Per Michael Tolkien's writing the dialog to Robert Altman's movie The Player (1992):
(A movie studio executive who believes a screen writer has been harassing him with threatening postcards has just murdered the screenwriter the previous night. The executive arrives late at a mid-morning studio meeting as other executives argue about the lavishness of writers' fees)
Movie studio boss: Griffin, you're here! We were just discussing the significance of writing. Maybe you have something to add?
Executive: I was just thinking what an interesting concept it is to eliminate the writer from the artistic process. If we could just get rid of these actors and directors, maybe we've got something here.
(Assistant hands the executive another postcard)
—
Re AI chat:
High school students who are illiterate now use AI chat to orchestrate the concoction of course papers they can't understand, then instructors use AI chat to grade the work. The grads apply for jobs and get selected by AI chat, then interviewed by managers using AI chat. The lucky hires are woken up by their IOs and transported to an office at an unknown destination by autonomous cars. Their work is to follow scripts emitted by AI chat to apply AI chat to guide refinement of processes, further feeding LLMs. Once returned to the home cubicle after the shift, the specialist consumes the latest cartoons and sexts with an AI companion. The IO sounds the alarm and it's time to sleep.
If the MCP guys can just cut out the middle men, I think we've got something here!
—
The threat of the new machines is not AGI overlords who will exterminate an optional humanity. The threat is an old one that's been proven over millennia of history: the conversion of human beings into slaves.
"The Player" (1992), starring Tim Robbins and directed by Robert Altman, is a good watch if anyone wants a deeper dive into the lifestyles of studio execs who have the authority to greenlight (or trash) projects. Great film!
As for happy endings etc., this have always been a mainstay of Hollywood. In the Hollywood satire "The Player" from 1992 it is actually a plot point how a script without a happy ending cannot get produced. (And that movie itself have an improbable tacked-on happy-end to drive the point home.)
For fun I looked up the term "Hollywood Ending" ("a film ending of a conventional type, characterized as sentimental, simplistic, or melodramatic, and often featuring an improbably positive outcome; frequently in extended use."). The first example of this usage is from...1929.
So not exactly a recent development.
As for every movie being a "super-hero martial arts movie." - well this genre is certainly big at the moment, but by far isnt the only type of movie. If you look at the most recent Oscar awards, you will see movies like Roma, Vice, The Favourite, BlacKkKlansman, Bohemian Rhapsody, Green Book. These are mainstream Hollywood movies (almost by definition, this is what the Oscars awards) but there is still a span of genres and narrative styles. I don't see this as notably more homogenized than any other year.
And despite the hand-wringing over superheroes, I would like to point out that the "Marcel Cinematic Universe" is actually a pretty original concept in itself. Never before have such a complex shared universe and storyline unfolded over so many coordinated movies. I don't know if this is particularly worse than bygone Hollywood fads like westerns, sword-and-sandal epics, musicals etc.
But if you don't like superheroes there is still plenty of movies to choose from, since the overall number of movies released is steadily growing.
Hollywood have a grand tradition for satirizing themselves mercilessly - from Sunset Boulevard to Tropic Thunder. They don't shy away from presenting powerful Hollywood producers as drug users, as in True Romance, and in The Player you have cameos of Hollywood personalities playing themselves in a movie which present the business as deeply corrupt and opportunistic. I dont' think anybody is as openly cynical about Hollywood as Hollywood itself.
> conclusion is that there is something definitely wrong with the way some movies are rated. I'm not sure if there exists a fix for that, apart from us, the "normal" viewers, just starting to ignore reviews and movie-critics and then watching movies with no preconceptions.
That seems like a big takeaway from one false negative. And I agree on Booty Call, I've long put it as one of my funniest movies from the 90's. That's said I didn't watch it in the theater and if the wife and I had gone I'm not sure she would have called it a good 30-40 bucks.
There are probably 3 issues here, critic blind spots (because the median critic is probably over 40 and has some cultural lenses that are hard to shake), the lack of information you can convey with one bit of data (which is an overall goodness bit not a "funniness" bit for comedies), and perhaps the sample size (this movie has only 12 reviews on RT and half are from no-names, more reviews might not change this score though it matters for some others).
FWIW Roger Ebert loved Booty Call and gave it 3 stars so, going beyond the one bit of fresh/rotten, it can lead you to critics that like movies you do and you can follow those personally.
And RT does pretty good at giving you good movies in general - their best comedies of the 90's rightly include Toy Story 1 & 2, Groundhog Day and The Player all of which are purchase worthy.
I know this just sounds like me being jaded and cynical but being completely open and honest: I feel like filmmaking lost me some time in the last 10 years or so. Might be because of age, I don't know, but I used to be a huge film buff, huge. If you had me filling out a bio about myself and asked me to list interests then "Movies" would be right up there at the top of the list. I loved going to movies, I loved watching them at home, I loved talking about them, I loved knowing little facts and details about them. I used to be able to tell you the name of any major production company from the first half-second of their intro. I used to watch individual scenes over and over again until I memorized them.
Filmmaking was always a delicate balance between creators and business, and I feel like the 2000s are when business finally took over. I'm reminded of the famous morning meeting scene in Robert Altman's "The Player" where a new hotshot producer explains why he thinks creativity should be removed entirely from the filmmaking process, and proceeds to describe an alternative that is horrifyingly close to what we have today.
