Hacker Cinema
Rocky
1976 · Film · 120 min
Part of Rocky Collection
Directed by John G. Avildsen
Rocky Balboa is a Philadelphia club fighter who seems to be going nowhere. But when a stroke of fate puts him in the ring with a world heavyweight champion, Rocky knows that it's his one shot at the big time — a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to go the distance and come out a winner!
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63 comments on Hacker News
Interesting, I've never seen more than two 4-wire Skycams used in an NFL broadcast (at least that I knew of). Given the need for flexible endzone to endzone coverage of NFL games, I'd imagine sectioned arrangements might be better suited for concerts, etc. The gratuitous two Skycams tracking each other shot is always fun. Just saw another one in recent weeks as they were discussing the retirement of a long-time Skycam operator.
I was going to mention the linear point-to-point 'Sidecams' but I haven't seen them used much the last season and was wondering if they've fallen out of favor. I'd guessed they might get in the sight lines of the primary cameras in many stadiums.
I actually got to briefly meet Garret at a long-ago NAB show. As not only the inventor but the operator on so many incredible film shots, the dude's a legend. IIRC correctly he did the Rocky on the steps and The Shining maze shots himself.
Look up Lost Cause of the Confederacy. Perhaps the biggest celebration of the losing side in history. Or the first Rocky movie.
> Americans only support the underdog when the underdog wins in the end.
By that definition the by far most cited example on the British side, Dunkirk, doesn’t count because Britain won in the end.
No one celebrates someone who was defeated if the defeat wasn’t memorable. Usually that was because it was an inspiration to rally a cause that was later successful.
Plenty of white people celebrate Custer. Search for “Custer statue” or drive around out west and see how many paintings of Custer’s last stand you can spot hanging in bars.
> what happens if you have a work where e.g. the music and the script were written by different people?
This happens ALL THE TIME. 2001 A Space Odyssey, Heavy Metal (1981-Blue Oyster Cult), Rocky (1976) airing on TV without Eye of the Tiger, It's a Wonderful Life was public domain but distributors needed to pay for the soundtrack. TV shows like Married with Children and Dave airing in syndication with different opening theme songs. etc.
All over archive.org you'll find tons of classic films but with the soundtracks stripped out.
And that this happened with the theme from Rocky playing (a film franchise in which an American underdog beats up a Russian super-athlete), and there were broken plastic robot bits left on the floor... it really, really does seem like a comedy skit.
Missing Pulsar from Pulsations Night Club outside Philadelphia. In the 80's, it would deliver cocaine and cocktails to people. I think that it was also the robot from one of the Rocky movies too.
https://youtu.be/uB4FqfIX9JY?si=VokrpZM8xAhLxdVN&t=184
Crazy times growing up back then.
Ask Russian-speakers to recommend a fun iconic movie to watch, and Ivan Vasilievich comes up all the time. I don’t see why, but it does.
Diamond Hand too.
It would be ridiculous if the same were true about Hollywood.
A Russian asks an American what movies to watch, and 8 out of 10 people go back to 1969 to recommend the same one? Impossible.
You’d get everything from Citizen Kane to Hitchcock to Rocky, etc. But you’d also get about 150 great picks from the 80s and 90s, and another dozen from after 2000.
And forget the greats. You’d get Zoolander, Demolition Man, Total Recall, Gremlins, Scream, John Wick, Legally Blonde even… there’s such a wide pool of fun iconic popcorn movies for any person.
Not to mention your Star Wars/Trek/Gate.
These movies aren’t “good” in the sense of being art. They’re good in the sense of people wanting to watch them.
Every n years I rewatch Commando, Con-Air, The Last Starfighter, etc just for kicks. It’s not pure nostalgia- they’re fun movies.
With int’l movies from any given country the list of recommendations is extremely shallow. It’s always one or two iconic revelations from a given decade. Or a couple auteur directors who won all the awards for their think-pieces about the human condition.
I had a friend whose home was full of movie memorabilia. The boxing shorts from Rocky, the journal from Raiders of the Lost Ark, props from Star Wars, etc. all professionally displayed in shadowboxes along with autographs and photos.
The only thing is that they were all fake. My friend's hobby wasn't collecting memorabilia, it was making fakes. He was quite open about the fact that none of it was real and would happily describe how he created each piece.
"Groundhog day" of course
most of Schwarzenegger movies because he is cool
Back to the future trilogy
Fight club
Some of the best soviet ones (Kin-dza-dza, Garage, Mimino, Irony of fate etc.)
Rocky
Forrest gump
I have a handful of "regulars" that I watch repeatedly. Most of them are at the point now that I've seen them so many times that they can work as "background noise" when I'm coding or doing something else. IOW, I can turn the volume down fairly low and it serves a purpose, but I'm so familiar with the story already that I'm not likely to get drawn into actually paying attention to the movie (as opposed to whatever I'm working on) unless I'm at a point where I need a break anyway.
Some of the ones that are on that list for me:
The Matrix
The Matrix Resurrections
The Social Network
Inception
Sneakers
Hackers
Antitrust
Rad
Tron: Legacy
Vision Quest
Rocky (really the entire Rocky franchise)
The Karate Kid
Kickboxer
Bloodsport
Hard To Kill
Above The Law
I'm tired of this particular brand of Think Piece that seems to be en vogue right now, which attempts to attribute all manner of ills to external forces. I doubt most people fail at personal transformation because movie montages and "marketers" led them to believe it would be easy, I think most people fail because it is really really hard to achieve. Getting permission to blame it on Rocky et al is more appealing than blaming yourself, but I would bet that in an alternate universe where training montages didn't exist very little would be different..
