Hacker Cinema
Superman
1978 · Film · 144 min
Part of Superman Collection
Directed by Richard Donner
Science FictionActionAdventure
Mild-mannered Clark Kent works as a reporter at the Daily Planet alongside his crush, Lois Lane. Clark must summon his superhero alter-ego when the nefarious Lex Luthor launches a plan to take over the world.
8 positive3 negative49 neutralfrom 60 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
64 comments on Hacker News
You're talking in terms of "lies", but I would say this is more "not buying the hype". I use these things every day at work and at home, I'm aware of the workflows and "how to hold it", and I just don't see the theoretical results being promised. Some things are easier. It's not null. But every time someone says "THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING!!" I want to trap them in those little "phantom zone" alternate dimension space prisons from the superman movies and launch them into space where nobody has to hear them ever again. It's ANNOYING and disingenuine. It's not a "skill issue" to push back against breathless hype from people that don't know what they're talking about.
IMO, the people spreading hype and fear are not neutral actors; if I just disagreed I wouldn't care. But I think they're causing actual harm based on a premise that isn't true. That's why I put up resistance to it, because I think it's important right now that we don't accept the narrative being sold to us, nor the deal we're being offered, both of which are bad.
This is just rose tinted nostalgia. You are remembering the things you loved which are much simpler and forgetting all the lemon shots and limitations of the day.
The movies and TV that can be made now without the limitations of the past are significantly different, from period movies to super hero movies and everything in between. Watch the 1970s superman or logan's run and see how they hold up.
The vast majority of CG you don't notice.
People do not yet fully appreciate what AI videogen + public domain rights mean yet.
We will see a flood of ai generated full length 1930s superman movies once we hit the 2030s
Like that superman movie with Christopher Reeves?
The current US copyright duration is 70 years after the life of the author. This is absolutely bonkers. 50 years from publication would be a significant improvement.
50 years ago was 1975. If copyright were limited to 50 years, we'd be looking at all of the Beatles works being in the public domain. We'd be midway though Led Zeppelin, and a lot of the best work from Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones.
Also, Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man. Disney would still profit from the MCU films which they produced in the 2010's, but they couldn't stop you from releasing your own Batman vs Spider-Man story.
The Harry Potter books would still belong to JK Rowling, but the Narnia stories would be available for all.
The Godfather 1 and 2 would be in the public domain, as would be original Star Trek TV show, and we'd be coming up on Star Wars pretty soon.
If there were no copyright protection, these works wouldn't have been created. It is good that Paul McCartney and George Lucas and JK Rowling have profited from their creative output. It would be okay if they only profited for the first 50 years. Nobody is counting on revenue over half a century in the future when they create a work of art today.
This is our culture. It should belong to all of us.
"This comes after the Feds decided not to renew their long-standing contract with nonprofit research hub MITRE to operate the CVE database." [1]
Doesn't seem like an untrue assumption. Feds decided not to renew the contract, people got upset, and later the feds decided to renew the contract the night it would expire [1].
This is like saying Y2K is a nothingburger because people updated the code to handle more than 2 digit years. It's because of the people getting upset that triggered a preventative measure preventing the problem. It's just the superman movie [2], if the kid just listened to clark kent then superman would've never been necessary.
[1]: https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/16/cve_program_funding_save/
[2]: https://youtu.be/-ikd_hRnVR4?t=69
Let’s be real, the overwhelming majority of those 500 are straight up terrible. Netflix alone has produced well over 100 movies, and IMO at best some of them are worth finishing not that I can think of any off the top of my head.
Now I’m sure you’ve looked forward to many movies but off the top of your head list stuff you’ve either seen more than once and or actually recommend to someone that came our in the last 10 years vs…
(78) The Deer Hunter, Superman, National Lampoon's Animal House, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (79) Apocalypse Now, Alien, Life of Brian, Mad Max, Escape from Alcatraz (80) The Shining, Star Wars: Episode V, Airplane!, The Blues Brothers, Caddyshack, The Elephant Man (81) Raiders of the Lost Ark, Das Boot, The Evil Dead, Mad Max 2, Escape from New York, Time Bandits (82) Blade Runner, The Thing, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Poltergeist, Conan the Barbarian, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Tron (83) Scarface, WarGames, Star Wars: Episode VI, Trading Places, The Evil Dead
Obviously not all great movies but that’s ~30 classic movies in just 6 years and I’m sure I’ve missed a few as kids movies are largely missing from that list.
