Hacker Cinema
The Dark Knight
2008 · Film · 152 min
Part of The Dark Knight Collection
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Batman raises the stakes in his war on crime. With the help of Lt. Jim Gordon and District Attorney Harvey Dent, Batman sets out to dismantle the remaining criminal organizations that plague the streets. The partnership proves to be effective, but they soon find themselves prey to a reign of chaos unleashed by a rising criminal mastermind known to the terrified citizens of Gotham as the Joker.
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186 comments on Hacker News
I believe that The Dark Knight Rises is pretty close to a bad movie. It does have qualities but it barely makes the cut. The rest varies a lot but outside of the more grounded ones (Prestige, Insomnia and The Dark Knight), I find most of their stories and characters very artificial and cardboard. Odyssey is very sanitized but it works very well because the characters and events are by definition representations of ideas.
Still, his movies try to be stimulating even if they don't land, and they all have great moments filmed in ways you've never seen before and that's good enough for me.
“This is yet another competitor launching a great product. But we had no doubt that, if it’s successful, we would do the same. We will launch similar products.”
In November 2008, Nokia released the 5800 Xpress Music, a year and a half after Apple had launched its iPhone.
Weird article, between those two paragraphs lies the MOST IMPORTANT period of the whole story. It was Nokia scrambling to adapt to the change in the market.
Their strategic move was to beat the iPhone with a Smartphone OS, expanding their (huge) existing ecosystem to a touch device.
But for that (Project Tube), Nokia had to upgrade their Series60 OS to include Touch-support while preserving backwards compatibility. They had severe troubles on all layers, because touch requires a low-latency feedback-architecture and Series60 was not designed for this.
For quite some time, all their weight was put into that device, they even went ahead and signed a sponsoring deal with WB to have the device featured in Batman The Dark Knight, a movie which finally ended up in cinemas BEFORE the product was even launched.
Now that's a fun one, where did you hear that from? Other ones I've seen include; tit for tat revenge for the assassination of Iranian nuke scientists; a global conspiracy of illuminati/masons/"jews" (defined so broadly as to be useless); chinese interdiction (kidnapping, a-la the reverse of the subplot in nolan's the dark knight film - that is essentially what you said); bankers who own everything and subvert everything to their interests (which remains stickily plausible to me); of course we can't forget our favorite: ancient aliens been doing all of this from the beginning. Anything to absolve people of confronting their own DNA and the predator/prey dichotomy that rules most life forms.
I don't even think I'd have the right to tear down anyone's list -- I actually think that even if an 22-year-old replied with a list of ten movies from 2016-2025 that he went to the cinema to see, and which he would be happy to recommend, that'd be enough for me!
I brought up this list: https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/guide/essential-2000s-movies/ and scrolled through, and I think I saw at least half these movies either in the theater or as rentals, and most of the ones I saw I loved. Furthermore, I think at least a third are major contributors to the American cultural canon, both as being in the zeitgeist in the season of their initial release as well as being remembered going forward. For instance, people still today make references to "Mean Girls" or "The Dark Knight" or "Minority Report" that only fully make sense if you've seen those films or at least know they exist and their premises. And I think it would be pretty easy to make a list of 50-75 significant movies each from the 80s and 90s, but I'm focusing on ones during my adulthood to follow the spirit of your ask.
This is what I can't imagine finding ten of in the past decade. I'd be tempted to put "Barbie" on that list potentially, given how many memes I've seen using frames from it. Also, honestly, several Pixar films deserve to be on the list too, though I admit that I'm biased because they're some of the few that I've seen.
>One thing that the multiple entertainment industry unions did is raise quality by ensuring continuity by ensuring livable pay.
Was the pay not livable back then for the people who made the likes of The Matrix, The Gladiator, The Dark Knight, LoTR trilogy, Tropic Thunder?
> the rise of streaming
Streaming still needs workers to make movies and shows. Rise of streaming means an increased demand for movies and shows. Does not explain the fall in quality.
He also beats up the Joker while he's in custody, because you gotta stop the badguy at all costs. And then there's Cops vs Protestors brawl in the other Nolan batman.
There is, admittedly, a precedent within the basic premise of the Batman story itself (and Frank Miller, author of the Dark Knight Returns comic is a noted right-wing libertarian) so in the case of that franchise, Nolan isn't inventing whole-cloth but it's also not something that's limited to just his Dark Knight films
In the context of the Dark Knight/surveillance example, it comes across to me as more of a recognition that the arguments in favor of these things can easily be made compelling if you evaluate them with no tradeoffs (don't you want to catch the bad guys??).
Then again, I guess the film ends up doing the same thing by only demonstrating concrete benefits alongside theoretical, but unrealized, harms...
The Dark Knight was released in the summer of 2008. This was almost 7 years after 9/11.
Many aspects of that film were deliberately done to explore post 9/11 America. This includes the methods Harvey Dent uses, the things the Joker says, and the surveillance scenes and more.
These discussions surrounding surveillance have been around long before 2008.
The Dark Knight was released in 2008. In that movie, Batman hijacks citizens' cellphones to track down the Joker, and it's presented as a major moral and ethical dilemma as part of the movie's overall themes. The only way Batman remains a "good guy" in the eyes of the audience is by destroying the entire thing once he's done.
Crazy to think that less than two decades later, an even more powerful surveillance technology is being advertised at the Super Bowl as a great and wonderful thing and you should totally volunteer to upload your Ring footage so it can be analyzed for tracking down the Jok... I mean illegal imm... I mean lost pets.
Dark Knight is an edge case because Christopher Nolan is a special kind of retarded when it comes to mixing his movies. He literally refuses to accept that people want to understand what characters are saying. [0]
But here's the thing: Most movies are mixed for 5.1 or more surround setups, where the front middle speaker has most of the dialog. Just boost that speaker either via setting or in a stereo/virtual surround by a significant amount and add some volume compression and you get something that's reasonable on a home theater setup.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/nov/16/tenet-up-listen-christopher-nolan-interstellar-sound-mixing
To name a few off the top of my head (although it might be cheating, because they’re much more famous for movie scores):
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (the original) was by Lorne Balfe and Hans Zimmer (personally, I think the end of Contingency sounds a lot like The Dark Knight)
- Wikipedia says that both of them also helped with Crysis 2
- Lorne Balfe did Assassin’s Creed 3
EDIT: Spotify reminds me that Harry Gregson-Williams did some of the Metal Gear Solids.
This appears to be LLM generated and full of hallucinations.
1. Aaron Swartz’s last blog post is a review of the movie The Dark Knight. No entry on his blog has the title "Goodbye, Dr. Spencer".
2. The quote is not present at all in the linked note.
3. The link is wrong, should be: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf
4. and 5. are simply extremely generic quotes without any valid source. "Programmers crying in despair" GitHub repo does not exist.
The school shooters do that because it's shocking and gets in the news. We have so many crowded situations throughout the world where an equal splash could be made.
We need about as much security around the airport as we need around a subway or a concert.
After the dark knight shooting, we didn't find the need to put up xray scanners in every movie theater. It's dumb to do that with airports.
Were I to guess, the reason we focus so heavily on airports is because our lawmakers fly more than most of the population. The theater is likely their safety blanket.
what a ridiculous comparison. Of course a superhero movie is more entertaining than a film that is explicitly designed to avoid mass appeal.
The nuance is that movies today is not where the most creative talent is directed anymore. The shift started with prestige TV taking off in the 2000s, and episodic content on streaming services surpassing film as a mass-market artform in the 2010s, with the pandemic driving the nail in the coffin.
I loved the late 2000s / early 2010s superhero movies. Spiderman, The Dark Knight, Iron Man, etc. These were great films. Today, the MCU is just eating its own tail with the most bland, repetitive crap. It's all designed to incentivize the same die hard fans to keep forking over their hard-earned cash with all the cross-film teasers and the need to watch every film to understand all the references and moving parts. I understand the business model—it's actually the same as comic books now—because people don't casually go in to see random movies anymore, they do that at home on Netflix, so they have to target the repeat viewers. It's visually impressive, and the acting is good enough to keep a relatively large subset of the population coming back, but for someone like me who wants at least a little bit of novelty or creativity in the plot or characters, it's just so become so mind-bogglingly boring.
Film is such a nascent art form. The 90s as “peak blockbuster action” is a valid stance on taste but hard to defend as superior to all that came after. Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight is leagues aways from the 90s Batman, as an auteur friendly and obvious comparison. Pixar another on the animation front.
There have been great films made in every era, but the trend towards tighter writing, more legible and compelling action, and emotionally impactful story telling is strongly trending upwards overall.
And nothing will ever top the merchandising mania of the 80s!
Comics have a huge impact on pop culture. They form the basis for some of the biggest budget TV shows and movies which last for a long time in our collective consciousness: The Dark Knight series, Watchmen, the Avengers, etc.
Several just on their own are huge cultural juggernauts: Calvin and Hobbes, Peanuts, XKCD, Penny Arcade, etc.
I don't know why you think comics are. Trojan Horse for ESG/activism. Like all media, they seek to reach wider and wider audiences, for a good chunk of time, the best perceived way to do that was to diversify those offerings. Even if that didn't end up working (assuming your POV in good faith), that doesn't mean it was a "Trojan horse for activism" anymore than the rise and fall of the shonen genre in manga was a subversive attempt to inject masculinity into the populace.
What you term as ESG and all is not a shadowy cabal to force people to think a certain way. It's just companies trying to do what sells. You forget that in the beginning it did work, which is why it caught on.
Same experience here. I loved The Great Mouse Detective, at age 8. Not much later I read The Dark Knight in a translated trade paperback, and it really tickled my little mind. There was a trend of having comic adaptations of movies back then, so I also read and loved the License to Kill comic and was disappointed when Terminator 2 omitted some scenes in the movie -- until the Director's Cut came out.
I was certainly not traumatized (apart from the week of nightmares after seeing Alien one night on TV at age 12). Because of this, I had no arguments when I learned my 11 and 13 year old kids' mom and their stepdad had secured tickets for us to go see Deadpool & Wolverine when I was visiting last time.
Kids understand more than one may think, depending on how much "real life" they assimilate through culture (and parental guidance), I believe.
Some movies have a working title and the release is different. We may never know how many title drops are in those. Although we know that the working title for "The Dark Knight" was "Rory's First Kiss".
For convenience, I asked ChatGPT to create this table, which summarizes how many times each movie has been mentioned in this conversation so far. It got a few counts wrong (as usual), but it still gives a good sense of the frequency. I hope it can be useful to someone:
| Movie | Number of Mentions | |-------------------------------------------|---------------------| | The Matrix | 9 | | Lord of the Rings Trilogy | 8 | | Pulp Fiction | 8 | | Alien | 7 | | Fight Club | 7 | | Ghostbusters | 6 | | Die Hard | 5 | | Back to the Future | 5 | | Inception | 5 | | Star Wars Trilogy (original) | 5 | | Groundhog Day | 5 | | Terminator 1 & 2 | 5 | | Jurassic Park | 4 | | The Thing | 4 | | The Fifth Element | 4 | | Monty Python and the Holy Grail | 4 | | Ghost in the Shell | 4 | | Interstellar | 4 | | Casablanca | 3 | | Office Space | 3 | | Shawshank Redemption | 3 | | The Godfather Trilogy | 3 | | The Blues Brothers | 3 | | Blade Runner | 3 | | Mad Max: Fury Road | 3 | | Unforgiven | 3 | | Total Recall (1990) | 3 | | The Crow | 3 | | The Princess Bride | 3 | | Akira | 3 | | The Big Lebowski | 3 | | Guardians of the Galaxy | 3 | | American Psycho | 3 | | Indiana Jones Trilogy | 3 | | Kiki’s Delivery Service | 2 | | Ratatouille | 2 | | A Clockwork Orange | 2 | | Mission Impossible (various) | 2 | | Casino Royale | 2 | | Skyfall | 2 | | Ferris Bueller's Day Off | 2 | | Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan | 2 | | Apocalypse Now | 2 | | The Shining | 2 | | Groundhog Day | 2 | | Donnie Darko | 2 | | Dune (2021) | 2 | | Gladiator | 2 | | Predator | 2 | | Seven/Se7en | 2 | | The Dark Knight | 2 | | Snatch | 2 | | Prometheus | 2 | | Schindler’s List | 2 | | The Wolf of Wall Street | 2 | | Dr. Strangelove | 2 | | Silence of the Lambs | 2 | | Kill Bill | 2 | | Real Genius | 2 | | Top Secret! | 2 | | Tenet | 2 | | Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy | 2 | | The Adjustment Bureau | 2 | | The Expanse | 2 | | Pulp Fiction | 2 |
After I learned to lucid dream real life became much less interesting in comparison. It felt like I came alive at night in my sleep, everything in the dream world was so vivid. I learned I could create any environment I wanted, like when Neo trains in the matrix. I would practice things (like tai chi) but it is a bit boring when the other characters don't have free will, so it was like interacting with robots.
