Hacker Cinema
Taken
2008 · Film · 94 min
Part of Taken Collection
Directed by Pierre Morel
Bryan Mills, a former government operative, is trying to reconnect with his teenage daughter Kim. After reluctantly agreeing with his ex-wife to let Kim go to Paris on vacation with a friend, his worst nightmare comes true. While on the phone with his daughter shortly after she arrives in Paris, she and her friend are abducted by a gang of human traffickers. Working against the clock, Bryan relies on his extensive training and skills to track down the ruthless gang that abducted her and launch a one-man war to rescue his daughter.
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30 comments on Hacker News
When you watch that Liam Neeson movie "Taken", do you feel sorry for the people who kidnapped his daughter?
Just adding my two cents after test driving Gemini Ultra after being a long time ChatGPT Pro subscriber:
Remember the whole “Taken 3 makes Taken 2 look like Taken 1” meme? Well Google’s latest video generating AI makes any video gen AI I’ve seen up until now look like Taken 3* (sigh, I said 1, ruined it) - and they are seriously impressive on their own.
Edit: By “they” I mean the other video generating AI makes models, not the other Taken movies. I hope Liam Neeson doesn't read HN, because a delivery like that might not make him laugh.
Why Taken? I was a moviegoer well before the Taken series, and people (normal people) were definitely aware of cuts. In particular they’d come up in conversation with action movies, or any movie where a music video director made the leap to films.
Cinematic taste came a long way since - I don't think most people were even aware of the cuts back then. The Taken movies have a lot to do with that!
Apparently there was someone who claimed Taken was based on him. It was a case of fraud though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taken_(film)#Controversy
> In 2011, a self-proclaimed counter-terrorism expert was convicted of wire fraud after claiming the film was based on a real-life incident in which his daughter was killed. William G. Hillar, who pretended to be a retired Green Beret colonel, claimed to have spent more than 12 years lecturing US government agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation on security issues. However, records revealed he had actually been a radar operator in the Coast Guard Reserve between 1962 and 1970, and had never been in the US Army. Nevertheless, his website claimed Taken was based on events involving him and his family. Hillar, who admitted the charges, was sentenced to 500 hours of community service at Maryland State Veteran Cemeteries. He also agreed to repay $171,000 in speaking fees that he had received from various organizations to which he had presented himself as an expert in terrorism and human trafficking.[29]
His Indian scam center sting videos were honestly some of the most impressive content I've seen on the platform.
Definitely worth a watch if you're interested in seeing scammers who ruin people's lives getting tracked across continents for a bold counteroffensive campaign.
It was like a real life version of the movie Taken, but with believable action.
So I watched John Wick yesterday evening, and unfortunately I didn't like it.
I didn't feel invested in the main character at all, let alone any of the other characters. Was it the camera work, or the editing, or the acting, or the way the story was told? I don't know. In any case as a result I found the whole movie extremely boring.
Someone here mentioned Kill Bill which in a way has a similar story and over-the-top fighting scenes. But I do love Kill Bill (even though I think the fight with the Crazy 88 would have been better if it were not as long). I also found movies like The Transporter or Taken entertaining (which I think are more or less in the same genre as John Wick).
Then what exactly is it that makes me like some of these movies but not John Wick? I'm afraid I don't have the answer to that.
You’re right, of course.
That said, “ No Country for Old Men” and “Hell or High Water” are significantly better movies than “Taken” and “The Equalizer”.
> While “old-man action” movies like Taken and The Equalizer could be considered descendants of The Fugitive, they lack its character development. Those thrillers that are character driven—say, No Country for Old Men or Hell or High Water—are less popcorn, more art.
iow, don't discuss because the goalposts will be moved aggressively.
> Is that a good criteria for whether a film is good or not.
I don't rewatch films as a rule but I do sometimes rewatch films with people who have not seen that film.
There are films like Dancer In The Dark, Grave Of The Fireflies, or Dogville that I simply cannot watch a second time because of the precise, agonising emotional turmoil they create. I will recommend this experience to everyone, and they too will watch it only once and recommend it to others.
Then there are films like Taken that I would never watch because they are dreadful, hateful trash.
I would consider the former list to be beautiful, painful exceptions to the idea that a film that can be watched endlessly is a great work. And even then I might be persuaded to watch them with someone I really loved. Perhaps. Though I'd have to love someone a lot to willingly watch through the end of Dancer again.
I would not be so enthusiastic about spending time with anyone who joyfully rewatches Taken.
