Hacker Cinema
The Batman
2022 · Film · 177 min
Directed by Matt Reeves
In his second year of fighting crime, Batman uncovers corruption in Gotham City that connects to his own family while facing a serial killer known as the Riddler.
8 positive12 negative94 neutralfrom 114 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
116 comments on Hacker News
You're basically describing the structure of the most popular manga and anime genre in the world, and some of the top sellers in that genre have been able to keep the power scaling up for years if not decades. It isn't a problem if you do it right.
Also few superhero movies that I'm aware of actually follow that format. Even the long runners like Superman and Batman tend to only focus on one or a few familiar villains and essentially rehashing their hero's origin story every time, and in the MCU Thanos was always in the background, but the heroes themselves consisted of wizards and demigods. And Hawkeye was also there.
Batman beating Superman in any universe is just stupid, I'll grant you that much. I don't care how much prep time you have, you're not defeating a being that can bench press the moon and slice cities in half with eye lasers like Ramiel in NGE. And you're literally just a rich asshole dressed like a bat.
Surely it's problematic that Batman doesn't have consent to hijack phones? Whereas participating in Ring is voluntary?
Anyway, movies aren't, like, the arbiters of truth. Sometimes they just have simplistic themes.
> It's probably got something to do with copyright. Like the way it interacts with markets makes this sort of arrangement net-harmful pretty much any time you see it.
I would say it is monopoly.
If you are a luxury brand you may sell your pen in a brand store only and limit access and will have some business.
But other companies will produce comparable pens and then your only moat is the brand identity but in all objective criteria the other pens are equal.
With intellectual work you got the monopoly. If I want the Taylor Swift song I don't want Lady Gaga, even though both may be good. If I want a Batman movie, I don't want Iron Man. These products aren't comparable in the same way. And another vendor (studio) can't produce an equal product in the same way as with the pen example.
A few recent Warner Bros films / coproductions
Imagine if these had not had theatrical releases, or, had only had 1 week limited releases just to qualify for awards..
Tenet
Dune
The Batman
Barbie
Furiosa
Twisters
Minecraft
Sinners
Superman
Weapons
One Battle After Another
I think you're making up a narrative in your head to support your bias against Disney here.
TASM 1 was definitely well received when it was released. It was tarnished by the slop that was TASM 2, which lead to Sony being able to come to a licensing agreement with Marvel Studios, to use Spider-Man in the MCU. I think it's an extreme stretch to think Disney had any nefarious doings in the public opinion of those movies, Sony did that to themselves and has proven time-and-time again they cannot make a good quality movie with their Spider-Man IPs.
The Rise of Skywalker is at 51% on Rotten Tomatoes, that was universally acknowledged to be terrible, even by the "critics". Disney definitely was also not able to silence or drown-out the absolute outrage by the cast and fans of the treatment of Luke in The Last Jedi.
Why would Marvel / Disney spend any effort sabotaging the DCEU when Warner Bros. was good at doing it all themselves? If Marvel was worried about DC stealing their audience, they would have focused more on movies like The Batman, not some c-grade antihero most people have no idea about? The Rock fostered a lot of the ill-will towards that movie himself.
I say all this but I also think it's accurate still to say reviews are trustworthy but I don't think they ever have been. I don't think this is some new phenomenon, just people are more aware of the corruption embedded in the system.
The real Heart O' the City Hotel is in Chicago, like the rest of the place names in the movie (although the real name is Heart O' Chicago). The Wachowskis wanted to film there, but Major Daley (historic asshole and scumbag, in case you're not familiar) wouldn't let them. I can't remember what the rationale was, but then of course two Batman movies shot there.
The hotel: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTY4-u0Fs4DOLzJL211Susx1v4D10wUaW9v3oeyH4vWUbGtjRtCyM9WbP6xdFIqvaswfsMcxEgtpebEjVHixRR3OZ6MRJDuGCq6X8AQYlLlnV1BANj7wcZyg1tbd9bCmeXk6pY_e8SUzo/s1600/Heart+o+Chicago+motel.jpg
> getting real 4K detail requires a level of precision in camera focus that frequently just isn't happening.
100% agree. Relevant examples: "The Batman" (2022) a gorgeous film which was shot with ARRI ALFA anamorphic lenses, intentionally modified and detuned to achieve a specific, "dirty" look and character. Blade Runner 2049 (2017) with Roger Deakins winning the Oscar for best cinematography even though he intentionally chose to shoot primarily on the Arri Alexa XT, a native 3.4K resolution camera. And the BR 2049 4K UHD is widely considered a reference grade disc and one of the best examples of what the 4K UHD format can achieve, despite technically being a 3.4K upscale.
And a personal example, this year's Superbowl broadcast, which was produced and distributed in 1080P HDR10, looked shockingly good on my 150-inch calibrated screen, which was enabled by a combination of best-in-class cameras, lenses and production talent with a high bit-rate throughout the distribution chain. It turns out when your primary cameras have $85,000 Canon glass on the front, it makes a difference (especially when Canon has a team of techs on-site all week to custom tune the lenses). Canon also loaned them a couple prototype super long lenses able to instantly switch to a shallow depth of field mode with zero change in aperture or shutter. One of those created a shot that made me literally rewind my DVR and pause just to appreciate (and then go look up how they did it later) It was a beautiful close-up on one player's face full-screen with perfect soft bokeh from a camera at least 150 feet away. Incredible.
> if you watch on a projector, 4K can be nice
It's interesting because I upgraded from a very high-quality native 1080P DLP projector (with pseudo-4K pixel shift) to high-end native 4K laser only about 18 months ago (fairly late). I never saw pixels on the 1080P projector except when displaying test signals during calibration (and even then, barely). I'm glad I waited a few years for 4K laser to more fully mature because, while there was an uplift in overall image quality going to native 4K, it was almost disappointingly minor. Even having waited so long, I feel like a meaningful portion of the 4K upgrade cost was wasted. Frankly, I'd still be perfectly happy with the (very good) perfectly calibrated 1080P DLP projector that's now nearly 7 years old.
If I was going to put more money into my AV system (and I'm not... because it wouldn't make anything look or sound any better), I'd invest in an even better projector lens. But that wouldn't matter unless Hollywood started releasing higher fidelity content. And even if they did, it wouldn't matter because there's no way to get a bunch of that higher fidelity content on my screen. Hollywood's not releasing anything beyond 4K HDR10+ UHD discs anytime soon (and maybe ever) and streamers don't want to distribute content at scale beyond 20-25 Mbps. OTA broadcast content could deliver slightly better fidelity (in theory) once (if) ATSC 3.0 ever rolls out widely but broadcasters have already made it clear they're going to divide any extra bandwidth the FCC gives them into more shopping channels at low bitrates. Frankly, I think we're pretty much at the end game for source quality in cinematic content for theater or couch-mode viewing. Now the only remaining battle is getting more people upgraded to gear, calibration, signal path and source content which can fully and correctly display what properly encoded high bit-rate 4K HDR10+ already provides (I include Dolbyvision in that because, in practice, it's pretty much the same quality as well-encoded HDR10+).
I also agree with you that it's hard to even see a noticeable difference between good 2K and 4K except with synthetic content like CGI animation. I think people who report observing a significant difference are either having some placebo effect or something was wrong with their 2K setup, signal chain or content, so 4K looked better not due to the resolution increase but because it fixed whatever was wrong with their 2K setup.
> Spending money on brightness and contrast is 100x more important.
Indeed. And also HDR, higher quality source content (ie less compressed), getting rid of digital keystoning or any other subtle degradation in the signal chain and, of course, ambient light control. I always tell new projector owners to first leave their projector turned off, darken the room to viewing mode and then sit there in the dark staring at their blank white screen. Then I point out, "that white is the blackest black you'll ever see". And that will (sometimes) finally convince them to get serious about light control. :-)
And then I walk by the row of 65 and 75 inch screens at Costco advertising "Amazing 8K Upgrade" to people who watch streaming movies from their couch 8-feet away from the screen and just shake my head. They're hawking grade-A homeopathic bullshit to nice people who don't know any better and should feel bad about themselves for lying to sell people something they don't need.
There's definitely a correlation between higher spectacle and poorer storytelling and less artful visuals. I was discussing this recently specifically in the context of less 'cinematic' cinematography in VFX-heavy super hero films and arrived at three primary conclusions:
* There are specific reasons for this correlation driven by the additional on-set shooting requirements placed on the cinematographer, lighting director and camera team to support VFX. This takes time and focus away from artfully lighting and lensing the live action elements and producers don't always budget sufficient time for both. When something has to give, it isn't going to be shooting the VFX plates.
* There are specific aesthetic reasons driving this. On a film with 2000 VFX elements that will later be layered into almost every live action scene, the cinematographer and lighting director are understandably reluctant to light or lens expressively beautiful shots because matching those shots can be more challenging for the VFX teams. It's easier (and faster) for everyone if the cinematographer lights and lenses with a more flat look. I recently saw an interview with the cinematographer on the Marvel series Loki (Season 2) and he said that he talked extensively with the VFX director specifically about this issue and the VFX director was unique in telling him, "Nope, shoot it how you really want to and we'll match you." Obviously, this was enabled in-part by the Marvel-level budget and talent. But it's interesting that it's rare enough to be notable.
* Ultimately, there's good evidence that VFX-heavy films don't have to look "flat HDR boring". We have counter-examples like "The Batman" (2022) proving a VFX-soaked super hero movie with beautifully expressive lighting and principle photography is possible. It's just hard, requires more time and money and you need highly skilled people.
The thread is here and includes links to several good videos with example clips: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43560111
> I'm not convinced it's necessarily a lack of creativity, but more just a lack of knowledge and expertise around what's even possible.
Agreed. Great creatives are still great (and still too rare). In addition to the lack of technical proficiency and creative aspiration, I also suspect there's an element of some directors/DPs on VFX blockbusters assuming all the sensational VFX elements in the frame simply overwhelm beautifully subtle, artistically expressive in-camera cinematography or maybe make it matter less. I can't really fault them for assuming that as it's sometimes at least somewhat true (for some viewers). But then I look at an extraordinary outlier example of VFX-soaked comic book movie lensed brilliantly like The Batman compared to a typically competent example like recent live action Spiderman and realize... nope, it still matters - it's just really hard to do well and integrate with VFX. (Some good comparison examples in this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STynLl-2FqU).
