Hacker Cinema
The Fault in Our Stars
2014 · Film · 126 min
Directed by Josh Boone
Despite the tumor-shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a few years, Hazel has never been anything but terminal, her final chapter inscribed upon diagnosis. But when a patient named Augustus Waters suddenly appears at Cancer Kid Support Group, Hazel's story is about to be completely rewritten.
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3 comments on Hacker News
I think the '90s had a bit more variety than the '10s and (for now) '20s. E.g. we seem to have lost good legal procedurals, thrillers, weird fiction, and "small scale" sci-fi.
Fo example, what are the'10s equivalents of "A Few Good Men", "Seven", "Dark City" and "The 13th Floor"?
There is _some_ stuff, but less than before, replaced by a massive amount of super hero movies or long-running franchises.
As a support clue, I invite you to consider the winners of the MTV Movie Awards, which are more "popular" than other Awards:
92 Terminator 2: Judgment Day 93 A Few Good Men 94 Menace II Society 95 Pulp Fiction 96 Seven 97 Scream 98 Titanic 99 There's Something About Mary 00 The Matrix (bonus: not 90s)
compare with the 10s
10 The Twilight Saga: New Moon 11 The Twilight Saga: Eclipse 12 The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 13 Marvel's The Avengers 14 The Hunger Games: Catching Fire 15 The Fault In Our Stars 16 Star Wars: The Force Awakens 17 Beauty and the Beast 18 Black Panther 19 Avengers: Endgame
I have the feeling most "risky" movies, for lack of a better word, have moved to streaming services.
As a Chinese person who grew up with the works of Jin Yong and Tolkien, I bristle a little bit at this comment.
For one, I think the marketing term is really used to explain Jin Yong's scope and impact, rather than a flat comparison of genre. In this sense, Jin Yong is, to Chinese literature, as impactful Tolkein is to Western literature.
It is a tradition within Chinese literature to prefer setting your work within our history. Romance of the Three Kingdoms is perhaps the most well-known in this vein. So to be critical of "creativity" here, is, I think a little bit short-sighted. It's like saying a Ken Burns documentary lacks the creativity of The Avengers, because magic powers and superheroes don't exist in the prior. Or trying to compare a book about the personal relationships of a cancer patient (I'm thinking "The Fault In Our Stars" specifically here) to the Harry Potter series. They are just fundamentally different things where creativity is executed in different ways. Who is to say that it is not equally powerful or creative to create characters that are deeply relatable, like Jin Yong's? In my opinion, his characters tended to ask morally difficult questions more often than Tolkein's.
Jin Yong wrote stories that were rooted in Chinese tradition, but his impact among young Chinese minds is greater than what even I can describe in a Hacker News comment. He wrote books that were about strength of self, moral character, freedom, and defiance in a time when the Chinese government strictly punished all of these things. I confess that I know nothing about Tolkein's backstory or history, but I can plainly see his impact. I think it is reasonable to say that Jin Yong's impact is as important and wide spread as Tolkein's.
"That modeling a gunshot or a sword stroke is much easier than trying to capture the nuance of a conversation."
I think that's really kind of true, though. If you look at the kinds of movies we export successfully, spectacle sells overseas a lot better than movies about conversation. Is it because mass audiences are dumb? I don't think so. Are the Chinese less sophisticated than us? No. So why is "Transformers Age of Extinction" a cash rake outside of the U.S., with 78% of its box office take coming from foreign markets, while something like "The Fault In Our Stars" only gets 19% of its money from overseas?
Because spectacle is easy, and more importantly, spectacle needs very little translation. A giant truck robot riding an even gianter dinosaur robot and wielding a giant sword speaks for itself. Movies about human interaction require a lot more translation. You need subtitles for all the text, and a good translation is difficult -- for one, film is a visual medium, and having to read subtitles distracts your visual attention more than being able to hear the dialogue and understand it. And even if you understand the words, that's not the same as understanding the context -- subtle nuances of wordplay can be lost in translation, and translation doesn't help with allusions to things that audiences may not be familiar with.
So what does that have to do with video games? Well, video games have always been rather limited in what they can convey. Early videogames especially, and since the author mentions Doom in passing, let's focus on Doom's level of technical sophistication. So much of what makes for conversation wasn't possible with Doom's level of technology. Forget anything but text -- Doom's audio was limited to a bunch of nearly-MIDI files and a handful of WAV files for sound effects. We didn't have MP3s yet, bandwidth and storage were both in short supply, and text to speech was rather eerie and easily identifiable as synthetic. You couldn't have inflection or tone to your dialogue.
At the same time, facial expression, body language -- all of those things are very difficult to convey in graphics that were 320x200 pixels with 256 colors. (They're also difficult to convey on modern high-res polygons; there's a reason we have the term uncanny valley.)
When Doom came out, I have absolutely no doubt it was easier to meaningfully convey violence against creatures from hell on Mars than it was to convey social interaction between people in the medium of video games. And in a lot of ways, I think that's still true.