The end game for me was going behind the curtain - into the dream control room. It was a room filled with screens each showing a dream I had experienced, even abstract dreams from the age of 3 or 4. From here I could enter any of the dreams through the screen. In the room was a man, like Morgan Freeman (it was like in the film The Dark Knight where he tracks everyones phone), he was the only person I ever met while lucid dreaming who seemed like a real person.
After some visits to this dream control room, I overcame my addiction to lucid dreaming, I stopped being active in my dreams and watched them like someone would watch a film. I knew it was a dream but I chose not to participate.
At this time I was also experimenting with astral projection. I really wanted to have a shared out-of-body experience which could be validated. I got my flatmate to place things in certain areas around our flat to see if I could find them while meditating, but I couldn't.
Being deeply involved in spirituality really distances you from most people in our society. I gave up meditating to better connect with the kind of people I am surrounded by.
I think the sequels are easy to ignore and tolerable bycatch if it means you get strong films amongst them - Batman Begins, Dark Knight, Dark Knight Rises, Logan, Infinity War (even just for a great villain), and (last but definitely not least) Into the Spider-Verse, etc. That last one is a relevant example given how many Spider-Man films there are and how few of them I've bothered watching.
You ignored 40+ films from both years, and these films made the difference even more strikingly apparent than your cherry picking.
As for your understanding, I think there are generally two types of films in Hollywood. There's the largely uninspired make a buck type film, and there's the more creative works where you have a group of people who actually have a pretty neat idea. 'Hollywood' did not remake the Little Mermaid because there was some wave of inspiration where they felt they could really create an amazing film. It was just an uninspired sifting through an IP bucket to find what could be remade to make a movie for the year. And that drivel is what they dug up.
And this is of course nothing new. But what's changed has largely been the ratio. I reference the spandex films not because there's anything inherently wrong with the genre, but because it's become the clearest embodiment of this uninspired conveyor-belt style film-making. The overwhelming majority of these stories may as well have been written by ChatGPT, and the future ones probably will be! And Hollywood is absolutely spamming us with them at this point. But there's nothing inherently awful about the genre. The Dark Knight was clearly an inspired and quiet good film, yet of course it was also spandex.
I've absolutely nothing against Hollywood and am more than happy to see an inspired film. In recently saw Dune 2 yesterday - a sequel of a remake!? But I have no interest in watching 'conveyor belt films', and that is currently the vastly overwhelming majority of what is coming out of Hollywood. And that's not how it used to be.
> Through Endgame, it was an unprecedented undertaking involving the hard work of tens (hundreds?) of thousands of talented artists and technicians across the globe, marshalling untold resources over the span of a decade
Just imagine what those artists could have accomplished working in the service of an artistic vision instead of churning out corporate slop.
Live action super hero dramas started with Superman and reached maturity in Sam Raimi's Spiderman movies. Highlights are Robocop and Unbreakable (throw a Batman adaptation in there, probably The Dark Knight). By the time the MCU rolled around, the genre was well past middle age. Despite billions of dollars of life support, it will be remembered as the last tortured breaths of a somewhat embarrassing cultural episode.
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)
Conversely, I find that often very "woke"/political films are rated overly highly on RT compared to how much I enjoy them. I'm not right wing, it just isn't going to make me enjoy an otherwise mediocre film.
Black Panther, for example, was a perfectly fine film... but who isn't bored of Marvel stuff now, and is it really worth 96%? Higher than The Dark Knight? And even that was probably somewhat overrated due to Health Ledger's passing...
> America’s favorite holiday, Thanksgiving, enjoys 82% popularity according to a 2023 survey by Statista. Memorial Day comes in second at 77%.
> The three most popular movies of all time on IMDB are The Shawshank Redemption, The Godfather and The Dark Knight. They have ratings of 9.2, 9.2 and 9.0 respectively.
These examples are so orange and apples it’s baffling the authors even came up with them.
You compare the most advanced personal pocket computer of all time with a patriotic holiday (assuming patriotism as an absolute value) or a movie about inmates escaping a prison. Like, really?!
No... it's a line from a terrific movie called The Dark Knight, and it's about the ease with which public perception is manipulated.
Hard agree.
It'd turn into a world where people would try to make money (which still happens but normally is sniffed out), instead of a place where people like LundgrensFrontKick produce content, for free, because they love doing so, like:
* Estimating how long it took The Joker to set up the giant cash pyramid in The Dark Knight
* Comparing the box office success of movies that have a snowmobile action scene vs those that have a jet ski action scene
* Objectively trying to determine which Fast and Furious movie was the fastest and most furious
https://www.reddit.com/user/LundgrensFrontKick/?sort=top
Yes I know he has like a podcast now or something, but that only came after years of doing this for no reason other than he enjoyed doing it.
This is what the Dark Knight does. The majority of the film is in whatever wide aspect ratio, but then for the "epic" IMAX shots the aspect ratio switched to a much more square aspect ratio. It was very noticeable in the theater when I saw it way back when.
Sure, that may be the case that they turned it down. It seemed to be a widespread issue though across a lot of reviewers and opinions.
The sound engineer interviews in that article are interesting though, and they seem to be blaming Nolan and the mixing as well.
I also get wanting to turn them down. I've been in theaters so loud that my ears were ringing after the movie, or were actively hurting during certain scenes. The Dark Knight was one of those. It could also just be poor settings at the local cinema in that case as well though.
Given the vast majority of movies are understandable, I just wish Nolan would mix with that goal in mind given I would actually enjoy his movies most of the time if it just weren't for the muffled speech and sound.
We re-watched The Dark Knight (2008) a few days ago.
There's darkness when it's appropriate. There's light to see what Nolan wants you to see. The fights are both well-choreographed and recorded and cut well -- not the flurry of a thousand ultra-tight cuts that waste the talent of everyone involved.
But the dialogue is about 9 dB under what it should be, and only subtitling makes any of it understandable except for a few scenes. My sound system is well-calibrated and powerful: it's the movie's fault.
Batman, and superheroes in general, have always been a bit of campy fun. The target audience was children, like the comic books they were based on. It wasn't until The Dark Knight that anyone took Batman seriously. That really seemed to break the seal on the "gritty, realistic superhero" genre. The trouble with that is that in the real world, the existence of superheros would be horrifying (an observation satisfyingly deconstructed by The Boys). Perhaps we can overlook that for a movie or two, for the novelty, but after a decade and a half of wall to wall "gritty, realistic" media depicting violent anarchistic ubermensch as the good guys, one has to wonder if this is entirely healthy.
I've never seen the movie, but was curious about it regardless. This is what I found about it, maybe others are as clueless about it as me:
> Fox [Lucius Fox, played by Morgan Freeman] eventually learned that Bruce [Batman] had expanded on sonar technology and developed an advanced surveillance system that could listen in and track the movement of any of the thousands of cell phones in Gotham, but, to ensure that the system was not misused, Bruce designed it so that only Fox could control it. Since that essentially contradicted everything that Bruce believed in, Fox agreed to help but said that he would resign if the machine was not destroyed after The Joker was defeated and captured. After the Joker was apprehended, Fox entered a code (his own name) as instructed by Bruce, which activated a self-destruct function for the system, and Fox continued to work under Bruce.
From https://batman.fandom.com/wiki/Lucius_Fox_(Nolanverse)#The_Dark_Knight
Seems he never actually quit, but was fine pushing his own ethical concerns aside for a little while, and continued working with Batman afterwards.
Also
> If it looks like something from a Marvel movie, there’s a reason. The army of consultants commissioned to work on Neom, the $500bn urban region of which the Line is part, comprises not only urban planners but numerous digital artists from the special effects industry. According to a Bloomberg report, they include Olivier Pron, a designer who helped create the look of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy films; Nathan Crowley, known for his work on the brooding Dark Knight trilogy of Batman movies; and futurist Jeff Julian, who worked on the apocalyptic extravaganzas World War Z and I Am Legend.
I guess if there's a fat paycheck in it, I'd design a megalomaniac choppy-choppy prince's fantasy city too...
Amazon's relationship with IMDB as been very fair.
They have kept their data open and downloadable https://m.imdb.com/interfaces/
They did shutdown the forums. But moderating is every companies nightmare these days.
Their reviews and ratings are world class and very accurate
(There are known issues like nationalism in certain countries, but it's easy to cope)
This is disappointing. But no other company would ever rate their own streaming with accurate ratings like Amazon do.
It must be be disappointing to spend over half a billion $ and end up with the mess they have. They do delete brigadeing like when people downvoted Godfather to get The Dark Knight to 1.
Maybe wait and see?
It’s not so much they were “real” problems, as they were acute problems. Acute problems - bad guy with gun - are easier to portray on screen than chronic problems. Anyone who thinks we don’t have real problems anymore and this is the end of history has their head in the sand. But it’s more difficult to visualize. How do you make a war flick out of climate change? How do you make an action thriller from wealth inequality? Even Covid, I mean I don’t know of any influential movies inspired by the Spanish Flu.
Some “dark and gritty” does suffer from a true lack of maturity on the point of the screenwriter - Zac Snyder does not have the writing talent to support his darkness without it seeming cheesy and silly - but a lot of it - Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight - very much does touch on the real suffering of the modern era: terrorism, surveillance, class divisions.
I avoid even comparatively mild stuff, e.g. Godfather or Dark Knight (peeking at IMDB's top movies), and have done so for decades. It's a conscious decision, one I made in my twenties and not in any way related to aesthetics, anxiety, being childish, or mental issues.
I'm not really advocating it. I don't claim it gives superpowers or big benefits (and if anyone claims them, I'd ask for hard scientific evidence), but I can just say that any life decisions differentiate a person, even if by tiny bit. Looking at the whole population, life decisions make people diverse and drive them to bump against each other, which is mostly fun, no?
Huh. Whereas my first thought is always the noise of the bat-cycle from The Dark Knight - which is also directed by Nolan and scored by Zimmer.
It was the second one, The Dark Knight, when Batman captures the mob accountant in Hong Kong and returns him to Gotham. It would be a pretty memorable scene in any other movie, but just about everything got upstaged by Heath Ledger.
The way I have described it is in the movie The Dark Knight they build the machine that uses phones to build something like sonar to see in environments. The way that is depicted in the movie is how I visualize things. I can navigate rooms or areas but I only see this vague representation of objects similar to how it's depicted in the movie. I have no problem with abstract concepts as a software engineer. But I can't visualize a face for example. It's a vague representation in my mind.
Doesn't Endgame literally have Thanos being decapitated? I don't think it'll scar most kids but I don't remember any decapitations happening in the Dark Knight movies.
PG-13 has a wide enough range these days to be entirely meaningless. There is no harm in taking a 7-10 year old to see an Avengers film, IMO, but of course I wouldn't say the same for the Dark Knight trilogy.
A really big screen makes a huge difference. If you truly want to appreciate 4K content (be aware that most streaming 4K content is not good at all, surprisingly YouTube’s rentals have the best 4K fidelity of any streaming option I’ve seen) you need like a 70 inch screen at less than 10 feet away. I can assure you that with right content this can transport you into the movie in ways only a theater can match.
A great example I use is that in the Dark Knight, the thread the joker ties to the smoke grenade while getting into the school bus unwinds from his coat and is also purple. Like isn’t that insane to notice?
When I promoted dark knight it just shows all other super hero movies when I really like Nolan movies more than other action hero movies.
I think it's more about the stakes, obstacles, "psychic wounds" etc, than the actual superpowers. Being born with superpowers isn't that big a deal, if you're in a film where every other significant character also has superpowers.
Spider-man lets his uncle die because he's busy showing off. Batman in The Dark Knight "has no cartilage in his knees, scar tissue on his kidneys, concussive damage to his brain, and a host of other issues". Bruce Banner is subject to fits of uncontrollable rage. Logan is dying and in constant pain. Doctor Strange's hands are mutilated due to a car crash caused by his own arrogance.
IIRC Wonder Woman has a naivity due to growing up on a remote island populated by women, but she's basically confident and hypercompetent throughout. Captain Marvel's big issue is she's forgotten she has galactically important superpowers. Black Widow's character has a bit more going on, and I liked the film better than the other two. But, I think there is a difference between the amount of freedom big budget movie screenwriters have with male and female characters.
At lower budgetary levels, you're more likely to see women with less straightforwardly heroic characters, facing more interesting or engaging stakes.
Before Captain Marvel Brie Larson was doing great indie flicks like Room and Free Fire. She's said she was quite conflicted about taking the role, and I can't blame her for taking the money but I think I understand her hesitation.
It feels like Hollywood has had a practical effects craze for a while in the past fifteen years thanks to The Dark Knight. Or maybe it's just been Christopher Nolan (and some Villeneuve) keeping that flame alive. There certainly has been no shortage of public gushing over Nolan's use of practical effects, even if some of his films didn't really live up to the hype.
Ragnarok is one of my favorite movies of all time, as I found it unique, mesmerizing, and incredibly re-watchable. Great comedy, great drama, great action, great world building.
The Dark Knight and the rest of its trilogy are just so ... blah. I just re-watched the 3rd and still find it so tepid and uninspired. I mean, Bane is kinda cool, but the rest is just bad. The story was insipid and hacked.