Our kids, both teens, are beloved by everyone they meet. I'm not exaggerating.
Our oldest, our daughter, has had a few jobs working in her craftland, and both loved it and was loved by her fellow employees and customers.
Our son is an open chess champion who is beloved by his chess club compariots. When he played out of his mind and won the open tournament, the cool part was that his chess club mates were really happy that he won, and a parent of one of his friends excitedly told me how happy they were. Even thought his son was much younger, my son's friendliness and kindness really endeared him to that young Indian boy.
The question is, "Why?"
First off, we're not particularly religious at home. We sometimes pray before meals, but we tend to eat when we're hungry, i.e. not all together, always. We rarely pray together because I feel strongly that religion is a personal affair. I also do not pray in front of them, to prevent putting any kind of pressure on them towards my preference. We Sufis feel there is no superiority in one form of religion over others, and I manifest that most deeply by letting them know that their path is theirs to choose. I'm only here to love them and teach them how to be lovingly kind and respectful to others.
Second, and probably most importantly: they have never had unfettered access to the Internet and we have no TV of any kind, and they do not have or use smartphones or social media of any kind (except our daughter is a good navigator in the car).
We did have Hulu for a minute, but mainly for the powerful "Summer of Soul". We have also watched some Tubi for, for example, "Death on the Nile" and a few select others. And the old Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes series are a mainstay, as well as a few select movies, such as the Avengers series and "Knives Out", but it is very minimal, nothing too sexy, and nothing at all too violent.
And ZERO internet or social media. Sure, we might look some stuff up, we watch some stuff like Tosh Show (after I pre-screen it), but stuff more like Veritasium (that they love), and some random YT videos we find interesing. Plus, we watch a fair bit of NHKOnline for Design Stories, 72 Hours, and, of course, Grand Sumo Highlights (just for how entirely foreign and intense that sport is) for maybe a decade now. They have their favorite EPL and Serie A teams, plus Champion's League, as they like to knock the ball around at the park. My son and I follow the NBA through a few pods (while he chesses online on his computer, which is in the living room with this one, our "media computer") and the occasional highlight.
My point here is that I keep their media appetites satiated with interesting, curated content, but they're spared the titilating fiction that I grew up on. The only horror movie they've seen (multiple times) is Jordan Peele's fantastic "Nope". But absolutely no gratuitous sex stuff, whatsoever, not that we don't have the occasional conversation about such stuff. And we watch a bit of comedy, with three of Tom Papa's stand-up specials on Tubi being a big recent hit.
The important thing is that we human beings have a part of us that gravitates towards the lewd and lascivious, and our media is naturally permeated with it, and they just don't need it, and my approach has worked. They help the family around the house because they understand that they're valuable parts of the team and that doing good work is good for everyone. And when they do catch wind of something gross (usually said by a comedian), they appreciate that we'll talk about it but that we screen off that part of the world for them.
I was exposed to porn at a young age (6th grade recycling dumpster "Oui" magazines) and then Playboy Channel and HBO in my early teens. No teenager needs Animal House or Porky's in their lives. Being homeschooled (our daughter's choice because middle school orientation was brutal, and our son to play more chess), they're also not socialized by kids with smartphones who watch "Game of Thrones" rapescenes and whatnot.
My daughter has listened to and/or read half of my favorite author William Gibson's novels, plus Anna Karenina and lots and lots of other literature plus Langston Hughes' own poetry collection plus the biographies of some famous women. We all together listened to 2018ish's Pullitzer Prize-winning 900pg biography of Frederick Douglass (5-6 hours/day for 2-3 weeks, weekends off), so they know how brutal America is to Black folks, and how talented and capable they are. And my son and I have listened to Stephen E. Ambrose's "D-Day" and "Citizen Soldier" multiple times, and we all love his book and Tom Hanks' miniseries "Band of Brothers". My son and I have also listened to a lot of the excellent podcast "Fall of Civilizations".
They understand the importance of love and they know enough of history to understand how brutal most of this world has been and still is, to some extent. We watched Jan6's debacle unfold live on CNN's live website, to our shared horror. That this orange bastard pardoned those fuckers is truly evil, and my kids understand that full-well. We hold no ethnic animus, or consider ourselves superior in any way to others, except perhaps in our worldview that centers on universal compassion, kindness, and mutual respect.
They have NEVER -- and I mean NEVER -- had an ill word said against them by anyone, ever, and that's no exaggeration. A teacher of our daughter's cried on their last day when she pulled me aside to tell me how much she will miss our daughter, and our son was chosen to be in the 4th grade class that spent part of the day mainstreaming ASD kids; he was chosen for his kindness. We love and care for each other, without even having to ask. We enjoy hanging out and we laugh a LOT, with each other, at each other, and, most importantly, at ourselves.
So, when I say that nothing in the universe is more important than we human beings choosing compassion, for one and all, I mean it, and I have the fucking proof. And when I say we're living in a world full of purblind fools who are destroying this world with their ignorant selfishness, I know what I'm talking about.
Wake up to compassion, my friends. Both your and our collective happiness is at stake.
"There's still time to change the road you're on." --Stairway to Heaven
And I've always sworn around the kids and let them swear freely (but only in the house), because that's the only way to learn the difference between profane and vulgar. Fucking is a very useful word, so long as it's not the verb form, but even that rule was broken when, at the end of Bale's Batman trilogy, Ras al Ghoul's daugher betrays him, after having slept with him, my wife asked why she did both those things, our daughter replied,
"She fucked him before she fucked him."
I couldn't be prouder that she both understands that truth and knows enough to not say it in public.
Batman, Superman and Spider-Man are not real. And that does matter. It is super normal to watch a movie and sympathize with what would be clearly bad guys in real life.
So yes, batman in particular would be considered bad by most people. He is just another gangster cause quite a lot of damage to the city on the regular. We do not care, because it is made up movie city.
Superman and Spider man afaik do not go around randomly assassinating people, but it is a long time since I watched that.
It wasn't a sudden change, it's been a gradual tendency towards them. James Bond was already 19 films by the turn of the century (or 20 if you include the other Casino Royale), King Kong and Star Trek both got to 6, Batman 8, Star Wars had just had the 4th, Friday the 13th had reached 9 films.
Even BttF itself was three films, and in the second one was parodying the tendency towards sequels with the holographic Jaws 19.
I meant it as a joke - it is a reference to the financial/accounting firm from the movie "The Batman"... bad enough it drove one of their auditors crazy ...
They are a fad because in most cases their entire purpose is nostalgia, i.e. pointing at the screen and saying "OMG it's just like the 1990s!!!". In the recent Batman movie, soviet lenses from the 1950s were used. Did anyone feel a "soviet" look? A "1950s" look? No, they were chosen because they look unique
The working title of the project is often public, e.g. on signs to the location shoot, and as such is often cryptic so that that the casual observer won't know that e.g. "Rory's First Kiss" is a Batman movie.
Batman. Any Batman movie but specially the cartons.
Hey everyone! Roam is the TikTok for games; a game-driven social app, where every creator, artist & influencer can make unique multiplayer games for their fans in minutes with the help of AI. We work with Rick & Morty, Batman, Harry Potter, Lego Movie, Tom & Jerry, 64 similar IPs as well as > 250 Content Creators with 138M+ audience reach who have committed to making games on Roam and are signing new creators & IPs daily.
Unlike UEFN or Roblox, that are limited to technical game developers, Roam provides tools for anyone to build personalised games, enabling 10,000x more games to be built annually by every creator & social media user out there. TLDR: We can build the first true game-powered social app and grab a huge market share on the way.
We’re currently looking to fill 2 roles:
* Founding Full Stack & AI/ML Engineer
* Founding Gameplay Programmer (Unity / C#)
We’ve built out the base layer of the platform, integrated AI environment generation, set up the game-building flow, finished 80% of backend, and have a testflight.
Learn more, apply & reach out here: www.build.roam.lol
It’s like something out of some old Batman film: „we‘ll put the poison factory right in the middle of Gotham city!“
“2h movie about batman, with a double twist in the end.”
I am a director now.
Once you keep your eyes out for the look, the usage of vintage lenses in modern movies can be pretty apparent, for example a Helios 44-2 was used in "The Batman" for the car chase scene with the penguin. There must be a few floating around the Hollywood rental shops, the Helios has a pretty distinctive bokeh pattern. You'll see it shot wide open looking directly at the subject for dramatic affect
Luckily these lenses are pretty cheap (The USSR made many of them), I purchased two in late 2022 that shipped from Ukraine
A video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYvWpavSXeE
You make a good point, there’s a difference in copyrighting exact works vs. the characters or the story that the work is made up of. I’m not arguing for removing literal copyright (though the terms should be shorter). But I think it’s fine if other people rushed to make their own Star Wars movies after it came out. Hardcore fans are pretty good at deciding what’s “canon” vs. not anyway, and the rest of us don’t care as long as the work is of good quality. Would it matter if the same Spiderman or Batman movie that’s remade once a decade could be made by literally anyone without paying royalties? It could make for richer content I’d think.
I feel like an artist should be more upset with what could be created from the prompt that was not true to the original film, with only minor changes to the prompt. For instance, a picture of batman and joker having drinks together on the roof top.
Should you pay royalties if someone says to you "remember that scene from Blade Runner" or "imagine if Jean Luc Picard beamed into the middle of a Batman movie" and visualize something similar to something highly similar to a movie or TV show you've seen?
It's superior because the technology for filming and effects is exponentially superior. Also story telling has become superior... Pacing is something directors pay more attention to and story formats are constantly imitated and improved upon.
The gap between 2022 batman and tdk is too small. When star wars came out it was relevant for over a decade.
Additionally it's impossible for things to increase and become "better" forever. In the last two decades we have are heading towards slow downs in improvements. For example Photoreal special effects can't get any better than Photoreal.
You give the edge to the original? Do you like older movies in general? Do you like vinyl records even though Spotify is superior? Then you belong to a segment of the population who hates everything mainstream because it's too popular. The more niche something is the more you like it because you think it makes you unique when I ironically it makes you cliche.