It's been so long since those could reliably be found, that even the 1978 Superman movie has a gag about it (Clark steps up to one of those stand-style payphones, briefly looks befuddled, then runs into door turnstile instead, super-speed changing while it spins)
Why not? Doing that with historical figures is pretty much what happened in the Superman movie when having his parents as teachers. It can be done with respect and honorably, in my opinion.
I watched the Superman movie with my kids the other day and I wondered how a planet like Krypton could just collapse after all its accomplishments. It seemed unrealistic. I totally understand now.
Is that a reference to the 1978 Superman movie?
Richard Donner‘s Superman, the first movie from 78, was a good serious movie. It later got more comical with Richard Pryor in Superman III
I mean, I take the comment about supervillains as mostly a joke, so I don’t really feel a need to strictly interrogate it for factual accuracy.
But also I do think it fits. Looking at super villains, they’re usually just powerful people with slightly unusual property, who also happen to be evil.
Lex Luthor’s company Lexcorp was an aerospace company. In the first Superman movie, Luthor was a pretty weird and relatively unremarkable guy. In the James Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies the super villain was just a guy with a global media company who created calamity and murder so that he could report on it first.
Nuclear power and radiation have often been themes for comic book heroes and villains. I think it’s reasonable to read the (misleading) headline and think “oh great now Bezos owns a nuclear power plant, he’s going to become a super villain” as the sort of non-serious comment prevalent on the internet. People say the same about Musk all the time.
I don’t think it’s meant to be taken literally.
We are talking about very different things. You are talking about mistakes that happen, sure that happens, write-offs of inventory or what have you obviously happen in every organization. We lose track of things, it happens, it's fuzzy. All accountants get that.
That's not what I'm talking about at all. I'm talking about rounding math. If you always round down, and I always round up, and then we supposedly have 50M identical transactions, what is the likelihood that we are even in the same ballpark? fairly low.
There are even many movie and TV shows involving rounding get rich schemes, including Superman: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/14925/has-a-programmer-ever-embezzled-money-by-shaving-fractions-of-a-cent-from-many-b
When you are talking about millions or billions of dollars, a rounding error can account for significant sums of money.
When you and your bank are off on how much money you supposedly have by 6 or 8 figures due to rounding, you absolutely better care.
The US has no consistent rounding laws for accounting, but the EU has a consistent rounding rule around the euro. The EU has an entire paper around rounding the euro available here: https://ec.europa.eu/economy_finance/publications/pages/publication1224_en.pdf The US basically shrugs and makes no ruling, because if you ever go interact with many different banks, you will find out that they don't all round the same.
Also you might find the wikipedia page interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rounding There are plenty of rounding options, and sometimes figuring out how an organization you interact with decided to do their rounding can be a fun exercise :)
If you know anything about dealing with money in computers, you know that floating point math and money math are completely incompatible, so you have to do decimal math to deal with money. This is like engineering of financial systems 101. Rounding math is financial systems 201.
> Through Endgame, it was an unprecedented undertaking involving the hard work of tens (hundreds?) of thousands of talented artists and technicians across the globe, marshalling untold resources over the span of a decade
Just imagine what those artists could have accomplished working in the service of an artistic vision instead of churning out corporate slop.
Live action super hero dramas started with Superman and reached maturity in Sam Raimi's Spiderman movies. Highlights are Robocop and Unbreakable (throw a Batman adaptation in there, probably The Dark Knight). By the time the MCU rolled around, the genre was well past middle age. Despite billions of dollars of life support, it will be remembered as the last tortured breaths of a somewhat embarrassing cultural episode.
They are two films I saw as a child, and I preferred Superman. Though twenty-five years later I would ROFL at “Charlie don’t surf!”
> Have you ever watched the original Superman movies and Clark talks with the AI hologram of his biological father from his home planet?
You get that this only played out positively in the movie because the writers/director wanted it to play out that way, right?
Have you ever watched the original Superman movies and Clark talks with the AI hologram of his biological father from his home planet?
I believe in the future our descendants will likely find it normal to talk with AI versions of their ancestors, perhaps not us parents right now, but I suspect my children will willingly train and generate AI versions of themselves for future generations to interact with.
