Hacker Cinema
The Mummy
1999 · Film · 124 min
Part of The Mummy Collection
Directed by Stephen Sommers
Dashing legionnaire Rick O'Connell stumbles upon the hidden ruins of Hamunaptra while in the midst of a battle to claim the area in 1920s Egypt. It has been over three thousand years since former High Priest Imhotep suffered a fate worse than death as a punishment for a forbidden love—along with a curse that guarantees eternal doom upon the world if he is ever awoken.
6 positive11 neutralfrom 17 commenters
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17 comments on Hacker News
But Star Wars was never about serious, adult themes, and great writing. It was about amazing space battles, laser swords, witty one-liners, adventure, and slapstick comedy, in a fun, kid-friendly package. Andor is a fine production. It isn't really Star Wars though.
My opinion: the closest movie, in spirit, to A New Hope is The Mummy (the 1999 one with Brendan Fraser).
In the small town where I live we have a small cinema with three screens. They always start the movie at the advertised time - no adverts, just a few trailers in the preceding 10 minutes. You can book online, but I usually just walk in and buy a ticket at the desk. The seats aren't assigned, so you can pick whichever you like.
Occasionally I have a "private screening" where I'm the only one in the auditorium. The most recent example was "The Mummy". I hadn't fully thought throught the implications of watching a horror movie alone in the middle of a darkened 65-seat auditorium!
There's another town a few miles away where a similar cinema has both assigned seating and 20 minutes of adverts before the movie.
The Mummy (1999) was the first theater movie for me, it was an epic experience!
My first thought was to the 1999 movie:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mummy_(1999_film)
I'm not so sure, I remember being unable to sleep after watching 'The Mummy' in my early teens because I found the idea of scarabs crawling under my skin particularly horrific, but haven't really noticed an effect since. I imagine horror movies may actually be better than more cheerful movies because they tend to involve dark scenes that probably don't mess with melatonin production as much.
I would like to see that study happen, I think the outcome might surprise (especially if they compare several different genres).
I honestly don't think Microsoft puts much that value in source code that's from around the time Brendan Fraser was doing Mummy movies.
A nice read.
Slightly off-topic, but Stargate is one of those movies, like the 90s Mummy, like Tremors, that's really much better than it needed to be, and remains greatly entertaining today. The care they put into the Egyptology really speaks to that.
For me a big part of it is due the slow pace. Today's slow movies are filmed in a way that make them feel more fast paced than action movies from the 80s/90s
Watch Jurassic park and Jurassic world back to back, or The mummy vs the remake with Tom Cruise, too many cameras, too many view points, too many cuts
> Film critics will quickly be forgotten because they created nothing
I think that's terribly dismissive. I mean, take Ebert's reviews of the Mummy series for example. There's something touching and wise in there that actually makes the films themselves better because they give us pause to reflect on these things.
Or in a completely different ballpark, the Red Letter Media "review" of Star Wars Ep. 1 that manages to be not only a valid critique of the film, but is longer than the film and arguably a better film in its own right!
(Edit: Another good example that just occurred to me is one that I heard in a recent episode of the Rest Is History podcast. They were discussing Tolkien and one of the hosts pointed out that even if he hadn't written any of his Middle Earth fiction, he'd still be well-known in literary circles for his critical examination of Beowulf that changed how we see it today.)
Like any other "content" there's a spectrum from prolefeed and seo spam on one end, and actual art and literature on the other. Pull that rabbit out of a hat enough times and there's definitely a niche to carve out a legend there.
As a fan of post-modern movies, I would love if this was the case. However I’m afraid that you are misremembering history a bit here. Postmodern movies heydays have long passed. I’m afraid the reached their peak in the 90s with e.g. the Danish dogma movies (pun intended), independent American movies like Clerks, etc. In fact Pulp fiction was a counter punch to the scene by taking elements of postmodern movies, telling a pulp story and dressing it in a Hollywood film. Ironically it is a long running joke among postmodernists to over-analyze Pulp Fiction with a postmodern reading.
Postmodern films got a tiny resurgence around 2007, but never with the same popularity as the pomo scene of the 90s.
So Lord of the Rings is made between those two modes. The movie industry is living in the wake of the unexpected Titanic success, and the studios are trying to create the next big hit. Movies like Gladiator, Pearl Harbor, Cast Away, Meet the Parents, The Mummy, Moulin Rouge! or Chicken Run etc. is what most people are seeing. The themes of the post modern movies is indeed far away.
I remember seeing that movie in what must have been early highschool. We got free tickets to one of those fancy theaters that have recliners and a button to have a waiter show up. We had tickets for free food too as my friend's dad did some work for the theater. I had never experienced such opulence before and although the movie wasn't on par with the first mummy movie, I remember really enjoying it and having a great time. I've never been a fan of movie critics in general and although I'm no movie buff, I've seen hundreds of movies and liked nearly all of them.
