Hacker Cinema
Rambo
2008 · Film · 92 min
Part of Rambo Collection
Directed by Sylvester Stallone
In Thailand, ex-Green Beret John James Rambo joins a group of mercenaries to venture into war-torn neighboring Myanmar to rescue a group of Christian aid workers who have been kidnapped by a ruthless local infantry unit.
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53 comments on Hacker News
All the american action movies we watched in the 80s and 90s with Rambo and Schwarzenegger etc were all about violence? Most American movies seem to work guns into them somehow too.
Leaving outside the ethical part of it - which is huge, this kills innovation.
The problem I see is that when everything is iterative, and you kill sustainable incentives for new views, innovation disappears.
Is like the movies. We will get all budget towards remakes and reboots, and little new would show up.
Being an 80s guy, I remember many new movies coming out every year, and when they stretched beyond 2 or 3 films, people frowned.
Back to the future, Indy (the good years), Rambo (first 3), lethal weapon. Cool gems came up too (Last action hero?Terminator) even in loaded fields like simple action movies…. Star Wars, 3 films. Matrix. bond was the exception.
Now? mission impossible (8 films at over 2h), fast and mediocre franchise (20 movies), Marvel and DC movies (3 movies shot 30 different times), and everything else is a reboot. Almost impossible for new ideas to get through.
We are killing culture, innovation and human spark for some companies to make a billion more. We are feeding like factory pigs from generic slop, and as the factories grow they kill fertile ground for those who wanted to eat something cleaner.
The fact that is happening does not mean it’s right. It’s just we are accepting mediocrity as our guiding principle at 0.01 USD a pop…
Netflix's workflow for creatives isn't more sophisticated than their competitors; Netflix simply prefers to re-create the wheel in-house while their competitors are more likely to use off-the-shelf software solutions to the extent that they use software at all.
As others have pointed out on this thread: Netflix's solutions don't scale up or down for others. This means that the technical solution is sophisticated because their unnecessarily complicated internal business process requires it. Netflix could save billions a year if it streamlined their production side like the studios have. Case in point: almost every film Netflix has made in the past few years has gone way over budget, and it's not because of backend buy-outs. (The Electric State cost $320 million, meaning that the base budget before backend buyouts was around $225 million. It doesn't even look like an $50 million movie.)
Netflix can get away with inefficient business processes because it's making enough money right now to paper over those costs, but eventually they'll have to streamline their processes. (For an indirect example, look up the story of Carolco Pictures, the company behind T2, Rambo, and other major hits.)
Interesting. I'm in a similar situation, but my first foreign language was French. I believe the source of English education makes a difference. In my case, it was Rambo movies :))
> The composition of this ordeal was inferred from statistical analysis of fights in The Iliad. Each of those scenarios included a fair share of spear throws, sword strikes, shooting arrows, and spear strikes, all performed in full body armor. Overall, the whole day was effectively a long, high-intensity interval exercise.
I love the idea of people 2000 years from now doing statistical analysis of Rambo movies to deduce how wars were fought in 20th century.
In the 90s, video cassette (VHS) rentals were very popular, and a friend's uncle had a parlor for renting. My friends and I spent our days growing up on Rambo, Bloodsports, Shaolin Temples, and the whole range of Westerns. Spaghetti Westerns and Cowboys stayed with me, and when in doubt about what movie to re-watch, I chose Westerns.
I remember in the early 2000s, when Macromedia asked me what are my hobbies or favorite leisure time, when they tried to highlight my profile was, “I like Western/Cowboy Movies.”
i miss the all-powerful USA I did grew up with. the reagan era. the movies where we had masculine huge bad-ass stars. i want that USA back. rambo, schwarzie, predator, and all the great shows we had in the 80s : miami vice, k2000, all that stuff.
i want movies with big bad-ass ass-kicking stars. all powerful usa looking far ahead at the horizon.
My grand kids will get to see the 9.59942^23 Rambo movie.
But they don't actually murder people to make movies. When you watch Rambo are people actually being shot? Do you think they are actually torturing people to make extreme porn? Are people actually being whipped or is it just faked like professional wrestling in the United States?