It was still pretty normal in Britain in the 70s. As a kid I remember watching the end of some disaster movie before it went back to the beginning - most likely Airport '77 or '79/'80. It started to change in my (relatively) small town with Star Wars, Superman and Raiders, when at least some performances required standing in line on the street and waiting to be let in at the right time (nobody had dreamed of pre-booking, or seat reservations, at this point). During the transition period newspaper listings would specify "cont.perf." for continuous performance to indicate when the old system was still in play, which carried on well into the 80s.
Edit to clarify: they did generally list the times that each showing would start, so you could choose to arrive at the beginning and leave at the end. But nobody was forced to do either. You could arrive in the morning and watch the same film five times in a row, if you wanted. Or two films alternating, if it had a B-movie showing between the main film... ah yes, fond memories of strange B-movies like a documentary around offshore oil production - perhaps due to the time period when movie studios became just one part of massive industrial conglomerates, perhaps because they wanted to bore the audience into leaving and freeing up seats... also the combination of Airplane! with the execrable Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Beatles jukebox-musical starring the Bee Gees).
Superhero films don't have to be sexless, even if kid-friendly. The dating scene between Lois and Clark in Superman (1978) (PG) contains more sexual energy and tension than many scenes in modern streamer series where the sex is shown on-screen in a manner explicit enough to have been considered softcore porn in the 80s and 90s. You can see the desire in Lois's eyes as she thirsts up Superman, and under that gaze Clark becomes nervous and off his game even in his more confident Superman persona. He fancies Lois enough to test her desire (by appearing to her as both Superman and Clark in the same night) and to become tempted to reveal his identity to her. Lois gets way more ribald ("what color underwear am I wearing?") than a late 1970s career woman would with a stranger, especially one she's interviewing for her job. She literally can't help herself.
The whole scene hits way, way different as an adult than when I first saw it as a kid. And nobody even gets undressed.
Interesting. Superman the Movie was filmed at the same time as this. I wonder if the helicopter scene (where Superman first goes public and saves Lois Lane) was influenced by this? Or maybe it was just putting to screen a pre-existing fear.
Superman The Movie was more prophetic than we thought.
> Here's the thing. Art is individual to its creator. Only Van Gogh can paint a Van Gogh. Only Shakespeare can write Shakespeare. Only Tolkien can write Tolkien.
> Rings of Power could never, ever be Tolkien. It could be, at best, competently made "I Can't Believe It's Not Tolkien." Yet, Partially-Hydrogenated Tolkien Substitute still could have been a good show.
Okay. Sure. But they can launch movements where people try to expand on what they've already created. In this case, the Rings of Power show is beautiful, jaw droppingly beautiful in scale and execution, showing a world larger than has ever been depicted on TV before.
https://winteriscoming.net/files/image-exchange/2022/08/ie_91003.jpeg
https://winteriscoming.net/files/image-exchange/2022/08/ie_91007.jpeg
A lot of attention to detail has been paid in the little things and I think it's amazing.
But that's besides the point. The point is that these are shows and properties meant for the young, people in their teens or those who are growing up. The Hobbit was meant for children. The Lord of the Rings for adolescents. These are stories meant to fire up a young person's imagination and get them to dream bigger than before.
By reducing these properties to an audience of adult fans, I feel, does them a disservice. As yes, absolutely media can be made to be enjoyable to all ages, but trying to please these fans is often an exercise in self immolation as whatever you create will never be as rosy as the memories from their childhood. But they are a powerful market. They are the ones buying the merch usually, instead of parents buying it for little kids. And so they have an outsized say on what happens within the product.
It's baffling to me to see older generations maintaining a stranglehold over the stories that they enjoyed when they were younger.
I think we should give these series and places room to grow and become into something more for each successive generation. And enjoy the process of that growth.
Because almost every single person who is disappointed by this series is a diehard, middle aged, Tolkein fan (often male). Who grew up with Tolkein in the 80s, a time when its very reading was an act of mild rebellion. From the article,
> Wayyyy back in the 70s and 80s, science fiction/fantasy/superhero content hadn't completely taken over the culture yet. New nerd content was rare and treasured.
> The Superman movie (1978) was mind-blowing. (I’m old enough to remember when Superman was a good guy.) A new Star Trek series was an impossible dream. Battlestar Galactica was cherished. We were so desperate for sci-fi stuff that we watched Doctor Who, for God's sake!
