I felt like this was a huge cop out in the movie Men in Black
In the movie Men In Black there's a scene where Will Smith's character is applying to become a MIB agent. All the applicants are required to fill in a form and all have difficulty doing so. He is the one who resolves the problem by dragging a low table over to his position to enable him to complete the form easily.
Lets see... the most recent comedy movies I've seen...
Knives Out (2019) was probably the one I enjoyed the most.
JoJo Rabbit was trying too hard IMO, but I still smiled/laughed throughout it. WW2 is kinda overdone at this point (though serious films like Downfall are worth revisiting)
Free Guy was fine? Apparently "The Suicide Squad" also counts as a comedy. I guess Deadpool and Deadpool 2 were also fine. Maybe other people are tired of comicbook / superhero movies, but really I'm personally only tired of the "Marvel Formula" (and Deadpool / The Suicide Squad strays pretty heavily from the formula). Going back a bit further is "Jumanji"...
There's a lot of flicks / comedy films out there. Nothing is quite as good as Airplane but I'd say Knives Out is on-par, maybe even better than Clue (1985).
I don't really like the "Despicable Me" series, but my nieces really wanted to watch "Minions: Rise of Gru" and I actually enjoyed that one. (My nieces love this series, so I can say that I've watched all of it and its mostly trash. But Rise of Gru actually got me to laugh)
--------
I'm no critic. I enjoy just a basic flick now and then. Honestly, I'd rewatch "Knives Out" more than any Adam Sandler movie from the 90s or even Austin Powers. 90s era comedy just didn't mesh well with me, despite me growing up at that time. I do have a soft spot for the dry 80s stuff with Leslie Nielsen, and I guess I really liked Jackie Chan's action/comedies through the 90s and 00s.
I dunno, if I think "90s comedy I enjoyed", I think of Men in Black or Aladdin? Nothing in the list that this author wrote.
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.
There is some value in presenting information in a way that regular people would take the time to read and understand.
The key here is you are being spied on by your government in the heart of NYC and AT&T is helping.
The video with this article takes the motif further with a sort-of X-Files like presentation and set of mysterious sounding voiceovers.
From the start, I thought this building reminds me of the one Will Smith’s character reported to in “Men in Black.”
To some extent all information in news is editorialized for an angle that draws the reader in.
Could it be the truths of this story are so well known to you that it is hard to enjoy the way this is presented? Perhaps, in the same way the TV show “Silicon Valley” is unattractive to some startup founders as too close to home?
The Pulp Fiction briefcase is more of a "pure MacGuffin", where the film director / scriptwriters are playing with the concept of MacGuffin more than actually using it as its intended purpose.
After all, its a Tarantino film. He basically expects the audience to be familiar with film theory (or at minimum: expects the audience to already be familiar with "typical plotlines").
----------
Your typical action movie / popcorn movies: Raiders of the Lost Arc (The Arc of the Covenant), Mission Impossible (The Rabbit's Foot), and Men In Black (Orion's Belt), and pretty much every James Bond movie, has MacGuffins galore and are better examples of it.
The scriptwriter doesn't care about the MacGuffin. But a well written story has the __audience__ care deeply about it. Otherwise, the escalation and conflict has no purpose. Pulp Fiction / Tarantino used the briefcase as an exercise in how to make the audience care for an object, despite never really explaining why that object is the center of all this conflict.
-----------
Golden Fleece, Apples of the Hesperides (aka: Heracle's 11th task), Holy Grail. It doesn't really matter what these objects do, we just use them as storytelling devices to get the characters thrust into conflict.
Split keyboards have been around for quite a while. You can even see the Kinesis Advantage keyboard featured in films like Flubber and Men in Black and plenty of companies have made ergonomic keyboards.
I think there's a sort of hobbyist renaissance going on right now, though. Plenty of new keyboards are being designed and built because it's more accessible than ever to design your own pcb or if not that to get someone else's design printed, which along with the general mechanical keyboard enthusiast market, has given people a wealth of options to choose from.
2019 (pre-covid) movies:
Men In Black, Shazam, Charlie's Angels, Jumanji, Murder Mystery, Big Time Adolescence, Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark, Good Boys, Weathering With You, Doom Annihilation...
It would be interesting to know how that data breaks down -- like photos vs videos vs software backups vs saved movies, etc. I assume that most people stream movies, TV shows, and music these days, and that few people save them to disk. And even for those that do, Apple could deduplicate (i.e., store exactly one copy of Men in Black even if 100,000 people saved it). Software installs are easily deduplicated as well.
So that leaves personal photos and videos. Apple has about 1 billion active users, so a back of the napkin calculation suggests that each user is storing 8GB of data. That actually sounds quite low. That's 1600 5MB photos without even talking about the crazy storage that personal videos would use.
The article talks about how much Apple stores on Google's servers, but doesn't say how much they store on their own servers or with other third parties. Maybe they have multiple times as much storage on their own servers.