That could be you. Barring that then you just have unique tastes for br. What I talk about is more of a generality here. It doesn't account for deviations too far from the bell curve, unless your goal is to deviate from the bell curve as much as possible. Ironically if that is your goal, as I stated previously, then you're just moving closer to the center as a hipster.
Why do you say that “2049 is obviously the superior movie”? You don’t give any reasoning, so I can only assume that you’re implying newer=better?
Is The Batman (2022) obviously superior to The Dark Knight?
(I was not alive in the 80s and love both Blade Runners, but would probably give the edge to the original if I had to choose my favorite. I greatly prefer TDK to TB, but that could be influenced by nostalgia)
I’d say that AAA are the rough equivalent of major Hollywood productions. Looking at Wikipedia for budgets and box office for a few high profile films:
Everything Everywhere All At Once had a budget in the $14M to $25M range, for a $141M box office. The Batman made $771M from a $185M-$200M budget, and Multiverse of Madness made $959M off a $294M budget.
EEAAO is a AA, maybe an A film where Batman and MoM are AAA, you couldn’t even produce The Batman or MoM with all the revenue from EEAAO. Nonetheless, EEAAO was by far the most successful of the three, both in terms of critical acclaim and in terms of return on investment.
Likewise, Hearthstone is definitely not a AAA game. It’s deliberately a much smaller product than Blizzard’s other games. Cities Skyline is the product of a tiny 30ish person company, published by a publisher famous for lower profile, lower production value games.
Paradox as a publisher is about the same tier as A24: Very successful in their respective niches, but not their industries’ 800-pound gorillas.
PSA: Nokia is out there pitching a vision for what 6G mobile networks will look like, and they're pitching this as a _feature_ of the media.
Nakia wants 6G devices to act as 3D imaging clients, and for network operators to have access to a realtime, 3-dimensional visualization that can see right through walls.
this was literally used as a plot point in one of the batman movies a decade ago to highlight how dangerously invasive tech can be.
https://www.nokia.com/about-us/newsroom/articles/nokias-vision-for-the-6g-era/
https://www.bell-labs.com/institute/blog/building-network-sixth-sense/#gref
> A very exciting innovation that 6G will bring to the table would be its ability to sense the environment. The ubiquitous network becomes a source of situational awareness, collating signals that are bouncing off objects and determining type and shape, relative location, velocity and perhaps even material properties. With adequate 6G solutions for privacy and trust, such a mode of sensing can help create a “mirror” or digital twin of the physical world in combination with other sensing modalities.
I like this argument a lot; but again -- how does this play out in the real world? It's pretty easy to refute what will happen in real life. Think, e.g Batman. I could write a very new and original "Batman" comic that doesn't strongly resemble anything -- movie, toy, comic, whatever -- that exists, but would be recognizable to fans.
Once it starts doing well, will DC come after me? You bet.
I would probably not hate The Batman as much as i do if it was only 2 hours. Terrible film.
It's not that a long movie is inherently bad. Indeed, the subtitle here absolutely call out that a three hour film from the right filmmaker could be great!
It's that the financial constraints that previously existed, that would drive filmmakers to a tighter narrative, have been removed. And now there's little constraining the desire to turn in a 180+ minute opus.
Are there stories that need 3 hours, or that can justify that kind of length? Sure. But there's a whole lot of films being released that are far longer than they really need to be. JOHN WICK 4 is almost 3 hours long. That seems absurd. THE BATMAN was a fucking SLOG of a film, and absolutely did not have 3 hours of content. It badly needed editing.
You know who else needs editing? Scorsese. His later films, including and especially the ones called out in the linked article, are fat, fat, fat. No word of it a lie, I'm not sure he's made a film I liked in nearly 20 years.
That's is why I called it two separate axes and not two ends in a single axis. You need a base level of technical competency to understand what the limitations of your equipment are to leverage it to the fullest extent and avoid doing things that will just plain not work, and the technical features are needed to accomplish specific things, but artistry is till required. Feature films have been captured on iPhone (you can say that is little more than a stunt, but it still exists).
Not everyone is filming Barry Lyndon with f/.95 aperture in candle-lit scenes. Watching older films where both the glass and the film were subpar compared to what's available today, where the grain was high, the focus puller wasn't at the top of their game leaving characters somewhat out of focus (when looking closely, maybe not noticeable at 480p or 720p), but the films are still enjoyable. Parts of The Batman were filmed on a Helios 40-2, an objectively terrible lens when it comes to it's optical characteristics, but it can evoke a look that you can't otherwise get which helps with the mood the cinematographer was trying to capture. You won't be able to capture the vast expanses of night time scenes of Nope (filmed as day for night with infrared cameras) with subpar equipment. You need full sharpness for easier rotoscoping when dealing with VFX. You want the best cameras available to capture miniatures of spaceships like in 2001 or Interstellar to make people believe these are real spaceships. You can leverage a new technology in a new way, like 28 Days Later used new at the time digital cameras (that would nowadays be considered subpar) for easier application of effects like undercranking and lower production costs, or how they used 360 shutters in Collateral. But you can also make a film like The Man From Earth that was shot in a single room, with a bunch of actors and an camera that was average at the time, or Saving Private Ryan simply undercranking and using really short shutterns to ensure that the beach landing scene was crisp through and through. Everything Everywhere All At Once didn't have Marvel-budget level gear, but they still made one of the best movies of the past few years.
I don't fully disagree with what you're saying: better tools expand the envelope of what you can accomplish. But technology is in service of the art, not the other way around (unless you're producing marketing material for the manufacturer, I guess ^_^).
I love combing over features, and learn about the mechanics of these amazing machines, and the theory of the physics of light (even knowing how it works, it is still feels like magic that you can take a full picture of an object that is partially obstructed as long as you can make that foreground element blurred enough). I'm a shit artist, but I trust one with a point and shoot to make something better than I can with my DSLRs. I can't wait to see what new story telling tricks people will come up with new tech, like Nope did.
Consider the comparison images:
https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/apps/csgo/images/csgo_react/cs2/maps/overpass_lower_tunnel_s1.jpg
https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/apps/csgo/images/csgo_react/cs2/maps/overpass_lower_tunnel_s2.jpg
(The former is CS2, the latter CSGO). In my office, with the sun streaming in through the double windows, with relatively low-gamma, lower-contrast old IPS monitors that don't suck but aren't 4k professional OLEDs, yeah, I absolutely want everything to be bright. It kills the horror-movie feel, where your eyes are at the edge of their abilities, squinting and peering into the foggy shadows for barely-perceptible hints of motion, but if you want to actually see what you're doing you want flattened dynamic range.
If you're not watching on an HDR monitor in a pitch-black home theater, you can't see anything in Batman (2022) or Game of Thrones, or any of the modern "realistic", "gritty," underexposed shows. It's definitely more artistically appealing in ideal conditions, but if you're not going to perfectly recreate the ideal viewing conditions (and crank up the gamma on your display to compensate a bit while you're at it), it's pointless.
I have the same complaint regarding dynamic range with regards to sound mixes, too. I understand that the real battlefield sends soldiers home with tinnitus because explosions are head-splittingly loud. I don't want that realism when I'm in-game, flashbangs should not be mixed in Counter-strike such that their own monitors and headsets/speakers physically incapacitate the players if they turn the volume up to be able to hear the radio commands. When listening to a movie, I usually just accept that I have to turn on subtitles (even though my hearing is fine) and will have to read the dialog if I don't want to wake up my kids with the house shaking when there's an on-screen explosion.
If there's anything I know about 1998, it's that Steven Tyler was dreaming of me, and didn't want to miss a thing. I can't think of the last time a movie moved the cultural dial the way they used to in the 90s. I guess Frozen? It seems to be a lot rarer nowadays.
For me at least, a movie just isn't a spectacle the way it used to be. Going out to see Top Gun: Maverick, and seeing The Batman at a drive-in cinema is probably the closest I've been to that feeling since the original Avatar. Maybe I'm not giving enough credit to the Avengers movies.
It may just be confirmation bias, but I've been noticing this with some scenes set in the outdoors shot in front of LED walls. They have almost too beautifully perfect, almost colorful lighting conditions.
Examples that come to mind right now:
1. Scene in The Batman where Bruce and Selina have a moment in the under construction tower at golden hour. Maybe some other scenes in that movie too. 2. The entire opening sequence in Thor: Love and Thunder.
> “You can't watch a really good movie with a satisfying conclusion, they are all written for a sequel.”
This only applies to the Disneyfied mega-blockbusters that represent a large share of production dollars but a small share of movies created overall.
It’s never been easier to find and access good movies, new and old. No matter if they’re from Iowa or France or Korea, practically anything is available on streaming a few clicks away. The problem is really the overwhelming abundance of choice. Given the choice of “The Batman” and “The Northman”, people will default to the familiar title and then complain that it’s derivative and anticipates a sequel.
I’m trying to think if I have any discs with Dolby Vision, I’m only buying 1080p blurays so maybe not. Most recent purchases were Dune and the new Batman movie and those both look and sound fantastic.
Exactly!!
Things became worse in the past 10 or something years (I am a 40 something btw.). As the article states we used subtitles in movies to learn language and to understand thick accent. However throughout time while we got better and better in comprehension the use of subtitles remained the same in overall. But very uneven too.
Old movies (not yet seen) and movies for children are never a problem. Also some properly made movies. The atmosphere and sound effects are fine as well as the dialogs.
But it became too much of a trend to make muttery a mushy dialogs where people seemingly unable to articulate. To the level never heard in real life (where muttering may be more common due to the more causal and mood or situation affected nature of conversations, unlike the carefully created and heavily controlled ones in movies). Also it is uneven. Some movies are still fine, but others (perhaps the newest Batman comes to mind, unsure, forgot that movie mostly, being so obscure) are a struggle, not fun at all. Aggrevated by the loud bangs and muttery dialog combo.
A sign that this is a systematic and intentionally manufactured problem, that sound engineers and directors lost their touch completely, is the existence of a feature in the newest Apple TV for equalizing the sound level in a movie. Streaming hardware manufacturers had to come up with solution to correct what sound engineers ruined or unable to get right nowadays.
Older movies are almost never a problem. New movies are in an uncomfortable amount.