This is not true anymore. And in that change, the stories that have been told and whom they're being told to has changed as well. And that genuinely seems to bother these middle-aged fans. And I think that's okay. It's hard to let go, but let go they must so that future generations can cherish what they cherished, with fresh, unblemished eyes.
Why would you want to do that, though?
Honest question. It’s going to be a long trip throughout the Uncanny Valley where everyone will clearly notice the fakery and then … what? What is the end goal here? Ok, making more Superman movies starring Christopher Reeves, obviously. But then what?
To quote someone who deserves to be more in more deep-fakes, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
If only 10% of the efforts going into special effects these days went into the actual story ...
Eye candy can contribute only so much to a movie. Spend 10x the budget on special effects and the movie will get at most 1% better, sometimes it gets even worse. Superman 1 was much more enjoyable than most movies that came out of Marvel the last years.
The pay phone was my way of calling for a ride in high school and calling home when I was in college.
I tested out a homemade red box on one of the phones at the high school once and got a suspicious operator on the line.
The pay phone and the booth have big roles in movies I loved: Superman, War Games, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure...
So, I should give the Expanse a second try? ....
My biggest issue these days is that there isn't actual development within the world created. Superman falls for Lois lane, not because of some sort of event or circumstance that we experience on screen, but because they're 'supposed to get together'. Or it's also bad when movies rely on a wider generalized context rather than actually developing something within the world.
> And half the plot is typically devoted to if they want to accept their new found powers or ignore them to live a normal life. So its still quite devoted to a choice with life changing consequences.
There is no way for Hulk to ignore or reject the powers. Nor for superman or spiderman for that matter. Superman in particular is just born that way, full stop. And speaking about action movies that nope, no big deep choices there. Even in matrix, the choice is singular scene where main character picks the pill so that movie can happen.
And I liked Bud Spencer and Terrence Hill movies, so I have seen them multiple times and consequences for choices and actions are not the theme there at all.
I have also read Spiderman comic targeted at kids back then. Half the time he just reacts to what is going on around, not having much choice nor choice being theme beyond "Am I going to do the right thing or not" false choice. Ninja Turtles had training in them ... but also they are essentially magical turtles due to some experiments or what done on them.
Average movie and entertainment in 90ties just was not that deep.
Nah. Superman, spiderman, hluk, any of these got skills by accident. Even karate kid which shown some training, shown imaginary low effort low time investment training. The typical action movie of my youth had guys winning all the fights for no reason other then that they are awesome. Audiences loved it. The past movies had enough of pure power fantasy or other "just gonna win" in it for the whole generation to drawn in it.
And not just American movies. Bud Spencer and Terrence Hill were super famous and did basically nothing but that. They don't train, never ever, they are lazy as cool factor and are strongest guys most sharpest shooters around. Franch movies, fairly often the same thing. Random middle aged man thrown in situation and suddenly climbing and jumping roofs.
And series targetted at kids still show plenty of training. Lego ninja go, winx club, all show training or classroom scenes often.
No no no - I think we are all missing the point here - if I learned anything from the Superman documentary series then we should be flinging the toxic waste at a trajectory that makes it go around the sun in REVERSE which will also mean it of course will travel backwards in time. And then for sure we can say that is going to end up as someone else's problem.
> comic books and star wars no longer considered nerdy now that nerd culture is mainstream?
Star Wars was never considered nerdy, it was mainstream even when it released 44 years ago. Same thing with the superman movie, it was released around then as well and was a huge mainstream success. So I'm not sure what you are talking about.
Glass seems fairly promising.
> Microsoft and Warner Bros. have collaborated to successfully store and retrieve the entire 1978 iconic “Superman” movie on a piece of glass roughly the size of a drink coaster, 75 by 75 by 2 millimeters thick.
> The hard silica glass can withstand being boiled in hot water, baked in an oven, microwaved, flooded, scoured, demagnetized and other environmental threats that can destroy priceless historic archives or cultural treasures if things go wrong.