Two quick thoughts:
1. The results don't load for me in Firefox unless I reload the page. I can see from the network tab that the ###.json file is received, but nothing is shown. (Tested on both desktop and Firefox for Android.)
2. I think the request "Name an old movie..." undercuts the surprise factor of discovering how old the movie you picked is, which is presumably the point of the site. My first pick for an old movie was Casablanca, which is too old to even generate results. I picked Lawrence of Arabia and then Star Wars, but the comparison films (some French thing from 1903 I'd never heard of, and King Kong) only confirmed that my choices are, indeed, old. I think some other prompt would be better able to create surprise. You want people to be entering films like Avatar or Men in Black, not films they consider "old".
I discovered revently that the Kinesis was featured in the background of the film Men in Black, as a futuristic keyboard. The prop department had painted it black and the wave of consumer demand was the reason for them introducing a black version, like the one I have.
>On the other hand, I didn't know that "Wild Wild West" was by Will Smith!
It was from the Wild Wild West remake movie he starred in as well. I think they were trying to recreate the success of the Men in Black formula[0] but that song wound up being the only part of it that anyone remembered.
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiBLgEx6svA
> So we should write off possibly blatant high-level interference in DoD acquisitions because our firms are already inefficient and we have de facto mercantilism already?
Claiming that there is an upcoming decision (or crisis) point when the status quo is being observed, comes off as sensationalist. It's misguided concern.
> When do we publicly acknowledge that mercantilism?
The context is already embedded in history. The internal (very public) challenges to the Fed have led to some scary outcomes. Putting the conspiracy talk aside, it's not like there aren't jokes in the media (from movies like Spies Like Us to Men In Black) acknowledging the known waste - https://www.city-journal.org/html/americas-missing-money-15725.html
Not sure what more can be done. It's like the marijuana ban or racism. It will take a few generations to sort it out or it will never be sorted fully. Either way, awareness is not the problem.
I wish Hollywood studios would create more new original stuff. There was a meme circulated around a few weeks back with a movie theater sign with Childsplay, Toy Story 4, Godzilla, Aladdin and Men in Black on it with the title, "The 90s called and want their movies back."
I get that older movies with established franchises can be secure bets to bring in money, but there's a lot of diminishing returns. I feel some people just see these releases in the theaters because there's nothing else released.
> just the few who requested conspiracy materials by mail.
I remember conspiracy theory / UFO magazines being more widely distributed than regular newspapers. There's even a joke on that in the first Men in Black movie.
They made a movie about that- it's called Men In Black.
And what is wrong with Men in Black? I love that movie.
Most of the giant media-loved scientists have died at this point - Sagan, Feynman, Salk, Pavlov, etc, and are finally starting to drop out of public-rememberance.
The 20th century had a lot of movies featuring (fictional) scientists, like Dr. Strangelove and Men in Black, too.
They were represented quite a bit.
It reminds me this great scene from the movie "Men In Black":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vmGcngRA24
Probably referring to the 'neuralyzer' gadget from the movie Men In Black (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuralyzer).
But could also be a reference to the 'visual knock-out capsules' from Alfred Bester's SF novel 'The Demolished Man':
"They were cubes of copper, half the size of fulminating caps, but twice as deadly. When they were broken open, they erupted a dazzling blue flare that ionized the Rhodopsin - the visual purple in the retina of the eye - blinding the victim and abolishing his perception of time and space."
Glance through ... "The MIB found such violations were routinely practiced." ... what?
Backtrack, backtrack ... "the NOAA N-PRIME Mishap Investigation Board (MIB)" ... ah, OK.
(Men in Black movie, if that was before your time. Where the checkout line tabloid rags - clickbait before its time - were the research reports. ;-)
Eh, anyone here by chance who knows how to watch the Avengers movies and the Men in Black movies in Germany? They don't appear in the catalog, but searching shows "Based on The Avengers" and the other MCU films, for example.
I'm having a really hard time understanding what this article is about. I've re-read it like 3 times. I think it has something to do with the UK's civil service and it's connection (connexion, excuse me) to the education system, and in particular the kinds of degrees and certificates required to enter civil service. The author seems concerned (although I'm not entirely sure) that these hallmarks of merit are out-of-sync with the qualities that actually make a good civil servant. E.g. government becomes increasingly staffed by people who themselves have passed these official tests, gained the Official Seal of Competence, and therefore only empathize with other people who've passed these tests, leaving the rest to their fate.
So, you get a government full of people who are brilliant test-takers.
The first Men-in-Black movie when Will Smith's character is being tested for induction was kind of a commentary on this, in that Smith was the outsider candidate, non-conformist, street-wise but perhaps not big on theory, and his competition were all hyper-competent well-educated civil servant types; and Smith's unique perspective was key to passing that battery of tests! A triumph against the meritocracy.
But then again, was it? At the end of the day, Smith got his "MiB" badge of Merit, and no doubt he would someday proctor the self-same test that got him into the organization.
I am still confused.
