Hacker Cinema
Rear Window
1954 · Film · 113 min
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
A wheelchair-bound photographer spies on his neighbors from his apartment window and becomes convinced one of them has committed murder.
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19 comments on Hacker News
Rear Window? A movie from 1954? Can you explain how that was better in 4K when the footage isn't even 4K?
You're missing out on resolution (4K) and picture quality (HDR, contrast ratios, color gamut) improvements by doing this.
Not everyone suffers from FOMO.
I've only seen one movie that was worth the bother and expense of seeing it in 4K (Rear Window).
The rest of the things you mention are mostly for a very small slice of theoretical people with perfect vision in perfectly lit rooms at the perfect height and viewing angle.
Beyond icons on a sticker checklist, they mean nothing to the 99% of people who just want to watch sportsball or eat popcorn while watching Disney films with their kids.
You can put lipstick on a pig, but most people are still watching pigs.
That's an interesting point of comparison. Games have that element of interaction that makes it different from a movie or a book in terms of how well it ages. For all sorts of technical reasons, even though Doom invented a lot of the genre, it doesn't really hold up the same way as, say, watching Rear Window or reading le Carre does for movies or fiction.
Yeah or Hitchcock's Rear Window. Even though they built actual buildings apparently, the backdrop of the sky is clearly a painting. These movies were not meant for modern resolutions.
Still, I don't think it really takes away from the movie. But with others of the same era that weren't such masterpieces it's more annoying.
The analog nature of film and its degradation along with the imperfection of human memory mean we can't really know for sure exactly how, for example, Lawrence of Arabia looked on the big screen in its contemporary transfers.
It depends on the source material.
As luck would have it, I just recently got the 4K Blu-ray of Lawrence of Arabia, and it is very very grainy. Much more so than the 4K version of Rear Window, though that has a lot of noticeable grain.
Fortunately, some theaters still occasionally show classics like these, so when Lawrence comes around, we should find out. Hopefully. Assuming it comes in on big reels of film, and not over a digital link.
What you're saying starting with Leica, and then "Nikon came along" is at the root of my comments about this article. There are more than 40 years of innovation between the ur-Leica in 1914 and the Nikon F. For a famous example, have a look at the movie "Rear Window" (1954), specifically the still shots of Jimmy Stewart's character using an Exakta with a very long telephoto lens. The SLR made long lenses practical in a compact camera. But Nikon wasn't there first.
The Nikon SLRs picked up a reputation after being used by professional photographers to cover the Vietnam war years after the release of the first Nikon F. Were they professional cameras before professionals started using them?
I have failed to mention the Asahi-Pentax, released in 1957, which had everything the Nikon had two years later. Why is the Nikon F the first professional 35mm camera? What made it special enough to obscure years of camera development?
It was less fun for me because I haven't seen many of those movies. If it were 100% classics it would be more fun IMO. Not classic as in old, just most popular. On the other hand who gives a shit what I think. This person probably just generated the images for their favorite movies.
For the ones I did know, I almost always could see a similarity to the "feel" of the movie. But the Rear Window one?? What happened there? Didn't capture the "feel" whatsoever IMO. Of course there are windows but it looks more like a backalley in Japan. The color palette is way off.
Tangentially related, this AI image generation account on Twitter never ceases to fascinate me. Many of the photos are seeded with an initial image however, which reduces the magic/specialness for me a bit: https://twitter.com/images_ai
This description immediately called to mind Rear Window for me, which largely takes place in a single apartment and is widely considered a classic film.
But ironic pedantry aside, I do agree people need to get out. Even as a homebody I find myself getting grumpy if I don't get out for some sun and fresh air once in a while.
>No Psycho by Hitchcock but 3 other movies by him?
Not like my opinion matters (nor does Mr. Lee's, in the grand scheme of things), but Psycho probably isn't in my top 3 Hitchcock films, either.
Vertigo, The Birds, Rear Window for me. Consider Notorious, North by Northwest, Strangers on a Train, Dial M for Murder...there are quite a few permutations, taste dependent.
Really? Rear Window always seemed like a script that would be ideally served as a play (i.e. not many scene changes) that Hitchcock had adapted well to a movie.
The list is for aspiring filmmakers, not necessarily just good movies. I can see why Rear Window made it to the list, because it's a script that is ideally made for the movie medium, for example.
Comparing to Citizen Kane seems unfair as it's not an action movie. So here are some other action movies. (NB: There are multiple entries for some of these but I'm not listing them all).
Die Hard 4.5 Die Hard 2 3.1 Die Hard 3 1.8 Armageddon 2.2 -- at least he's ben consistently on the quick side Total Recall 3.7 -- original, 1990 Robocop 3.7 -- original Haywire 6 And I keep trying to search for movies they don't have in the database. So certainly for action movies (1980+), at least for some popular ones, the ASL isn't out of the ordinary.