No, like it has absolutely no give initially. Then it briefly opens and air floods in, and then force you were exerting is no longer held back by the force of the atmosphere on the suction sphere (treat the opposing force of the other team as horses as being symmetrical, despite it not being so, they communicate with their force on usually a man getting torn apart, the basis for the experiment, science being stronger than the human body). Horses don't want to put their poor specially adapted (for riding) backbone into a prank. When they sense weird shit, they don't pull the same way, looks like it but eh, if you could go back in time and put a spring measuring newtons of force (which this contributed to developing, hence back in time, Hooke came later), they're not going for it like an executioner's horse quartering a man told to die. Then yes and I think the opposite forces of horses in both directions is based on quartering, tearing limbs apart, tearing the sphere in two. That's what it's based on. Horses don't frequently pull things apart except those told to die. Like to work it has to be antagonistic, like there ought to be a bet of some sort. Bets as challenges have their place, it can be very little money or mutually desired rivalrous good. The setup is a huge thing, like how do you cast the ball, how thick is the metal (this makes it give initially when pulled, that comes into play), not just how much pressure and how good the seal, which are of course the figures of merit. The measurement, how much you can pull, what the limit is.
This was good science overall, but beware using living things in experiments like this.
The experimenter and participant can switch places.
Changing the subject a bit, the scientist must have made smaller brass balls for himself to try to pull apart. And it's so subjective, like the puppies that were smarter than the shrinks electrocuting them, knew it was torture and being a dog.
Spesh a puppy, according to the shrinks because then they learn faster which was what the learned helplessness experiment was about, also blank slate for reproducible experiments, and finally a bit of cruelty. I've seen the faces they make sometimes, in sick mode. Again, might as well switch places, me telling them what's up. They were practicing for humans later, the industry for electric dog collars is nothing like the industry around torture. Torture is very expensive to administer, huge losses. What 1984 outlines is incredibly expensive if that's the only form of oppression. But it's not, that's only for the patsy, the hero, whatever you prefer to call him. Even in Chile, where it was massive, they just couldn't torture such an incredible number of people because it's so dirty and it takes a lot of people to run the torture apparatus. Couldn't torture four million people, that would require four hundred million people just to operate at a loss, meaning all of humanity as its slave class subsidizing it, and then who tortures all humanity? No, that doesn't scale. What scales is fear. And never revealing their own fear, like they did to me, never being exposed as being the only true bitch in the system. Like in 1984, which it turns out I live-action-role-played, you read it and at some point it's like, O'Brien is a complete bitch. He needs a full-on Egyptian pyramid (inefficient for space, good for monuments though, which is what Miniluv actually is), with a dungeon, tons of guards for a mile on all sides, no getting out no getting in (secret passages), no Brotherhood. And logistically it's a crazy money-loser. Says so right in the book, they're very wasteful.
Like get this: they actually have a guy carefully putting dust back on Winston Smith's book exactly like he did with in one second, taking like an hour very very carefully, that's a career path for some total loser. It's 3600-to-1 and they brag about it anyway.
O'Brien gets a great wage let me tell you, and everyone in that building is at least in their own view handsomely paid for blind loyalty, and their sadism really, job requirement, like the sadism bribes of government land Pinochet handed out for pittances to the most sadistic and abstracted political supporters, in the elite of course, way below market prices. And they loved him forever, set up a flight Santiago to London direct motherfucking Pinochet airlift, again the inefficiency plane after plane of sychophant must have been weekly or biweekly, just to get the one asshole out without any consequence. Call it 100 airplanes to lift that fat ass out of London, just to clean up after his shit. All the people that the operation required, duh yes lawyers but so much more behind the scenes, so many specialists, each with their field working together as a team.
Like in 1984 there's a guy preparing the heroin for the hero to him addicted to giving in just a tiny bit, you know that bartender went to an institute to specialize in getting the measures right, just enough heroin (it's heroin, it's real heroin in the Miniluv, uncut) to seduce him into thinking he can think he is a bitch, but not that much, they're still mostly torturing him. The funhouse mirrors with screens behind them, same thing, that's a national security first priority getting those special effects built to the highest standard, like there's a make-up crew to paint Winston Smith horribly when he's passed out to make him believe that he really is being bitched in his heart of hearts. Dude and nobody does any work in that book, tells you how privileged Orwell was in a way, he thought he could be a writer or intellectual, yeah. Yeah an intellectual who participates in torture, O'Brien, then yes. Need that degree though, very into the certificate and especially the prestige. Typically, though, intellectuals are persecuted just as Salvador Allende predicted in his final radio address, when the Republic of Chile announced it was operating under the same name, but a change in management due to treason. Still in power, a long golden age for traitors, and it seemed like it would last forever...
Or let's put it another way.
Your choice.
Be a bitch or die being a hero. Die under torture. Or be a bitch.
And in the end, people get what they want. Ends up being, the subtext, is millions of Chileans were subjected to the threat of torture, millions of cases of extortion, because most people aren't so...stupid, as the shrinks put it. They're smart, they let someone else take the fall. But don't underestimate yourself! There is absolutely some threshold of abuse (eg making you eat dog meat, or human feces, or force you to penetrate another victim) at which you wouldn't try delegating the dying to someone else. Don't think there's not a hero in there somewhere! Why else would you watch those movies? That Batman Superman Joker shit resonates with you because in fact most of the genome comes from heroes. It's a remote possibility but that's the entire genome, heroes and heroines. Like most of the genome, like 66% is from the Cambrian explosion, that's the basic outline of vertebrates, crazy era, the Justice League, so idealistic. So every so often, and you can tell age of fossils with this because it's like a clock, a mutation brings about a new protein. Molecular clock, literally. Like 10,000 years. A defect within a defect, in fact. There is a local maximum, this is a departure from that, hence defect, with the stigma, defect. Then, something happens and you go even farther out--and attempts to go with the herd are hopeless. And this protein made him different. It's rare but it's like the whole genome, apart from that it's remixes, like deciding in what order to watch Batman and Superman movies for the millionth time.
But don't think those actors with their special effects are the heroes! You're more of a hero for watching that movie than they are for starring in it, by a lot. And they aren't actually heroes in a Roman Law capacity as they , people confuse actor with character. On the contrary, Heath Ledger! I actually did that exact same shit to a real gangster, made my getaway just like Heath Ledger, like a glitch in the system. Declared a hero, told what I did was perfect. And that was just the beginning, long weekend, long ten years of silence. But what happened ultimately? Justice, the dungeon being put to original intended use. A bitch in the system.
> What about "So-and-so ought to be stabbed"
> [That is a] clear incitement to violence, and [is] clearly illegal already.
Not in the US it's not. Clear and present danger, not hypothetical horseshit. I'm shocked at how unfamiliar censorship maximalists are with the current state of speech rights. I think it's why they think that censoring anti-vanilla ice cream speech or anti-Nolan Batman films speech is such a small step.
Every single would-be censor thinks it's illegal to shout fire in a crowded theater, and don't realize that phrase was used to jail someone for anti-war speech.
What makes you think that "incitements to violence" are illegal? Is is that "incitement" is a very legal-sounding word?
> Iron Man and Batman have taught an entire generation of moviegoers about incredibly shitty corporate behavior.
This rings true, and I would like to extend it to more general behavior. Many of these tropes are common in superhero films: unquestionably heroic good guys pitted vs irrationally evil bad guys, society is inherently corrupt and only the heroes can improve it (by personal intervention), a contrarian weakling nearly dooms everyone by disagreeing with the hero, but is ultimately shamed/killed... etc.
At the risk of sounding paranoid, they sound vaguely fascist in tone. I wonder if the last decade of movies has pushed society in that direction, or vice-versa.
The lack of a center bar was a bigger deal than I expected. Being able to extend my SQL window to the full screen seeing all columns for example, beyond 'just nice'.
Same with code, not always but sometimes I need a wider view.
There are a lot of subtle gains that I'm probably forgetting about and really only one negative that I've run into - games don't play super nice on the ultra-wide, but that's not really what I use this machine for.
Oh another bonus I forgot - watching shows / movies on it is really nice. I have very rarely considered this but with an 18 month old, you find you have to squeeze in time here/there, we had to stop the new batman movie on HBO with 20 minutes left... I probably would not have ever watched the ending (it was pretty good!) if I didn't have that display, it was a nice way to spend 20 minutes during lunch and I've been watching movies/shows on it randomly during lunch since. It's pretty great for this use too.
The problem is not solvable. OP has been directly linking his real name to his username for years on the internet. This isn't a Batman movie, there is no "Clean Slate" program that can wipe all memory of you from public records.
No one does it like him though, or rather his team.
I thought his work on no time to die was pretty boring, but the work he did with Pfister on 2049 and on Dune are almost genre defining, I feel.
His ability to integrate the score into the sound design of the movie is something I don't think anyone can do. Maybe no one else has the budget for it.
I think Dune is probably his best work, it's the perfect blend of atmosphere, evocations of a strange new world, but also thematic and structural rigour that has let down previous adaptations.
I definitely get tired of him sometimes, but equally I never feel like I need more deliberate choices from his work. When I listened to Giacchino's mostly fairly good score to The Batman, I felt myself thinking "This motif's entropy is too low", I very very rarely feel that in Zimmer's more modern work.
That being said I think Zimmer gets more credit than he deserves because I think more than many other names he is the director of the music. There's genius in sitting back, too, but I doubt he composed all the trills and melodies in the dune soundtrack.
I dislike this format because it makes a 4 hour story into an 8 hour story where 4 hours of it is showing the character in some type of inebriated state. I think flight attendant did this too, and the only reason I can think of is to pad their statistics and it being cheap to film those sequences. But it just ends up boring me.
And all the content producers are doing it. I tried Severance on Apple TV+, and I had to stop after 4 episodes because nothing was happening, and this is supposed to be a critically acclaimed show.
The new Batman movie was excruciatingly long too. I miss my 100min stories from the early 2000s and before.
Netflix was already willing to alienate users by stooping to conditional joint acquisitions.
Better Call Saul is proudly labeled a "Netflix Original".
But you couldn't watch season five on Netflix until April, even though it originally aired two years ago.
Had to let AMC reair it first, right?
Think season six will air on schedule with AMC in August?
Meanwhile, HBO Max, and Hulu by extension, released The Batman nearly on time with theatres.