See also:
How 'The Karate Kid' Ruined The Modern World (2010)
https://www.cracked.com/article_18544_how-the-karate-kid-ruined-modern-world.html
"I think The Karate Kid ruined the modern world. Not just that movie, but all of the movies like it (you certainly can't let the Rocky sequels escape blame). Basically any movie with a training montage.
You know what I'm talking about; the main character is very bad at something, then there is a sequence in the middle of the film set to upbeat music that shows him practicing. When it's done, he's an expert. ...
Every adult I know--or at least the ones who are depressed--continually suffers from something like sticker shock (that is, when you go shopping for something for the first time and are shocked to find it costs way, way more than you thought). Only it's with effort. It's Effort Shock.
We have a vague idea in our head of the "price" of certain accomplishments, how difficult it should be to get a degree, or succeed at a job, or stay in shape, or raise a kid, or build a house. And that vague idea is almost always catastrophically wrong.
Accomplishing worthwhile things isn't just a little harder than people think; it's 10 or 20 times harder."
---
Effort Shock and Reward Shock (2014)
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/07/09/effort-shock-and-reward-shock/
"The good news is what I’ve started calling reward shock. In some (not all) domains, it is more than enough to offset effort shock.
When you overcome effort shock for a non-trivial learning project and get through it anyway, despite doubts about whether it is worth it, you can end up with very unexpected rewards that go far beyond what you initially thought you were earning. This is because so few people get through effort shock to somewhere worthwhile that when you do it, you end up in sparsely populated territory where further gains through continued application from the earned skill can be very high.
Programming, writing and math are among the skills where there you get both significant effort shock and significant reward shock."
No, I confuse nothing, you have Hollywood-induced brain rot :)
The purpose of a movie is not to entertain. Or rather, that is one possible and valid and fine purpose, but it is certainly not the only such purpose. To believe that it is, THAT is the real confusion.
The difference between a documentary and a movie isn't about purpose, it's about method: how they try to get at the truth. The documentary tries to do it by looking at a specific case; the movie (and fiction in general) tries to get at truth via an imagined aggregate (although of course usually embodied in a single fictional character, like Rocky).
You seem to be mixing documentary and movie. To me at least they are different.
The purpose of a documentary is to educate viewers. If people are not entertained that is okay, but if the don't go away educated in some way it failed.
The purpose of a movie is to entertain, so it if isn't entertaining it also isn't good. It might also be educational, but that isn't the purpose.
What documentary directors know is that if you are not at least somewhat entertaining viewers will not watch and so they put in some entertainment aspects even though that isn't the purpose. Movie directors know that they need not tell the truth, though often they will just because viewers will believe the movie and potentially change behavior despite that not being intended and so morally they sometime feel a need to show someone doing something that works even though it isn't required and some do not.
Of course where the line is, is often blurry. Some movies are intended as documentary except that they are propaganda and so we would call them fiction. Many documentary are primarily entertainment, with the minimum education to claim documentary.
Rocky was clearly intended as an entertaining movie. The directors put enough effort into finding truth about boxing training that you won't go too wrong treating it as a documentary - but if you really want to be a boxer there are better sources to learn how and you will discover some things they got wrong for plot reasons.
Watching Rocky run up the stairs every day might well be boring for long stretches, especially to people not used to looking closely and patiently at the world, but that's fine. It would elevate the movie into something fundamentally better than what it is. A movie need not be entertaining to be good; in trying to be entertaining, it often makes itself worse, and worse, makes its viewers worse.
I was talking to a guy years and years back and my dad said to ask him about when he played in the NFL. Older guy. He lights up and says: “now this was back before anyone got paid anything to play football. We weren’t making anything but it was fun and we were allowed to hit real hard. I had a friend on the team who said ‘man I’m getting out of here… I’m gonna be an actor.’ Well, we’re all just a bunch meatheads but he was the only good looking guy… couple of years later I’m watching some boxing movie and there he is as Apollo Creed in Rocky”
We started to get a lot of the classic movies in the 70s (Taxi Driver, Godfather, Star Wars, Halloween, Blazing Saddles, Rocky, Alien, Clockwork Orange, Exorcist, Jaws, Apocalypse Now just to name a few) and the 80s went absolutely wild and - particularly - far more broad. The kids films from the 80s didn't really exist before then (outside of Disney).
In the 50s/60s there were less (but still some of per personal faves) and the dominant genres (Westerns particularly) have been out of fashion for at least 40 years now.
For me personally that’s a nightmare. I don’t like to dwell in the past too much. But there are always people I know personally, who can remember some very precise things of the past (e.g. me wearing something very common and usual during some very common and usual event at, say, school). Whilst I cannot even remember the event took place at all, so usual it was. They not gaslight me, I know, as with their reminders I can remember some minuscule details. But I see them themselves as someone living in the past way too much. ‘Good ol’ days,’ you know. I’m not a very enlightened person myself, but this living in the past is way too much for me.
That’s what I feel about re-watching some shitty movie over and over again. Even cult ones, like Rocky, original Star Wars, Terminator etc. It feels way too much for me. A tiny dose of nostalgia once a few years maybe, that’s okay. But being there over and over, nah.
Conversely: people are basically forgetting "John Wayne" (to name a larger-than-life character of recent memory).
I made a reference a few years ago to "Let's put on the 'Theme Song from Rocky' and get this done!" (in reference to having figured out a bugfix or something for the project of the day), and I was met with blank stares by my (admittedly younger) co-workers. It really kindof broke me for a second that something that was _such_ a cultural phenomenon is currently "unimportant" or "irrelevant".