But my point stands that they are probably using a very narrow definition to produce this extreme result like using a very narrow definition of consent or very wide definition of abuse such as mostly using verbal abuse to constitute abuse, which is hardly abuse if you are an paid actor and it isn't real.
Pro-war fiction? That's like the standard movie for several decades from Rambo to Michael Bay's epics and Top Gun Maverick, and in movie form that has far wider appeal, 10000x the audiences, and is way more glamorous! "weird pro war fiction" would be very low in effectiveness...
Why is that messed up? Do you feel the same about army vets? How about ones who have been dishonorably discharged? I would also be curious what you feel about Rambo, the movie? Do you identify with the sheriff or the vet?
This. Just because we agree with something - doesn't mean it's apolitical. Even a purely romantic film such as Brokeback Mountain, when it was released was called political by Christian conservatives. I don't agree with their views at all, but in this case they were right.
Because anything that can be targeted by legislation, is political in it's definition.
Also, multiple war movies, such as Rambo for example are explicitly political. So, this recent pearl clutching about Hollywood political honestly makes no sense.
My father (1951) went through Tandy's Dancing Demon through text adventure games, Lode Runner, Prince of Persia, Doom and modern video games.
He went from black and white mummies movies through Rambo to Matrix.
I (1980) was raised with Lucas Arts games, and you know the rest.
The gap between my father and me is huge. He saw the entire entertaiment industry transforming, from technology and from content points of view.
I've seeing the same things since year ~2000. I am tired of nostalgia, seeing the same things over and over again... The same formula up to the point I can predict how most movies will end.
While I enjoy Ron Gilbert doing Monkey Island again, and retro games, I still expect something more. And it's not coming.
I surely can see there are more modern topics like inclusion and the kind in most American movies and games, but I don't think it's enough for a change in the industry like the ones my father saw.
And Modern tech like deepfakes will only enforce nostalgia... Entertaiment industry is stealing my middle-age.
That’s really interesting. Can you document a single locale that is “kicking out their problem citizens?” That was the plot of Rambo and that was a great movie, but I’ve never heard of such a thing in this century. I welcome being educated so please do tell if you can point to some examples that aren’t old enough to legally drink.
> Average American in 1984 couldn't conceive....
"Couldn't conceive" is pretty strong - it was the era of the Cold War, GI Joe, a hangover from the Cuban Missile Crisis, the contras. Maybe accurate to say the average American would find it highly improbable, and our eventual victory always assured because Chuck Norris, Rambo, and the inherent virtue of our cause against totalitarianism.
Anyway, I think the paratroopers that appear in Red Dawn are from Cuba or a socialist country in Central/South America, right? Which isn't terribly far-fetched in the context of the eighties imagination - maybe more accessible idea than a Soviet D-Day-style invasion. Also not out of line in history - didn't the Germans court the Mexicans in WWII? The French during the Civil War (I use the word "court" loosely with the French 'intervention', but hell, we got a holiday out of it).
The film was marketed saying that no foreign invasion of US soil had happened, though it ignored the Japanese invasion of Alaska. The "average American" probably still doesn't think of Alaska very often except for reality TV, much less its history.
https://www.archaeology.org/issues/433-2107/letter-from/9780-alaska-wwii-battle
>This article is written like 50 years is undicipherable hieroglyphics territory.
Then again your name is Rambo, whereas the author might be some 20+ year old, for whom Rambo itself is a "classic" movie kinda like Casablanca was for us :)
Public fights can occasionally be net positive for one of the participants, but your arguments will be publicly scrutinized and they better be watertight. If the logic you presented is your best work, then I can easily see why you've experienced some trouble in getting people to support you.
Let's start with the very first argument you presented: getting rejected by YC is a clear proof of collusion.
Getting rejected by YC happens to tens of thousands of applicants each batch. Your chances of getting accepted increase disproportionally if you can show progress since the rejection. To react the way you did is a contrarian move. And it kind of fits the pattern - to publicly insult every VC on Stripe's cap table is also a contrarian move. Not to mention that you also made it clear to all your future potential talent that there's this thing about you not being liked by the VC community in Silicon Valley.