> “One big thing we wanted to eliminate is this expensive cycle of moving and rewriting data to the next generation. We really want something you can put on the shelf for 50 or 100 or 1,000 years and forget about until you need it,” Rowstron said.
https://news.microsoft.com/innovation-stories/ignite-project-silica-superman/
History/Context:
How Green Screen Worked Before Computers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msPCQgRPPjI
Hollywood's History of Faking It | The Evolution of Greenscreen Compositing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8aoUXjSfsI
Zoran Perisic's 'Zoptic' front-projection system used in Superman: The Movie
https://www.fxphd.com/fxblog/effects-of-days-past-making-superman-fly/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbXC16p8tNc
The technology that’s replacing the green screen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yNkBic7GfI
Mandalorian 'Stagecraft' technology
https://www.slashfilm.com/the-mandalorian-stagecraft-photos/
I think these are the typewriters in the loud open office scene(s) at the Daily Planet in the movie "Superman (1978)"
There's probably a less lofty, more mundane pop cultural answer for this: the generation that grew up on Saturday Morning superhero cartoons are now tastemakers, and the mainstreaming of nerd culture and fandom has incentivized studios towards making big budget live action versions of what used to be consigned only to cartoons on TV.
Also, while superhero movies are as old as Christopher Reeve's Superman films, or perhaps Republic serials, the mainstreaming of nerd culture and fandom has also created a public that's more open to elaborate world-building and lore in their summer blockbusters. So while superhero movies used to be more self-contained, now we have these sprawling multi-film sagas giving the studios an excuse to churn out multiple pictures a year.
...or EVEN read a BOOK.
Aspiring authors offer up a collective sigh.
But there are movies, still.
By the way, has anyone seen the 37th remake of Superman? Sorry, I meant 36th.
Hey, anyone want to invest in a new movie idea. It's gold. It's only been done 36 times before. Don't delay. You won't believe what happens at the end. Lois Lane loses 30lbs with 1 crazy dieting trick that big-Doctors don't want you to know about.
Time is running out. Don't wait. There's no time to read that book, you're missing out.
Superman (1978), starring Christopher Reeve.
It involves Superman traveling at faster than c to save the day, rather than breaking a promise made under duress, which makes flunking ethical calculus into a super-vulnerability.
Movies based on comic book characters have come a long way. And even movies based on DC characters have advanced slightly.
This is from the first Christopher Reeve Superman movie.
There are probably many from 1950 - 1980 to choose from. I've read many science fiction books from that era where the premise was such a bomb (though the destination was different). I'm not a movie buff, but I'd guess there is a superhero blockbuster with that theme somewhere in there ( Superman?).
This commentary gets the psychology of superhero narratives entirely wrong:
> Primarily, mass-market superhero movies seem to be abetting an audience who do not wish to relinquish their grip on (a) their relatively reassuring childhoods
It’s the exact opposite. Superhero movies speak most strongly to those whose childhoods were traumatizing. The misfits, the rejects, the nerds who were bullied and had no protector. These narratives are about downtrodden heroes discovering their inner strength and standing up to evil and abuse. Look at the archetype of the mild mannered geeky protagonist who hides his incredible abilities - Spider-Man, Superman with his Clark Kent glasses and persona.
The reason these movies are resonating so deeply in this cultural moment is we have an entire generation of traumatized kids, now adults, who are searching for stories to help them make sense of their reality. This is directly linked to the rise of so-called mental illness, aka trauma.
I’m not saying that all of these mass produced movies are works of art, but you need to understand where the appetite is coming from. The root is in collective trauma.
The only connection to DW Griffit’s racist film is surface level - literally just the fact that masks and capes are involved. Pointing to that film as a forerunner of superhero movies is frankly absurd.
The information required to decode the data encoded on the glass is encoded on the glass. The AI/ML is apparently a testing mode, to ensure that someone who knows nothing about what is on the glass is able to extract video of the Superman movie from it.
If the bootstrap section is good enough, the naive, untrained, know-nothing AI should be able to decode the movie. If it isn't good enough, the AI cranks for a long time and then puts Superman in a purple, orange, and green costume, and won't even know that those are all villain colors.
They mention in the article that some of the old black-and-white Superman film is stored on glass as well - but what really amuses me is that (if I recall correctly) Superman HIMSELF stores film on glass (or long crystal shards) in the 1978 film that is the subject of this article. My sister and I used to pretend in winter that icicles were our VHS tapes and we’d put them in the snow to “watch” them.
Wait a minute... isn't this basically Lex Luthor's plan in the first Superman movie?
Also, see the plot from the 1978 Superman movie.
I'm not very knowledgeable, I'm an 80s kid.. so US comics === super hero (also movies to an extent, Donner's Superman was a massive event, Robocop, TMNT ..).