It's clear that Netflix simply lacks the content creation supply chain of its competitors.
And no amount of price hikes, ads, excuses, or desperate back-door deals will solve that.
Their greatest hope was to capitalize on successful originals, like Love Death and Robots.
But in three years they've managed to deliver only two season of that show.
Which, even with the pandemic, should have occurred much faster given it's an animated anthology.
I wouldn't be surprised if I woke up one morning to find news of a Sony and/or Paramount buy out.
You seemed to have missed the author's point.
Superhero stories were supposed to represent an escape from the old, adult-focused form of entertainment. Where they ended up was of course just another form of it.
The money quote is: "Wallowing in death isn’t a sophisticated leap beyond the superhero concept; it’s the failure to imagine what it means not to die."
You can liken this to the sitcom. Storytellers had to envision a platform upon which an endless number of stories could be told in a particular format, without getting boring. The setting, including the characters, have to remain static. Breaking the sitcom mold doesn't make for an evolved sitcom, it makes for a devolved one. One that brought back all the problems that the sitcom format resolved.
Superhero comic books had to appeal to seven year-olds, while still retaining enough in there to keep the teens and then adults they grew up into entertained. You need a story that can live forever, and still remain interesting. The bad guys have to get handled with a minimum of fuss, and understated magic, such as Batman never killing anyone, is an appropriate storytelling device. The morality play, good beating evil, and all the whimsy and silliness that conjuring it entailed, is just part of the superhero format.
Without all that, they're not superheroes, they're just story protagonists with special powers that are sometimes heroic. That's the argument the author's making.
+1, some good stuff over there, all the HBO classics and new movies are available quite soon after release - watched the new Batman yesterday, about to rewatch The Wire. Also the new platform is really improved in terms of usability, it the old HBO GO service which HBO MAX replaced was really bad with buffering and "adaptive" quality which somehow was always 480p for me. Now it's crisp and nice.
> Star Wars is suddenly not about defeating totalitarianism and tyranny,
It's a massive universe and there's been six movies about this theme already. Why retread old themes instead of trying something new? By the way, I am NOT defending the new trilogy - it is absolutely awful, but it's not awful BECAUSE it's about feminism and animal rights (also, it isn't, it's still about totalitarianism and tyranny).
> Batman become a medic rather than do what Batmam does: beat up bad guys.
Again, there have been anywhere between 9-10 batman movies depending on how you count of him beating up bad guys. Why do you need more? Why not try something new and really interrogate the psychopathy of the character, and the realization he might go through which is that beating up bad guys isn't the best use of time for a billionaire.
> Catwoman must be with the times and complain about the attention paid to "rich white men"
Did you miss the part where her mother and her best friend were both essentially sex slaves that got choked to death by the italian mafia? If anyone has a case and a grudge against "rich white men", it's probably her.
Also, the whole movie, is about how rich corrupt people let the whole city down.
I haven't seen the new Bond movie, but if they actually had the balls to kill him, that's tremendous progress.
Why are you so resistant to any change?
Quite a topical article, considering the controversy around how they made a potentially great Batman movie unwatchable by turning large parts of it into a radio drama where you can't see anything and have to figure out what's happening with nothing but your ears.
A couple years ago I got into the idea of vampires and did a watch-through of some of the best Dracula movies. There are a staggering number of them, truly, there are "top 10 best Dracula movies" lists. Some of them really are phenomenal. Like The Batman out right now, there truly are so many different ways to approach a story.
I watched the 5 or so I chose chronologically based on release date and so Nosferatu was first, it's actually pretty good for what it is and I can recommend for anyone interested - just keep in mind film standards for the time when setting expectations.
Warner Bros and Sony quickly followed: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/warner-bros-pulls-the-batman-russia-release-1235101581/
Replace the permanent magnets with coils and you get the fabric/stuff from the batman movie (memory cloth?)
Comment written by cirrus3
Checks out ;)
We’re in the midst of a once in a century pandemic. The best movie theater in Seattle has been closed since the beginning of 2020 and may never reopen. I have way better food, and far cheaper drinks at home. I don’t have to pay ridiculous amounts of money to park. I don’t have to wear a KN-95 mask to feel safe. I can pet my dog while I watch the movie. I can rewatch scenes when I feel like missed something delightfully subtle, like I just did earlier tonight with Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch. I can pause the movie to go use the bathroom whenever I want to.
Sure, there are plenty of movies that benefit from a fantastic theater experience. But I’m not going to get that right now, especially in the city I live in. Maybe I’m just an old man yelling at clouds, or maybe it just isn’t ever worth going to a theater to watch Hangover, Part 3 or whatever.
Go watch The Batman in a theater if you want to. I’m not telling you how to live your life.
Color design would not be a great choice for AI. It is not objective, and there are many, many "right" answers. It also requires understanding the intent and greater context of a scene. To grade the following scene, you need to have watched the Batman movie it references, know they're trying to sell jean jackets, and infer the client's preferences from their personality and previous projects.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=FClp1qGPAuM
"the way it was supposed to be" irks me too. You can't reify an artists vision better than they can.
I suppose I would watch a fan-recoloring. The movie would not be how it was supposed to be — it would be something new — but that could be something interesting to watch.
This is so true, I get really bored of combat scenes these days for many reasons, this is a big one.
I remember the first time I really noticed this was when trying to watch batman (can't remember which one), at an "imax" cinema, ya know, those ones where you sit very close to a huge screen designed for films that intentionally fill that extra space with peripheral vision information... But for an already annoyingly close cut series of fight scenes it made it so much worse, unwatchable, I had to just close my eyes for half of the film because it was so physically hard to look at.
Ah, "testimony" and "personal narrative"!!! Okay:
Gee, finally: Early in school, I was very interested in learning good information. For "fiction", my summary was that it was by definition and its own admission not true so definitely not the information I was interested in.
Later I guessed that maybe fiction could have some value as information if viewed it as suggestions or hypotheses about people, maybe actually valuable if the author had some unusually good insight -- information about people stands to be important, but people can be complicated and good insight when available might be about the best information we can hope for so far. For academic research in psychology, my brother tried that through his masters but changed to political science for his Ph.D. because of his summary of the psychology research -- had some solid results that applied to rats but not to humans.
Then I complained: Reading fiction, (A) I was not sure what the author was claiming to be true and, (B) even if there was a good guess about the claims, the evidence is not very good.
Then I noticed that I have some guesses about humans, and when I see fiction that agrees with such a guess I can start to conclude that at least the fiction writer was guessing that lots of his audience will agree with his guesses about humans. So, at least a reader of the fiction can come away with some evidence that some audience agrees with the guess about humans.
Finally I settled on the description that mostly fiction was about entertainment, call it vicarious escapist fantasy emotional experience entertainment (VEFEEE)! Yup, and movies about Superman, Batman, and Spiderman can get a lot of revenue!
I dunno, Batman spans the gamut from "campy bang pows" to "lite morality plays" -- not quite to the extent of, say, Joker, but some of the Nolan Batmans were way more existential and dialogue/monologue-driven than the older Batmans.
Maybe a more similar distinction would be the X-Men/Wolverine movies vs Logan, where the latter is a more introspective take on the character, and so the story is relatively more important than the action sequences.
This is a great question. The answer imho is that large creators can use crowd sourcing and leverage their reputation.
All they have to do is ask the public for money to make the next [say] Mad Max, Riddick, Startrek, Batman, etc etc
If the public doesn't want a new Startrek movie funding will be insufficient. It might have to happen on a smaller budget, not at all or simply have to wait until funds are sufficient.
New things (not sequels) can be done/advertised on the reputation of the studio, director, actors etc etc
I pay for production, I pay in advance for a cinema ticket, I get a digital download some months later.
Whatever copying happens after that is pure promotion.
> cameras on computers were not uncommon
In 1994?! Name two, please.
The first widely known laptop with integrated webcam option, at a pricepoint starting at US$12,000, was an IBM RS/6000 860 laptop and his ThinkPad 850 sibling, released in 1996.[1]
As I recall, even though there was at least one commercial webcam available in 1994, it was very uncommon for anyone to have an external webcam connected to their computer even up to 1998-2000, let alone a built-in camera. Certainly there were "pioneers," those with interest that always had the new doodads, but I would not remotely describe them as "not uncommon." They were precisely uncommon, i.e. maybe 5% or less of home computer users had a webcam prior to 1998.
You know, not being impressed isn't a virtue or anything, and it isn't a crime nor even a character flaw to be impressed, even if mildly, on occasion.
Also, let's not conflate the Internet with the WWW. First streaming webcam is a decent woop, especially considering that beyond processor, resolution, bandwidth increases and new protocols, not much has changed, the evolution has stalled. Though every device today has a built-in camera, one might expect there to be a layer of the Internet dedicated to video, but there is not. The best we have even today are video posting sites, and sites of live webcam directories, when there should be something better by now, some sort of seamless integration of all the live cameras, perhaps like in that Batman movie.
[1] some wiki
> get this basic stuff right?
I bought the cheaper Kindle with the ads enabled. They were supposed to be targeted ads, but were usually for feminine hygiene products. I have no idea how any reasonable targeting algorithm would have decided to pitch that stuff to me.
I also enabled for a time context sensitive Amazon ads on my programming web site. What did I get? Endless ads for the Batman movie. Google would do slightly better, they'd show the same ad for a C++ training course over and over and over and over.
I abandoned both of them.
I also have a site on the American Revolution. Google's context sensitive ads showed ads for travel agencies.
Context sensitive ads are so pathetically bad. I can't recall ever seeing one that I even wanted to click on, let alone buy.
There is a simple fix, that nobody does. Allow me, the website designer, to list the categories for the ads. I know my audience far better than Google/Amazon, why don't they allow a little human guidance? Geez, maybe I should patent this idea.
I think it's a whole genre that was finally allowed into mainstream. For a long time we had very black/white view on the superheroes in movies. Only relatively recently Batman got a bit interesting, Star Wars had someone turn "bad", Ironman was a good jerk, Starlord... was a good jerk, Loki and Deadpool are pretty chaotic, now Sandman is soon coming out. We have a number of "that bad character had reasons" movies like Cruella.
Those existed for ages in comic books, but I don't think mainstream / Disney would touch them.