The multi movie story and world building is the best thing that has happened in cinema in a long time.
So you and I apparently have quite different tastes.
Thor Ragnarok is one of the few capeshit movies I have seen and it was pretty bad. The entire dialogue is written around forced oneliners from a minute into the opening scene. Guardians of the Galaxy was OK but nothing to write home about or even make me remember to watch the sequel(s?).
All of them are a steep drop in quality from The Dark Knight and there certainly isn't enough material there for twenty something 3hr films and half a dozen TV shows. Just like The Empire Strikes Back is a legitimately great movie while everything else Star Wars themed asymptotically approaches zero.
The whole idea of world building with dozens of movies is a scourge on story telling and a complete dead end imho.
The superhero genre already went through the deconstruction phase. The Watchmen comic book is from 1986. It did not kill the genre - if anything it revitalized it by introducing new themes. Frank Millers The Dark Knight was supposed to deconstruct and subvert Batman, but instead revitalized the character, so he is now the most popular superhero.
On film, the Watchmen movie predates the current Marvel movie wave which mean we got the reconstruction before the genre it was supposed to reconstruct. There have also been several superhero-team parodies like "The Specials" before we got the serious versions.
So it is safe to say the genre will not be killed by deconstructions, subversion and parodies. The genre will die when the audience lose interest and the moves stop making a profit. Subversions will probably help keep it alive longer.
If you are not a fan of the genre you probably hope the superhero genre will soon end its dominance of the cinema box office. But don't hold your breath.
I'll go further than this, and say that this is practically the only use case I would have for a movie theater.
As-is, movies air in theaters for only a couple months, and then they're gone. Like, what the hell. Every time in recent memory that I've ever suggested to someone that we go see a movie, I've had to find out that the movie was no longer in theaters, or was even already available for streaming. That's basically a non-starter for people with jobs. Not that I haven't also gone to a theater with no particular movie in mind and just watched whatever was playing, but if anything that seems way more niche to me.
The last times I went to the movies were March 2019 and October 2017, and both of those were special cases (the latest installments in a series I was heavily invested in, Fate/stay night, each with a limited one-day release and a long expected wait before it would be available for illegal download via Blu-Ray rip). I haven't been to the movies with any kind of regularity since I was a teenager.
Anyway, point being, I think movie theaters would actually be more compelling for more people if they included a revolving door of well regarded classics, rather than only whatever films happen to be the latest releases. I'm unlikely to wander into a theater with no idea what's playing or whether any of it is worth watching*, but if I could rely on them also having one or two that were known great and/or on my bucket list (Citizen Kane, Fight Club, Matrix trilogy, Dark Knight trilogy, Star Wars, Pulp Fiction, Schindler's List, Shawshank Redemption, etc.) then I might just take the gamble that something playing will be worth the time.
*: I suspect that this is also a generational gap in play. Older folks who primarily watch traditional TV with ads probably have a much better idea of current and upcoming movies.
Before everything shut down last year, my local theaters played a showing of a classic film each month, often Hitchcock. The few I went to had plenty of attendees.
Another local theater took the lockdown as an opportunity to do outdoor socially-distanced showings of previous blockbusters, like The Dark Knight. Plenty of attendees there, too.
I'd be happy to have more showings like that.
The original Pirates of the Caribbean was a superb work of its genre with classic acting, humor, and subtle characterization that you do not give it credit for.
https://youtu.be/zhdBNVY55oM
As far as claiming “every superhero film” - that’s a tall order. While one can say most MCU (and perhaps DCEU films) share a certain level of formulaic quality that make them easy to reduce and denounce, there are always outliers. Consider the neo-Western greatness of Logan. The contemplative complexity of Unbreakable. I didn’t even mention the late Heath Ledger’s performance in The Dark Knight.
one of the top movies ever, unfortunately the sequels were really bad (Batman returns is still ok) until The Dark Knight come out, which is as good or better.
For me Jack Nicholson Joker > Heath Ledger Joker.
>The author eventually puts some thought into it and subsequently adopts a public stance matching what was privately true all along—revealing how little they value the things they said they did.
I wouldn't chalk this up to irony just yet, but the lack of benevolent gatekeepers has allowed this to happen. And it will happen time and time again and there is nothing you can do to stop it. You've had a good run in your basement using something that the suits didn't pay much attention to, because they couldn't connect at the time how this seemingly boring machine called the computer could lead to money. But rest assured, your hard work has demonstrated it to them and has brought them over.
Slowly but surely you should make amends with some utopian idea of a decentralized, apolitical, and not-under-control-of-some-state web. Anything less than that is being delusional.
A free society has so many enemies from inside and outside who wish to force their hand upon everyone, that it's best to stay out of the way of the herd unless you believe getting trampled over is worth it.
When we were "battling" for net neutrality last time (or was it two times ago?) there was a good meme image floating around that showed a handful of different "packages" of websites you could have access to:
https://qz.com/1114690/why-is-net-neutrality-important-look-to-portugal-and-spain-to-understand/
But if you really look, this has already started to happen. Netflix once had a decent library of movies, and then everyone caught up to them and now it's Netflix, Amazon, Hulu/Disney, HBO, and the list keeps growing.
Spotify, Apple, Google Music. Eventually this exclusivity card will be played by them in a much greater scale. At which point, the necessity of most people having to _ration_ what web they want to see will inevitably resemble having those packages up there.
So in closing, you're out-financed, out manned, and to make things worse, you've got so-called "leftists"/"liberals" as front line soldiers working free of charge (Mark Zuckerberg was right - they're not just dumb fucks, they're _gullible_ dumb fucks) for these corporations to further erode your chances of having any semblance of a decent internet.
As Morgan Freeman so eloquently put it in The Dark Knight: "Good luck."
The same thing was said about home video, then video rental, then pay-per-view, then streaming, and now streaming during a pandemic. If there's one thing I've learned in my time on this earth, it's that there are plenty of people like you and I who love the social experience of going to a movie theater.
As an anecdote, my favorite moviegoing experience was when I was watching the Dark Knight during the first showing, at the point where Commissioner Gordon pulls of his mask, a guy in front of me jumped out of his seat and yelled "YEAH!! GORDON!!" The whole audience got a laugh, and it was just a really fun moment that only the thirty or so people who happened to be there got to experience.
Also, no matter how good your living room "home theater" is, it will never replicate a real auditorium that has had actual audio engineers work on setting up.
Slight aside but I'm somehow reminded of a quote from the film - The Dark Knight "You Either Die a Hero, or You Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become the Villain".
Illegal copying? Call it what you will, if you had paid for the Dark Knight, WB would get $5. Instead they get $0.
It's illegal and if everyone did it, movies would not exist.
It's funny that the article mentions The Dark Knight without mentioning that in that movie Nolan blows up a real building in the scene in which the hospital is destroyed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nJTZzgBwnQ
The Dark Knight: I searched the entire thread before posting and was surprised to not see this movie on the list. I would say that this was one of the very few movies that ever challenged me morally. To this day, it's one of my favorite movies to rewatch.
Meh. For the last 10 years maybe two movies a year get me to a theater, otherwise, television, laptop or phone for me. The only movie in my life where the theater factors into my subjective memory of a movie was The Dark Knight. I'll never forget how immersive the open scene was on a giant IMAX screen.
My memories of sounds in movies on the other hand are only of the bad, like some of the ridiculous sound effects in Transformers with overly accentuated bass
Batman is apparently heavily inspired by the philosophy of Nietzche. The quote is probably a more polished version of this one from Beyond Good and Evil: "He who fights monsters should see to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."
So maybe somewhat German after all.
Source: https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/10572/is-this-quote-originally-from-the-dark-knight
I don't see it any differently than the rise of science fiction as a genre. Science fiction can be a platform for storytelling, but it can also be a dumb excuse to use special effects, or to fantasize about the future, or any other amount of vapid justifications. If you blow it off completely due to the few movies you've seen, you're gonna miss out on a lot of excellent storytelling. For example, if you've dismissed The Watchmen or The Dark Knight because you think Iron Man is dumb, you're missing out.
I disagree, but I think I mainly put the agency on film producers / investors, and not on viewers. Super hero movies tend to be either sequels or in a series, and producers have recognized that these are low-risk, pretty decent guarantees of a good movie. So they've been highly motivated in cashing out that trend.
In the 00's and 90s we had a lot more variety, but the movies also had more variance in their investment return.
For the last few years I've only been watching superhero movies when they hit netflix or when I'm on a plane, and I think there's a growing trend of people being tired of superhero movies.
And I'd say that there are times when a predictable superhero movie is great. But the best movies probably won't be marvel ones.
[Hypocrisy disclaimer, one of my top 3 favorite movies is The Dark Knight, and IDK if that qualifies as a superhero movie.]
Do we benefit from drawing lines between "cinema" and... whatever you might call a Marvel film? What do we call a Marvel film, if not "cinema"?
Further, why isn't anything at risk? Infinity War got about as close to real risk as any MCU film has so far, and I think if Mr. Scorsese watched that film he'd realize it's actually possible to create emotional drama within the context of a "Marvel Movie".
Also, are we really drawing the line arbitrarily at Marvel specifically? Where does "Joker" fit? Watchmen, The Dark Knight, Wonderwoman, 300, Scott Pilgrim, V for Vendetta? What about undeniably "Marvel" films like Logan, and Into the Spiderverse? Do we dismiss all media sourced from the pages of comics, or just the MCU specifically?
I ask both to make a rhetorical point, and because I genuinely don't understand. Mr. Scorsese writes this opinion piece like there's a shared understanding of what a "Marvel movie" is, but I don't know that there is such an understanding.
Well, of course - these are 'Blockbuster' films, designed with high budgets, like AAA games - they need to be guaranteed to make back a significant investment made into something with such high production values.
South Park recently lambasted this in S26E02, 'Band in China,' where we saw a host of characters on their way to China - part of a group the series was lambasting on selling out to China with regards to censorship. The characters had been 'selling out' to expand their financial markets to China.
A film usually needs to make back twice its budget in order to be deemed a 'financial success.' If that film has a budget of $80-180mil, the execs are going to want it to fly with the lowest common denominator. If it happens to actually say something as well, and become critically-acclaimed, such as Joker, or the Dark Knight, well, that's an exception.
tl;dr: High budget superhero action films need to be guaranteed to make their budget back. They are made to hit the lowest common denominator and sell tickets. If they happen to be brilliant they are an outlier to the rule.
I just finished reading this well-researched and well-written article, and the best way I can summarize it is with a quote from The Dark Knight:
"You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain."[a]
--
[a] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Dark_Knight_(film)
And the dark knight films. Apparently Nolan is fond of it.
I really like Ashton Gleckman’s YT channel. He goes over the process of making and composing movie scores. Check out the video on the Dark Knight. It’s fantastic. Unsurprisingly he got hired by Hans Zimmer’s studio.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9Z0p8W-IvB_2K_cAQdf7bg
I feel like the majority of good movies came out before 2000. The Dark Knight is an exception.
https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?groups=top_250&sort=user_rating,desc
There are very few good movies coming out anymore. When is the next Pulp Fiction or The Godfather going to come out? It is very hard to get excited for whatever is being released these days. It's just not even comparable/close.
> I want to watch films like Harry Potter, The Dark Knight, and Lord of the Rings. Unfortunately, they are either scattered across a dozen different services or simply not there at all.
FWIW, Netflix has had a scattered selection of The Dark Knight and Lord of the Rings off-and-on recently. I guess that might be your point, though…
Agreed, I like Spotify quite a lot. But for movies, Netflix simply ins't cutting it these days. Try searching for any movie from 2000 - 2010 [1] that made more than a million in the box office on opening weekend. Most of them are not there. I want to watch films like Harry Potter, The Dark Knight, and Lord of the Rings. Unfortunately, they are either scattered across a dozen different services or simply not there at all.
What I would like is a rent-on-demand method. Xbox almost gets this right: they have plenty of titles you can rent for up to 24 hours. You typically pay between 3 - 6 dollars per film. More recent films are more expensive. However, I would like to see the cost go down, especially for older titles. Basically match any Redbox prices (1-2 dollars), and provide a way for me to stream it on-demand.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s_in_film
Do you remember in "The Dark Knight", how the Joker just happens to run into Batman on a building overlooking a river, while two boats just happen to be escaping calamity. One boat happens to have prisoners, the other boat happens to have regular people. Both are wired with explosives, and each boat has the other's detonator.
That moment really broke the movie for me. The Joker is effectively in charge of the butterfly effect. He flaps his wings, and gets what he wants in a "deus ex machina" style way. The odds of timing that so perfectly are astronomical.
You're telling me that a foreign adversary happened to pull this off? "Russia" is becoming a catch all bogey man for everything that we don't understand. There are far simpler answers to how this started to spread.
Google et al. might want to take heed anyway. This all reminds me of a quote I love from the Dark Knight movie: "You squeezed them, you hammered them to the point of desperation. And in their desperation, they turned to a man they didn't fully understand."