If "The Theme Song from Rocky" can be forgotten, what chance do I have of making an indelible mark on life?
Maybe John Wayne movies still come on every once in a while, but as a global community, we're losing a lot of "broadcast shared culture" in favor of "unicast, A/B-tested, divisive entertainment", and specifically "entertainment" rather than "culture".
So don't focus on making an indelible mark on life-at-large, or being a larger-than-life character like John Wayne... but instead focus on making positive impacts to the people closest to you, and especially yourself.
<3
This is what happens when you people are too young to have seen the Rocky movies. Rocky doesn't need an expensive bike + subscription. He uses his body and public parks to grind himself into fitness.
Cost: zero.
Fitness outcome: tons better than you.
Some receivers have “dialogue boost” or otherwise let you adjust each channel individually.
More and more we just leave subtitles on, as too much dialog is easy to lose in the rest of the sound. I think it’s also a difference in how movies are made now; compare the pacing of Rocky with anything modern. Older movies stop the action to dialog; modern movies have quips over explosions
"A series based on “The Last of Us”, a post-apocalyptic game, seems to be a critical success. Sonic the Hedgehog was among last year’s biggest films and Mario is likely to be among this year’s. Nintendo is opening a new Mario theme park next month—in Hollywood, no less."
For a second, I just imagined how bad would be the Disney version of Mario or Rocky Balboa. Disney is one company that probably few of us were going to miss if they go broke... unfortunately.
Just because a movie looks better doesn’t mean it is a better movie. There has been trash made during all eras, but today is about volume, not quality, so finding the gems is much harder and frustrating.
Do we really need to have another movie about super heroes or another movie about rescuing some retiring tough guy’s kid from a bad guy? Or another movie that spends the first half rotating between character building scenes filled with silly, rote dialogue and no story line? Or another movie that takes an old, tired story and simply replaces the characters with a new set of characters intended to signal the importance of a particular demographic group? Or another Jurassic Park, Hangover, Rocky, Transformer, Terminator, Star Wars clone? Yawn.
For folks who don't want to click, the argument is Indiana Jones didn't have an impact on the outcome of the story; the Nazis still would have found the arc and died in the end.
It's an amusing idea, but I've always thought it was weird to call it a problem with the movie, as it would apply to the protagonist in a bunch of movies (spoilers abound in this extremely random assortment of movies off the top of my head):
* If Kurt Russel's character hadn't been in The Thing, everything that happened still would have happened
* If Harry and Sally hadn't been in When Harry Met Sally, New York would still be Yorking
* If Florence Pugh's character hadn't gone to Sweden in Midsommar, the tourists still would have died
* If Richard Dreyfuss's character hadn't been in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the aliens still would have made contact, dropped off their old passengers, and picked up new passengers
* If Scott Pilgrim hadn't been in Scott Pilgrim, everyone would probably still just be hanging out more or less the same
* If Matt Damon's character hadn't been in The Martian, they would have all still ended up back on Earth
* If Rocky Balboa hadn't been in Rocky, probably two other people would have boxed and one of them would have won
To each their own, but for my money good stories are about character journeys, not about... I dunno, like, an accounting of what changed during the movie.
> I think this can only be taken to a point before you realise you'll be wasting your time.
If a waste of time is lack of progress towards a desired outcome, you'd first need to define what the desired outcome is. Arguments on the internet almost never have the effect of persuading the person you're debating of your opinion when they didn't previously hold that opinion already.
But for those on the side lines who merely read through a thread without participating because they simply hold no opinion on the matter at all, or maybe encounter it years later when searching for some information on a search engine, there often is value when both sides of a debate carry it on for as long as they have new information to provide and their time budget will allow.
The termination criterion that's actually in effect most of the time is that a debate is broken off when the overall tone has veered away from civility by too much. That's why we rarely get to see good debates on the internet. They are broken off exactly when they should be getting interesting. ...so that's why I say: It's lack of civility that deserves downvotes, not opposing viewpoints.
Debating, after all, is almost a bit like a sport. Now imagine someone challenges a boxing world champion to a fight, and the world thinks that the fight is worth watching. Now the champion turns it down, thinking to himself "It would be a waste of my time to fight this person who is just so much worse of a fighter". ...that would be unsportsmanlike. And what's the worst that could happen? Either the champion reaffirms his position and the fight is a bit boring (but still good "training"), or it's a Creed vs Rocky kind of thing, where everybody gets an unexpected retune of their respective perceptions. ...either way, if it's a fight the world wants to see, I'd just give it to them.
Blockbuster carried the latest movies from all the studios. Everything newest and most desirable. They had a smattering of classics and art house and older genre films, but mostly it was about everything latest and greatest.
Netflix streaming seemed like that at first, but better! Now, they have a tiny slice of content. And as a content-producer, they seem willing to throw money at anything B-list.
Meanwhile, the studios became more risk averse as people started preferring to watch at home. Then theaters shut down and studios became more risk averse. And Netflix and Amazon arose and started playing studio games and studios became even more risk averse.
That trajectory of fear is mirrored in the content. The 1970s were known for directorial freedom and risk-taking. The 70s gave us Apocalypse Now, Taxi Driver, The Godfather, Star Wars, Animal House, Annie Hall, Rocky, Halloween, Smokey and the Bandit, Deliverance, MASH, and more - not all high art but all complete gems. Every decade since, we've seen a gradual progression toward samey-ness.