So my answer would be .. no. US comics = Disney + Marvel + DC. I actually struggle to remember anything else. I'd be happy to know more though..
But everyone pays the higher prices while very few hustle CC rewards programs. Just like that superman movie plot or Office Space, the GP is gathering up all those fractional pennies and using them to buy first class air travel.
Superman was the last movie my grandfather worked on before he retired. He was with British Lion so probably at Shepperton Studios/Sound City unit, not Pinewood. If you do read this, please send me an email, would be great to see if you ever crossed paths.
The effect was actually done using retroreflective tape; the building were indeed a physical model, with the edges covered in 3M Scotchlite tape. From first-hand experience (on other movies) the camera is placed behind a half-silvered mirror placed with a 45 degree tilt, with a projector underneath (in this case shining green light). The net result is the camera and projector are on the same optical axis, so no shadows are visible and because the tape (retro)reflects so strongly that's the only thing that shows up.
We used exactly the same technique on 'Superman', but projecting footage in sync with the camera and the most massive screen of Scotchlite behind the actors (it's must've been something like 200 feet wide and 50 high, so big we had to dig a curved trench several feet deep in the floor of Pinewood's A stage to fit it all in (my boss at the time won an Oscar for the flying FX).
..and for the titles in Superman (the old movies with Christopher Reeve). I used to work on computerised rostrum cameras and optical rigs, and watching the rigs actually doing slitscan was always fun.
> I notice in Ebert's reviews an appreciation of films as mere entertainment in cases where is what they intend to be, and an appreciation of films as art if that is what they aspire to. In fact, one of my annoyances at his (often excellent) reviews is that he seemed to apply consciously lowered standards when he thought that a film wasn't aiming too high, which led to him recommending films that were close to mediocre, because they hit the mark they were aiming for. There is a certain integrity in this, of course.
I think he did a great job voicing his own standard, which I think makes a lot of sense, in his review of Shaolin Soccer (https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/shaolin-soccer-2004):
> "Shaolin Soccer" is like a poster boy for my theory of the star rating system. Every month or so, I get an anguished letter from a reader wanting to know how I could possibly have been so ignorant as to award three stars to, say, "HIDALGO" while dismissing, say, "Dogville" with two stars. This disparity between my approval of kitsch and my rejection of angst reveals me, of course, as a superficial moron who will do anything to suck up to my readers.
> What these correspondents do not grasp is that to suck up to my demanding readers, I would do better to praise "Dogville." It takes more nerve to praise pop entertainment; it's easy and safe to deliver pious praise of turgid deep thinking. It's true, I loved "Anaconda" and did not think "The United States of Leland" worked, but does that mean I drool at the keyboard and prefer man-eating snakes to suburban despair?
> Not at all. What it means is that the star rating system is relative, not absolute. When you ask a friend if "Hellboy" is any good, you're not asking if it's any good compared to "Mystic River," you're asking if it's any good compared to "The Punisher." And my answer would be, on a scale of one to four, if "Superman" (1978) is four, then "Hellboy" is three and "The Punisher" is two. In the same way, if "American Beauty" gets four stars, then "Leland" clocks in at about two.
> And that is why "Shaolin Soccer," a goofy Hong Kong action comedy, gets three stars. It is piffle, yes, but superior piffle. If you are even considering going to see a movie where the players zoom 50 feet into the air and rotate freely in violation of everything Newton held sacred, then you do not want to know if I thought it was as good as "Lost in Translation."
It's interesting the way films like the original superman had a very clear hero "doing good". And now we have superheroes with clear flaws, wresting with their conscience and shades of gray. This mirrors the USA fall from hegemony.
I think so too, in as much as I noted elsewhere I think a large part (not the whole picture, but a large part) of why authenticity is a big deal today is the perception (though not always, true) that what is authentic is better in some tangible way. While it may be wrong sometimes, that idea persists because it often is true.
But at some point the virtual Venice will be better than the real thing: the temperature will never exceed what you find comfortable even if your travel companions have different preferences; there will never be too many tourists; your hotel room is more luxurious than anything you could hope for in real life; somehow you always find what you were looking for even when you read the map wrong. You always get a seat at your favorite restaurant. The buildings are cleaner. The "flaws" are just at the appropriate level to make you feel it's authentic.