That's a good question. I'm not sure what the other poster had in mind, and I suspect it's not the same, but RT has a bunch of rating problems that would probably become far more egregious for news than they are for movies. (Leaving aside the tricky question of how to translate the formats: is a movie like a news story, or a news source? Does news really have an existing aggregation-worthy source like movie reviews?) RT provides percentage scores for both audience and critic reviews. Those percentages are not averaged scores, but percentage of positive reviews. There's good reason for this in both cases, but it causes a lot of weird side effects.
- For audience reviews, reviewers rate out of 5 stars, and the score is the percentage of reviews at least 3.5 stars.
The goal is to insulate scores from extreme opinions and odd voting patterns. On IMDB, which doesn't do this, a few low scores can destroy a movie's rating, and movies that invite careful analysis are effectively penalized. The Dark Knight ends up rated higher than Schindler's List, but the latter has lots of slightly-imperfect scores with incredibly positive review text.
The basic side effect is the loss of all meaningful score data. That punishes daring movies: 100 4-star reviews equals 100% while 50 3-star and 50 5-star reviews equals 50%, but I would much rather see the second movie. It also hides deep flaws: The Boondock Saints outscores 2001, but a look at the reviews shows that its "rotten" ratings are often 1 and 2-star reviews calling it garbage, while 2001 is full of 3-star reviews like "slow and confusing, but fascinating". Another problem here is that naive binary scores suffer from reviewer skew and vote-bombing campaigns. It's less bad than IMDB because extreme scores are 'softened', but still worse than systems which relate individual scores to the reviewer's other opinions. BeerAdvocate, of all things, takes on this problem with interesting meta-info like "reviewer's average distance from consensus".
- For critical reviews, each review is reduced to a binary opinion and the score is a weighted average of positive review count.
The goal there is to condense varied or absent rating schemes into an aggregation-friendly score and avoid reviewer skew. Metacritic, which doesn't do this, ends up systematically distorted by which outlets review things. Unscored reviews like Ars Technica's (on video games) are skipped, while sites with extremely skewed scores are included by some unspecified weighting system. As a result, Metacritic lists game reviews averaging 75-89 as "generally favorable", but there's a widespread understanding that any major-release product below 85 is terrible. (GameSpot once infamously fired a reviewer for scoring a game 6/10.) It's largely the same problem as Uber and Amazon ratings: does a perfect score mean "exceptional" or "nothing wrong"? RT tries to dodge the problem by saying "good" or "bad", with a weighting to accommodate a reviewer's 'signal strength'.
The side effect here is, again, the total loss of secondary data. RT sometimes gets reviews actively wrong; something like "despite lovely action sequences, this movie is a meandering waste of time" will get parsed as "lovely action sequences". That's probably an automation error, but lots of other reviews can't be clearly declared positive or negative even by humans. And within a categorization, there's a great deal more lost data. Ebert produces 'fresh' for The Avengers because "It provides its fans with exactly what they desire," but he produces 'fresh' for There Will Be Blood by declaring it "A force beyond categories."
- The reason all of this works alright for Rotten Tomatoes is that it's fundamentally answering one question: "will I enjoy watching this?" The Avengers isn't on par with There Will Be Blood, but if you like the description and it's rated fresh, you'll enjoy either one. If you see that critics hate The Boondock Saints and audiences don't, well, you probably know whether you're somebody who likes that kind of cult classic.
But what of news? People already shred Snopes whenever it tries to deal with assessments like "factually correct but misleading" or "incorrect statistic but the real number also supports the same thesis". The entire point of news reviews is to not rely on "will I enjoy this story?", so all the things RT quietly glosses over will become critical problems.
> "there are absolutely choices you can make for marketing rather than artistic reasons"
That is fair. I believe it's also the case that when evaluating art, it's easy to conflate those reasons with one's own POV and demographic biases.
In other words: Forrest Gump is cynical pandering to Baby Boomers... but [this-year's-Marvel-superhero-movie] is an artistic gem, and The Dark Knight or Black Panther got robbed at the Oscars, etc.
IMO IMDB has a big problem with recency. #3 in their top movies list is The Dark Knight, which is frankly absurd (it's a great movie, but #3 of all time? Come on)
> Or voting some awful art house movie a 10/10 to signal that they, too, understood the high brow nuances that the groundlings could not.
I think this just speaks to a divide in movie reviews. Those critics are reviewing the movies as art, whereas many user reviews are reviewing movies as a consumer product. Neither approach is incorrect, but they have very different outcomes.
Culture is opposed to it. Hollywood movies and TV shows generally portray mass surveillance as a tool of oppression or as a last resort (The Dark Knight).
There's a fine line between truth and justice. Nothing illustrated this more than the movie, The Dark Knight.
Anecdotal. I am slowly realizing that not many of the people I know like to rewatch things. For a while I told myself they don’t want to rewatch it so I shouldn’t force them to. But I realized that I was depriving myself from reliving the movies and the great scenes just because no one else rewatches them. It’s great to just put on a old movie and do chores. I recently watched The Dark Knight for like 8th time (last time was a couple of years ago) and I just enjoyed it.
Different strokes I guess?
I would argue that if you can set aside the pop-culture legacy of the character of Batman--that feeling of "can something this popular be actually good?"--The Dark Knight is a better movie than Interstellar.
Interstellar has some beautiful shots and inspiring moments, but I think the plot and characters are not as well-realized. As much as I love the subject matter, I think Interstellar is one of Nolan's weaker films.
Honestly, as a kid watching The Dark Knight for the first time, I had been highly compelled by the movie.
That's a fair analysis. They are blockbusters first, and superhero movies second. I do hope that the genre will evolve towards more interesting topics beyond Good vs. Evil. The Dark Knight showed a nuanced view of how one cannot exist without the other, even within one hero's mythos itself. Unfortunately movies like The Dark Knight and Logan that are willing and capable of tackling nuance and complexity in a feature film aren't common for the genre.
> Citing superficial similarities to mythical figures...
I think you missed why I quoted Tolkien. There's something compelling about a common mythology for a culture. The modern cosmopolitan culture, American especially, doesn't have an ethnic, racial, or language identity to fall back on when exploring identity, struggle, the merits of sacrifice, moral issues, etc. Mythological figures allow us to explore these themes in a less traumatic way.
You can call that "escapism", I guess, but I think The Dark Knight was one of the few films that wrestled with the War on Terror in honest ways. It had to be a mythological film (Batman v. Joker) because the same subject would have gone over rather poorly in one way or another if it were an actual terrorism/spy thriller or something.
Anyway, I think Tolkien wasn't exactly wrong to pine for an exploration of culture, language, and identity through mythological archetypes. He, in particular, wanted non-borrowed ones. We are sort of in the same boat since nearly all content is borrowed in a global market.
>This has been a half formed thought bouncing around in my head, but I think part of the reason for the resurgence of comic books and superheroes is the simple fact that we live in a complex world where there are very few instances of Good and Evil. We live in a subtle, complex, and nuanced world, where if you take the time to dig in to an issue, you find more complexity...and a lot of really morally compromised people. We don't live in a Good/Evil world, but we want to. I think that comics are a retreat from that, a mental/moral bulwark that gives us an outlet for our need for Right and Wrong. We might not be able to figure out <insert political issue> without coming to blows, but we sure as hell can agree that Thanos is a piece of shit, and that Batman is wicked cool.
Now, I always think this, but I think we also need some amount of moralizing mythology to remind us that, at the end of the day, when the time comes to act, there really are such things as good and evil. My favorite superhero movies tend to be the ones that show it, rather than trying to add "complexity" by actually removing the mythic content by invoking gray-vs-black morality and calling it "complexity".
Captain America: the First Avenger did it well, though I'd have liked them to have kept the Red Skull as a loyal Nazi. Let Hydra genuinely be portrayed as a Nazi cult, carried from its origins in WW2 to the modern day. It's mythically important that a Nazi piece of shit gets punched in the face by Just a Kid from Brooklyn.
It's mythically utterly unimportant that one manic-psychopath and another brooding, resentful psychopath "can do this forever" (The Dark Knight).
It's moral complexity when a fortunate kid from Queens tries to find some responsible way to deal with a working-class villain just trying to make it good in a world dominated by the Tony Starks and Thors (Spiderman Homecoming). White versus mid-light gray (with a good reason to be gray) offers us a compelling conflict, in a way that "two pieces of shit fight each-other" does not.
(Yeah, Marvel > DC, and holy war upon anyone who says otherwise.)
Have you been to a real IMAX? They have massive screens that are sort of square-ish as shown on the right. As the article mentions, Nolan films parts of his movies with this bigger aspect ratio. Most movies, when projected on IMAX, still only take up a small portion of the screen due to the aspect ratio. In a Nolan film, like the Dark Knight or Interstellar, during certain scenes the aspect ratio will open up so that you are viewing image on the entire multi-story screen. It is an amazing experience and really immerses you into the movie like nothing else; it takes up your entire visual field.
Wow, this feels like something similar to the mechanism Batman uses to find Joker at the end of the dark knight movie. Instead of Joker, it's IMSI-Catchers.
It would be interesting to see how they validate their findings which should be a challenge I guess.
Are there any historical examples of "a joker"? The sole example cited by the article is Nazi Germany which forced the US and the USSR to work together for a short time. That doesn't to me seem to be a real example of a "joker" however, that's just the enemy of my enemy being my friend kind of thing. Hitler wasn't just fucking things up for the sake of it, but had a very specific world he was trying to create. The Joker wanted chaos, or if he wanted anything else, doesn't tip his hand, being an unreliable source of information. How many different ways did he get those scars?
I'm just asking because scholarly articles about the actions of fictional psychopaths seem a bit much. Especially when we are talking about applying it to entire groups of people (nations) without some good examples. Note, this is also different than Swartz's or the author's suggestion - that this cooperation was intended. That's not implied by the movie, nor the joker of the article. This is the first paragraph:
In the recent Hollywood movie The Dark Knight (2008) the comic character known as the Joker jeopardizes a whole society spreading chaos and destruction with no aim of benefit at it.
That's not Nazi Germany (the sixth paragraph or so and example). Hitler may have had a fucked up sense of societal benefit, but that was his goal, not wanton destruction (at least until he went completely crazy).
I graduated from art school and am now a software engineer. I went because when you're really good at drawing in high school--everyone tells you that you should be an artist, regardless of what else you may be good at.
I believe my degree was worth it. If you want to learn technical skills, this article is spot on and has some great advice. There are some great resources he gives for learning this stuff fairly cheap.
What I learned in art school was critical thinking, problem solving, perception, and observation. The most important things you get out of art school that are applicable to software:
1. How to critique work and talk about your work with others. Most studio classes are basically just a long critique of everyone's work. I use these skills everyday in software in code reviews and in my role as a manager mentoring others.
2. Problem solving. We regularly had assignments like "Draw a sequence of images defining density" or "Create a sculpture that defines the space between an architectural space and your body" or "Create an invention and build it with only brown paper lunch bags." It takes some novel thinking to come up with creative solutions to that shit.
3. How to deliver. You need to get stuff done and produce a volume of work to get good.
Of the good friends I had in art school:
- One is a paper sculptor and has made work for Facebook, Apple, Google, the Queen of Jordan, and has been a guest on Sesame Street. He also works with research scientists on solar cell development. - One has been the visual effects supervisor for the Harry Potter films, the Dark Knight, and Star Trek Beyond. - One is the director of a glass blowing school. - One is a executive creative director at a large design agency.
I would guess that every one of them would attribute part of their success to the art school they attended.
Going to repeat a lot of what has been said so far:
- Minority Report (The TV show isn't bad either)
- Ex Machina
- District 9
- Elysium
- Oblivion
- Edge of Tomorrow
- Looper
- I am Legend
- Her
- The Martian
- The Matrix (Only 2 & 3 if you're super bored)
- Basically any of the Mad Max series
- Firefly (TV show, movies are OK)
- Dark Matter (TV show)
- Snow Piercer
- American Ultra
- Last Witch Hunter (more fantasy than SciFi)
- Riddick
- Dredd
- X Files (I mean, it's not NOT scifi...)
- Treasure Planet (Yes, the animated one)
- Atlantis: The Lost Empire (Gets a bad rap for being animated, but it has it's own language and everything)
- Serial Lain Experiments (anime)
- Watchmen
- The Dark Knight
- Inception
- The Prestige (technically SciFi)
I can go on for hours
> "After reviewing the Warner Brothers report, Google decided not to remove links to Amazon, IMDB and Sky Cinema from its results."
I took that to mean, by omission, that Google went ahead and removed warnerbros.com from its results. That would have been a great way for Google to hint that indiscriminate takedown requests are bad.
But searching for "batman the dark knight", as described in the article, still does bring up the Warner Bros site. Ah well.
Ha, this is amazing. Reminds me of movies using seemingly far-fetched premises at their time.
Sneakers - in the beginning when they're spying on Dr. Janek, the team can't see the entire password he types, but Whistler hears the missing keystroke.