I will skip all the little jumps to conclusions that you also presented throughout your thread, and will instead focus on the big picture here. The whole time I was reading your thread, I was waiting for the triumphant finish (eg: today we're announcing that we stole Stripe's biggest customer). Instead, all I heard was that Stripe is unbeatable, which sounded quite depressing from your company's point of view. I wonder how this will make future fundraising or deal closing any easier. Another contrarian move.
I am not in a position to criticize you because clearly you've gotten very far and something that you're doing must be working. But whatever it is, it's super contrarian. So rather than presenting the Stripe-Bolt competition in the light of a mobster movie, I think a Rambo analogy would be more appropriate - a traumatized but highly skilled fighter declaring war on everyone and their grandmother.
When I joined the (Canadian) military in the mid 90s, many of the guys there cited anti-war films such as 'Apocalypse Now', 'Full Metal Jacket' and 'Platoon' as inspirations for signing up.
Nobody cited 'Rambo' or 'Top Gun'
I don’t know if hollywood has ever been anything else. I watched a documentary recently on the action movies of the 80s and 90s [1]. The part that was eye opening was the interview of Mario Kassar, who produced some of my favorite movies as a teenager in the 90s: Rambo, Total Recall, T2, Basic Instinct, etc. He talks about what he puts in his films literally like a farmer talks about grain for his pigs.
It has always been primarily a business targeting the lowest possible common denominator of the largest possible audience. And as the developed world expanded, that denominator shrank. Hence everything Marvel now.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8840400/
Why? yes they should be remembered for the atrocities they did … why change the name?
I’m always worried that if we engage in this type of cancelling we will end up with vilification and people will forget that Stalin and Hitler were also just people (and not evil looking demons).
The Taliban got a dedication on an Apollo mission and in one of the Rambo movies … now these things tend to be forgotten. It’s always better to remember and remind people about the potential of evil we (you and me) can do to other people. Leave the name, yet make sure that the article and every mention refers also to the R A F.
Consider that in Italian high school study plans, history "stops" at WW2, sometimes right after. I never got exposed to the Vietnam War as a history topic, and I've got my information like many others in my generation in Italy mostly from Rambo movies. Want another one? I had no idea Nixon bombed Cambodia secretly for five years until I visited Cambodia, also in 2017, and visited the landmine museum near Seam Reap.
Is the same true of movies where a man goes on a killing spree ala Rambo or John Wick? Or videogames where one does the same? I'm trying to suss out the logic where one indulgence of fantasy through fiction is ok and the other isn't.
I find that films from the 1950s had more realistic violence. People remembered the war. Even with a small revolver, when someone got shot, they fell down. A few decades latter you get to something like Rambo, with bullets flying, but none hit him.
I don't know if that's true. Look at the Rambo movies. The first was a harrowing story of a man dealing with ptsd. The rest were just violence porn.
It's incredibly sad that the world is not doing anything about it. Even if half of the things they say are true - putting anyone in camps for sporting a beard or praying in public, forced prison labour, physical torture, separating new borns and kids from parents in camp, sending kids to brainwashing schools, sexual abuse, organ harvesting etc - it's enough to make anyone feel disgusted at this state of affairs.
But the west won't care because of the ethnicity and religions of the victims just doesn't cause as much outrage as it should because the victims aren't white or christians. I know some of you will outraged at this suggestion but even Hollywood knows this - that's why the in one of the Rambo movies, where he is in Myanmar / Burma, the victims are Christians (instead of highlighting the real victims there, the Rohingya muslims facing persecutions - another genocide that the west prefers to turn a blind eye to).
That is cool use of AI !
Sidenote: I always had this idea for "video compression" I'm by no means an expert in compression.
1) Take like the top 10 most "VISUAL DIVERSE" movies (imagine Forrest Gump(slow drama) VS ToyStory(anime) Vs Rambo(fast paced visuals)
2) "Encode/compress"(I know these terms are not interchangeable) the movie as a "diff/ref" to the "most similar" movie from step 1
2b) This the "diff/ref" can be many forms "sliding window" over x section of y amount of frames.