More importantly, virtual plain-old Venice will have to compete with virtual Space Venice, where canals float between islands floating in space, or Renaissance Venice, or Black Death Venice for the horror fans, or Vegas-style Venice, or Godzilla-attack Venice, or Lego Venice, or any number of crazy variations.
Places like Venice are also important to us now because it stands out so much. But to people growing up with higher and higher quality virtual environments it will seem more and more boring and bland when compared to modern re-interpretations.
To put it another way: "My" Superman movie was the first Christopher Reeve one. It's the "authentic" one. I measure the new Superman actors against that one. I measure new Zod's against that one. But it was not first Superman movie, and I haven't even seen the older ones. And to many in my sons generation, it's some old movie that's far too slow-moving that most of them have not seen or heard of.
To take another example: The painting Scream, that to some already is "that painting that looks a bit like the Scream mask".
To generations growing up with virtual Venice 2100 with taller, more impressive buildings, more dramatic bridges, and other "upgrades", real Venice may soon enough become "that boring city that looks a bit like virtual Venice 2100 but isn't as nice".
I'm curious what you expect people to do and what you're doing yourself.
I worry about climate change and so do most of my friends but I see ZERO action on any of our parts. Example: Nearly all my friends FLEW to GDC this week, many of them that's a HUGE amount of CO2 added to the atmosphere just so we can have fun, network and party. Then we go to BBQ and hamburger restaurants and eat lots of beef which we're told we shouldn't because it's the biggest resource user for the smallest amount of food. Many of them upgrade their $!000 phone every year as well as several other electronic gadgets creating lots of electronic waste.
My point is, even the majority of "believers" won't change their behavior. At most if you're lucky they might start carrying their own bag to the grocery store yet still probably have 15+ pairs of shoes for "fashion" (yet another industry people claim is bad for the environment"
If the believers won't change their behavior what chance is there the non-believers will do anything?
If the only solution is "vote for a world government to geo-engineer the planet" well that's never going to happen.
Is the only rational thing to do, figure out where the new beachfronts will be and start buying property while it's cheap (like Lex Luthor from the first Superman movie)
That he is ethical is part of the problem. He is the perpetual rescuer. He doesn't initiate action, only reacts to situations forced upon him. IronMan does things because he wants to. He has an internal personality. Thor has an internal life. Even Hulk makes decisions on his own occasionally. Superman's role, like Captain America, is to apply ethics to a situation created by someone else. They are perpetually innocent, perpetually perfect, and therefore perpetually boring.
My favorite characters are probably Colson and Fury, both dynamic people who take action on their own. The make mistakes because they make mistakes, not because they are forced or tricked into doing so by evil guy. We don't always know what they are thinking, or by which ethical rules they operate. That's interesting. That's worth watching. Batman and Superman are empty shells in comparison.
> Superman? He is too flat for me to have any opinion.
IMHO, Superman is ethical. He'll stop a nuclear launch and get a cat out of a tree, because he's the ultimate boy scout. Every problem is important to solve, and he has the power to, at least try, to solve them all. Violate ethics for the greater good? Never.
I don't think the Superman point has really come across since Christopher Reeve. I really liked the Nolan Batman movies. He was able to really capture the spirit of that character. It's a shame WB couldn't put that together for Superman.
It's just pent-up demand, I think. Comics never really made sense as the source material for movies until very recently, because they're full of outlandish, fantastic characters and locations that would have been prohibitively expensive (or just downright impossible) to have staged using only stunts and practical effects.
Look at the 1978 Superman movie, for instance; the big selling point there was that "you will believe a man can fly!" Never mind all the other stuff Superman can do in the comics; it was stretching the boundaries of the possible just to show him flying in a way that was convincing to an audience.
The advent of affordable CGI removed those limitations, of course, but by the time that came along there had built up this huge well of untapped source material and a big audience that grew up reading comics for which seeing this stuff on screen is completely novel. Eventually one or the other will dry out, and superhero movies will go back to being just one genre among many.
There was a fundamental change in Hollywood in the late 60 early 70s, when a new generation of filmmakers came up through indie cinema and the studios. Those filmmakers changed the technique, style, and values of the studio system pretty dramatically. Many of those changes persist until today.
Also in the mid 70s, you had the rise of the modern high-concept blockbuster, with films such as JAWS and STAR WARS. Not to mention the advent of the modern superhero movie with SUPERMAN. Those changes have definitely held on until today, and shape not just the content, but also the form of much of modern movies.