Since we're talking movies, I'll throw in a handful of movie titles that I find inspirational and /or uplifting as well:
Rocky, Rocky II, Rocky III, Rocky IV, Rocky Balboa
Vision Quest
Tin Cup
The Pursuit of Happyness
The Social Network
Rad
Hackers
Wargames
Iron Man
The Man Who Knew Infinity - based on the book of the same name, which I also recommend.
> It's common to advise hitting on the gym, which I just started doing last week. Funnily, the gym is the place where I last noticed my awkward behavior :)
Funny, gyms are really much less judgmental than many other places--like bars a bit, but moreso elite college classrooms--in that hey, every strongman was once a skinny little dude, those early stages of building up that first muscle are really hard, there's easy gainer fat men and hard gainer guys with perma-sixpacks. Really a lot of tolerance. And funny enough, the really gigantic guys mostly don't want to say anything--one gym had celebrity athletes in it, it was rude to go up and talk--but sometimes they're super nice guys, in some cases because they sell steroids, but that doesn't take away their super-sweet positive disposition.
The gym can be anywhere. Unless of course it's a gym that makes its money from the subscription and getting nobody to go, like those places full of mirrors and shit. Ask yourself when entering a gym: is this fit for a Rocky movie? Those are the best ones, there's lots in Santiago, crazy cheap and the weights weigh the same as at an expensive gym, same metric system. The poverty of the gym will make you better. The expensive gyms have their appeal, the equipment is really good a lot of the time, and in one gym in Santiago I found a tibialis machine, which I've never found anywhere else but like anywhere anywhere, not even in the gyms at Stanford...maybe the football team has one, but I doubt it. I won bouts thanks to that training, because my tibialis was too strong for an ankle lock.
I chose "idyllic", expecting titles like Kiki's Delivery Service, but all the recommendations were either fighting or sports-related movies (Raging Bull, Southpaw, Rocky, etc). Sometimes there's also an issue where the same page loads inside the video frame.
Good idea, just needs a little more polish.
Terminator is an easy one. The terminator at the beginning has done nothing wrong, and fights a gang[1] of bikers who antagonize him and gang up on him, and fight him together, for being naked after traveling through time.
Karate Kid had the Cobra Cai, I think it was called, the rival school. I didn't see it, but I believe they were bullies. Maybe you're right about that one, although I think Daniel-san triumphs against a bully, there might have been several, or the bully had little supporters. It's a coming of age movie, though. It's also a sports movie, they do Karate-Do, which is for decorative, spirital, and sport purposes, not Karate-Jutsu, the military or let's call it "action".
Robocop, there's that company that makes the robot that Robocop has to fight in the end, there's a lot of people working in that company and together they built an automatic murder machine, which they then set loose. And IIRC they're doing a housing development and have ties to the criminal activity in the city Robocop tries to clean up. And like that evil robot had missiles coming out of its back I think, the special effects were glitchy, which made it look like an even greater monstrosity. Companies are groups of persons so absolutely can be guilty of conspiracy if the facts warrant it, incorporation documents don't give permission to traffic heroin. So it happens to fronts for drug dealing and it almost happened to Abbott Laboratories, also basically for drug dealing, only with a drug patients hated instead of craving.
Rocky does not involve a conspiracy, except of course the conspiracy that Rocky works for, the mob, as a debt collector. Which is the reason behind his conflict with Mickey, while Rocky says "it's a living" Mickey replies "it's a waste of life!" But I think I can hand you this one. One catch: this is a sports movie, not an action movie.
I haven't seen the others.
[1] gang is a well-marketed and very glamourous word for conspiracy, which is the term courts use when there's the formal elements of a conspiracy: meeting of the minds, two or more participants in a crime acting in coordination, there's a third one [EDIT: secrecy, and illegality or bad faith are others] but that's the gist of it, it just means criminal teamwork. Some things you do alone, some things with others, same goes for crime...at any rate, don't accuse someone of being a conspiracy theorist to a judge. Judges deal with conspiracies continually, sometimes multiple different ones per day, and there absolutely are people trying to play that judge by "covering" for each other. You will curry zero favor with that judge by putting the word "conspiracy" in your opponents mouth and then claim he must be delusional. That always works on talk TV, but not in court. Judges simply don't have the luxury of being able to pretend criminals never cooperate, like none of them had a single friend.
Just rattling off the action movies I can immediately think of, I don’t believe any of which include a conspiracy in their plot/synopsis. The only action movie I can think of about a conspiracy is the movie Conspiracy with Mel Gibson, got any others?
- The Last Action Hero
- Robocop
- Karate Kid
- Baby Driver
- Rocky
- The Revenant
- Mad Max
- ConAir
- Terminator
> It's also interesting to watch old American movies like Rocky or Top Gun where the Soviets are portrayed as the more technologically advanced nation but Americans prevail thanks to their spirit and courage.
I don't recall the USSR being portrayed as a more technologically advanced nation in Top Gun, and they absolutely weren't in Rocky (in Rocky IV they were portrayed as more committed to using the power of the state without ethical boundaries in sport)
> When you come to the end of the 90's and the beginning of the 2000's you have movies like Fight Club and Matrix denounce technology as the destroyer of the society or humanity.
Maybe the Matrix; Fight Club focussed on consumerism and blind capitalism, not technology (and even then, the attack on it was literally a manifestation of mental illness.)
That's probably because of Sputnik.
I'm not old enough to remember but from what I've read, when the Soviets launched Sputnik, the American public was shocked having SSSR machine passing over them and they can't do anything about it and don't have anything to match the soviets. They believed that the USA was the frontrunner in technology but the Sputnik demonstrated that this may not be the case.