It was probably a joke about everything already screwed plus movies like Mummy.
"The Mummy" was "written and directed by Stephen Sommers"[1], not Brendan Fraser (who played one of the main characters).
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mummy_(1999_film)
Why did you exclude the highest grossing film that year from the list? It seems you just selected the movies you thought helped you point.
Movies among the top ten grossing which you left out of the list:
- Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace
- Tarzan
- Big Daddy
- The Mummy
- Runaway Bride
- The World Is Not Enough
- The Blair Witch Project
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_1999_box_office_number-one_films_in_the_United_States#cite_note-2
I do agree Hollywood is different today, but rehashing ideas is nothing new.
The Godfather was a book. Twelve Angry Men was a play. Ben Hur (1956) was remake of Ben Hur (1925). All the songs in Singing in the Rain was recycled from previous movies. The Lion King was the first Disney animated movie with an original story (and even then people say it was plagiarized from Kimba).
As for TV shows and made-for-streaming, do you exclude this from Hollywood? It is increasingly the same talent writing producing and acting, so it is more a question of format and distribution.
How could i forget the haboob! I was actually in Phoenix for this, it was wild. Like something straight out of the Mummy movies.
Netflix has already killed the old distribution model. For the price of about 8 full-price DVDs per year, you can watch any video in the Netflix catalog with the assurance of consistent quality and convenience. You can even watch multiple video streams at once, if you have a network pipe that's fat enough and a few extra screens.
I have a decently-sized collection of DVDs. But my indexing and search system sucks, in that it heavily relies on physical discs being replaced in exactly the right spot, which is often hard to reach. Now, a decent HTPC with networked storage would solve that problem handily. But I would still have to read the video files off all the discs and put them into a media catalog.
Netflix has already done all that work for the videos they are licensed to distribute. So if I know that a movie I want to watch is buried behind two rows of DVD cases, certainly no longer in the genre+alphabetical order that I try in vain to enforce, and possibly not even in its case, I'll definitely check to see if it's on Netflix before I get off the couch.
And if I know I don't own the DVD, and it's not on Netflix, I'm certainly not going to go check a dozen walled gardens that will probably still want me to pay $2.99 to view each TV episode one time, or $4.99 to see one movie one time, and maybe they also want me to log in using credentials from a cable or satellite provider.
It only takes a few instances of being annoyed and frustrated like that, and a few instances of finding exactly what you desire from friendly pirates, before skipping the former. I have already demonstrated my willingness to pay for content that I like. But that willingness has limits.
I bought the Ghostbusters DVD, because I knew that I'd want to see it again, at multiple times of my choosing in the future. And I also know how to use certain programs to take the video off the physical medium and transcode it to a file viewable on my kids' Android tablets. That's still not as convenient as Netflix, because I have to do that extra work, and there's still no central entertainment nexus, where I can search in just one place for the video I want to watch.
That's the thing that will kill the walled gardens. People don't want to have to flip through 57 channels and still not find anything they want to watch. They want to open up the program guide, maybe search, maybe look at recommendations and reviews, and then press play. If consuming your entertainment becomes too much like work, your audience shrinks. As long as Netflix has the infrastructure to make consuming entertainment convenient it doesn't need to carry exactly the content people want. All they need is a reasonable alternative.
For example, if people search for "Indiana Jones" on Netflix, they might see a "not found" result. Instead, Netflix could have said "not found, but..." and made suggestions.
Features like "Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark": "The Librarian and the Spear of Destiny", "Allan Quatermain and the Kingdom of Skulls", "The Da Vinci Code", "The Mummy", (>> more >>) ...
Features starring Harrison Ford: "Star Wars", "The Frisco Kid", "Witness", "Cowboys and Aliens", (>> more >>) ...
Features directed by Steven Spielberg: etc ...
Features set between 1917 and 1945: etc ...
Something like that would kick those distributors who refused to license content at a reasonable price right in the wallet, because Netflix would be forcing them into direct competition with all the other features that include the same old tropes and plots. Likewise, anyone who could seize the initiative from Netflix as the first place that people check for the features they want to watch could kill them, too.
All it would take is a better search engine, with support for alternative recommendations.
My 18-month-old daughter's name is Evelyn (though we often call her Evie for short). Her name comes from two totally different places. First, she is named after my grandmother who passed away shortly before she was born. I wonder if this is part of the reason the older names are popular again. Secondly, she is named after Evie from The Mummy, which is one my wife's favorite movies (the 1999 version). Also a reason certain names become popular. Her middle name, Grace, comes from the fact that it was only by the grace of God that we were able to have her. We were really blessed with me getting some amazing freelance work when we were trying to figure out how to finance our IVF. I'm guessing that's a pretty common reason for Grace though. Well, anyways, we've done our part to influence the standing of Evelyn in the names race.