Very cool storyline but the excessive voice-over can be a little grating. Fight club meets Hackers meets Men in Black
Here is the full episode (without the hoops) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpxvvnWvffM
I don't even agree that Scrum is agile. It's a one-size-fits-all prescriptive methodology with rigidly defined schedules, rituals, and roles.
If I had the memory erasing device from the Men In Black movies, I would use it on people who advocate for by-the-book scrum.
The above link is to the first minute and a half of the interview sequence in the original Men in Black movie.
It's not that they are so formulaic, it's that they are so identical. It's as if every one who used bootstrap for web design also used identical color schemes and layouts.
Take a look at the upcoming "RIP Department." It's like someone just took the Men in Black script and replaced all references to aliens with references to the undead. It's the same movie!
From a secure, undisclosed location from some secret intercepts via advanced technological means from an interview in a secure vault inside a Faraday cage with multi-sensor shielding in bedrock deep under the Senate chamber:
Interviewer: Chairman Feinstein, what can you tell us about the USPS data collection just reported by the NYT?
Chairman Feinstein: Our committee received highly confidential, double secret, triple national command authority top secret, quadruple crypto secret, eyes only, not to be remembered (as in the movie Men in Black -- it wasn't just a movie) on the main threats to US national security.
Interviewer: And?
Chairman Feinstein: We got the best of the best of the best.
Interviewer: And?
Chairman Feinstein: Well, we learned about the main threats to US national security, in descending order of seriousness, (1) invisible squads of ETs corrupting our precious bodily fluids, (2) marauding giant herds of 100 ton, angry, rabid mastodons destroying our cities, and (3) progress in the genetics of intelligence that produced a strain of giant rats with intelligence and cunning far above that of humans. Yes, the rats have escaped and are now breeding rapidly in the sewers of our major East Coast cities and spreading quickly west. They have been stowaways on airlines and now are colonizing San Francisco and spreading rapidly on the West Coast.
Interviewer: And why have we not heard of these massive dangers before?
Chairman Feinstein: Isn't it obvious? The intense work of our committee, yes, with that of the House, and our national security command authority has been successful.
Interviewer: But what about the Boston bombers?
Chairman Feinstein: Well, nearly successful. But that was a small gap compared with invisible squads of ETs, marauding mastodons, and super genius intelligent giant rats.
Interviewer: But what did all of that work cost?
Chairman Feinstein: The budget is classified, so high that no one can see it, not even God.
Interviewer: Ms. Chairman, thank you for your interview, and I'm sure all US citizens will be intensely interested in the work of you and your committee.
I came to say something similar. Much of the tech like light-speed travel and other advances will not be around for a very long time, perhaps never. There's a fine line between sci-fi and fantasy. Lots of ideas have been done in other movies, like The Matrix, with instant learning through brain programming, lifelike VR simulations. Men in Black, Thor, Contact, Aliens go from sci-fi to unrealistic fantasy.
I think Star Trek tries to maintain a balance that still looks attainable. Also, perhaps there's a shortage of grandiose discoveries lately. We know the Higgs exists, the universe is flat from WMAP, quantum entanglement is gaining practical use. But this isnt as useable for movies as say discovering that we live in a universe with other galaxies, etc...
Are they trying to piggyback on the "Men in Black" meme/movie with this title, or what?
I want to share my results of a tertiary topic on this thread: Adam Lipsius claiming that hundreds of thousands of pirated copies of "16-LOVE" had destroyed his chances of profiting from the film.
A Google of Adam Lipsius returned his IMDB page, his Facebook page, a few videos about 16-LOVE, and no Wikipedia article. I followed his IMDB page and discovered he has participated on the producer + director level of several films. He is said to be 'known for' The People vs. Larry Flynt and Men in Black, but was involved only in the sound of those films.
16-LOVE produces similar results: virtually nothing on Wikipedia or IMDB. Its IMDB article says it is similar to films such as "Zookeeper", and is rated at around 5 stars. Completely distinct from the IMDB results, RT claims it is 100% fresh with 39 reviews. It was directed by and produced by Mr. Lipsius.
Conspicuously absent in my searches were any torrent offerings.
---
Here's what I think:
I think 16-LOVE was not a popular film, and just plain didn't do well. I don't think piracy had anything to do with it.
My opinion is that generally you will find the noisiest, most entitled, belligerent users amongst the ranks of the free. They didn't pay for it, and so there is literally no skin in the game to persuade them to like it.
I contend that if, indeed, hundreds of thousands of people had illegally downloaded this film, there would be much, much more evidence of its existence available through Google - the same exact route I would have found torrents, by the way.
I think it was just an unknown film, with no publicity, and maybe - hell, probably - it would have done far better if it had been offered through a more direct, easily-accessible avenue.
Just reminds me the "Men In Black" movie.
movie of a crazy serial killer browsing Facebook
Serial killer? That's just your assumption, based on video editing. Remember the scene in Men in Black, where Will Smith is asked to shoot cardboard aliens and shoots a little girl instead?
HN Against Prejudice! :-)
(showed TakeThisLollipop to my gf, who freaked out and immediately deleted all fb apps... so prejudiced!)