So from my understanding, the technology become a populist agenda as a result of that.
It's also interesting to watch old American movies like Rocky or Top Gun where the Soviets are portrayed as the more technologically advanced nation but Americans prevail thanks to their spirit and courage.
Maybe after the collapse of the Soviet Union, science and technology got a pushback in popular culture? When you come to the end of the 90's and the beginning of the 2000's you have movies like Fight Club and Matrix denounce technology as the destroyer of the society or humanity. You even have Lord of the Rings trilogy that tells an epic story about an industrialist who dares to start a mass production and tech research, meritocracy instead of race but "the good guys" are those who are deeply involved keeping the world as-is for thousands of years and value separation between races, masters and servants.
And what we have now? Red pills, blue pills, black pills from the Matrix, quest to restore the manliness from Fight Club, race separation, leader worship and and looking down to technology and multiculturalism from Lord of the Rings. Half Joke, half serious of course :)
Hard to say; it's actually somewhat rare to see very high IQ's even in leadership to elite positions such as "Sales Manager", CEO, politician, ...
https://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/Occupations.aspx
The people around a set like an actor to be "smart" in the following sense: you show up to work and know your lines, the director or somebody else tells you what to do and you don't need to be told again. You need to be a "quick learner" of the random sorts of skills you need to do your work. As an actor you can outperform the person you become because your lines are written for you, so you can put 100% of your effort into everything else.
I have a somewhat high IQ, I'm good at hard math (I'm sure better than Sly Stallone) and abstract thought and my words/minute rate of writing has been legendary at times, but I struggle as an actor.
Stallone's success had to do with the breakout success of his movie "Rocky", which he wrote. That in turn had to do with convincing other people to take a chance on him and his script, and that gets you into a whole interpersonal area where the role of IQ is really controversial.
If I wrote fiction I'd be dangerously tempted to be like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_L._Forward
I am fascinated with how many "Starship(s)" full of ammonia it would take to fill the atmosphere of a small space colony, what you do with the hydrogen and so forth. Stallone is much better at relating to the average person than I am, and that's what makes him a "genius".
I don't think so. People only listen to people they admire, they don't listen to people they do not.
If nobody listens and respect you you can't be a good coach. This happened in Real Madrid with a coach that had been a mediocre player. The "top of the world starts" did not listen to this person because they did not admire or respected him.
In Rocky the film for example you see as Rocky gives an advice to a kid, before he is famous. The kid does not listen because "Who are you? A loser".
This could happen even if the person is a master, because of envy. I remember a man that was very successful with women, and wanting honestly to help others do the same, only to being rejected by others because they felt threatened or envied him so much.
I see this every day, when someone who is successful at something because he does something better than others. But others do not admit that this person is better creating rationalizations like "this person is so lucky", and then they will generalize even further "all success is luck", when they could not get it.
I know because I have learned a lot from those people and in some ways replicated their success. The only thing I needed to do was admiring that they were better than me at something, being humble at first, and that looks easy but it is very hard because it goes against your ego.
I took a skiing lesson from a master and he looked at me skiing and made me practice basic sky lessons: the kind novices take.
I remember thinking: WTF! I already know how to ski well!! But I forced myself into listening and doing exactly what he told me, even when it looked ridiculous and made no sense.
My skiing improved radically because of that.
After reading the comments here, I've started to wonder...
Does elitist mean "Doesn't like the same things I do?"
---
While I wouldn't phrase it the way Scorcese did, I sort of share his opinion. Super hero movies bore me to death in most cases. As do most things created and A/B tested by a committee, i.e. most Disney movies. Despite having all the time in the world, I do not go to the movies any more. There's very little I want to see...
When will there be new movies in the same vein as Pulp Fiction, Tombstone, Donnie Brasco, True Romance, The Godfather, Goodfellas or hell, even the Rocky movies.
/Old man yells at clouds
That NCBI study (which I am 100% was not scientific) was funded by the Winkler Family Foundation. Yep, the guy who produced the movie "Rocky" funded this. And the Winklers have direct ties to the evil Monsanto Corporation: https://usrtk.org/tag/winkler-family-foundation/ Monsanto (now Bayer) wants to eliminate meat eating. So, no thanks... I will pass your "tip."
I guess the point is you just can't defeat life. Just like in the Rocky movies, life will hit you eventually. It's easy to forget that while we are young and dreaming of being the next billionaire, but it's better to be prepared. You can be a Stoic and still achieve things, as long as you accept that you are not entitled to any achievements.
As just one more point of reference for this song's cultural power: whereas the greatest movie about boxing, Raging Bull, made such wonderful use of highbrow music like the Intermezzo from Cavalleria, the greatest boxing movie, the first Rocky movie, in its own way, makes wonderful use of more familiar touchstones. In particular, an instrumental "Silent Night" plays jarringly in the background of the dramatic climax scene, where Adrian stands up to her brother. Masterful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxriLTLhyyY
What is the difference between busywork and training exercise? Often there is some kind of strawman goal to make the training exercise more interesting, but those who see through the strawman might be better off with a honest "you need to go through these stupid repeats because more interesting challenges later will be overwhelming of you can't do these in your sleep".
Rocky Balboa prepares for the showdown at the end of the movie with a series of boring morning runs, not with a series of exciting bar fights. Similar patterns apply to writing, music and even maths.