And related to the original post, The Dark Knight has Batman using sonar from everyone's mobile phones to detect where the Joker's henchmen were and here we are with wifi routers (and potentially other 2.4 GHz devices).
> The take away phrase, in response to someone sending nonsense input, was "Some people just want to watch the world burn."
That's a big line in the batman movie "the dark knight". While it could have originally came from elsewhere, I'd be willing to bet it came from the movie.
Superman vs. Batman, they are making a new movie about that.
Superman caused a lot of damage in The Man of Steel movie and many people died as a result of his fight with Zod that ended up with him breaking Zod's neck and killing him. The movie could have gone a different way if he asked his Father's hologram about Zod, and any weaknesses he might have during the 24 hours he had to think over. Then use the craft he came to Earth with to destroy Zod's ship engines, defeating him without any property damage or killing innocent people.
But anyway Batman always has a plan in taking down any super powered being in case they go rouge or mind controlled. He stores them on his computer and makes technology or finds items that can weaken them or take away their powers.
For Superman he has a battlesuit and kryptonite. The battlesuit gives him strength and power to fight Superman and the kryptonite weakens Superman so Batman can fight him.
Yet in The Dark Knight, Batman used a program to use everyone's cell phone to create a spying device that gave hi the location of the criminals Joker employed and where the victims are. Sort of abusing his own powers for domestic spying and making cell phones insecure by infecting them with an exploit that installs his own backdoor to get access to the cameras etc to scan for things.
Any chance this contributed to the Dark Knight being filmed there? Choosing Chicago for the cityscape makes sense by itself but the film focused heavily on corruption.
I found a nice breakdown of scene / real locations while looking into this: http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/d/DarkKnight.html
There is a bug that lets you kinda of load the description for a movie that you don't have permission to see. This is 'The Dark Knight' http://www.netflix.com/title/70079583 which we (in the US) don't have available to us but loads a mostly empty page. But if you go to the 'More like this' tab, it suggests movies for you.
Don't stop with Star Wars. Just about every morality play can be analyzed this way. It's a trope that goes all the way back to antiquity. It's one of the first things I think about when I watch such a movie. Is this political order really something that needs to be destroyed? My answer winds up almost always being 'no'.
My favorite is this treatment of The Dark Knight:
https://www.reddit.com/r/FanTheories/comments/3insgr/joker_is_the_hero_in_the_dark_knight
I enjoyed the otherwise-awful movie The Seventh Son because of the playfulness they take with world-building. The heroes and their quests all wind up being a part of the broader political structures of the world rather than those structures being the stakes. I like it when the very plot doesn't take itself seriously.
sigh
right, first things first, none of this is new.
lets start with the more obvious stuff, what you see in film isn't real. No really.
Just look atthe harry potter series; all those kids went through puberty, it was as equally unkind for them as it was for us.
An entire generation of VFX people cut their teeth painting out the pimples on many a potter face.
Then there is the making older people look young. You know those actors(male and female) that always seem to look around 30, despite pushing 55? that almost exclusively digital. I used to do night shifts with a bloke who's entire job was to remove crows feet (and a lot more) for a very successful British chick flick.
then you have the other extreme, you know those shots where people have arms missing? or facial disfigurement?
James bond: http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/jamesbond/images/0/01/Silva's_disfigurement.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20130329141917
board walk empire: https://vimeo.com/18275127 (1:44, however the rest is worth a look)
Dark knight, Twoface: https://vimeo.com/3852161 (0:59) (fun fact, the tube bit for the cronicals of nania, I sent back to be re-rendered because I though the renderer had fucked up(I was only looking at the matte, and flashing mattes are normally bad))
As for body doubles, thats been going on for decades. pretty much any shot that involves the back of some star, there is a 50% chance that its a body double, or a stand-in. Mainly because its cheaper.
Look here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHRLX8jRjq8 You see Daniel Craig zoom around riding a motor cycle like a pro, except you don't. Its either a bike welded to a trailer (0:34), or a face replacement. The first Digital double is at 0:42 (there are lots more.)
So you can see that actually it happens a lot, and frankly there is nothing wrong with it. In fact there is a whole achademic field devoted to it, (fun thing, google "digital doubles framestore")
Its basically a case of some dickhead wanting to see tits, and feeling cheated because he can't command someone he's never met to do a full frontal scene for the price of a movie ticket (or less)
> ...25 sequels, but none of those films will be memorable.
* Back to the Future 2 * Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom * Army of Darkness * Goldeneye * Evil Dead 2 * Terminator 2 * Ghostbusters 2 * Captain America: Winter Soldier * Batman: The Dark Knight
Yeah, none of those sequels are memorable. We should stop making sequels and only make original films so we don't waste money on travesties such as these.
Here's what Elon Musk said during his conversation with Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy (that he invested) about online courses by talented teachers:
---
Elon Musk: The analogy I sometimes use is, you've seen like Batman – like the Chris Nolan movie – like the original one. And it's pretty frickin awesome. Right? You've got incredible special effects, great script multiple takes, amazing actors, and great sound. It's very... is very engaging But if you would instead say okay that you have the same script so, at least the same script, and you said, ok now that script, instead of having movies, we're going to have that script performed by the local town troupe. Okay and so in every small town in America, if movies didn't exist, they'd have to, then, recreate the Dark Knight.
SAL: Right.
ELON: Like with home-sewn costumes, and, like jumping across the stage – not giving their lines quite right, and not really looking like the people in the movie. And no special effects – that would suck. It would be terrible.
SAL: That's right. Very, very –
ELON: That's education.
---
And here's the author's characterization of online courses:
---
Our disarticulation of knowledge accumulation and knowledge transmission also leaves us exposed to an even more frightening adversary. I refer to tech and its maniacal destabilizing energy. Financiers have recognized that there’s good money to be made in conveying knowledge; their thoughts, naturally, do not linger on the costly infrastructure that produces knowledge. Working in tandem with the digital wizards, they wager that they can do it better than we can and cash out in the process. Given that they’re up against a cohort that has very little interest, or dexterity, in sharing its immense store of wisdom, the money and tech people like their odds.
---
Also, lectures themselves are not that great to begin with, so that's something to consider too:
http://educationoutrage.blogspot.ca/2015/01/why-do-we-give-lectures-why-does-anyone.html
Have you seen Batman (the Chris Nolan movie)? It's pretty frickin' awesome. You've got incredible special effects, great script, multiple takes, amazing actors, and great sound and it's very engaging. ... If instead of having movies- say we're going to have that script performed by the local town troupe. So in every small town in America (if movies didn't exist), they would have to then recreate The Dark Knight. You know, with home-sewn costumes and jumping across the stage and not getting their lines quite right, and not really looking like the people in the movie, and no special effects or anything. That would suck! It would be terrible. That's education.
-- Elon Musk (chatting with Sal Khan)[1]
I think there's a ton of improvement to be had in the education space. People have used technology to make many forms of entertainment more compelling, but education is pretty similar to half a century ago: classrooms, teachers, lectures, etc. A lot of the stagnation is due to bureaucratic and legislative inertia, which isn't such a big problem in countries lacking widespread public schooling.
With regards to cost and bandwidth issues: Remember, Gates's predictions/goals are for the next 15 years. Technology is only going to get cheaper and faster. In 2000, iPods didn't exist. In 2030, even low-end tablets will put current hardware to shame.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDwzmJpI4io#t=2280
imo, the dark knight is a good movie despite it being a comic book superhero movie. v for vendetta too.
I watched most of the Marvel movies and I have the same opinion, Avengers was one of the worst IMO, I enjoyed most of the X-Men ones, "First class" in particular.
My favorites super hero movies are not Marvel, I would put The Dark Knight at number 1) and Watchmen at number 2).
How about that thing in the Dark Knight Batman film, where he hacks into all the cell phones and then uses reverb / echo analysis to somehow create a 3D volume rendering of the space.
They can't do that yet, right? Right?
I am not sure if I would call Jack Nicholson's Joker a goofy prankster. Well he was, but... he was just a different flavor "all out sociopath" than Ledger's Joker. I say this as a huge fan of both Batman (1989) and The Dark Knight (2008).
I am assuming you must have been talking about the Adam West TV series Joker.
I do observe the same trend as you however in general. I think the rise of of video games has a big role. People can play action movies now. If they are going to be reduced to spectators, the movies need to one up the games on other metrics like storyline and acting (rare), or effects and violence (more common).
I feel for this guy - people can't understand that what he wants is "Life his way" and not to be a martyr to society burning his happiness to solve up equations. The greater good and so forth.
But there is a fundamental angle that I find odd about people's perception of intelligence. People expect intelligence to be always found alongside ambition.
When I watched "Limitless", it did hit me in an odd way. If I suddenly could out-think 99% of humanity, I wouldn't be running for president or becoming a stock trader profiting off the market. Actually, I don't know because I'm not that intelligent - but is that kind of ambition pasted over by Hollywood on top of intelligence?
In comparison, everything from Thor, Dark Knight, Iron Man and even the new Wall Street movie was about clean power - hell, even Inception has got the guy with the windmills. That I felt like was an ambition that could occur with genius (i.e "First thing you do, is find the biggest problem on your planet and beat it").
But government official or company executive?
That feels odd.
I felt its magnificence was its ability to evoke emotion. In the case of the supposed convolutions, it was the ability to evoke confusion. The confusion helped promote and maintain the tension, so that the catharsis was stronger, because the key fact in the whole thing is "Cobb is lost". I, for one, was crying by the end of the movie.
The masterpiece of The Dark Knight was the same thing, except that the emotion was horror: each of the Joker's little atrocities kept building up and building up until the last one was so large that he didn't even need to be on screen anymore.
That's Nolan's trade mark. He uses callbacks and repetition to mount emotion.
I saw The Dark Knight and I would not have lost anything if I didn't. What's so good about it? Yes it has one or two nice jokes; the whole Joker character is nice; but not enough to agonize thru a 3 hour movie.
(Inception was even more boring, they have one good joke and no Joker)
While Avatar, for example, is a movie that does deliver something you would not have if you didn't watch it.
> Recent films have started focusing more on the roller coster ride of the visuals, and will do any distortion of the story necessary to motivate a visceral impact on the audience. Good storytelling takes a second seat to putting the audience into the most intense situations possible.
I thought that all of the movies listed (Star Trek Into Darkness, Battleship, The Dark Knight, The Avengers, Skyfall, Star Trek Into Darkness, Olympus Has Fallen, Oblivion, 21 Jump Street, Fast & Furious 6) had awful plots, but for some of those movies the visual spectacle made them tolerable.
None of the movies listed (well, I haven't seen 21 Jump Street) obeyed the rules of physics, which is a huge turn-off for me because it breaks the suspense. The best suspenseful movies they tease you into thinking that you can predict what is going to happen next, as if they were a puzzle.
I'm not saying that I don't enjoy every movie that can't be taken literally; I just don't like movies that are logically inconsistent. Star Wars doesn't follow the rules of physics, but at least it does so consistently; you understand the capabilities of the technologies that they use and can reason about how the characters might use them. I find movies that violate the rules of physics inconsistently to be intolerable; if you don't know what behavior characters are capable of, you lose your sense of immersion because you can't relate to the characters, and can't predict what they are going to do at all.
That's just my opinion, though, and obviously enough people don't agree with me because those movies (listed in article) made lots of money.
You stated explicitly that you thought it was a quality film due to its wide popularity.
(As an aside the article itself never criticizes Dark Knight for being poor only for being formulaic).
Determined by "many".
Granted, that's vague, but certainly among people I know, The Dark Knight is considered the high water mark of modern action films.
And while this still is just more anecdotal data and not scientific proof, the movie sits at #6 on imdb's list of top 250 movies of all time:
http://www.imdb.com/chart/top?ref_=nb_mv_3_chttp
Which suggests strongly that this view is shared more widely in the general movie-watching population.
The comment above just said that TDK was "regarded by many as the greatest "action" movie of all time.", rather than making an absolute judgement.
I think that's a reasonably defensible statement - http://www.metacritic.com/movie/the-dark-knight.
Yeah - if I only manage to make movies as good as "The Dark Knight" (one of my more favourite films), I'm reasonably OK with that.
Well, among the supposedly "Hollywood killing" samey movies mentioned in the article is "The Dark Knight", regarded by many as the greatest "action" movie of all time.
Which goes to show that there's still plenty of creativity to be had while following classic structure, and proving once again that broad ideas are meaningless and execution is everything.
>Except, you know, all the movies where the antagonist is actually given a backstory or character development.
The problem is that it's still oversimplifying. In movies like that the government agents become the wooden bad guys who can do no right, and then the general rule is that by the end of the movie they'll either be killed or arrested and everything will be right with the world once again.
In reality the world is not so black and white. Government agents invading privacy or otherwise breaking the law can have led long and distinguished careers and have caught legitimate bad guys. They may or not be corrupt or have illegitimate motives -- no doubt there are government officials who sincerely believe that dragnet surveillance is a good thing. You can have normal people who do bad things for good reasons, and it's still wrong and has to be stopped.