> For instance, Taken gets 59% with critics on Rotten Tomatoes. It was a hugely important and impactful film. It basically spawned/revived a whole subgenre of action film.
I wouldn't be surprised if 41% of the general population didn't much like Taken either. I've never had a desire to watch it a second time, for instance, which places it pretty far down my personal list of movies I've seen.
So you can think it's "too blue collar" or whatever, or you can think "it's a subgenre, so broad appeal isn't expected" and you could then argue about how movies without universal appeal should be reviewed, but jumping straight to "they don't like it cause damn blue state liberals" or somesuch seems like a stretch.
> For instance, Taken gets 59% with critics on Rotten Tomatoes. It was a hugely important and impactful film. It basically spawned/revived a whole subgenre of action film.
A fair number of critics looked down on that film because it is casually chauvinistic, nasty and bigoted. (I absolutely loathe it. Want to see how that film could have been? Watch Man On Fire.)
I don't know whether you can support your "politically desirable" assertion with meaningful data -- not to say that you might not be right, but more to say that I don't know what shape that data would have.
But I'd be interested to hear a couple of examples anyway.
Movie critics tend to give mediocre movies a bump when they like the message or think it otherwise is politically desirable.
Similarly, critics tend to downplay movies that have a more... blue collar?... appeal, no matter the artistry or purpose of the film. For instance, Taken gets 59% with critics on Rotten Tomatoes. It was a hugely important and impactful film. It basically spawned/revived a whole subgenre of action film.
I tend to mischievously misapply the word "Challenging" to movies I think shouldn't have been made because they expose the bigotry of their audience.
Like all the Taken movies, or A Boy And His Dog, or anything Steven Seagal made after he discovered Russian money.
I think it’s much the same reason why you see an actor like Bruce Willis in many of the same roles. He keeps refusing them until the price tag is high enough. Also reference the Taken series of movies.
It sounds like something out of a Taken movie.
Or having your car shot at. (With the caveat that my knowledge of kidnapping mostly comes from the Taken movies.)
To change. To do different roles and things beyond acting looking that careers of Clint Eastwood, Al Pacino etc for inspiration noting that if Clint kept on repeating "Go ahead make my day" in every film his career would have been over pretty fast thereafter.
The plan is constant reinvention. The underlying irony is to western audiences, including those who love his work very dearly, he's type-cast and plays essentially the same character in every film. His new grittier film likened to Liam Neeson in Taken, may change that.
I don't know why you've been downvoted, since IMO you raise a valid point.
I've known a few prepper types. They had plans for escape rooms, a significant cache of weapons, some ammo, and a few MREs in the closet.
Nobody had more than maybe a few liters of water per person in the home, and when I asked about an escape plan (e.g. there's a fire, get out and meet at John's house on the next street over) they looked at me like I was insane. Oh, and of course they're all in fairly bad shape.
In my opinion, most of the "prepper" stuff is about fantasy role playing. I see it as related to the "middle aged man porn" we see lately in the form of the Taken franchise of movies. It perhaps it gives a feeling of smug satisfaction in a chaotic life. You're angry that you were cut off in traffic on your way to a job that might have layoffs tomorrow, but at least you can tell yourself that when the apocalypse comes, you'll succeed while that jerk will be fodder. Sort of a tough guy variant of the classic "ass pennies" comedy sketch.
"The men who ran the Mega sites passed around customers' e-mails with reactions, complaints, and compliments, many of them mentioning obviously copyrighted content. For instance, in May 2009, Batato sent an e-mail to Ortmann with a customer note reading: "We watched Taken successfuly [sic] and then tried to watch the Alphabet Killer a day later and got the message to upgrade if we wanted to continue watching."
Another user in 2010 e-mailed Batato asking, "where can we see full movies?" Batato answered, “You need to go to our referrer sites. Such as www.thepiratecity.org or www.ovguide.com[.] There are the movie and series links. You cannot find them by searching on MV directly. That would cause us a lot of trouble ;-).”
In 2008, a user wrote directly to Dotcom complaining about video problems. "I’ve been trying to watch Dexter episodes, but... the sound doesn’t match up with the visual," he wrote. "I didn’t choose to use your site, you seem to dominate episodes 6 and 7 of Dexter on alluc[.org, a linking site]."