3) The "end-user" or "destination" have these "10-master-movies" locally on hdd and together with the local-data can construct the original "frame" or "movie" from the compression and local-movie on disk.
Tl;DR Try to compress a new movie by saying "the top corner of frame 1-120" is very similar to MasterMovie-2-FrameXYZ-Frame-ABC
4)
Sylvester Stallone made a film about the plight of the Karen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rambo_(2008_film)
People dismiss it as just another (bloody) action movie, but it's not - it's a moral and political condemnation
First - you've misused the term 'technocracy' is. A 'technocracy' is not government based on technology - it's a government run by 'elite experts'.
Second - "We are not willing to give up liberties regardless of the benefits of the technology."
This makes no sense. It's like a line from a Rambo film. Communities trade liberties for benefits all the time.
Suppose police could clear 100% of murder crimes if we all consented to having our fingerprints taken. We we then do that? Probably. So long as there were no other ill effects.
This arbitrary notion of 'freedom' completely abnegates the fact that people live in communities with other people. Everything is a tradeoff. Absolutely everything.
Go ahead and use your chainsaw at 1 am in the city and see how 'free' you are to do such a simple thing as trim a hedge when you please. Or do it naked in the front yard.
Second - both these comments have shades of fear of the unknown.
This is the same kind of uproar people had about 'finger prints', 'DNA' and possibly 'seat belts'.
Both DNA and fingerprinting have been used expansively and widely for law enforcement, we generally accept their use, and are better to understand the parameters of them.
Using AI on a case by case basis in fact - is considerably less invasive.
Your fingerprint and DNA are semi-private bits of information.
You face is de-facto public.
Using 'AI' is no more 'technological' than any thing else, frankly, the term 'AI' is misleading because there is nothing special about it.
We could very well frame it as 'database search'.
---> The police took video footage from the crime scene and identified three possible suspects to the database one of the assailants was found to have the gun used to commit the crime.
It's ridiculous to assert there's something wrong here, let alone some kind of fundamentally new way of policing.
As for 'arbitrary surveillance' - that's another thing entirely. We don't have camera speed traps in a lot of places, that's fine, that's one application of technology.
I suggest we don't need broad surveillance either, but that has little to do with AI.
Crime is a real thing, cases unsolved and criminals unpunished definitely represent 'injustice' and so we need to use the tools we have to make the world a better place.
>Film and TV editors across Los Angeles were sweating Monday evening as their workstations were refusing to reboot
The irony of something refusing to reboot in Hollywood. Hopefully the production of Star Wars 12, Rambo 8 and Terminator 9 has not been too disrupted.
Hollywood investors are some of the most risk-averse types ever. If it pays x% return fairly predictably, they're going to keep making the same things over and over until it doesn't. For example, I also saw today that yet another Rambo movie is about to be released. Forty years of profits, can't argue with that!
I don't think there's many from that crowd who invest in tech startups.
I think we should consider whether the American movie theater experience is really the best way to share video entertainment in a communal fashion.
One anecdote to consider:
Back in 2005 I went to India on business. While there in the city of Hyderabad, a local contractor that I was working with invited me to visit the village where his grandparents lived. We went to the village which was several hours drive from Hyderabad (something like 8 hours or more ... I don't remember exactly). The village was a completely different environment than Hyderabad ... very humid, but green and beautiful. And very few people spoke English there (which is relevant as you'll see).
In that village there was a kind of communal video hall run by a local entrepreneur. He basically had computer projector (I think it was 720p resolution ... nothing fancy) connected to a computer and a rudimentary PA system.
Starting at around 6pm or so, after people in the village had had their supper, he would start showing films. It was whatever he felt like showing or whatever people paid him to play.
My host was kind of a big man in the village, since he was from the city, and much more well to do. He was shown a lot of deference. My host asked the theater owner to play a movie that I would enjoy ... and the theater owner decided to play Rambo.
It was very clear that everyone in the village had seen the movie before ... probably many times before.
People talked with each other during the film. Some of the men were smoking (which I wasn't a fan of). And it was hot and humid.