The Dark Knight kind of exemplifies the problem. Even when they're trying to give a justifiable treatment to the surveillance issue, at the end of the day the hero builds and uses the unreasonably invasive tools to save the day and is never brought to account for it by anyone. Because it allows them to be mealy mouthed pandering marketing trolls: The gung ho surveillance advocates get to see their arguments justified in fiction because the surveillance is necessary for the good guys to win while the anti-surveillance crowd gets to see the machine destroyed at the end. So Hollywood gets to avoid alienating any of the viewers by taking any kind of a real stand rather than making the hero face the hard choice and then do the right thing and catch the bad guys the right way instead of breaking the rules for expediency.
I actually enjoy both quite a bit, and am likely too see both types in theaters. My point was simply given enough money to pay for the highest quality experience of one movie, I'll pay for the big budget action film over the small scale but still high quality movie. I feel I can enjoy the smaller movies just as much on a TV at home. Seeing The Dark Knight in IMAX is a hugely different experience than at home.
It may also be your movie tastes differ from his too. Right now I am noticing basically two groups of people (not correlated to age): one group which enjoys the effects, 3D, epicness... and the other which is disillusioned with today's movies (ie yay another movie where I watch CGI dudes shoot around and then get a 3D fly-over the battle-field every 5 seconds).
I think there is something to be said for the funneling of movie budgets into a few MASSIVELY costing movies (ie per the Spielberg interview that was posted on HN last week). I, myself, enjoy a good "Dark Knight", but also something like the King's Speech or The Tree of Life. The question is whether both can keep being made for their respective budgets, and both in film vs other media.
There's a famous line from the 2008 Batman film "The Dark Knight" in which Bruce Wayne's butler Alfred Pennyworth is trying to explain to Bruce and help him understand the Joker, his new sadistic and unpredictable archenemy:
"Some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn." [1]
Maybe this makes me a bad person on par with the Joker, but I don't want Mark Pincus to be bought out, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. I just want to watch him burn.
(metaphorically speaking, of course)
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efHCdKb5UWc
See my response to the other guy. I don't think you can "explicitly" solve the community problem, due to the issue of poseurs. E.g., if you explicitly create a site called FilmEnthusiasts.com, you'll get some film enthusiasts (i.e., exactly what you're after), but you'll also get a bunch of knuckleheads who think the Dark Knight was the 6th best movie ever made. http://www.imdb.com/chart/top
You have to solve the problem implicitly, which means setting up barriers/hurdles/shibboleths to entry, which is anti-thetical to the web, which is why it's so goddamn hard to do on the web.
Batman - The Dark Knight: Clever bad guy, goods characters, believable, fantastic, long movie.
(It is not original, it just take what Holliwood do for long know, and it do it very well.)
"Briefly, the categorical imperative states: “Act only according to the maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.” Whoa! That certainly describes the extreme nature of tons of the protagonists/antagonists of these various films. From Bane and Batman in The Dark Knight Rises to everyone in Inception, the idea of finding a universal truth and then applying it (sometimes forcefully) onto everyone seems to be exactly what’s at the core of all these movies."
Philosophy grad here. Absolutely none of these characters are exemplary of Kantian moral philosophy. That goes for about 99% of blockbuster heroes.
The key thing to understand is that 'universal' is a technical term in Kantian philosophy. Kant doesn't use this term to designate a relationship like that between a genus and its species, a class and its instances, or a set and its members. 'Universal' in Kant is synonymous with 'necessary', as in, "all stones necessarily fall back down to the ground if I throw them in the air." So what the categorical imperative really says is, "Live your life as if it were a force of necessity", or a more humanist formulation, "Live your life as if you were fulfilling your duty." If that sounds weird, realize that Kant doesn't think altruism qualifies as a foundation for morality because it's still based on pleasure, which for him brings us right back to egoism.
In terms of blockbusters, Watchmen's Rorschach or The Dark Knight's Joker are better approximations.
I have not watched the Hobbit in HFR but i felt something very similiar when watching The Dark Knight on a new 3D LED 200hz whatever TV at my friends house. It almost felt like a documentary, so clear that you could feel the filming set instead of being transported into the movies world. It felt very strange and after reading this its exactly how it felt.
Can say i like it or not yet, but it concerns me that because of this production budgets will have to rise because you can literally see every detail. It will make every process of film making more costly, the same that has happened to video games in the last 10 years.
You've probably heard this counterargument, so I'm just putting it out there for the sake of completeness:
If Jackson hadn't done those things, there was no way he could have culled the story down to 3 3-hour segments.
That said, I do agree. I was disappointed that Bombadil and his immunity to the Ring didn't show, for instance. But while the Scouring of the Shire was immensely critical to the books, it was also profoundly anticlimactic: it would have broken the simpler narrative of the movies to pull in those more complex themes to have a second climax.
As it was, Jackson only barely managed to hang the two main plotlines together. They didn't need a connection in the books, but it's much more challenging in a movie format. It might have been worth it to split The Two Towers into two films in order to give each its room. (Frodo and Sam from the Breaking to the escape from Cirith Ungol in Film 2; Aragorn and Gandalf's contests with Theoden, Saruman, and Denethor as a very long Film 3; and twisting the two back together in 4 with room for the Scouring.) Nolan managed it in The Dark Knight, where after the Joker was beaten, there was one final emotional explosion. So it can be done. I don't know if Jackson could have done it.
Agree with all of it. Especially Dark Knight Rises.
It was so bad that it reflected badly on the previous two films. I realized at the end of Rises how poor the character development was throughout Dark Knight, and getting (re)confused about the authenticity of Bruce Wayne's motivations in Batman Begins.
What's interesting to me (for background, before I ended up programming I trained in traditional film/animation) is that a lot of the 24/48fps discussion on HN tends to be around technical concerns, whereas a lot of film developments come out of artistic needs.
HFR is really interesting when contextualized in the history of cinema: frame rate was never a problem until directors started changing how they shot action scenes in the 1980s. It was realised that if you made the action fast and blurry you could get away with a lot more: what from a wide shot would look like a slow moving car chase could become a very dramatic action scene.
I think this is being reflected in a lot of the reviews coming out for The Hobbit (I haven't seen it yet): it seems a lot of people don't mind it during action sequences, but it becomes distracting during dialog and less frenetic moments. And this makes sense: why should dialog scenes be in 48fps? There's no technical or artistic reason for them to be.
I'd be really interested in watching a cut of The Hobbit which moves between 24 and 48 fps for dialog/action: people are happy to accept aspect ratio shifts (like moving from full-frame IMAX to CinemaScope in the Dark Knight, etc, and more artistically moving to Academy for a particular scene in Life of Pi), perhaps they'd be willing to accept frame rate shifts too?
Or Prestige, which is on my "top 5 greatest films of all time" list. Along with The Dark Knight.
(The others you mentioned I like, but not top-5 like).
I actually like Hans Zimmer a lot more than John Williams - the latter has a very distinctive style that can seem very in-your-face, more like an "Oh hey, this was done by John Williams" than something that best fits the film. Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Indiana Jones are all recognizable as Williams soundtracks, even though they're very different films.
Zimmer seems to vary his music a lot more to fit the needs of the film - it's just universally good, it's not universally Zimmer. The Lion King is very different from Crimson Tide, which is very different from Gladiator, which is very different from The Dark Knight and Inception.
BTW, I think Basil Poledouris (The Hunt for Red October, Wind) was another underrated film composer whose music is much better than his reputation.
This echoes my usage patterns as well, and I'm 37; the only difference is I had a reasonable CD collection (~250 discs) before I met Napster and AudioGalaxy back in the late 90s.
I only ever rented VHS/DVDs and I buy blu-ray used and only if I want to own a re-watchable experience (Dark Knight, The 300, Pulp Fiction, etc.) First-run blu-ray movies are RedBoxed or downloaded in 720p x264 from usenet (RIP NZBmatrix) and deleted after viewing.
Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and Pandora/Spotify round out content. I watch more stuff now that I don't have cable (around 2hrs/day) than when I did (30min. or less/day).
This really doesn't seem to solve the main problem that most current ranking systems have - it doesn't compensate for recency. Newer critically-acclaimed movies like The Dark Knight rank higher than much older but just as well-liked movies like Citizen Kane.
I couldn't disagree more, and forgive me for saying, but I believe this to be an incredibly shallow summation of what is an amazingly deep and moving piece of art and perspective from a historic time in our (US) nation (the Cold War).
I believe the ultimate theme of Watchmen is this:
"In an irrational world, only the irrational becomes rational."
This theme is pervasive throughout the novel:
_ Regular people donning masks to fight crime at little personal gain and great personal expense.
_ Horrific and violent crimes disregarded as minor indiscretions of a time past.
_ An all-powerful god, resigned to do nothing due to the ineffectiveness of doing anything.
This theme climaxes when Ozymandius, the universally recognized "most intelligent man in the world," (translated, "most rational") illustrates exactly this point when in order to save a world on the brink of irrational self-destruction, theatrically stages an alien invasion, something which simultaneously changes nothing, yet everything, in order to save it.
Even the all powerful god recognizes this seemingly illogical and horrific solution as the ultimate most perfectly rational means to save an irrational world from itself.
In the end, the story's hero, Rorschach, the consistent (and author appointed) voice of reason amidst a delusional world, is rendered ineffective and unable to make a difference, an impediment on the path to salvation to be destroyed by its god, Dr Manhattan.
Let that last point sink in for a moment, and you'll understand the implications of this theme; it's the final scene of an epic novel:
__the world's last rational man is an obstruction to the survival of an irrational world.__
The theme itself is startling in its simplicity, and the impact of watching its very real once impactful characters, heroes and anti-heroes, struggling to come to grips with their irrelevance in an irrational world can be moving and profound in its implications.
Watchmen is a postmodern thesis. Whether you share in the postmodern sentiment, understanding the context is incredibly rewarding, emotional and thought provoking.
Tragically, the movie's creators did not understand this and lost the the whole point and very soul of the novel, transforming the antihero, Ozymandius, into a lunatic and villain. Understandably, this is likely the source of your misunderstanding. Ironically, the replacement of the antihero with a villain could itself be construed as an unintended commentary on the persistence of our world's delusions.
The theme itself is metaphorically mirrored internally within the "Tales of the Black Freighter" story. The Black Freighter is a tale of a hero's lamentable decent into darkness as he loses his grip on reality to become the villain he was running from by ultimately in ignorance murdering his last tie to his world (the light), his wife. It's a commentary on the world of Watchmen itself (the world in which the heroes exist, not the heroes themselves), and the manner in which they metaphorically murdered their once heroes and only hope of salvation to descend into irrational darkness. Make no mistake too, the salvation brought about by Ozymandius is no salvation, but instead the coup de grace of a once rational world's beyond salvation ultimate embracement of the darkness, the conclusion of the novel.
The greatest tragedy of all though, is the spiritual death of its heroes. Alan Moore sums it up well with his inversion of the famous satirical quote, modernly taken as a criticism against political corruption, "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" ("Who watches the watchmen?"):
"'They're watching out for us, who's watching out for them?'"[1]
In an irrational world, only the irrational is rational, and the core of who we are becomes backwards and called into question. Do we define ourselves by the changing world around us and betray who we once were, forcing us to withdrawal into ourselves, Nite Owl, or do we "Rage, rage against the dying of the light" to our ultimate destruction, Rorschach?
Or do we embrace the darkness, as Ozymandius did, or as so poignantly put by Harvey Dent / Two-Face in The Dark Knight:
"You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain."
____ Update
This post led me to read a little more on Moore's own interpretation of his work, and while Alan intention is for us to question the need for heroes, and a call to personal responsibility, specifically anti-Reagan, I don't find this to be inconsistent with my analysis. I would add this:
My romanticism of the heroes may at first blush seem inconsistent with Moore's intent. However, as you can see in my conclusion, I point out that the heroes themselves become corrupted by their own roles in a world that rejects them. Moore himself is equally inconsistent in his own analysis of his work, claiming it to be a criticism of the Reagans ("invulnerable" "heroes") of the worlds that lead us to the brink of madness, yet it's the world that rejects the heroes in its madness that drives itself to brink of extinction.
Moore said writing Watchmen allowed him "to purge himself of his nostalgia for superheroes." Something I feel is best illustrated in the inconsistencies between his own motivations and my analysis.
[1] http://www.tcj.com/a-portal-to-another-dimension-alan-moore-dave-gibbons-and-neil-gaiman/
Thousands overall maybe, but the number of mass market films is in the hundreds.
I, personally, have a familiar definition of "mass market film". I grew up in a small town with about nine total screens, usually one movie per screen and one screen per movie. Figure they turn over 4 screens per week for new releases. That's 208 movies per year. You'd need 3-4 more doublings to get it over 1000, so it's pretty clear that "hundreds" is the better order of magnitude.
I picked a year at random: 2008. The following movies were all released in 2008: The Dark Knight, Wall-E, Iron Man, Slumdog Millionaire, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, In Bruges, Kung Fu Panda, Gran Torino, Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, and Quantum of Solace. Your average moviegoer will easily remember more than "one or two" of those (though not necessarily the same ones).