Dotcom forwarded the e-mail to Ortmann, writing: "on many forums people complain that our video / sound are not in sync... We need to solve this asap!”
from http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/us-unveils-the-case-against-kim-dotcom-revealing-e-mails-and-financial-data/
A full list of foreign titles for "Taken" :
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0936501/releaseinfo#akas
The worst localized title I know is "Die Hard: With a Vengeance", mysterious called (literally) "Die Hard - Mega Hard" in Denmark. Schwarzenegger's "Red Heat" is (translated) "A Russian cleans up Chicago".
Serious question though, why can't DDG do the same thing without compromising privacy? It would seem like it'd be possible to keep a log of things like "A user searched for 'movie about kidnapped daughter' and clicked on 'Taken'. Maybe weight that one higher next time" -- without keeping user details at all.
That works when you know what it is you're looking for.
Google still wins when you don't know the word/term/name etc for something and are describing it. The reason for that is mostly that every time someone searches on Google, they help make Google smarter. Effectively every time you search, the results are largely based on what someone searched for historically and what they clicked (or even subsequent searches and clicks).
e.g. "movie about kidnapped daughter" (I'm looking for the 2008 movie Taken, but have "forgotten" the name).
Google: 3rd result. Bing: 8th result. DDG: 7th result.
Why is Google 3rd and DDG/Bing 7th and 8th respectively? They likely have all indexed the Wikipedia and IMDB pages for the movie Taken. However Google likely ranks those links closer to the top because historically that's what users want when they searched for that phase.
mainstream: American beauty, Pulp fiction, No country for old men, American History X, Saving Private Ryan, Taken, The pianist
classics: Lawrence of Arabia, The Shawshank Redemption, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Terminator I & II
hipster: Knife in the water (Polanski), Come and See (Idi i smotri - best war movie I've seen), Haute Tension (french horror movie), Requiem for a Dream, Trainspotting, City of God, Blue Is the Warmest Color, Goodbye Lenin, The cube
While I think this sort of research is useful- I dont think this is anything that will affect people in real life. This is more the makings of a plot from the movie "Taken". If someone wants to rob your house, they will break in and probably be in and out before police can respond. A thief isnt going to jam your alarm systems radio and pull some elaborate hack to steal your laptop or flat screen tv.
It's more than that though. Even if you never leave your country, be it the UK, Brasil, Canada, South Africa, Israel, or Japan, you're going to experience foreign media; American TV shows, movies, music, books, video games are everywhere.
If you're in the US, however, you generally only experience US media; in several cases, US remakes of popular foreign shows (House of Cards, The Office, etc.). A lot of foreign media you don't necessarily notice is foreign, and books, movie posters, and video game covers are modified for US audiences (some would claim 'dumbed down').
Americans only see America through the eyes of America, and the rest of the world through the eyes of America; for example, in Taken, Armenians are shown as kidnapping slave-trading murderers, after all our poor innocent white girls, and the French police chief is shown as a corrupt, indifferent traitor.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world sees the US and the rest of the world through American eyes, but they also see both through the eyes of their own media, which provides them with more of a balanced view, and lets (forces?) them to make at least some of their own decisions.
No, from the available information (including the indictment) it did not appear that Megaupload complied with DMCA laws. Specifically:
(1) They sought to rate-limit DMCA takedown requests
(2) They operated the service with red-flag knowledge of copyrighted content, such as when a user complained that the video quality of the Showtime show "Dexter" was poor, and Kim Schmitz mailed his team to work on improving the quality of that content.
(3) They themselves used the service to exchange copyright-encumbered material, such as the movie "Taken".
(4) They operated a paid incentive program to get users to upload copyrighted content, and in their itemized performance reports for the program acknowledged repeatedly that the content they were paying for was copyrighted.
Obviously it hasn't been proven, because the case hasn't been taken to trial. But the indictment is damning; the DOJ has MegaUpload's emails and lays the case out in Kim & Co's own words. For instance:
On or about April 23, 2009, DOTCOM sent an e-mail message to VANDER KOLK, ORTMANN, and BENCKO in which he complained about the deletion of URL links in response to infringement notices from the copyright holders. In the message, DOTCOMstated that “I told you many times not to delete links that are reported in batches of thousands from insignificant sources. I would say that those infringement reports from MEXICO of “14,000” links would fall into that category. And the fact that we lost significant revenue because of it justifies my reaction.”
And:
* When an outsider complained that MegaVideo's hosting of the Showtime pay-tv series "Dexter" had desynchronized audio/video, instead of taking down "Dexter", Kim Schmitz fired off mail saying that fixing the AV problem was a priority.
* Mega employees themselves uploaded copies of major motion pictures to the service, such as Luc Besson's _Taken_.