But then I searched for Alfred Hitchcock and got some interesting results. This database has many duplicate entries and some wildly different values. The Skin Game had 3 entries at about the same time (17.1, 17.3, 17.4). However, Rear Window has an entry at 3.7 and another at 8.8, and several at 10.5. I suppose I need to read about their methodology to understand why there's so much variance.
As I understand it, Rear Window Captioning Systems specifically don't modify the actual film of the movie. That's their advantage over baked-in captions.
Wikipedia suggests that it costs more like $40 per minute. For movies anyway.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rear_Window_Captioning_System
I have no idea why it would be "even less if you do it yourself", unless you do not value your own labour.
Vertigo (1958) SFAIK was the only Hitchcock film set in San Francisco. Rear Window was set in Greenwich Village, though it was reportedly inspired by a stay by Hitchcock in a Jackson Heights garden apartment.
Sounds like a contemporary twist on Hitchcock's Rear Window. (A great film!)
This is a large category.
There are tricky cases of defensible portrayals of sex involving children, e.g. Schlöndorff's adaptation of The Tin Drum (which was banned in Canada as child pornography), and narratives that document the child sex industry, but they are rare by comparison. With artistically and morally defensible portrayals of rape, the range is huge. sspiff mentions A Clockwork Orange; even Jeffrey Archer (former senior Tory politician) wrote a novel with a rape scene. I also recall that when Virginia Bottomley (another former senior Tory politician) was asked to name her favourite film, she named Hitchcock's Rear Window, which is quite voyeuristic, and Hitchcock has filmed what I would class as morally indefensible rape scenes. The idea that moral guardians go about forbidding various classes of transgressive art forms that they themselves admit to enjoying is quite ironic.
For the sake of having some sort of a list: Bandit Queen, Deliverance, and Leaving Las Vegas all have hard-to-watch, defensible, and narratively necessary rape scenes. The victim in Bandit Queen I think was supposed to be prepubescent. And didn't Slumdog Millionaire have a child rape scene?
I like that you ask for mindfck movies. They definitely hold a special place in my heart. A lot of the entries here have been very sci-fi. I tend to like more historical or present-day dramas with great acting that expose some sort of undesirable human behavior, but I snuck a sci-fi movie on the list ;). You can't take the nerd out of the cinephile!
There Will Be Blood - No "great movie" list is complete without a movie that stars Daniel Day Lewis. Go watch all his movies if you want to see what it's like to take acting to the extreme.
(M) The Spanish Prisoner - Probably my favorite suspense movie, along with a Hitchcock or two like Vertigo or Rear Window. This is one of David Mamet's best, in my opinion. All these random things happen in the beginning of the movie that make you question why they bothered mentioning them, and then the catalytic action ties it all together expertly.
Pirates of Silicon Valley - This is the lightest contribution on the list, but probably the most relevant to HN. For what it's worth, both Woz and Bill Gates have described their portrayals as fairly accurate.
Alien - Definitely plays out more like a space horror film than an action movie like the sequels, the acting and suspense is fantastic, not to mention the costume work that went into the alien on the part of HR Giger (if you want a true mindfck, skip the movies and go read his website--terrifying).
Grave of the Fireflies - I wanted to include an animated film on my list, but I really had trouble deciding between Interstella 5555 (Daft Punk's Discovery set to an anime with no talking whatsoever. Great concept) and a Pixar movie (personal favorite: Up). I went with this because I figured you've probably seen Pixar movies. Grave of the Fireflies is a super depressing Ghibli film about the aftermath of the Kobe fire bombings in WW2. The way the movie shows the horrible living conditions and bleak outcomes of the two main characters (the boy is in his early teens and his sister must be around 4 or 5--I can't recall). The movie manipulates your emotions more than any other film I've included on this list. I don't think I've ever had as strong an emotional reaction to a movie as when I saw this one.
I posted this on the site, posting it here too:
I would say a better metric would be "How much did you enjoy this film?" vs "How good is this movie?"
I've been grappling with this problem since subscribing to Netflix, wondering how I should rate a movie I personally did not enjoy that I also felt was incredibly well made. For example, "A Clockwork Orange" is an incredible movie by all means and I would give it 97 stars out of a hundred.... but I hated every single second of it. It's gruesome, sadistic, dark, miserable, and disgusting. But it was undeniably well made.
Rewatchability sucks in the aspect because many movies can't be rewatched, while still being both splendidly produced and enjoyable. Let me make this clearer with examples: "The Sixth Sense," "Rear Window," "The Accused," "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," "12 Angry Men," "Apollo 13..." The list goes on and on. There are great movies that just don't rank so highly because they're SUSPENSEFUL and that suspense doesn't translate will into rewatches. Rewatching suspenseful movies will make them seem boring and long-drawn.
Rewatching feel-good movies ("Seven Pounds," "How To Train Your Dragon," "Blind Side," etc.) however, is just as good the second time if not better.
tl;dr the rewatchability index will be heavily skewed towards feel-good favorites and epics, and away from dark, gritty, mysterious, and suspenseful. Not a good index.