Hacker Cinema
The Mask
1994 · Film · 101 min
Directed by Chuck Russell
Timid bank clerk Stanley Ipkiss discovers a magical mask infused with the spirit of the Norse god Loki. Donning it transforms him into an unrestrained, green-faced, cartoon-like wild man. While the mask grants him the confidence to woo a local singer, it also makes him the target of a ruthless mobster.
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https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?title_type=feature&release_date=1994-01-01,1994-12-31
Pulp Fiction
Lion King
The Mask
Four Weddings and a Funeral
Dumb and Dumber
The Crow
Speed
True Lies
Interview with the Vampire
Natural Born Killers
Ace Ventura
Stargate
Clerks
The list goes on. Lot's of movies that turned out to be classics or cult classics, or the start of some great careers.
The Mask. It was one of the few movies my grandmother had on VHS, and my sister loved it enough to watch it multiple times, on repeat every time we'd visit.
I binge certain directors from time to time, but I've really got a thing for reading scripts, especially for films that never got made like the Pee-Wee Herman Story or Ghostbusters 3.
A good overview is in [1].
Curiously, before the classic paper on modeling shutter efficiency [2] came out in 2005, all renderers used in VFX production used box shutters. I.e. the shutter opens instantly, stays open for the specified duration and then closes instantly.
When you watch movies like "Jurassic Park" or "The Mask" and see scenes with extreme motion blur, that's PhotoRealistic RenderMan with a box shutter.
The first in-the-wild 1:1 implementation of the parameterization in [2] was done in [3] in the same year the paper came out (hasn't changed until today). It was first used on "Charlotte's Web" (only the spider character done by Rising Sun Pictures has it as they used [3] for it).
Pixar added it a few years later too and went a tad overboard with theirs in [4]. Most offline renderers nowadays have this feature and call it a "shutter curve".
[1] O. Navarro et al.: Motion Blur Rendering: State of the Art (https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/doc_view/pid/fc23fb525cafa8fe68ec84c1eadf85e30090a774)
[2] Stephenson, Ian: Improving Motion Blur: Shutter Efficiency and Temporal Sampling (https://staffprofiles.bournemouth.ac.uk/display/journal-article/5221)
[3] https://www.3delight.com/, see specifically https://nsi.readthedocs.io/en/latest/nodes.html
[4] https://renderman.pixar.com/resources/RenderMan_20/cameramodel.html#the-shutter-model
I love Sandler's movies exactly because you know exactly what you get. He's found a formula that works well enough, and has largely stuck to it. He's one of a handful of actors I can go "I'm in the mood for a X movie" about and not care much which movie it is. They're a genre in themselves.
Sure, I know I will groan at how dumb various things are, but that's part of the expectation.
Carey is similar but less so. His span is wider. That hits both ways, Carey at his best have more brilliant performances than Sandler, but it also means that you can be in the mood for Carey, but not Mask and Ace Ventura stupidly over-expressive Carey, for example, so it's harder to just semi-randomly pick one of his movies based on a mood.
It's almost completely gone in the US on Netflix also. I've had better luck watching older movies on Youtube 'Free with Ads' service, especially 80s and 90s movies, than I've had on Netflix. And there's no ads if you get Youtube's premium service (I currently don't, but don't mind the ads).
Currently on there is Wrongfully Accused (funny Leslie Nielsen movie), Glengarry Glen Ross, Robocop (1987), Ghost in the Shell, The Mask, License to Drive, The Neverending Story, Tombstone, Leon The Professonal, The Amityville Horror, Over the Top (some Stallone movie), Miracle on 34th Street, Con Air, Edward Scissorhands, Gone Fishin', Look Who's Talking, While You Were Sleeping, The Craft, Red Dawn, So I Married an Axe Murderer, Secret of Nimh, Killer Klowns from Outer Space, Revenge of the Pink Panther, Mad Max, Das Boot, Little Shop of Horrors, Hackers, .... okay, I'm just going to stop now, but t keeps going, I'm only a third of the way though the list.
It's one of the primary responsibilities of the movie to set up a universe that is compelling and believable. The fact that it's live action imposes some constraints, but they can be creatively worked around.
Just a few movies that do this well that come to mind:
* Scott Pilgrim vs the World.
* Kick Ass.
* Ella Enchanted.
* Amelie.
* Thor: Ragnarok.
* Space Jam
* The Mask
Google is very trend-orientated. It cherry picks the hottest trends, and displays them on the first few results. You can of course constrain your results to match a certain time-frame, then you will find your `The Mask` movie results. You could also use something like DuckDuckGo which isn't as trend-orientated and gives you a basic result, not a trying-really-hard / popular result like Google does.
I don't disagree with King's thesis that a prolific writer can, of course, produce great works and many have done so, but I also can't shake the feeling that there is something special about authors who produce great works and then quit when they don't have anything else to say.
bad works don't diminish great works, but it feels like authors who only produce works of great quality and nothing else have a special feel for their craft, it seems like they are so confident in what they have to say that they'd be repulsed by just putting anything out that isn't remarkable, and that at least to me makes them special.
It's like comparing Daniel Day-Lewis and Jim Carrey. The former has taken on roles in remarkably few films, but pretty much every role is amazing and that's what's stuck in my mind when I see him in a film.
Carrey also has participated in films like the Truman show but then I'm also reminded of the Grinch and the Mask, which just ruins it for me a little bit.