Hacker Cinema
Midnight in Paris
2011 · Film · 94 min
Directed by Woody Allen
While on a trip to Paris with his fiancée's family, a nostalgic screenwriter finds himself mysteriously going back to the 1920s every day at midnight.
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18 comments on Hacker News
> the poster's lament that he's nostalgic for a time he never knew is one I've heard a _lot_
For sure; the 2011 film Midnight in Paris is a great comedic exploration of this feeling as its central theme. (well, if you can set aside any well-justified reservations about writer/director Woody Allen.)
This is kinda way off-topic, but that feeling of the "bringing back" something that had been lost to time that Field of Dreams provides, I get the same thing from the movie Midnight in Paris. Like a literally palpable warm, comforting, everything-is-alright feeling (mostly from the Salvador Dali encounter).
Reminds me of the movie Midnight in Paris, where a guy comes to Paris with romantic visions and is disappointed by the modern touristy reality. Whither the 1920s Paris of Hemingway, Dali, and Stein? And then he accidentally happens across a portal to that era, and falls in love with a girl… who is entirely disillusioned with the interwar Paris that doesn’t live up to her romantic associations with the Paris of Balzac and Toulouse-Latrec, the Moulin Rouge at its peak! So he shows her the portal which takes them back in time to the 1870s where they go to the Moulin Rouge and meet Toulouse-Latrec, who rues the loss of the Paris of the 1820s. What a glorious time period that was!
Grease the movie came out in '78 and fronted a mid 50s revival.
But yeah before that the eras dull for a while. Guessing WWII was popular in the 60s though.
Midnight in Paris explores nostalgia in two periods... 1920s and 1890s if memory serves.
It you haven’t seen it, take a look at a movie called “Midnight in Paris.” It does a great job highlighting how each generation find the past to be somehow better than current.
Midnight in Paris is a fun take on this phenomenon among other things.
I don't know about the quantification. But there certainly is something about the pining for an idealized prior time period. One good example today is the retro appeal of film, vinyl, and even instant photography. You also see it in design and fashion. I'd say certain aspects of 60s style are seen as appealing today whereas in the 70s-80s, they'd just be seen as old-fashioned. You're really talking about the point where tired becomes retro-chic.
That's one of the themes in the film Midnight in Paris. (Yes, it's a Woody Allen film.)
Death of Stalin, Booksmart, Jojo Rabbit are definitely smaller independent comedies, but compare:
The Artist: $130M gross, $15M budget Knives Out: $311M gross, $40M budget Birdman: $100M gross, $18M budget Grand Budapest: $173M gross, $25M budget Midnight in Paris: $154M gross, $17M budget Superbad: $170M gross, $20M budget
All of those are in the same rough ballpark, but Superbad had 70% of its box office revenue in the US+Canada.
Compare Grand Budapest and Birdman, which only saw 40% of their takings in NA. Midnight in Paris comes in at 37%, and, as a European production, The Artist saw only 35%-ish of its revenue in NA. Even Knives Out, the most hollywood-y of the lot, came in at 53% revenue from NA.
Superbad is a Hollywood movie with Hollywood sensibilities, so it obviously performed best in the US, and it's obviously become a cultual touchstone there — but I personally only even heard about it relatively recently. All the other films performed much better elsewhere so obviously don't seem to have had as much of a cultural impact from a US-centric perspective.
There's a brief footnote about their REVES volume rasterizer used in Soul World crowd characters. They simply state their render farm is CPU based and thus no GPU optimizations were required. At the highest, most practical level of abstraction, it's all software. De-coupling the artistic pipeline from underlying dependence on proprietary hardware or graphics APIs is probably the only way to do it.
https://graphics.pixar.com/library/SoulRasterizingVolumes/paper.pdf
On a personal note, I had a pretty visceral "anti-" reaction to the movie Soul. I just felt it too trite in its handling of themes that humankind has wrestled with since the dawn of time. And jazz is probably the most cinematic of musical tastes. Think of the intros to Woody Allen's Manhattan or Midnight in Paris. But it felt generic here.
That said the physically based rendering is state of the art! If you've ever taken the LIE toward the Queensborough Bridge as the sun sets across the skyscraper canyons of the city you know it is one of the most surreal tableaus in modern life. It's just incredible to see a pixel perfect globally illuminated rendering of it in an animated film, if only for the briefest of seconds ;)
Paris between the wars is a classic example. See the movie “Midnight in Paris”
Oh please...nostalgia is self deception. I knew this but the movie "Midnight in Paris" had a big impact on my perspective. The main character travels to the 1920s and meets famous writers and figures like picasso. And there were people and a general view that their time was past the "good ol days", we now call their time "the golden 20s" but they thought about how the late 1800s were much better.
Anyway, back on topic: The internet is the global BGPv4 and BGPv6 network,as seen in the global routing table. It's a network and how that network functions has not changed much.