But god damn if it wasn't the best action movie screening of my life. Everyone was commenting and cheering for Stallone ... and nobody knew what the hell Stallone was saying directly ... but there was kind of a really bad audio running in Telugu on top of the English audio ... which I can only assume was a local translation recorded over the original audio.
At one point Stallone has a bow and arrow and shoots a guy with a grenade tip ... and the guy explodes. Not something I'd want my kid to see ... but there were kids from 5 to 15 cheering and hollering like he'd scored a goal in a tournament or something.
Really an enjoyable experience.
Maybe we just need smaller, nearer, more locally tailored theaters.
Speaking of propaganda, can we talk about how good the movies Wolf Warrior and Wolf Warrior 2 is? Both films feature Chinese military protagonists and both films feature western villains.
These films remind me of Rambo even including the jingoistic pro-nation-of-origin message.
I think the international market accepted Rambo because they thought USA was cool. I wonder if we will find ourselves consuming “Chinakana” (riff on “Americana”) when we think China is “cool.”
Being good is evidently boring...
I added a few examples in another comment. Even Rambo sacrificed his own safety and freedom to help rescue POWs.
Modern day heroes are all a bunch of whining self-centered children. Just go watch any super hero movie today for a good example of that.
It's almost a badge of honor to be morally ambiguous. Compare a list of protaganists, how many are anti-heros? Do we even have any real good guys in movies and tv these days? Even Superman has been turned into a murderer for this generation.
A few examples from popular TV:
Walking Dead: everyone is a murderer. Murder is justified consistently.
Billions: It's hard to know who to root for, they are all rotten. The righteous people are the "bad guys"
Scrubs: All the characters are morally bankrupt (compared to 30 years before it's time)
Ironman: A selfish rich asshole.
Batman: (ok, he was always an anti-hero from day 1)
Deadpool: Do I need to explain this one?
Wicked: A play about how the evil witch is misunderstood.
The Shield, The Wire, modern Star Trek vs old Star Trek, the list is too long...
There has always been corruptions, lack of morals. That's not my issue, it's that today, there simply isn't even close to a minority of actual real main protagonists that are selfless.
I think people find good people trying to do what is right just boring these days.
/rant
I wonder if that could be applied to film/tv. Is Rambo bannable? Can gaming channels be banned?
The problem is that application of the term 'genocide' is subject to endless, recursive, despicable politics at the UN.
I wish there was (forcible) injection of ideas from computer science and mathematics into politics. An example, for this case: a subset of general language that could describe a political or humanitarian situation in unambiguous terms, so that there could be no 'wriggle room' for politicians to shirk their duties. (Herbert's Dune featured a 'battle' language.)
And signatories to the UN should be compelled to adhere to a set of clearly defined moral principles, to open the way for action to be taken immediately against violators.
Sure, I've been criticized many times for such 'simplistic' ideas, but why shouldn't it be this simple??
Here's some other genocidal activity taking place right now: Turkey against the Kurds, Russia against the Caucasian peoples (Chechnya, Dagestan, etc.).
Incidentally, Stallone's most recent Rambo movie (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rambo_(2008_film)) addressed the brutality of the Burmese regime. He wasn't afraid to speak out, 9 years ago.
It probably will be.
The key difference between the Iraq ops and the Vietnam War is the lack of a draft. Iraq wasn't nationally felt the same way Vietnam was; such a film would have its audience, but you're actually lacking the overall cultural zeitgeist that Rambo was able to tap into.
Even though I agree with all the points made by the author, the notion of 10x programmer reminds me of one-man army movies like Rambo and it's equally ridiculous. Software development is a collaborative effort, not a contest where whoever commits more LOC or finishes more tasks wins. It's not that hard to be 10 times more productive than anyone else if you built something from the scratch, possibly reinventing the wheel instead of using common libraries/frameworks, wrote no documentation and you're not really willing to share your knowledge with other developers. Sadly, this happens - see e.g. http://thedailywtf.com/articles/the-inner-json-effect [edit: added link]
You should look up what the movie Rambo is actually about. It's an interesting and important story.
> The Chinese have a "face saving is the most important thing" culture, and the US does not. Think of it more like the tribal regions of the -stans: China is metaphorically ready to do some honor killing over this in a way we can't grok.