Rocky movie has an explanation about Southpaw, may be it is here say or not, but it does.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jK4lxjvrhHs
Not only Captain America. They had everybody from Horatio Alger to Joseph McCarthy, all the tele-evangelists and their ilk, all their popular movies, books, comics, tv shows etc with overly simplistic morality plays and nationalistic narrative etc. Even the 60s rock n' rollers just added some tamed dissent to an otherwise hook line and sinker adoption of the "american dream", all the way to Rambo, Rocky, Top Gun, and so on.
It's people like HST, Kurt Vonnegut, black musicians and writers, directors like Cassavetes and Kazan and such that embedded a dose of realism to the popular narrative. But anything really mainstream was always 80% sugary propaganda.
I'm sure you can find lots of bad and shallow movies released in 1976 (e.g. a rather bad remake of King Kong) though there were also a number of good films in addition to Network (All the President's Men, Taxi Driver, Rocky). Network was particularly good though and seems rather prescient today.
> The thing is that we have been in the work of parody for so long time that we don't ever know were it started. Get the Rocky series blockbuster, for example. We had a much better history, with a black man and boxe. But then someone stole the idea and put a white man against his worst enemy: another white man with diferent world view (Russians).
I'm not sure what you mean when you say "someone stole" the idea of Rocky for Rocky IV. Sly both wrote and directed that. It's as regular a sequel as anything.
> I find it funny how most of people that discredit the OP conclusion also thinks they are right when they are in the opposite situation. I don't see you Bros complaining when Hollywood whitewash history.
I explicitly said that I'm not discrediting OPs conclusion, I however did not agree with how they arrived there.
The collective "Bro"-thing I don't feel worthy of responding to.
> And last, when did you guys started to think that the "old" stuff is yours? They have legally owners, and they can change to fit or create a better history/world (and some guys like you keep thinking in ways to put it worse), like star wars and the woman and black as main characters.
I can't answer for "us guys", only for me, but I have no problem with them doing whatever they want with Ghostbusters. All I am saying is that the reviews in this specific case isn't about sexism, but the movie not being at all relatable to the original one(s) in tone. Nothing to do with gender. As much right as they have to make the movie, the fans of the original have a right to opinions on it, without it being sexism, simply because the new characters happen to be women.
Personally I liked the new Star Wars, but it's entirely beside the point, but since you brought it up: SW:TFA was so true to SW:ANH that I'm inclined to call it a true remake, much in how Interstellar worked as an homage/rehash of 2001 with slight twists. I happened to like that one too.
Damn...whenever I watch boxing movies like Rocky, I always think the action and power look so fake compared to what you normally see when watching broadcast boxing fights. But I guess if you grew up watching videos of Ali, you'd have a higher expectation of razzle-dazzle.
Plus the absence of internet-enabled devices (phones, etc.) in theaters.
I recall when "The Godfather" and "Rocky" were in first-run theaters for at least a year. The Syufy theaters had a quarter-page print ad for one or more films every single day.
> 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.
The thing is, this basically suffers the same problems. It's not so much technical shortcomings (although the sound desperately needs work...but I'm a sound guy so I would say that). It's just that special effects, ultra-violence, money shots, and showdowns are not the backbone of a movie. Now, the eye-candy stuff is the most expensive in production terms on a real movie, and trailers are always full of eye candy because a) you want to catch people's attention and b) you need to sketch the story very quickly and pictures are the most efficient way of doing that. But the backbone of the story is the relationship between the characters that you care about, and you can't ever get to know characters enough to care about them if they're just walking around turned up to 11 all the time.
Look at South Park - visually speaking it looks terrible, the character design and animation is about as basic as it can possibly get. But it's involving because the characters act out their personalities in a consistent enough way that the audience can identify with them by mentally modeling their behavior. South Park sin't to everyone's taste of course, but you can think of lots of other examples, I just picked this one to point out that the visuals are the least important element. The surprise in a storytelling reveal comes from discovering that a character is not who you thought she was, or or from having a resolution between two conflicting elements within the same character.
The reason that tragedies are tragic is because there are many things you like about the lead and it's painful to see them lost because of the lead's poor moral choices and eventual downfall. Likewise the enjoyment in seeing a hero's triumph is in watching them transcend their weaknesses. Rocky wouldn't be a success if it was just 90 minutes of Sylvester Stallone boxing to victory. the film seems like it's about boxing, but it isn't. It's about a dead-end guy who wants love and self-respect. Only his girlfriend knows what his real goal is, because she's the only person he's able to be completely honest with.
The problem with Deathknights in Love is that nobody in this story seems to have any life outside of Being Epic, whether they're Casting Epic Spells, Fighting Epic Battles, or Making Epic Whoopie. I can't relate to them because they're not real people, they're WoW avatars. I think Valve's Team Fortress & source toolkit are a far more fruitful tool for Machinima because the characters are more cartoonish and have clearly delineated strengths and weaknesses, so while none of the related Machinima is Shakespeare there is plenty of scope for comedy. The relative lack of realism makes it easier to focus on the dramatic elements rather than the purely visual ones (camera moves, impressive entrances and poses, special effects etc.). I think this was also a key aspect of Red v. Blue's success - it's much easier to transcend production quality constraints with humor.
I work on a lot of low-budget films, many of which are dreadful - and what makes them bad is not the lack of production value (sets costumes, cinematography, FX etc. etc.) but the lack of life in the characters, who are usually so bad that the actors and crew hold the fictional characters in complete contempt; at least if the characters are ridiculous the film has a chance to be tongue-in-cheek funny, but often they're just awful. This is the opposite of the film school problem where the characters tend to be richly textured wonderful people (because the writers and directors want everyone to know how interesting and pleasant they are), but there's not much budget or time for production value so you get a lot of films where Nothing Happens and the nice people who live in the world of the film are never put under sufficient stress to make for an interesting story.