Citizens are conditioned to believe that police will solve all the crimes from shows like True Crime, CSI, etc.
And when said criminals are such masterminds that even the police can't catch, they are then conditioned by superhero movies from Marvel, Superman, Batman, etc. that someone should rise up to catch such criminals, this is the end state.
See, every kid is taught and empowered growing up that they should stand up for what's right. And when the justice system is imperfect, everyone is trying to fix it in the best way they know how. Some are doing it politically, socially, physically, etc.
This is a superficial view that does not account for the advertiser's ability to price discriminate via advertising. For example, say there is a Batman movie coming out, and I sign up on the Batman website to find out when/how it is released.
The movie folks now know that I am very interested in this movie. They can choose to target me for a small coupon advertisement, knowing that I will likely claim it and consider it a win.
Simultaneously they can target people on FB that they think are Batman fans (but who have not signed up for their email list) with a more generous coupon.
So while I am seeing advertisements for relevant products, I may be seeing less-generous offers than I would see in a world without tracking.
This is truly awesome, and I back it completely.
Having said that, I can't help but imagine it as part of a Batman movie plot, though.
> Can you name single great work of art created by Disney that isn't mostly derivative? Reflect on why you can't: they are monetizers of existing culture, not creators of originality.
You sort of have a point, since this is Disney we're considering, but this is a slippery slope.
Most _everything_ is derivative work.
Should I pirate all commercial software that's powered by open source software?
Should I never pay for a modern book with a hero's journey storyline simply because it's not original?
And I shouldn't pay artists for their covers or remixes of other songs? So unoriginal.
And why should I buy tickets to any new Batman movie? Batman's part of our culture and the story is probably taken from the comics.
And I should never profit from my business unless it's MY original idea.
If you dislike Disney (for good reason), then boycott them. But that doesn't give you the _right_ to pirate their content nor should you encourage others to pirate.
Derivative works aren't fair use and aren't really related to fair use. Derivative works are like writing a new Harry Potter book or making a new Batman movie.
Wasn't this a maguffin in one of the Batman movies?
Sorry for the naive question, can anyone explain what it means for something to enter the public domain? What is the public domain anyway? Is there a database somewhere of all the public things?
Does it mean anyone can put batman on a t-shirt, sell that t-shirt and keep all the profit? Does it mean batman movies can be pirated without repercussion?
That’s not how this works. The actual books/movies/cartoons that Batman appears in will eventually be public domain — you’ll be legally allowed to copy, edit and distribute these without restrictions. However, “Batman” (the idea, the concept) is still protected by trademark laws making it illegal to produce new (non-derivative) Batman books/movies/cartoons without the trademark holder’s consent.
When companies like Marriott and JJ are doing things like this, people incur great losses and there is little to no repurcussion to the companies.
Meanwhile, some guy in the street will go to prison for selling some weed.
All those who did this at JJ honestly deserves a life sentence at a minimum given abestos exposure leads to mesothelioma.
This is some diabolical stuff - something out of a movie, akin to for example contaminating the water supply in Batman.
So evil.
This is long. You have been warned.
> Does anyone have tips on how to enjoy the journey?
Every time in my life I got subdued by my hedonism during my rich perioids I was struck by severely awful series of events that ended up humbling me and making me thankful even if I can only cover bills and food afterwards. EVERY DAMN TIME.
So I guess the answer is: you need contrast, for all your life. Which means a lot of pain and stress, periodically, until you learn to universally appreciate what you have and not eternally moving your own personal goalpost.
The danger of being rich for a long time is that you lose perspective and have no other extremity to compare with. This leads to many mental problems.
Observing myself and others, I noticed that the longer your basic needs are not in danger, the more you lean to doing pretty useless crap: mostly tooting political views of which you know nothing about, or my personal favorite -- looking down on people in ever more and creative ways. I legit heard a former friend of mine say the famous Marie-Antoinette phrase: "No bread? Let them eat cake" when we dicussed the gypsy population of my country. Everybody on the table was baffled even more when we realized that he didn't know about that historical quote at all. He reinvented it right there and then on the spot. Really makes you think what is the common trend that makes people lose touch with reality so severely.
What I am trying to say is: when you are rich for a long time, you either become Lara Croft / Batman, or you become a very plain hedonist (like the rich guys who outbid each other on a rare bottle of wine in Vegas and end up paying $6000 for a glass of it... WTF?).
Our brains always need to solve problems. So if one lacks ambition to solve hard problems still existing out there then they end up inventing their own problems and focus on them, usually until the day of their death. It's no coincidence that many rich people end up taking a lot of drugs. They have no struggle in their lives at all and end up feeling empty and directionless.
Giving example of myself: I am currently in an absolutely horrible period of my life. Lost 3 pretty lucrative jobs / gigs that I managed to juggle for years... basically in 2-3 weeks space (5 months ago), and still cannot recover because I refuse bad jobs and don't want to invite stress and burn out back in my life. (I say I lost them and that's not obscuring reality: I only refused to renew contract on one of them because it was really toxic and stale, and political decisions took the other 2 jobs under my feet basically days later). Long story short, if I manage to stabilize and get to a middle-high-class level again as before, I definitely will be buying myself a few years of break and will just work on trying to invent General Artifical Intelligence. I don't care if I will succeed. It makes me happy and fulfilled to combine workout, walks and movies with my wife, and several hobbies (of which inventing AGI is one).
I know I'll never be a hedonist; I would buy myself a beach house and two good bikes but would never ever reach for a private jet even if I can afford a fleet of them. The poor periods of my life have taught me that many kinds of money come with stress and tons of maintenance attached to them. And that other kinds of money you just spend so you can impress other rich people. I don't want any of that crap in my life.
Finally, I work really hard to maintain a balance between being rich and having to do minimal housekeeping. That I believe is a very good balancing factor to help you stop and appreciate life as well.
> Especially when they're story based so basically you're replaying the movie that you've already seen.
Weren't most of Telltale's stories original? I didn't play any of the others, but I know the Borderlands and Batman ones were.
Oddly, this is a common trope in a lot of popular media, where heroes are often noble and strong, whereas their opponents are weak but cunning. (Various "Batman" movies have such plots, where Batman is almost brought low by the scheming of physically weak adversaries.)
Being good is evidently boring...
I added a few examples in another comment. Even Rambo sacrificed his own safety and freedom to help rescue POWs.
Modern day heroes are all a bunch of whining self-centered children. Just go watch any super hero movie today for a good example of that.
It's almost a badge of honor to be morally ambiguous. Compare a list of protaganists, how many are anti-heros? Do we even have any real good guys in movies and tv these days? Even Superman has been turned into a murderer for this generation.
A few examples from popular TV:
Walking Dead: everyone is a murderer. Murder is justified consistently.
Billions: It's hard to know who to root for, they are all rotten. The righteous people are the "bad guys"
Scrubs: All the characters are morally bankrupt (compared to 30 years before it's time)
Ironman: A selfish rich asshole.
Batman: (ok, he was always an anti-hero from day 1)
Deadpool: Do I need to explain this one?
Wicked: A play about how the evil witch is misunderstood.
The Shield, The Wire, modern Star Trek vs old Star Trek, the list is too long...
There has always been corruptions, lack of morals. That's not my issue, it's that today, there simply isn't even close to a minority of actual real main protagonists that are selfless.
I think people find good people trying to do what is right just boring these days.
/rant
You mean that thing by the CIA which was successfully tested in 1958, and later was a plot device in a Batman movie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulton_surface-to-air_recovery_system
To provide a specific example, some women have severe vocal fry / creaky voice. Its a socially transmitted thing like valley girl speak from decades ago.
I can only imagine how weird that sounds autotuned in a deep bass artificial voice. Imagine the movie line "I'm Batman" with vocal fry.
(edited to note, I see three people simultaneously cited vocal fry as an obvious experimental error and one tried to derail with the standard citation needed technique, so its probably a pretty serious issue)
In defense of big-budget productions, look at the Marvel franchise. Those movies, which are all sequels of each other, do very well. They are massive CGI exercises but they are well written and executed. They are movies for movie fans, full of jokes and themes you have to work at understanding. Millennials may tweet hatred, but they show up at the theaters.
On the other side are horrific CGI messes like the latest Fantastic Four. Everyone knows will flop because they see the overly focused-grouped "reboot" coming. Fans tolerate new political or religious themes (Batman) but you cannot rewrite an established backstory (Catwoman) or belittle a character's cartoon origins (Ninga Turtles). The Marvel franchise does well because respects its fans.
Wasn't this in the Batman movie?
Are they wrong? If I were advertising Batman I'd expect maybe 2x as many people on a programming site want to see it as on a random internet site. And the marketing budgets for these films are so massive that any opportunity like that is well worth spending on.
I'm not normally one to jump on the "it's the media" bandwagon, but it's unusually true in this case, although not in the way you present it. I think that shows and movies have show "the good guys" using torture more and more frequently, and this has actually changed our perception of right and wrong.
(For example: 24, Almost Human, Batman...almost too many to list. It's funny to watch the second Rambo movie and ask yourself if there's any difference at all between the russians in afghanistan in the 80's and the US there in the 00's.)
I would really love to be able to watch a movie and look around the scene. Even if the camera was at a stationary point.
Imagine watching Batman while perched up on a ledge in Gotham... when the Joker comes flying down the street to the right and you look right to watch, while someone else viewing the movie looks left to see Batman flying down.
Awesome.
He's really bad at sci fi.
Inception doesn't make any sense (sense in terms of being sci fi, it's good entertainment).
Nor do the climactic action scenes in the Batman movies: a mega powerful microwave device that only affects the water inside of far away pipes and a portable, self sustaining fusion reactor that blows up when its battery dies.
The Joker's speed with setting up explosives is also a little bit ridiculous, but that's less of an offense against possibility than the above.