So the proportion goes from two in a thousand to maybe five in 250, or from 1 in 500 to 1 in 50.
What do these entrepreneurs all have in common? They own, operate, or invest in server-side Internet services. Such innovative products do not need IP enforcement because their core IP assets are protected by the client/server barrier, or they depend on network effects to protect first-mover advantage.
Innovations which must be shipped in whole to the client--like new music, new movies, new games, packaged software, client device software, pharmaceuticals--are not so blessed.
For example: most video game companies ship their entire IP directly to the customer. What keeps from making a copy of Skyrim and selling it on my website for half the price of the original? The legal enforcement of IP protections.
I think it is really easy to fall into a bubble where "innovation" comes to mean "the latest hosted social web service". There's a lot more to innovation than that. Which was more innovative--The Dark Knight, or Triggit? I would say TDK, which was a major cultural event in the U.S. Or how about Gardasil vs. I Can Haz Cheezeburger? One will prevent thousands of cases of uterine cancer, the other hosts user-generated cat pictures.
You make a good point. What I was trying to get at is that HuffingtonPost has a DNA that's different than many of the previous "new media" models that didn't perform nearly as well.
It's not that book publishing's success stories will exactly resemble HuffPo. In fact they will likely look very different. Rather, I expect the internal process to be very similar, in that the winners will use data to win arguments, will move fast and break things, etc.
And maybe the book culture could use a bit more medium/low-brow culture to better expand beyond its core audience. An analogy would be how a blockbuster movie like "The Dark Knight" manages to both be very entertaining but also appeal to a huge audience.
Nolan's made some of the most inventive movies of the past decade. Memento, The Dark Knight, and Inception were pinnacles of the form.
I'm not saying he'd be ideal to direct Snow Crash, but your criticisms of his work are unfounded.
I actually think Christopher Nolan or whoever else was involved in writing the recen batman movies are also familiar with Girard:
http://www.jonathanlipps.com/blog/2008/07/the-dark-knight-and-rene-girard/
> Because he's the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now. So we'll hunt him because he can take it. Because he's not our hero. He's a silent guardian, a watchful protector. A dark knight.
Why am I quoting a 2008 movie?
Would realy love to see a documentary of this Batman. Seems like he would move more people then the Dark Knight.
my opinion on re-learning - there were multiple subjects that I took in college which went over same content that I had learned in High School. I actually enjoyed re-learning them because the content was presented in a different way, so it made more sense to me that it had before. It is one thing to learn something once, but when I learn some concept over and over again, I tend to discover something new about it or related to it. Even small concepts can have greater meaning to it that I did not saw at first.
I have similar experience with movies - Dark Knight - I watched it 4 times and each time I find it more fascinating because I saw new details in the movie.
I was just talking with a friend about favorite Nolan movies. I can't decide between The Prestige, Inception, and maybe Dark Knight. Sounds like as good an excuse for a movie marathon as I've heard.
Sounds like the Volunteer's Dilemma is the scenario that played out in the movie The Dark Knight, actually.
Directors get huge payouts for the same reason athletes or other performers get huge payouts: simply because they generate a TON of money AND because the pool of potential candidates is so small that there is no one to undercut the rate. That $xx million ($200 mil was the budget for the whole film fyi) that the director got paid is a fraction of the total revenue generated by a major blockbuster like The Dark Knight, just as the 10-30 million an athlete receives is a fraction of the revenue he generates for the owners. You simply can't get around the fact that many people will spend a lot of money on entertainment, and even if we don't think actors and directors deserve all of that money in terms of social contributions and the long-term redeeming value of their work, the numbers don't lie: they get big payouts simply because they generate lots of money.
The same principle applies in other jobs, the values are just much smaller.
>This is just sad, I get the impression from the comments and up votes that tech does not get Hollywood. Hollywood business only work because only Hollywood is willing to give Christopher Nolan 200+ million dollars to make Dark Knight, ditto with James Cameron's Avatar.
Your comment is somewhat ridiculous because these examples are not risks. Christopher Nolan was well known before Batman Begins in writing Memento. James Cameron wrote the script for the original Terminator and directed Aliens, T2 and the highest grossing film of all time in Titanic. Anyone would've bet on these two individuals.
We did very fine, thank you, before Nolan's "Dark Knight" or Cameron's "Avatar" hit the screens, and I'm saying this as a movie freak. In fact, I'd say that the only difference between Melies' movies (which he did as an independent producer back in the day) and "Avatar" is only a technological one, not an artistic one.
Hollywood losses are partly due to Hollywood accounting. The budgets for production are real cost. In these high budget movies, there are major expenses apart from just salary. In the Dark knight, the batmobile and other machines are real vehicles, the sets are made with real materials, live effects are not cheap, permits are not free, not everything is done on a computer. This only scratch the surface of the expense involved in making a big budget film.
This is just sad, I get the impression from the comments and up votes that tech does not get Hollywood. Hollywood business only work because only Hollywood is willing to give Christopher Nolan 200+ million dollars to make Dark Knight, ditto with James Cameron's Avatar. When Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook or Yahoo decides to give a Christopher Nolan or James Cameron $200million+ to make a movie, things will be different. Then these multinationals can distribute to everyone who wants to buy the movie without DRM, without regional restriction and at a competitive price. Until then everything is just posturing, indie budgets will not change Hollywood. Tech world has competition, but only Hollywood is making these big budget productions.
edit: not sure why this is getting down voted, it would be interesting to see a counterpoint.
Why does H'Wood have to be killed? All they have to do is change their business models a bit.
I've been wondering if an apps-like model would work for TV shows and movies. EG, if you like The Daily Show, you have a Daily Show app, instead of having to subscribe to a whole slew of channels you'll never watch. Or for sports: Like Formula 1? Get the F1 app. Need some news? Daily News app, done. After you've got all your apps, you can mix & match, set whether you want to be interrupted (watching the daily show and some F1 qualifying is starting, switch to that app y/n?), heck, even set the number of ads and length of ads (longer ads means less ads, and vice-versa).
Similar for movies. There, you could split up the apps either by genre, franchise, favorite star. Like Leo DiCaprio movies? D/L the Leo app. Like the Batman franchise? Get the app, and have everything from the 60s TV show (yes, I know, mixing TV and movies, here) to The Dark Knight.
"So what have they done lately?"
Not even counting foreign films, here are some darn good productions from the past five years:
Midnight in Paris, Hugo, Drive, Warrior, Black Swan, Inception, Inglourious Basterds, Up, Whatever Works, The Limits of Control, The Dark Knight, WALL-E, Gran Torino, The Wrestler, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Into the Wild, Ratatouille, The Departed, and The Prestige.
>I am also astounded that people on HN are calling this a legitimate business. What was its business? Was it being used to distribute Wikipedia archives? To host videos of people's kids singing? No - it was hosting pirated content. Not torrents, not links. AVI files of films. AND THEN CHARGING FOR ACCESS.
So by your definition, Dropbox is an illegitimate business because I stuck my (purchased) copy of The Dark Knight on there and they didn't remove it?
I used MegaUpload. A LOT. For legitimate content. It's very useful because I don't have to worry about hosting it on my own server and potentially going over my bandwidth cap (I send RAR files with large images for graphic design, totally legitimate need for MU).
WRT marginal quality, I don't think that word of mouth buzz from great quality can be ignored - one of the ways to build a massive (and massively profitable) franchise like the Dark Knight/The Matrix/Toy Story is by making a really, really good movie.
It's getting a lot harder to "con" people into making a movie a blockbuster via advertising.
WRT marginal quality, I don't think that word of mouth buzz from great quality can be ignored - one of the ways to build a massive (and massively profitable) franchise like the Dark Knight/The Matrix/Toy Story is by making a really, really good movie.
Sorry, the difficulty seems to be what "search result" means. If you search for "foo", and that term happens to be on page 3, then Google may produce page 1 as the search result. Just like at the moment, sometimes the term you search for only appears on the pages which link to the search result, not on the search result itself.
Sometimes the term does not appear at all, for example if I search for "batman begins sequel" the first result is: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0468569/ That page does not have the term "sequel" on it, but it is still the first search result. And if you view the cached version, the only word highlighted is "batman".
Very specifically, my post above addresses the comment that Google might display one url, then take you to another. That seems unlikely. Instead, you will only see the url of the page that is the search result, which may be page 1.
The Joker in Dark Knight executed some very careful and involved plans. For example, your quote is taken from his conversation with Dent, which was the final step of his plan to drive Dent crazy. Hell, remember the heist that the film starts with? Does it look unplanned?
As a consumer, I wouldn't pay to download such an app. This is just my opinion and it may or may not be reflective of your market [1].
It seems like selling the backend tech / service to the movie theaters is the way to, but can you create enough of a value proposition to charge them enough money (assuming a re-occuring basis) each month to stay in business?
Also, I'm not entirely familiar with how movie theaters operate, but it seems like a vast majority are controlled by a relatively low number of chains. If the individual theaters are run on a franchise model, it may be easier to penetrate. But if they're all corporate controlled, selling seems would be a much larger challenge.
[1] I've also never had too bad of an experience at the movies. Aside from some guy who was eating popcorn obnoxiously during "The Dark Knight", I can't think of anytime I've really been annoyed with someone at the theater.
Good catch. The Godfather (imdb: 2, 3); Shawshank Redemption (imdb: 1); The dark knight (imdb: 1) are not available on instant watch. The blog post says "All the IMDB 250 that are available on Netflix Instant.", not "IMDb Top 250 available on Netflix Instant" as the HN post (which I interpreted as all 250 movies).
Netflix Watch Instantly is full of mediocre B-rated movies. Even the foreign film selection isn't as good as I had expected it to be, considering how horrible it's A-rated movie selection is.
And about BluRays vs. DVDs. There is no comparison if you care about picture quality & movie experience, while trying to own the movie. Try watching the first 20 minutes of Dark Knight on BluRay on a decent quality screen at 120HZ, then watch it on DVD. You will buy a BluRay player.
Link to watch: http://www.facebook.com/darkknight
Fascinating move by both Warner Bros. and FB. I wonder if this is streaming from FB datacenters or Warner Bros? No wonder Apple hates FB, they just went up against Apple, Netflix, Amazon and Google/Youtube (EDIT: Also, Hulu) in the video rentals space, and social is one aspect that affects movie watching the most. Very smart.
EDIT: Ooh, they also launched an iOS app that allows you to buy the movie: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-dark-knight-app-edition/id401016418?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D4
Also, Imagine being able to use facebook credits earned in Farmville to rent movies...
I think Moki.TV just redefined 'polarizing'. If you look at the individual bar graphs for each movie (especially the ones on the top right of the main graph), the voting distribution is actually very even ('square' or 'sloped' looking). For the data to be truly polarised you would expect the graph to be U-shaped: lots of 5s and lots of 1s and little in between.
What this data shows is that lots of people are giving these films a chance (and paying money to do so) who aren't really that engaged with the genre, or niche. That's a big validation of the studios' design strategy for the films.
An illustrative example I can think of that isn't in the top 20 is District 9: a very familiar 'niche-y' core genre, a fairly predictable plotline, but with enough influences from other genres to keep a diverse audience interested. The Dark Knight would probably be another.
Maybe they watched The Joker do it in The Dark Knight movie?
<b>but the films that make the most money are rarely bad. The highest grossing films of the last three years have been Avatar, The Dark Knight, and Toy Story 3</b>
Which, even if praised by whoring critics, are all quite bad , formulaic, shit.
They aren't gonna be near (random selection of quality stuff): Citizen Kane, On the Waterfront, Arsenic and Old Lace, Apocalypse Now, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Vertigo et al in any cinephiles list...
A lot of bad sequels make orders of magnitude more money than critically acclaimed films, but the films that make the most money are rarely bad. The highest grossing films of the last three years have been Avatar, The Dark Knight, and Toy Story 3, which were all critical darlings to various degrees. People really want great movies but are willing to settle for mediocre ones that have some of the things they're looking for (e.g., exceptional visuals, or characters in which they're already invested).
"Film-makers use this whenever they want to portray someone with power."
My favorite recent example of this: The scene in the Dark Knight when Bruce Wayne is shown sunning himself on the deck of his yacht alongside soloists from the Moscow Ballet.
edited: It was the Moscow Ballet, not the Gotham Ballet.
Stealing is wrong in any form, but I have no sympathy for the losses major studios and record labels have suffered due to online piracy. Illegal downloading hasn't robbed the industry from profit, Avatar/Inception/The Dark Knight box office sales have disproven that. What has ended, is the business model of putting garbage inside a shiny mystery box that people have to pay for the opportunity to peek inside. Gone are the days of cd's that have one good song and fifteen filler tracks, movies that show their only worthwhile parts during the trailer leaving the story begging for a plot. Forget you Hollywood, I hope your industry suffers needlessly for years. The 'mystery box' business model only works when people can't preview the garbage inside
Will there be any good ways to “crossgrade” buyers from the retail edition of an app to the App Store edition without making them pay again in full? (My guess: No.)