The web on the other hand has changed a lot both in terms of functionality and content. But here's a different perspective: the "old web" was very slow. There were so many limitations, i mean are we talking pre-adobe-flash? If so,you had little rich and dynamic content. You couldn't stream movies,things like napster were viewed as criminal , as much as i dislike it youtube on it's ow has given much such rich and valuable content. Social media sucks but man, we're living in the golden age of memes!. Look at all the great things that happen because people can record videos and share them live/instantly! And security! We have come sooo far!!! From how amazing twitter has been to help infosec pros communicate to all the crypto improvements. I don't think i can go back in time and be able to share or access the same sites and content i did in the past,knowing how everything was so full of holes and made with little to no security consideration. I think I can easily make the argument that the old web was a dumpster fire. But in reality, I think it was ok for it's time and what we have today works for our time as well.
Let's be real here, anyone can host a discord server and many do that. There are so many free web hosting services now that let anyone host their own site without needing to learn html or webadmin. So many blogging platforms like medium and wordpress. So many privacy friendly products and services.
The past always looks different in hindsight and you don't know what you have until it's gone.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default-free_zone
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection
What are the most important Woody Allen movies?
I'm thinking:
1977: Annie Hall 1979: Manhattan 1986: Hannah and Her Sisters 1989: Crimes and Misdemeanours 1992: Husbands and Wives 1993: Manhattan Murder Mystery 2005: Match Point 2008: Vicky Cristina Barcelona 2009: Whatever Works 2011: Midnight in Paris 2013: Blue Jasmin
Have I missed anything?
If this resonates with you and you haven't already, you owe it to yourself to see Woody Allen's 2011 film Midnight in Paris.
In 2040 someone will discover Haskell, shed tears on why C#++.cloud is so widespread instead in the industry, and use it to conclude the sorry state of the world. Seriously, don't compare what was published in papers 50 years ago with what business uses today, compare it with what is in papers now, and there are lots of interesting things going on all the time, when was the last time you even checked? Probabilistic programming? Applications of category theory to functional programming? Type theory? Software transactional memory?
Woody Allen did this great movie some time ago, "Midnight in Paris", where the main character, living in present times, dreams of moving back in time to the 1920s as the best time for literature ever. When the occasion to really go back appears though, he discovers the writers of the 1920s thought the best literature was done in 1890s, and so he has to go back again, then again, ... This talk is like this, sentiment blinding a sober assessment.
That's complete crap and merely a manifestation of "Rosy Retrospection" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection).
Monty Python made fun of this "in my time, you see" bullshit with the Four Yorkshiremen skit (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo). Woody Allen's movie Midnight in Paris did the same (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_in_Paris).
The programmers before us were the exact same as the programmers of today and they will be the exact same as the one's that come after us. The only difference between them is whose shoulders they stood upon and what they were be able to do using the tools at hand.
Programmers of the 60s were happy just to get things to add up. The guys in the 80s squealed with glee at GUIs. The guys in the 90s made the internet what it is today. And the guys of the 2010s will bring AI and robotics into the main stream.
Everyone glues things together - it's how creation works (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Johnson_(author)#Where_Good_Ideas_Come_From). The only difference between generations is the things you have available to glue together. Sometimes you glue together a stick and a rock to make a spear, and other times you glue together a machine gun, a camera, and a computer.
Either way - same people, different situations.
"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.
How does MovieClips.com feel about CantWait's use of the trailers it has licensed and posted on YouTube?
For instance, here's CantWait's "Midnight in Paris" page on its website:
http://cantwa.it/movie/midnight-in-paris/first-trailer-117/
The YouTube movie that is embedded on that page is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_3gIxrcWK8&feature=player_embedded
Which happens to be posted by MovieClips.com, a company that pays the studios to license their trailer data. Is CantWait paying MovieClips.com? Does it pay YouTube? Does it pay the rights holders of the trailers?
Here's another example, CantWait's "Spider Man" trailer: http://cantwa.it/movie/the-amazing-spider-man/first-teaser-6/
It was posted by Sony Pictures on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=upwf8RsyNqQ
Is Sony Pictures cool with CantWait's use of its trailer within a commercial app and website?
I am curious if CantWait is at all concerned about being shut down for commercial redistribution of content from YouTube? Or is CantWait paying YouTube for the content and its bandwidth? What if CantWait scales and YouTube says, enough is enough?
I know this is what is referred to in Midnight in Paris as "Golden Age Thinking," but I can't fight the feeling when I see television programs and interviews in the 50s and 60s that the level of "popular" discourse was much higher then than it is now. That is, interviewees of all ages are much more well spoken, articulate, and informed. I can't imagine the panel of American Idol judges (much less the audience) being able to drill down so quickly to a historical event like that, or even care to take a serious crack at it. Am I off?
Ex, a 60s era CBS documentary on rock--fair from and to both sides: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSq1ca__cRA