Not GP poster, but years ago (so not recent, at all) I tried editing both for grammar and content. In a variety of article types (movies and books, technical content like math and CS topics) nearly everything got reverted. For instance, if I corrected a plot point listed in the plot summary for a movie it'd be removed. As an example, imagine an obviously wrong statement in the summary of Batman saying that his alter ego is Clark Kent (trying to remember the actual articles, this wasn't one, but they were just as bad). This is clearly wrong and easily verifiable, but someone would revert the edits and dispute it in the talk pages. If an algorithm were incorrectly described on a CS page I would try to correct it, leaving comments in the discussion about why I was making changes. They were almost all reverted to incorrect pseudo-code or python implementations. Again, these were easily verifiable (in some cases by literally copy/pasting the python code and trying to run it). It was just an exercise in frustration so I gave up. Maybe things are better these days, I haven't bothered since 2010 or 2011.
As a father of daughters, I'm waiting for the series of articles that will help me understand the proper way to have a conversation with them about the fact that their boyfriends, when they are old enough to have them, do not have the muscular build nor the attractive looks of common comic book characters such as Batman, Superman, and so on that they constantly see. Never mind when they see movies with all those overly attractive male stars.
But all I get are articles about how certain comic books, that they probably shouldn't be reading anyway, gives them unrealistic expectations of what their bodies should look like. Plus the fact that will somehow prevent them from getting a career they want to have.
Anyway, I often take my daughters to the local comic book store that I feel has an adequate range of comics for all ages and gender. I let them loose to get what they want. The older one goes for things like Monster High and My Little Pony. The younger goes for those as well as TMNT and Transformers. I just let them decide for themselves what kind of comic book reader they want to be. I feel they'll mostly work it out for themselves. Some people shouldn't worry so much over such details because in the end it only stifles your kid's growth as a person. Trying to shield them from the world they live in doesn't help them in the long run.
What about CPS? The towers know where they are, and they know you are communicating with them.
Its not perfect, but they can get your position by just measuring your signal strength to the multiple towers and triangulate the rest.
No, this is not a batman movie. For more, check out http://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?CC=US&NR=5519760&KC=&FT=E&locale=en_EP
Very funny
You don't know what you are talking about.
EDIT: yes, please, go ahead and explain how you're going to get phone's location geographically. Hint: not everybody has data turned on always. Or GPS.
This is not a Batman movie you know
There is a huge difference between a kid playing a prank to a few cars on the road and a malicious hacker willing to take control of a portion of the street indefinitely.
Imagine for example some hacker programming all the cars in the proximity of a bank to grind to a halt and cause congestion so his team can go rob said bank and have the police delayed because of the inconvenience. Yes, it sounds like the plot for a Batman movie, but still the potential is there.
Take a look at "Juice Cubes". It's a game by Rovio. They are pretty much the same game with Candy Crush. I just enjoy playing Rovio's version a bit more.
It's like the Batman movies by different directors. It's the same basic concept but others are still better and more enjoyable than the rest.
"Judge Ronald S.W. Lew asserted that Gotham Garage can't simply manufacture Batmobiles as depicted in Batman movies, without the consent of Warner Bros., the producer of the Batman franchise."
If Warner Bros. had no intention of producing their own Batmobiles, then they were really unfair to fans. Why wouldn't they just ask for royalties from the cars and let him be?
Ditto... this is the one role that kind of makes me think Affleck might actually be halfway decent as batman. He knocked that "slimy stock broker" role out of the park in that movie.
Too many batman movies
Brilliant, you get comfort from a murdering, torturing, loose cannon nut job, who takes no notice of his superiors. Not to mention making mistakes that kill others. Amazing. Its a live cartoon. Might as well have faith in Batman.
Yeah, I loved 24, but thank god its a wonderful fantasy and not real.
Oh, forgive me, but what was the episode where Jack and co got the bad guys by looking at facebook?
I wholeheartedly support the idea of children using interactive creative environments rather than just watch TV. However, as a non-parent, I can't figure out why cursing is such a big deal. Many parents wouldn't bat at eye at some pretty awful violence in movies(think Batman or something), but feel "fuck" is cause for evacuation. I have the same issue with fear of nudity.
I think this is a great idea! What i don't get about the current version is how do i know who also wants to watch the movie? I think you'll need to add search features because as a user Im down to see a movie with almost any startup person, college student, regular mate but I don't want to be set up on a blind man-date with homeboy in the tenderloin. It would be cool to see some graph search used. For example I want to see a movie with people who like saving private ryan and the batman movie who also has a background in computer science.
>>>Indeed, the kind of content that is protected by DRM is mostly entertainment, and not very much culture.
Did you ever go see a Batman movie? A Superman movie? Iron Man? The Avengers movie? Those weren't considered "culture" as recently as the 1970s. Stop.
Didn't James Holmes dress up like the riddler/joker, record an insane voicemail greeting in joker character, cover his apartment in batman posters, and shoot up a theatre playing batman? Clearly it was call of duty and gaia that made him do it
At least this senator could've found some sort of phony empirical evidence before scapegoating. Guess the violent movies are the root of all evil card is played out
Agreed. But do want to say being a HN community its good to observe/"hack" his life and learn from this. As one big question arises: Was his death to make a statement, give up, or escape this life. Food for thought:
Reddit life:
"I was miserable. I couldn't stand San Francisco. I couldn't stand office life. I couldn't stand Wired. I took a long Christmas vacation. I got sick. I thought of suicide. I ran from the police. And when I got back on Monday morning, I was asked to resign."
"I followed these rules. And here I am today, with a dozen projects on my plate and my stress level through the roof once again." "Every morning I wake up and check my email to see which one of my projects has imploded today, which deadlines I'm behind on, which talks I need to write, and which articles I need to edit." -https://aaronsw.jottit.com/howtoget
Post Reddit Era:
"The post-Reddit era in Aaron's life was really his coming of age. His stunts were breathtaking. At one point, he singlehandedly liberated 20 percent of US law. PACER, the system that gives Americans access to their own (public domain) case-law, charged a fee for each such access. After activists built RECAP (which allowed its users to put any caselaw they paid for into a free/public repository), Aaron spent a small fortune fetching a titanic amount of data and putting it into the public domain. The feds hated this. They smeared him, the FBI investigated him, and for a while, it looked like he'd be on the pointy end of some bad legal stuff, but he escaped it all, and emerged triumphant." -http://boingboing.net/2013/01/12/rip-aaron-swartz.html
Aaron makes a parallel between the Batman movie and his own struggles, highlighting the corruption of the system and how the Joker was actually the only "sane" person in an insane world. Sadly, he decided to pursue the same path as Heath Ledger. -zatara -doktrin -http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/tdk discussion on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5047421
"Depressed mood:.." -http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/verysick
"Later, I tried to take care of him while he was being destroyed, from inside and out. I struggled so hard, but not as hard as he did. I told him, time and again, that this was his 20s. It would be better in his 30s. Just wait. Please, just hold on." -His Girlfriend http://www.quinnnorton.com/said/?p=644
Lessons to learn for myself: Depression is a serious issue ... no doubt the Govt case played a big role in his last moments, but so did the little things: previous thoughts of ending life, excessive stress, depression. Love how jacques_chester said below: "Depression is insidious because it makes all the alternatives to suicide seem much more difficult than they actually are." It might be easier to blame one person, than these smaller hard to see things. Things we can find fault in ourselves, and improve, putting bigger focus on these clues and hints of depression that exist in many of our relationships, and other early warning signs.
Aaron Swartz did many amazing and courageous things in his life, and his life was a great service for our nation, but had he lived another day...
I want to end with this word of hope to HN community and others by Pitarou:
"TL;DR If Swartz's death is triggering suicidal thoughts, you must understand that this will pass, and life will be worth living.
After seeing the impact of Aaron Swartz's death on the Hacker News community, I am concerned about the Werther effect (the tendency of a prominent suicide to trigger other suicides). I hope I can help by sharing what I learnt through 10+ years of depression and recovery.
Depression robs you of the ability to: 1. remember happiness 2. feel happiness 3. anticipate happiness 4. make considered decisions
#1-#3 make you miserable, but #4 is the killer. Bits of your brain actually shut down, and you run on pure emotion. For example, when I was depressed, I was easy prey for offers like "4 for the price of 3 on this crappy overpriced chocolate" because I couldn't weigh it up. All I could think was "chocolate: good. 4 for 3: good. 4 for 3 chocolate: irresistible". But if you're running on pure emotion and your emotions tell you "everything sucks" well ... suicide looks like a good option.
So why didn't I kill myself? Somewhere in my guts, there was a stubborn belief that "this will pass". You might even call it a sense of entitlement: "come on world -- you can give me something better than this!" And you know what? It DID! Thanks to some wonderful people, and to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, I found a way to recover.
With the best 10+ years of my life lost to depression, starting from scratch in my 30s has been hard, but it's still a life, and I swear that life is worth more than you can possibly understand when you're depressed.
Stay strong,
Pitarou"
Based on the movies, I would think that a Batman supporter would be in favour of a warrantless surveillance bill.
>While it's great to understand the psychology behind the characters, this knowledge doesn't really make the movie or knowledge that much better.
Disagree with this so much. Knowing the depth and psychology of the characters is what makes the Watchman so much more interesting than say Superman or even my favorite superhero, Batman. Watchmen is very open and honest about the fact that people who would do this are probably riddled with psychological issues. I also like the subtle suggestion the book makes that most superheroes would fall onto the reactionary side of conservatism. I doubt there would be many incredibly liberal people out there taking the law into their own hands, but for some reazon the first time I noticed this mentioned was in Watchmen. Just a brilliantly written story with incredibly deep and realistic characters.
When I was a college student, I had my bikes stolen so often that I did two things: First, I started buying hot bikes cheap because, hey, legal bikes were expensive.
Second, I wrapped the frame of one bike in masking tape and smeared grease and paint on it. I kept that one for years; not even the local junkies wanted it. I guess they didn't notice my servicable Campy brakes and shifters, or didn't see the value in them.
I'm not sure the rational-actor theory applies to bike theft.
UNLESS it's the bike dealers behind the theft rings doing it to create demand, and they're just crushing the old stuff. Bwahahahahahaha. There's a batman movie in that villain theory.
Well, the ninja baine reference was an admittedly weak attempt at alliteration. Due in the main to having recently seen the last Batman film.
The mention of my concern refers to the subjective feeling I have about personal safety only. That is simply because risk has in fact been greatly reduced beyond the gate, but in many airports around the world, not before that point.