* There are Mega emails, on which Kim is apparently CC'd, in which employees enumerate the specific files uploaded to certain high-performing affiliate members, noting (approvingly) that they include copyrighted movies and TV shows. For instance, one line item in an accounting mail: 100 USD [USERNAME DELETED] 10+ Full popular DVD rips (split files), a few small porn movies, some software with keygenerators (warez)
There's a widespread misunderstanding of the DMCA on Hacker News and Reddit, and that misunderstanding goes like this: "to follow the letter of the law, you must somehow be responsive to individual takedown requests from rightsholders". That is in fact not correct; it only captures part of the responsibility of service providers under the DMCA. Another responsibility, clearly spelled out in the DMCA, is that you can't operate a service with knowledge of specific infringing content. You cannot know that Luc Besson's _Taken_ resides on your service at a specific URL and then simply wait for a rightsholder to request its takedown. If you operate your service knowing that there are specific pieces of copyrighted content on your site that you're "getting away with" having because nobody's sent you a takedown, and a prosecutor can show that (for instance, with an email obtained during discovery in which your staff does a line-by-line accounting of a promotional program you ran in which you paid contributors to your site to upload copyrighted material, and in that email you specifically make a case for paying one such prolific uploader more because more of their material is copyrighted), you forfeit safe harbor protections.
Finally, and orthogonally, let me just add that while we can't convict Kim Schmitz on the presumption that he is a scumbag fraudster, and the checks and balances in our system of government do require us to dot every 'i' and cross every 't' with regards to chain of custody of evidence, evidentiary standards, and cause for search --- so that if Schmitz escapes his inevitable imprisonment this time, I'll at least be comforted that our legal system takes those issues seriously --- Kim Schmitz gets no such pass in the court of public opinion. The evidence against him in that court is overwhelming. Unless you think the DoJ fabricated his emails, we know he's a crook. You can pretend there's a controversy here, but if you do, my take is you're not allowed to criticize Zynga or evil hedge fund managers and HFTs anymore.
You keep coming back to "generalized knowledge doesn't comprise red-flag knowledge", and I keep coming back with specific examples of red-flag knowledge. For instance, I can name the actual title of a copyrighted movie the Mega staff pushed onto the site. It was _Taken_, produced by Luc Besson. How did they know it was there, you might ask? Because they put it there.
Admittedly these issues are for the courts to decide, not message boards, but come on: by all the evidence available to us message board peons, these guys were a bunch of crooks.
Thanks for asking this question. To help understand what's being alleged by the DOJ, you'd probably want to know what they found in Mega's email; for instance:
On or about April 23, 2009, DOTCOM sent an e-mail message to VANDER KOLK, ORTMANN, and BENCKO in which he complained about the deletion of URL links in response to infringement notices from the copyright holders. In the message, DOTCOMstated that “I told you many times not to delete links that are reported in batches of thousands from insignificant sources. I would say that those infringement reports from MEXICO of “14,000” links would fall into that category. And the fact that we lost significant revenue because of it justifies my reaction.”
* "We have a funny business... modern days pirates", said one Mega- employee to another. "We're not pirates", he responded. "We're just providing shipping services to pirates."
* When an outsider complained that MegaVideo's hosting of the Showtime pay-tv series "Dexter" had desynchronized audio/video, instead of taking down "Dexter", Kim Schmitz fired off mail saying that fixing the AV problem was a priority.
* Mega employees themselves uploaded copies of major motion pictures to the service, such as Luc Besson's _Taken_.
* There are Mega emails, on which Kim is apparently CC'd, in which employees enumerate the specific files uploaded to certain high-performing affiliate members, noting (approvingly) that they include copyrighted movies and TV shows. For instance, one line item in an accounting mail: 100 USD [USERNAME DELETED] 10+ Full popular DVD rips (split files), a few small porn movies, some software with keygenerators (warez)
Remember: there are two sides to claiming "safe harbor": complying with takedowns, and not operating your service with actual knowledge of infringing activity on the service. Mega obviously operated with extensive actual knowledge of infringement. The operators of Youtube obviously knew that piracy was rampant on the Internet, and even on their service, but no prosecutor or litigator was ever able to show that Youtube's operators knew of specific, actual infringing activity on the site.
I found it easier to cite my comments from the last big Mega thread here than to go back to the indictment, which you can find easily on Google. The indictment is hilarious. The craziness at Mega just goes on and on. If you can think of something a lawyer would tell you not to do if you were going to run a file sharing service, Mega probably found a creatively terrible way to do it.