Please, can we ditch the outdated stereotypes? The Chinese govt uses the parallel tropes to the US ("we've suffered under years of foreign domination" "Here we're on an anti-corruption campaign so you don't have to suffer under unnecessary taxes" etc. And funding local SoEs to keep the jobs flowing).
Is make America Great Again any different? "Other countries are laughing at us." "We never win any more""We're going to bring back coal"
I just picked MAGA because it was a recent successful platform. But consider dispassionately: 15 years ago a small bunch of bandits killed 3000 people and cause a few billion in property damage. IN return the US has spent trillions killing people who had nothing to do with it in order to to restore its honor. Movies from Rambo to Shooter to anything by Chuck Norris are simply ways to pander to loss of face.
Of course there are differences between the two but let's stick to facts.
The "how" is more defining than the "what". All bloody kill-em-all movies contain bad one liners, swearing, guts, as-much-almost-nudity-as-allowed-on-tv, etc. But there's a difference between any Tarantino movie and some all-star Rambo-like movie which came out this year.
Modern policing seems to be moving more in the Rambo direction, if we're picking Stallone movies.
> But the "action hero" died a while ago.
As a 30-something guy the main issue I had with Avengers 2 (just to pick the latest mainstream action movie example) was the blatant product placement which had no logic (like driving an Audi convertible in the midst of a gunfight scene). Plus, there was too much talking, I almost felt asleep mid-way through the movie. I'm not a comic-books aficionado, so I didn't particularly care about any of the characters, I just wanted some good action.
Compare that with "Predator" or the "Rocky" or "Rambo" series. Lots of good action, lots of "this is damn cool!" feeling without much thinking or non-sense talking. And "Last Action Hero", the movie, was indeed genius, like its director, John McTiernan.
Not only is the hacking and programming in most screen flicks fake or far from reality, it also continues to amaze me how some shows are completely dependent on the falsehood that some people can use a computer to hack, mine and get everything they want as long as it has a keyboard.
Take for example "Criminal Minds". It is about a group of profilers at the FBI who catch serial killers. There is this one girl on the team who consistently manages to find out ANYTHING with the computer she owns and greatly assists the team of profilers; she can access ANY database on ANY computer. So the team says "give me a list of people with x and y from z between 2000 and 2002" and she gets it (after, of course, fast scrolling green text on a black background).
Rambo movies must give the same feeling to people in the military. A scene which might be cringe-worthy to anyone in tech:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqtbN_VHXVA
Rambo screenings would likely have a better effect, myself and others often get so pumped up by action movies we're one wrong tone of voice from going postal. Hijackers wouldn't stand a chance in such an airplane.
"the goal of airport security is"
to provide security theater. It would be a heck of a lot cheaper and more effective to just play rambo movies on the inflight entertainment system.
What is more, a large section of SKoreans yearn for the reunification. Presumably, there are many in the North that feel the same. This is one of the problems with Governments getting to be the "mouthpiece" for an entire society. Given the way "democracy" works, you tend to get overly solvent, largely isolated ideologues as your representatives. These folks come exclusively from the wealthiest families, and are therefore more inclined to maintain the status quo.
Regardless of the posturing of both sides governments, Korea is one country with a grievous split artificially placed between the two by the warring strongmen placed in their positions by superpowers with limited or non-existent information about the native culture.
I would also like to point out something we tend to forget here. The losses on both sides (excluding UN/Americans) were immense. The climate, terrain, and technology coincided to create massive casualties and widespread suffering. After a shaky armistice, the US just kind of left, but the war never ceased. We as typical Americans feel as if bygones should be bygones (we tend to be best friends with the countries we fight... afterwords, of course), but we oftentimes fail to take into account the massive list of dead.