There really was a qualitative change in movies around 1970, so it's not unusual if someone can relate more to movies from that point onward.
See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Hollywood
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-concept
Try to actually think about it. What movies fit that formula?
Iron man - no, an arrogant man built his own powers Thor - no, an entitled boy temporarily had to cope with the absence of his powers to earn them back The Hulk - no, he is not a great wizard, he is trying to cure himself Captain America - you could make an argument for it, but no, he auditioned for his powers Batman - no Guardians of the Galaxy - no Spider-man - OK, especially in "The Amazing Spider-man" they played the destiny card Superman - sort-of, but he grew up with his powers Green Lantern - yes Daredevil - sort-of, but his wizards power is "not actually blind" X-men - sort of, but their powers are a civil rights race analogy
Most comic book movies do not fit the boy-who-thinks-he-has-nothing-is-actually-a-great-wizard formula and those that do tend to be less successful.
It's an unfortunate oversimplification to reduce Ebert to his Sun-Times reviews. They were well-written and erudite, but they weren't meant to be extended meditations on the art of cinema. His review-writing had customers, and he gave the customers what they needed and wanted. Ebert had other venues for deeper kinds of writing, and was prolific in them. Ebertfest, for instance, was well-known for frame-by-frame analyses of important movies. Or read how he arrived at and massaged his top 10 films of all time, or what he wrote about Ozu or Herzog.
But I'd pause before stipulating even that his review writing was broad. Even within the medium of mass-market reviews, Ebert was impactful. Think about how his star system worked, so that Donner's Superman shared a rating with Herzog's Aguirre, The Wrath of God, and that somehow still made sense. Or the way he managed his brand, or syndicated his show with Siskel.
I have mixed feelings about this post on what is by far my favorite TV show. On the one hand, I think he's spot on highlighting the aspects of Numb3rs that are unrealistic:
* Time frame for both gathering data and performing analysis
* The incredible depth and breadth of Charlie's knowledge
To enjoy the show, you simply have to think of Charlie as a superhero and suspend your disbelief as if you were watching Spiderman or Superman.
However, the author spends a good chunk of the post attempting to persuade readers that Numb3rs can be thought of as a propaganda vehicle for persuading the masses that a math-based surveillance society is good and necessary. I disagree.
First, there are several episodes featuring poor ethics at the FBI, NSA, prison officials, etc. which sometimes includes manipulating surveillance information (i.e. 216 Protest, 310 Brutus, 313 Finder's Keepers, 608 Ultimatum).
Second, one of the great appeals of the show in general is intense exploration of ethics, with the father and two sons of the Epps family frequently challenging each other and themselves.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, this show appeals to geeks (most people I know who love this show are math/engineer/computer enthusiasts or close to it). You don't get into the hearts and minds of the populace at large by doing virtuoso math demonstrations tied with intense discussions of ethics.
Though I disagree with the propaganda angle (and the off-hand comments about how Numb3rs-type thinking is partly responsible for the house boom and bust), I think it was a great, thought-provoking post, which did a good job of listing out the elements of numbers which stretch the bounds of credulity.
EDIT: typos, inserted specific show names
I bet Digg wishes it had that power.
I always thought Superman was flying faster than the speed of light to go back in time and save Lois. Turns out he really was reversing the rotation of the Earth to rewind events. I like my version of the movie better.
Star Wars, the original movie
Superman, the original movie
Star Trek, the first movie with Shatner, Nimoy, etc. Also Wrath of Khan.
The Matrix
300 probably will become one
The Social Network was surprisingly motivational. Fairly realistic portrayal of programming and programmers and startup life, and I loved many of Sean Parker's motivational speeches, and some of the Zuckerberg character's speeches as well.
I'm going to get my future wife to put headphones on her belly and play a 24/7 loop of the speech Jor-El gave superman from the movie.
Kid will come up a winner.
You know how Clark Kent's boss, in the first Superman movie, says "A good reporter doesn't get great stories — a good reporter makes them great."?
Same thing with programming. If you are given enough freedom to do the job right, and you can find a way to motivate yourself, there are no bad programming jobs.
Zed Shaw himself has bragged about a system he wrote which does the kind of business logic you mention -- except by his description it's a meta-programming system that can add rules almost as fast as they can think them up. That sounds like some sort of constraint solver, which is among the fanciest kind of programming around.