Hacker Cinema
The Day the Earth Stood Still
2008 · Film · 104 min
Directed by Scott Derrickson
A representative of an alien race that went through drastic evolution to survive its own climate change, Klaatu comes to Earth to assess whether humanity can prevent the environmental damage they have inflicted on their own planet. When barred from speaking to the United Nations, he decides humankind shall be exterminated so the planet can survive.
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Day the Earth Stood Still and Forbidden Planet are ‘required’. Haha. Robinson Crusoe on Mars is great.
The Black Hole is a Disney movie.
How about some TV?
Classic: Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, need I mention, Star Trek?
Current: Lost in Space, …
(Yikes. If 2001 is slow and boring, Solaris (1972) is watching paint dry. Sheesh)
… age appropriate is difficult, ahaha. You could also try your local library, the might have DVDs of TV shows and staff usually have kids section, and classics separate.
I came up with a fun game that’s along the line of your snarky movie game. I call it Mixed Up Movies, where you have to create a movie title and description that combines two separate movies into one. You write the description and provide the real actors and the other folks have to guess the name of the movie.
For instance:
Hilarity ensues when a mild-mannered suburban family adopts a troubled San Francisco homicide detective.
Clint Eastwood, John Lithgow, and Margaret Langrick star in?
Dirty Harry and The Hendersons
Or:
A retired English butler reminiscences about his time in service to a Lord’s estate while also trying to convince his fellow townsfolk that recently arrived aliens come in peace.
Keanu Reeves and Anthony Hopkins star in?
The Remains of the Day the Earth Stood Still.
Or:
The boss of a Los Angeles crime syndicate enlists the help of a top British Spy to help recover a stolen briefcase by going undercover at an exclusive high-stakes poker game.
Ving Rames, Daniel Craig, and Samuel L Jackson star in?
Casino Royale With Cheese
The TV and movie industry continues to ruin the literary integrity of almost everything, despite budgets that allow great production values. Every story gets reduced to one of the conventional formulas. They couldn't even remake decent versions of the "The Andromeda Strain" or "The Day the Earth Stood Still". Did you ever see NBC's "The Martian Chronicles?", or the two versions of "Brave New World" (soon to be joined by a third version)? There are only so many Stanley Kubricks out there (currently out of stock) who are capable of doing these kinds of stories well.
It's the ethics. I wouldn't 'hang out' with anyone who would shoot an unarmed civilian in the back. It's not about the gun.
In case you haven't seen the movie, 'The Day the Earth Stood Still', I'm referring to the speech at the end. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASsNtti1XZs
"But it is only on the brink that people find the will to change. Only at the precipice do we evolve."
Quote from the movie/film "The day the earth stood still". (don't know if it's copied from the older film or some book etc...)
I did quite like that film (it was "ok", kind of advanced-mediocre) - at a certain point I was reaaaally hoping that somebody would state something like that, and a few minutes/seconds later they did => it made me incredibly happy :)
I'm reminded of a scene in an admittedly crappy movie, The Day the Earth Stood Still. No, not the awesome original, but the recent one with Keanu Reeves. Super quick plot synopsis, an alien is sent to Earth to wipe out humanity because we as a species are doomed to destroy the planet due to our insufferable nature. There's a point in the film where a scientist is arguing for keeping humanity alive, and emphasizing that humanity can change for the better, but only when at the very precipice of calamity.
That quite succinctly sums up my view of our species. The only thing that will cause us to change is to have the utter ruin of our civilization right before our feet. Unfortunately, in regards to climate change, it will likely be too late once people realize that things have to change. Mind you, the earth will be fine. Humans on the other hand...
He had done a direct to video movie before Emily Rose, a Hellraiser thing with a budget of about $2 million. For that he likely made around $100k salary and if he had any net, it was worth nothing.
But that project proved he could direct an acceptable film, which isn't as common a skill as you might imagine.
So once he'd done that, he had the chance to move up to the next budget range, $20ish million, plus or minus. For that, as I mentioned above, he probably got in the neighborhood of $500k. Maybe a little more, but certainly less than $1 million.
Then when that movie did extremely well, he went on to do The Day The Earth Stood Still, an $80 million dollar project. Whatever he got paid for that is highly variable, but it was likely a million or two.
As he mentions in the podcast, TDTESS did 80 million domestic, total of 240 global. Which made it a success in terms of money, but since the domestic was so low it wasn't perceived as such in the industry.
So he didn't move to the A list after that. He said he got offers for things like big franchise sequels, but his own dream projects weren't able to get the greenlight. If he'd taken the hired gun route on studio sequels, he said he'd probably make a couple million per.
So what he did instead was go and make his own film, cheap. He made the current movie Sinister for $3 million. Again he's back in the few hundred thousand range at most for salary. But this time, since it was his movie and he made it cheap, he's got real gross participation.
As he says in the podcast, after the movie hits a certain breakeven point (which it likely is very close to doing if it hasn't already), the money starts rolling in for him and he'll be "rich". From the podcast, it seems likely his deal on this project will let him get what would be called FU Money here.
It's not a terrible system, really. Directors aren't completely screwed, they do ok for themselves.
The real secret is to own the property yourself.