Anecdote: i was hanging out with a Vietnamese friend from high school and we were (unaccountably) watching Rambo 7 or something (whichever one is the newest/most embarrassing) and we ere both growing increasingly uncomfortable. I kept making comments about cinematography and acting, whilst my buddy just grew more and more aghast. Finally we turned it off. I went on at great length about all the technical reasons i thought the film was poor. Finally, my friend pointed out the amount of Filipino extras that were slaughtered by that 'roided asshole with the wrecked face. And that was it. That was "all" that bothered him. I never really realized before that moment just how callus American storytelling is to the lives of Asians and their struggles. "We" literally killed so many Koreans and Asians in certain battles that left stacks of dead higher than a man stands. Untold numbers were left to die from maneuvers alone.
I do not say this to inspire guilt or launch a recriminatory flame war, but i think it is important that we all consider why the North is so damned sullen and obnoxious. The ear of blaming everything on "communism" needs to end.
> It's like having "authentic" weapons and "authentic" unit names in a Rambo movie. At the end of the day, it's more fetishism than anything else.
Precisely.
> I was referring more to atmospheric and thematic authenticity.
I understand what you mean, but the mechanics do detract from any perceived authenticity. It's like having "authentic" weapons and "authentic" unit names in a Rambo movie. At the end of the day, it's more fetishism than anything else.
> Either way, entertainment which utilizes ongoing conflicts has the potential to leave a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths. It comes off as trashy if poorly executed.
CoD is not known for its nuanced approached in this regard.
> Regarding ArmA, although it has vastly more realistic mechanics, it's not really a valid comparison due to a lack of virtually any story or narrative at all. It's more of a simulation sandbox at heart, albeit a sterile one.
I don't know about ArmA, but Operation Flashpoint: Resistance had a decent story. I heard good things about the "episodic" Arma III campaign as well.
I like your analysis of the incentives to do it, it reminded me that there is another place where it is used, Entertainment. Projects are pitched as "this is the Rambo for Millenials" or "This is Bonanza in Space."
So in those cases there is an attempt to transfer some of the success 'aura' of the brand name to the pitched project. No one pitches a movie saying its like "Heaven's Gate" :-) and I suppose nobody pitches a startup as "The Color for Dog Walkers."
Not watching Disney movies is cultural/social death. Don't do that to your kid.
I'm all for good role models. But bad models are useful to, so the kid knows it's bad behavior, especially when they are likely to run into that culture anyway (as is the case with role models). All the kid will see is that you won't allow them to see what the rest of America has. Any moral message will be secondary. So you might as well ensure that they learn the lessons correctly the first time.
And no, they don't need to see Rambo, but Rambo isn't likely to be relevant to their lives if we're discussing Disney movies. I strongly believe things like Disney are crucial for kids.
-I'm barely recovering from a childhood of only PBS allowed and I feel entirely disconnected from my generation whenever we talk about culture before 2003. All I remember is from watching The News Hour about Bill Clinton having sex and bombing places and reading about nsync on the back of juice boxes. Don't do that, it's not healthy.
Why call out Disney for such special treatment. Should he do similar with the Rambo series?
Not watching Disney movies seems like a perfectly reasonable response to the content of Disney movies. There is no shortage of other things to watch.
On a recent visit to the states I got to try out Netflix, and on being told you could watch any film you wanted was very impressed.
Turned out there are only certain categories of film (i.e. the ones that would be on daytime tv..) you can watch on "freeplay" and anything good you have to wait for a DVD in the post.
No wonder its cheap. Was still better than the adverts every 8 mins while watching Rambo on a cable channel though.
Strange. My first reaction is that the auto-complete was so bad that it, alone, would keep me from ever returning. I typed in "Ran" (the last film I saw), and then I had to click a tiny down-arrow about 25 times, and the down-arrow jumps around as you go. What takes "3 letters + return + click" on IMDB, took "3 letters + 25 precise clicks + return" on Nanocrowd. Autocomplete is usually an optional assist; here, it's more like a mandatory in-place search system with awkward controls.
I would have left a note about this (and other issues), but their only feedback mechanisms seem to be email or logging in to Blogger.
It may be the coolest recommendation algorithm ever, but from these first two things I tried, the interface seems fairly high-overhead. You need to hook me before I'll go for high-overhead. You need to convince me that you're more valuable than, say, simply listing other films by the same director. For "Ran", Nanocrowd recommends "Rambo" -- 'nough said. :-)