With Machinima, the temptation is to use the computer for all that stuff that would be impossibly expensive to do otherwise. And I don't blame anyone for wanting to do something that looks epic, because while comedy is easier to stage it's harder to write, and if you want to be dramatic then awkward/comic stuff lets the air out of the balloon and can actually be depressing. But the strength of epic stories comes from the character development and that ultimately means characters have to overcome their natural tendencies in pursuit of something else. I would be much more interested in (and forgiving of) the Deathknight story if started out with a character that was actually fearful and whose sole interest was in escape, survival, and relief from being someone else's target all the time. That's a situation where good and evil start to actually matter, and courage has to be found rather than just being a character trait for the people on screen to measure each others' bad-assery. Apocalypto is a good film exploration of this theme, not least because it has so little dialog and all the action is motivated by the lead characters need to escape.
Alternatively, I'd be intersted in a story where I find out why the villian is so bent on exterminating everyone else. It's not Because He's Evil; nobody goes through life doubling down on the belief that they're a bad person, people do evil things because they believe they're superior and that people who get in their way are obstacles to be overcome in the pursuit of some worth (by the villain's standards) goal. A villain that just wants everyone dead doesn't have anything much to struggle for; even if s/he's a sadist, then there needs to be a struggle against boredom. If the villain completely succeeded in taking over the world and eliminating all opposition, what would s/he do then? Villains are either fleeing fears or pursuing goals just like heroes; when a plot revolves around Good vs Evil it's usually a sign that the story is basically Zombies vs. Zombies. Even in such a situation, audiences still want o pick a side; so the Alien vs. Predator movies succeed as action movies because we can anthropomorphize the Predator character more easily than the Xenomorph. If it was, I dunno, Aliens vx. Giant Spiders or Terminator vs. Predator (or any plot where both sides are intent on the destruction of the other and have little or no instinct for self-preservation) then it isn't that interesting to watch any more because questions of success or failure become so abstract as to be meaningless.
In short, I need a reason to care for characters other than their merely wearing metaphorical white hats or being the first people to appear on the screen before the Villains.
I can tell you how I do it, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend my path to anyone else. I'm not even 100% sure I'd recommend it to a younger version of myself, although I'm also not sure I'd recommend against it either.
Basically, I'm single and childless, and darn close to my every free minute goes into the startup project. When I was working full-time, that meant "after work" M-F and the majority of my Sat and Sun. hours. I make an exception during football season to watch the Dolphins game on Sunday (yeah, yeah, go ahead, say it... I'm a glutton for punishment).
I force myself to take a break every once in a while and read a novel or watch a movie or something... but truth be told, lately, even when I watch movies or something, there's an angle related to the startup. For example, I've been reading and studying a lot about sales lately, and I've seen more than one sales book mention "be like Columbo".
I had kinda wanted to rewatch some old Columbo episodes anyway (yeah, I'm old, deal with it) so I've been watching Columbo and thinking about "how do you apply his attitude / approach to this 'diagnostic business development' thing"? And the movies I make time for tend to be ones that I find inspirational (Rocky, The Karate Kid, Rad, etc.) that help keep me motivated.
About 6 months ago, I dropped down from full-time status to part-time status at my regular job to free up more time for the startup. I had a little bit of money saved, but not enough to quit outright... luckily the owner of the company was willing to be flexible and let me do that. I've pretty much burned through my savings though, and we aren't profitable yet, so I'm going back to working full-time next month.
These days I forgo most social activities like dating, parties, and most non-technical social events. I rarely mountain bike anymore, and almost never set foot in the gym. I bailed on going home to see my parents for Christmas so I could use those few days of "down time" as recovery time. I stay amped up on more caffeine than could possibly be healthy, and do everything I can to the tune of heavy-metal[1] or hard-rock of some sort. My mantra right now is "Caffeine, heavy-metal and adrenaline". \m/
I know, I know... you're thinking "dude, you must be miserable". Nah... I enjoy this in a certain sense, and since I'm 40 now, and haven't achieved anything yet, my mindset now is to say "fuck it" and go for broke. It's now or never, ya know? My mindset is to achieve the biggest and most ambitious of my dreams, or - when life finally breaks me - pull a Leaving Las Vegas deal and go to Vegas and try to drink myself to death.
Do not try this at home...
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQQcOQsCFnw
Movies: Rocky, 8 million. Star Trek, Infinitum.
Maybe we're just very different people, but I find anxiety crippling and a huge drain on my ability to do creative work in particular.
Heh, yeah, it's hard to explain. I certainly have "stuff" that it would be nice to get off my chest, things that I don't want to talk to my best friend about, even things I don't want to talk about with my co-founder. But don't get me wrong... I'm not suffering from crushing, debilitating depression or anxiety here. And the feelings I feel are - to me - largely motivational.
I guess the biggest thing is, I don't know how to tell anybody exactly how scared of failure I am in this context, or how to explain why I am so driven to make this work. And now that I'm getting older and getting more of that "this is my last shot" mentality, the pressure is even stronger.
Anyway, I don't want this to sound too morbid. I'm not in a bathtub full of hot water with a straight razor or anything. Yeah, I sometimes worry that my story ends like Leaving Las Vegas, but that's just a background thread that activates from time to time. Most of the time, I'm just slogging away, working hard and dealing with the day to day stuff that comes along. :-)
For me, knowing that even if I fail at starting my company, it will be much easier to get a good job afterwards being able to demonstrate that I've got the drive and interest to help a company's core mission is very, very helpful. This is the best advice I was given by my friends. Yeah, my company might fail, but every other company will be more likely to hire me to a management or other high level role knowing that I tried, even if I failed.
