Hacker Cinema
Straw Dogs
1971 · Film · 116 min
Directed by Sam Peckinpah
David Sumner, a mild-mannered academic from the United States, marries Amy, an Englishwoman. In order to escape a hectic stateside lifestyle, David and his wife relocate to the small town in rural Cornwall where Amy was raised. There, David is ostracized by the brutish men of the village, including Amy's old flame, Charlie. Eventually the taunts escalate.
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2 comments on Hacker News
> CDs... are more fraglie.
CDs can be scratched more easily, obviously, and ruin them, but if you kept the production CD in good shape they will last a long time.
About three years ago, I decided to buy one of those "random 100 CDs" on eBay, just to see what kind of weird stuff I would get. A few of the CDs in there were pressed in 1984, and they ripped just fine onto my 2022 laptop into FLAC and I listen to the FLAC files regularly. As far as I can tell there were no checksum errors or skips or anything like that.
Burned CDs and DVDs do not have that luxury, especially cheap ones. My dad found out that a lot of his home movies that he had archived on burnt DVDs were literally starting to rot away. Fortunately in his case he had the habit of burning like twenty copies of each of his collections, so I don't think he actually lost anything, and I was able to show him how to extract images from it, but I consider ourselves lucky.
> I've always liked the faint airy sound of tape silence in a weird way.
Me too! Honestly there's something kind of charming about being forced to hear the artifacts of the actual medium that carries the sound. The light hiss has a certain "purity" to it, for want of a better word. It's also why I like watching movies from the 1960s-1970s; they couldn't make everything completely silent, so there was always a small hiss. It makes movies like Straw Dogs much more unnerving.
> The really cool thing about tapes are the same cool thing that playing an MP3 locally has:
Yeah, and CDs as well. For reasons that I am equal parts surprised about and grateful for, CDs never had any DRM; I can take an exact copy of my CD to my computer, copy it to all my devices, stream it with Jellyfin, remix it with Acid or SoundForge, or pretty much anything else I can think of. Given that CDs still sound excellent, I think you could make an argument that it's objectively the best audio media that ever got widespread adoption.
I don;t think so — it's just that if you have 100-ish years to choose from, this doesn't seem like a very even spread. To be sure, I would feather off anything too early — the silent era seems only interesting to film historians that want to see where the modern ideas of film began (example: "Battleship Potemkin" (1925)).
But at the same time, Hollywood does seem to have fallen into the trap of mediocrity for some time now — probably since the 1980's to be honest (having only gotten worse over the ensuing decades). "La La Land" was popular in large part because it was something of a throwback to 1930's Hollywood. Tarantino's success seems to stem from his mining of gritty 1970's Hollywood.
So why not go back and watch "Gold Diggers of 1937" for the "La La Land" stuff, or "Straw Dogs" (1971) to see what Tarantino is making homage to.