As to not catching all scenarios, I know a spook who trains in the fight against bad guys, and he got through a number of security checks before being pulled up in transit at a US airport with something standard issue. He forgot he had it in his carry on.
I'm aware of the potential of breaches. However, terrorist acts are often designed with a view to terrorising. This leads me to a different calculation of probabilities.
Events like this one are problematic because they can have an affect on public confidence. I may be wrong, but I think that might be just as much a consideration as failure of purpose in this situation.
> How is the next 300 million dollar Batman flick going to ever get made if the studios let everyone go see the movie for free? It won't get made.
IP isn't what makes people pay to see Batman. The loss of IP would not prevent studios from making a killing with Batman at a theater, they'd just have to be a touch more creative in controlling distribution, timing, and release of the official copy. Even without IP, they can contract with the theater to make it a violation of the contract for the theater to copy the film as a condition of getting it. IP isn't what protects the movie industry, it's what protects the home video industry and some of the long tail profits.
Also, making a great movie doesn't require 300 million dollars, and the world did just fine before 300 million dollars movies existed.
How is the next 300 million dollar Batman flick going to ever get made if the studios let everyone go see the movie for free? It won't get made.
No it isn't because there is zero demand for those types of movies, in fact there is a huge demand. It is because of copyright that they get the up front funding as the studios can be sure they have protection to make up the cost at release time (if the audiences like the flick enough to go see it).
Even here in Germany, the overreaction to the event in Aurora can be witnessed:
I went to the cinema last sunday (for Batman), and they had signs all over the place saying something like "In reaction to repeated worried requests about security, we will not allow visitors to be costumed and may search bags."
I won't comment on the knee-jerk reactions of the customers. What more interesting to me is the decision made by the people in charge there, in reaction to those "worried customers". Was the cinema management panicking as well? Or were they just not courageous enough to stay calm and risk being deemed as "not doing something about it"?
"It’s like mail, it’s private, we cannot just go in there and police what these users are uploading."
This has been mentioned before, but I'll say it again.
If I upload Batman to my personal storage locker, and never share it with anyone else, and then a pirate uploads Batman and shares it with everyone, why should I lose my digital copy of Batman due to the actions of someone else?
Maybe I don't have a thorough understanding of now Hashes work, but if we both rip the same movie with the same software, won't that file have the same hash?
Blockbusters are not the only movies that get made. Let Hollywood keep Batman. In the meantime, it's not hard to imagine a new way of making and distributing Mad Men and Portlandia.
Suppose (for hypothetical example) that Warner contracts with its distributors not to stream a "Batman" movie until it's been in theaters for a month.
That contract is not unlawful, nor is it immoral. It is not the government's job to block such contracts by declaring it lawful for you to pirate new stuff just because otherwise you would have to pay the theater or wait to see it.
Warner has rights to call the shots on how the "Batman" movie is distributed - in that limited sense they "own" it.
This is the polar opposite of ridiculous "download a car" arguments. I certainly think that public domain should kick in far earlier, that the media industry isn't in real trouble, that RIAA's tactics have made it a sort of copyright secret police against downloaders, etc. but you do not have a special right to pirate the latest thing just because it isn't going to be released fast enough for you unless you pay a premium.
Yes, totally agree. There's a dead feeling that comes with movies that have been made as commercial vehicles, rather than as pieces of art.
Sometimes the results aren't too bad, Batman, Ironman etc., but other times they are just phoning it in.
Pfft, no vision!
However, this thesis seems mostly sensible. I think the crucial answer is that the "Skillz" of Batman are attainable, and there is a reasonable proportion of people in the world with potential to attain them, BUT the problem of being Batman is not in the technology.
The problem, as highlighted, is that there is no role for Batman in our current society. Vigilantism is frowned on, and, practically speaking, having a secret alter ego that lasts only happens in the movies.
But the real problem is that Batman exists to solve a problem; Gotham has a massive crime problem, way beyond what we see in any major city in the world. And it is a city where number of crime bosses, criminal geniuses and psychopaths exist, and where they can act fairly freely.
Given a real life city with that setup, yes, Batman would stand a better chance.
"A good idea for a movie doesn't mean it's a good movie. A bad idea for a movie doesn't mean it's a bad idea."
This is exactly what I meant when I said that the quality of an idea is a marginal factor in the success of an endeavor. I fully agree that execution should be the main focus.
What I was trying to say is that not all ideas are equal. You can always make a worse movie with a better idea, or vice versa, but some ideas are easier to pull off than others. Given the exact same level of execution, "Batman fights the Joker" will beat "Random nobody in Nebraska sits in the dark eating cereal" every single time.
If all ideas are of equal quality, why would Hogan's Heroes be an excellent example? Wouldn't all examples then be equally good or bad?
Hogan's Heroes is an excellent example precisely because the idea is harder to pull off than other ideas. If you gave Hogan's Heroes and American Idol each to 100 teams to turn into a show, I believe American Idol would become a hit with greater frequency than Hogan's Heroes.
still a few more (some are in the works)
* Stargate
* "startup.com" - about the formation of 'govworks.com' i wonder what these guys think about Obama.
* Takedown - 'Kevin Mitnick's story'
* Serenity
* Star Trek: the Voyage Home
* The Last Starfighter
* Johnny Mnemonic
* Short Circuit 1 & 2
* Crest of the Stars (anime)
* Fahrenheit 451
* Equilibrium
* Batman (begins, dark night, the tim burten one)
* Edward Scissor Hands
* Space Balls
* Avalon ( http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/movie/decade/2000-current/avalon/#comments)
* LAIN: The Serial Experiments (anime)
* Cherry 2000
* Dune
* Ender's Shadow (in the works)
* Ender's Game (in the works)
* Diamond Age (in the works for sci-fi, 'a young girls illustrated primer')
* The Arrival
* The Terminator 1,2,3
* The Sarah Conner Chronicles
* D.A.R.Y.L
* Flight of the Navigator
* Explorers
* AI
* Batteries Not Included
* Blade Runner
* IRobot
* Appleseed (anime)
* Bubble Gum Crisis (anime)
* Ergo Proxy (anime)
* Virtuosity
* Metropolis (all of them are good)
* The Last Exile (anime)
* Cherry 2000
* Robocop (this so hold up)
* Primmer
* Probe ( the TV series, it took me 3 months to find the copies of this Issac Asimov based TV series on ABC ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probe_(TV_series)
* Infest Wisely
* Logan's Run
* Planet of the Apes
* Star Trek: First Contact
* CQ ( if you get it, you'll get why this is a hacker movie , 'la resistance')
* Amelie
* 2046
* Trigun (anime)
* Escaflone (anime)
* Tank Girl
* Twelve Monkeys
* THX 1138
* Bicentennial Man
* The Philadelphia Experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Philadelphia_Experiment_(film)
* Seaquest ( some episodes )
* Strange Days ( new yeas hacker style )
* Freejack
Petercooper shared a great list here are some of my thoughts...
We failed to promote our last start up very well (Seekler.com), and our new start doesn't rely on eyeballs so we aren't really promoting it. That being said we did learn a few things. Some of these are probably specific to our type of site which was silly / interesting lists, other tips might be more generalizable.
* Focus more niche, whenever we specifically targeted and marketed based around a niche we were far more successful (batman comics vs. comics http://seekler.com/lists/Best+Batman+Graphic+Novels+(Comics) )
* Engage highly motivated users, we wanted to make a great horror movie list and we found a couple horror movie blogs, forums, and fans and got them involved in the process from the beginning and after they all thought it was good we promoted it.
* Time you promotion, some days are better than others to announce a link / site / news. Figure out what days are best for your kind of content. Then try to focus all of the announcements across various sites into one day. Single day focus always did much better for us than slowly stringing along a few links here and there. (likely because of the larger social news and voting effects)
* Get a good relationship with a couple bloggers that write about your topics. We had a few that we could email at any time and they were happy to add a link pointing out our new announcement or release.
* Blog and Twitter we have had a few blog articles drive as much traffic to the site as any marketing attempt. I have also been amazed at how many people will sign up to follow site announcements via twitter if you don't abuse it by posting all the time.
* One in awhile go for something edgy, some of our mainstream lists did well, but some of our weirder ones were easier to get links for.
* Share the wealth if you get some good traffic from other sites link back to people, you will find them more likely to mention something you do if you have been showing them some love.
* Spend a little time making sure you site is OK at SEO, just good enough that you aren't hurting yourself when you do get linked up for various topics.
Anyways just a couple tips off the top of my head, our attempts where never hugely successful but we had a handful of good traffic hear and there. Hope some of my thoughts help.
I see the following problems:
1. Most people find websites through Google. MS wants to measure what websites people are going to, well that is going to be influenced by pagerank.
2. It will be like alexa where there sample data just covers some users and not a great cross section of Internet users. Unless if MS builds this into the browser, which would cause a firestorm of protest.
3. Pagerank uses obvious indicators of value which BrowseRank seems more like the Yahoo home page where the top seaches box give you links to Jessica Alba pictures, the Batman movie, etc. Driven by popular culture.
Ok, one of the things I am working on is a music startup so I'd like to challenge this:
"The answer for the music industry, for example, is probably to give up insisting on payment for recorded music and focus on licensing and live shows."
This is almost blogosphere orthodoxy now. If anything the wild success of allofmp3 shows that people will pay if the price is right. The price point is wrong, not the model. High volume + lower price = Increased total revenue. This is the point we make when we meet with the labels.
"But what happens to movies? Do they morph into games?"
No they don't. Which is more popular the new Batman film or the new Batman game? There’s plenty of room for both.
Well, I suppose we can do what the batman movies, or Gundam series do. Batman, Batman Returns, Batman Forever, Batman Begins. Gundam Wing, Gundam Turn A, Gundam Seed.
Web. Web Social. Web Ubiqu. Web Singularity.
I guess most hackers don't like the term web/bubble 2.0/3.0 is because it's overloaded, and hence, imprecise. Thus, ripe for exploitation by marketers, which generally have a bad rep with hackers (sometimes with good reason).
I think the author just means "the next evolutionary step of the web" Just as when people are talking about 2.0, they just mean that the web now was far different than it was back in 1996.
Reading this article is like watching the "dark" future depicted in a Batman movie. It was entertaining until the "Google buys Microsoft" report. Why would Google ever want to do that?