Yeah, part of my problem is, I feel like I'm too old for that stuff to matter. Plus, the entrepreneurial route is the only way I think I can ever be really happy. It's not about making a lot of money, mind you. It's about the fact that I don't want a "job" in the traditional sense, for any company. As long as I have a "boss", in the sense of one person who can order me around and fire me for non-compliance, I will always chafe at that and be unhappy.
(Yeah, I know that when you run a company you still have a "boss" in a sort of metaphorical sense. That isn't quite the same thing though.)
Edit:
Also, just to illustrate something... I'm just old enough to have grown up on a steady dose of 80's "feel good" movies. That brand of narrative pervades my thinking... the determined underdog, through hard work, grit and determination battles his way to victory against all odds, etc. I watch Rocky for inspiration once every couple of months or so. So I think that I actually need to be in this "do or die" situation to feel at balance with the world. That's my reality, being the underdog, having the deck stacked against me, and having to test myself to see if I can overcome. Sounds weird, I guess, but it's just something that's become part of my fabric over the years.
Think twitter would have gone as viral if it was called "smsdispatch.com" or "sms.com".
It wouldn't have.
Names fit a particular purpose. What is good for one purpose (selling to the corporate market for example) then "sms.com" might be worth the money. Another situation, maybe not.
Naming and branding is important because based on psychological principles and things that have been around forever it is important. (Sorry that I don't have time to point to the underpinnings of the research and basis for this statement.)
Ev's argument is also like saying the name of a movie is less important. You can always find isolated cases where the name wasn't that important like "the social network" and counter it with movie names like "goodfellas" "godfather" "rocky" the list is endless.
As John Gotti Jr. said to the interviewer on 60 minutes "la cosa nostra" like the way that rolls off your tongue? The fact is people do like cool names.
> To me, it's like watching the movie Rocky—he's up, he's down, he's out, he wins!
Maybe next time actually watch Rocky instead of reading a 140 character synopsis...
One of my favorites is this one from The Social Network:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uC5wVJrhzl0
Another is the scene in The Fighter where Micky Ward is talking to his girlfriend and there's the "I'm tired of being a fucking disappointment, I told everybody I was gonna win that fight and get back on track, blah, blah" bit.
And plenty of scenes from the Rocky movies, Vision Quest, Rad, The Karate Kid, and a few others...
Even if you dont like Rocky you might want to watch this story: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywuse55qU2A Much shorter than movie, but super motivational!
Does the author realize that the last image has Mr T. representing flash and Rocky representing HTML5.... in the movie, I believe, Rocky won.
While perhaps not inspiring of "entrepreneurial productivity" my favorite/most inspiring movie has to be...
Rocky!
I think it's a rule in Hollywood that sports movies must be inspirational. In addition to Any Given Sunday, you've got:
* Invictus * The Blind Side * Rudy * Remember the Titans * Miracle * Rocky * Karate Kid
And that's just a few of the genre.
According to many who worked on that movie, the story told here about Stone's refusal of huge sums for _Rocky_ and insistence that he be the star is a "near-total fabrication": http://www.hollywoodtoday.net/2006/12/20/rocky-story-revealed-a-studio-myth/
I think people keep forgetting that Rocky was already a fighter, and that he lost the main fight at the end of the film (although he did meet his goal).
I didn't really like the article. It's just summing up what we've known for a good time: success requires effort. I don't buy movies being the cause of it. I did find the choice of Rocky somewhat amusing though, especially when the author mentioned his book taking 8 years (albeit doing other things).
Sylvester Stallone: [Explaining to 'The New York Times' on how he wrote the script for Rocky in three days]: "I'm astounded by people who take 18 years to write something. That's how long it took that guy [Gustave Flaubert] to write 'Madame Bovary.' And was that ever on the best-seller list? No. It was a lousy book and it made a lousy movie."
Effort alone doesn't make one successful, either, and in my opinion telling people it's going to take them years to succeed is just as bad as telling them they can succeed in 21 days.
From my perspective, the training montage in Karate Kid demonstrated that it took a LOT of effort, not the little bit this article criticizes it for. Two months of hard work, from sunrise to sunset, to develop muscle memory? It's not the 10,000 hours required to become a world-class expert, but 600+ hours of intensive training is enough to see some pretty decent results. The other movie he criticizes by name, Rocky, was similar. Rocky had 2 months to train for his first fight, and he wasn't starting from scratch.
It's hard to become a world-class expert at anything. You need some combination of latent talent and many thousands of hours of training, hopefully with someone who really understands how to train you effectively. But I don't think either Rocky or the Karate Kid greatly misrepresent the amount of effort it would take for an exceptionally talented individual, with a great trainer, to make the leaps they did.
I don't think the article is worth reading.
According to the author, "Effort Shock" is the phenomenon of realizing something is a lot harder than you thought it was. Then you get depressed about it and give up. This explains failed blogs, failed diets, failed restaurants, etc.
The Karate Kid and other Rocky-esque movies ruined the world because the training montages make it seem like you can go from beginner to expert in a single Survivor song.
I was hoping the author would dig deeper into the subject, but he just repeated the same thing again and again and ended with a plug for his book.
I enjoy watching a good movie to get me in the mood. Rocky or Rudy usually does the trick.