You can gift someone an album on the iTunes Store. When you buy a DVD the DVD can "gift" you the iTunes version of the movie (The Dark Knight did this, though it just copied over from the disk). Why can't a software company gift someone an app on the Mac App Store when they buy the app elsewhere?
Or maybe one as a metaphor for the other. Still, it's not a great example.
I'm struggling to think of examples of movies where characters really are motivated by doing stuff just for the hell of it. The only example I've got so far is the Joker from The Dark Knight. His motivation throughout is exactly what Zuckerberg described -- doing things because he can and because it would be interesting to try. It's not exactly a positive portrayal, though.
Apparently:
> I think the 'pain' comes when there are issues with the c > library that lxml binds to.
Scores 80.99/100
I think that the algorithm needs more work....
Also:
> I count 8: > Avatar (2009) - Yep > Titanic (1997) - Yep > The Dark Knight (2008) - Yep > Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977) - Yep > Shrek 2 (2004) - Nope > E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) - Nope > Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) - Yep > Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006) - Yep > Spider-Man (2002) - Yep > Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) - Yep
Scored 74.45/100
I count 8:
Avatar (2009) - Yep Titanic (1997) - Yep The Dark Knight (2008) - Yep Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977) - Yep Shrek 2 (2004) - Nope E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) - Nope Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) - Yep Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006) - Yep Spider-Man (2002) - Yep Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) - Yep
The lesson taught in almost every movie is that your problems are only permanently solved by the death of your action antagonist. Even kids' movies have this lesson, e.g. A Bug's Life where the bad-guy grasshopper is eaten by a bird. There are few movies where the action antagonist does not die, and these invariably involve morally ambiguous lead characters (e.g. The Dark Knight).
It's shame that more conciliatory outcomes are not considered. And you wonder about youth violence, but if this is the message taught by every film what do you expect?
P.S. counter examples please!
Let's look at the top 10 (I will use US sales): Avatar (2009) - Yep, Titanic (1997)- Yep, The Dark Knight (2008) - Yep, Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977) - Yep, Shrek 2 (2004) - Nope, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) - Nope, Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) - Yep, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006) - Yep, Spider-Man (2002) - Yep, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) - Yep
So 9 for 10
I agree with PaulJoslin's criticism.
It was a good film, but I didn't think it was great, by the end I had a certain hollow feeling, same as I had after Dark Knight or Memento (not after Prestige).
Like in DK, I felt that the plot was overcomplicated, there were too many dream layers, too much was going on. I also missed somewhat longer, continuous action sequences. In Inception, every action sequence was over in 30 seconds, with everything happening in a dream (death just means you wake up), so it removed what little tension these sequences carried. (But then sometimes the in-game rules were broken, eg. the Jap. guy get shot but he doesn't wake up, so from then on shots are lethal? Well I guess not, because at the end everybody is fine after all.)
Interestingly, the overall plot's tension, whether the act of Inception succeeds remained, but the action sequences just didn't work. The plot's overall tension worked for me exactly until they went into yet another dream/coma state called limbo, at which point I just lost interest.
As PaulJoslin said, a much more effective film could have been built on these core ideas.
Two reasons:
1) I am a knowledge-whore. I like to think that after doing something for a substantial time, I will come out of it having learned something. I would consider film culturally enriching, mostly because I watch fringe, independent or foreign films; For some reason, I have a very high opinion of filmmakers as artists. However, I can't say the same about video games or their artistic or cultural merit. I am unable to consider them substantial in that regard.
2) I like to share and talk about my experiences. I can talk about movies, I can recommend albums, I will even take the time to scribble directions and notes on someone's pristine travel book and tell them where to go. But I can't do the same with video games. There is no particular instance that I can think about and reference later; either because the games are dynamically generated, or because the gamer demographic are just not the people that I tend to socialize with, so I don't identify with them.
Bonus:
3) I like realism. Along with video games, I don't tolerate Anime, Fantasy Fiction, or any other type of "geek" entertainment. I was offered two DVDs by my neighbor; The Dark Knight and The Quiet American; I took the later. Hard to explain, really.
P.S. I am a hopeless Soduku addict and play 30 minutes when I wake up in the morning, and 30 minutes before I go to bed. In fact, that's what I use my phone for 90% of the time.
I think they worked better when Facebook offered them free to promote things. There were a lot of Dark Knight icons being passed around when the movie came out. I don't know any friend that's actually bought one.
It's possible, but I find it a bit unlikely. Porn differs from other media in that it's easily replaceable by inferior goods. If someone can get off on watching a 7.0 on PornTube or whatever, you can't get them to pay for an 8.0, you have to have a 10.0 before they'll pay money for it.
By contrast, there's a large difference between even a decent amateur movie and The Dark Knight. Part of this is production costs, but a lot of it is that there's not a diminishing return on "epic" or "action-packed", or at least there's less diminishing return relative to porn.
So while the cost of making a quality production in both fields is falling, it impacts porn much more than it ever will film because there's a differing sensitivity to quality.
I don't like to read about movies that are supposed to be good.
It raises my expectations, and then I enjoy the movie less when I see it.
I think there are some in the movie world who take note of this. I think the previews for The Dark Knight were made with this in mind. In the first trailers there is very little pre-view and much more building of anticipation without building expectation.
I went back and watched this and found it highly interesting.
The technology has advanced from mostly bittorrent instead of gnutella based networks.
The film industry is producing arguably better blockbusters (The Dark Knight vs Signs?) and are making more money than before with this year being one of the biggest years on record, even during a recession.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-boxoffice2-2009feb02,0,7465333.story
Mediadefender are now involved in a case where they DOS'd legitimate servers.
I wrote a little about it here.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=502705
But essentially I believe that there is a real disconnect between the cost of production and the amount of entertainment that a viewer can get, especially since things are approaching a free pricepoint (impact of filesharing) and TV and the Internet converging (like PG has written about recently) along with major upgrades in bandwidth.
I also think that as home entertainment systems become more widespread and advanced, people will prefer the convenience of watching from home instead of cinemas, especially if it is significantly cheaper and the experience can be a little more interactive (internet overlays)
Anyway, throwing down some numbers, doing some quick back of the envelope math, The Dark Knight cost $180 million to make and it has a runtime of 152 minutes. So an approximate cost of $1.1 mil/minute for the production.
Conversely, Season 1 of Lost (which is known in the TV industry as being notoriously expensive to produce) cost $44 million for 22 episodes of 44 minutes approx running time each, or 0.045 mil/minute.
Yet in terms of entertainment for the home viewer, 1 minute of entertainment is 1 minute and tastes vary - so why the big difference in price of production? The major costs are salaries of large numbers of people involved and technology (sets/effects etc) [1].
This is why we start seeing ludicrous distribution agreements in place to maximise profits so that the economics of this weird system can work [2], eg - regions on DVD's
A little anecdote about what I tried to do the other month. I live in Australia, and I jumped onto itunes because I was curious about what shows were available. A lot of the shows I enjoy were not on there, but even more surprising was that some shows that did exist were missing seasons. The worst case of this was a certain show only having seasons 1, 3 and 5 available on itunes - this is a result of stupid distribution agreements and simply being unable to put it up on itunes yet.
However, I could jump onto any torrent tracker and download everything for free, including the seasons that were not available through legal online systems. There is something wrong when the path of least resistance is unlawful.
So my idea is that you could produce content for the online market using a process fairly similar to a digital animation studio [3], just limiting yourself with digital assets and working it a bit like a sitcom. Limited pre-made sets, characters, story driven and episodic content.
Your production pipeline then essentially becomes a case of an asynchronous digital puppet show and if you keep most of your talent inhouse, you could work it using a team about the size of a small to medium sized startup.
Anyway that's the basics, I haven't detailed much about my monetisation strategies (there's more that can be done than just advertising) and there's a little bit of secret sauce I can't reveal, but that's the general gist.
[1] - Marketing costs don't usually get taken into account in the cost of production of a film, instead the company distributing the film takes a percentage. For example, in Pixar's early days, Disney was taking an approximate 50% cut. Internet distribution reduces these costs and so the total amount of income required is less to break even, so easier to attain profitability on any production.
[2] - When you see people saying that you can't make money with online video, I personally think it's because they're still wasting money unnecessarily on production costs. If you use online advertising as a benchmark for monetisation, the way it is now, you really need to reduce the cost of production to be able to make a profit and when/if online advertising recovers, you will only stand to make more money.
[3] - Another thought is to produce content like Uwe Boll is notorious for. I'm not sure what the situation is now since there has been a few enquiries about his practises, but in the past a film produced "in Germany" (basically by a German production company) was able to have 100% of the money invested into it written off due to German Tax law. So investors were investing say, $10 million into a film, which would only net a $3 million return, yet it essentially cost them nothing due to the tax loophole, so the return was all profit. Uwe Boll would pick up video game licenses (which are why all his films are based of video games) cheaply and produce "films" (I use the term loosely) at an alarming rate.
http://www.nplusonemag.com/ Hipster's New Yorker. Less prolific, but makes up with more pretension.
American politics: http://nplusonemag.com/dev/test/drupal-test/obama
Global politics: http://nplusonemag.com/dev/test/drupal-test/?q=defending-dictatorship-another-view-pakistan
Caustic film reviews: http://www.nplusonemag.com/dark-knight
I've found that video game music can make fantastic background music while working - there's hardly ever any distracting vocals and it feels like you're attacking something mythic.
Movie soundtracks have a similar effect on me: The Incredibles, Dark Knight, Primer.
This is normally good enough for me: (most ppl?)
http://www.google.ca/movies/reviews?cid=b1bbc12bd62930eb&hl=en&fq=the+dark+knight&sa=X&oi=showtimes&ct=reviews&cd=1
Anything specific you're really dying for?
At least The Dark Knight isn't the #1 movie anymore...
Ka-ching. The opening-day box office receipts for the Batman film “The Dark Knight” had just set a record. And for myriad reasons — including the late Heath Ledger’s delicious turn as the Joker — the blockbuster is still filling theaters on a pace that may land it just behind “Titanic” on the list of all-time, top-grossing films.
Psh. If it were legal to shoot file-sharers on sight, it would be the highest grossing movie ever! Won't someone please think of the movie executives?
This problem has already been solved in various forms.
Social features may not be worth it if you want the best content. The guy who made delicious purposely didn't include "community" features like ratings or comments. http://simon.incutio.com/notes/2006/summit/schachter.txt
Or from the recent dark knight/godfather episode on IMDB..
"...in these types of situations their cognition or cooperation failed because the members of the crowd were too conscious of the opinions of others and began to emulate each other and conform rather than think differently." - http://news.cnet.com/8301-13515_3-10000650-26.html
Even Dawkins weighed in on this back in 1997 - http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/Dawkins/Work/Articles/1997-11-16trialbyjury.shtml
I think what we need is an adsense for content.
Blockbusters popular with the avid Internet users have always started at incredibly high ratings only to slowly fally to the right place. The LOTR movies were in top-10 once too.
I suppose IMDB might try to account for the initial voting wave being raving fans and dampen the initial votes, but why would they? Personally I've reloaded the "Dark Knight" IMDB page half a dozen times to see if it was still at #1.
The most popular topic on the IMDB message boards is "This does not deserve to be in top 250" or "Why is this not in Top 250 why some-other-movie is not?". People like to keep an eye on rankings and to comment on them.
The main practical use for the ratings IMHO is to get a list of movies within each genre sorted by the rating, to see if you missed something people thought was great.
The problem is not the Dark Knight fans, so much as the algorithms being used to rank the movies. How can you take advantage of crowd wisdom if you don’t control for spoofing, spam and mob voting? It’s surprising that there wasn’t already in place a process for dealing with such a common phenomenon.
It is fine for "FanBoys" to push Dark Knight into number one. But downvoting Godfather to put your movie into the #1 spot is plainly wrong.
I think that the problem is similar to the eternal September problem. I'm sure that the people who had been voting and contributing to the ratings on IMDB had been involved on the site for a while. Now, there's a big influx of people on IMDB that are voting for their favorite movie. I bet that many of the people who are voting Dark Knight up have never seen the Godfather or Shawshank.
Same thing happened to my wife in film school. She went to film school because she loved the classics of the 30's - 50's. She was stunned to find out that the kids she was going to school with thought that Austin Powers was the best film ever.
This mob mentality, brought on by a significant event (in this case, the release of The Dark Knight), causes a total breakdown in a system that is otherwise fairly accurate, useful, and trustworthy.
I wouldn't call this a "total breakdown in the system". I would call it a minor blip. I mean, ultimately the system recommends what movies to watch. If someone isn't going to watch the Godfather now that it's ranked #3 instead of #1, then the person is flawed, not the system.
Otherwise, this was an interesting post. I have been astonished that TDK is #1. Didn't realize people were also downvoting other movies to keep it there.
The Iron Man film is astounding; better than expected. It is bursting with comedy. The visual style of the film is similar to The Dark Knight. The gadgetry is amazing. For example, you'll love Tony Stark's multi-monitor desktop. And I've never seen Gwyneth Paltrow looking better. I'm expecting a sequel.