I have absolutely no illusions about Hollywood prior to my disillusionment. It's always been a cesspit, but it was a beautiful cesspit that seemed to create wonder in spite of itself. Now it's basically just Disney-in-screen-form, everything - and I mean everything - is carefully driven by the beancounters. The last little vestiges of creativity and brilliance were finally squeezed out by the arrival of global markets. Bland, boring sells.
And I read threads like this where people argue about how lazy filmmaking isn't really lazy filmmaking because X Y or Z and all I think is you're moving deck chairs on the titanic. This isn't about soundtracks or sound effects, it's about movies-as-business rather than movies-as-entertainment.
I get it makes the companies major bank, and I get that there's no going back. I'm not ranting saying we should regress. But speaking personally movies went from a big part of my life to something I find extremely off-putting, boring and frankly a little stupid.
Even if you didn't care about learning business through film, I would recommend these. Most are classics and highly enjoyable. I left out the great ones already mentioned.
Risky Business - going from idea to execution in a very short time
High Fidelity - small business, vertical expansion, labor relations
There Will Be Blood - "I have a competition in me."
Office Space - process reengineering, efficiency, employee motivation
It's A Wonderful Life - customer service, community building, ethics
The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit - work life balance
The Player - handling office and industry politics
Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room - ethics (and the catastrophe that befalls those without them)
* If you've already read Cryptonomicon (see more here: http://jseliger.com/2006/11/29/cryptonomicon ), you're going in the right direction, but you should skip the Baroque cycle and Anathem.
* Joel Spolsky's The Best Software Writing isn't fiction but is worth reading.
* I'll reiterate Tom Wolf's The Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full.
* Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy is nominally aimed at adolescents, but people of any age can enjoy it.
* Michael Tolkin's The Player is partially about the business of film, as is its sequel, The Return of the Player.
If you're curious about more, send me an e-mail; I write a book blog at http://jseliger.com , and a lot of the reviews/commentaries would probably be of interest to hackerish types.
Hacker Cinema
10 comments on Hacker News
Watch The Player (1992) which is a direct forebear of The Studio.
More great stuff packed into that one movie than in the entire series.
Per Michael Tolkien's writing the dialog to Robert Altman's movie The Player (1992):
(A movie studio executive who believes a screen writer has been harassing him with threatening postcards has just murdered the screenwriter the previous night. The executive arrives late at a mid-morning studio meeting as other executives argue about the lavishness of writers' fees)
Movie studio boss: Griffin, you're here! We were just discussing the significance of writing. Maybe you have something to add?
Executive: I was just thinking what an interesting concept it is to eliminate the writer from the artistic process. If we could just get rid of these actors and directors, maybe we've got something here.
(Assistant hands the executive another postcard)
—
Re AI chat:
High school students who are illiterate now use AI chat to orchestrate the concoction of course papers they can't understand, then instructors use AI chat to grade the work. The grads apply for jobs and get selected by AI chat, then interviewed by managers using AI chat. The lucky hires are woken up by their IOs and transported to an office at an unknown destination by autonomous cars. Their work is to follow scripts emitted by AI chat to apply AI chat to guide refinement of processes, further feeding LLMs. Once returned to the home cubicle after the shift, the specialist consumes the latest cartoons and sexts with an AI companion. The IO sounds the alarm and it's time to sleep.
If the MCP guys can just cut out the middle men, I think we've got something here!
—
The threat of the new machines is not AGI overlords who will exterminate an optional humanity. The threat is an old one that's been proven over millennia of history: the conversion of human beings into slaves.
"The Player" (1992), starring Tim Robbins and directed by Robert Altman, is a good watch if anyone wants a deeper dive into the lifestyles of studio execs who have the authority to greenlight (or trash) projects. Great film!
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105151
It has more than one meaning. see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Player_(film)
As for happy endings etc., this have always been a mainstay of Hollywood. In the Hollywood satire "The Player" from 1992 it is actually a plot point how a script without a happy ending cannot get produced. (And that movie itself have an improbable tacked-on happy-end to drive the point home.)
For fun I looked up the term "Hollywood Ending" ("a film ending of a conventional type, characterized as sentimental, simplistic, or melodramatic, and often featuring an improbably positive outcome; frequently in extended use."). The first example of this usage is from...1929.
So not exactly a recent development.
As for every movie being a "super-hero martial arts movie." - well this genre is certainly big at the moment, but by far isnt the only type of movie. If you look at the most recent Oscar awards, you will see movies like Roma, Vice, The Favourite, BlacKkKlansman, Bohemian Rhapsody, Green Book. These are mainstream Hollywood movies (almost by definition, this is what the Oscars awards) but there is still a span of genres and narrative styles. I don't see this as notably more homogenized than any other year.
And despite the hand-wringing over superheroes, I would like to point out that the "Marcel Cinematic Universe" is actually a pretty original concept in itself. Never before have such a complex shared universe and storyline unfolded over so many coordinated movies. I don't know if this is particularly worse than bygone Hollywood fads like westerns, sword-and-sandal epics, musicals etc.
But if you don't like superheroes there is still plenty of movies to choose from, since the overall number of movies released is steadily growing.
Hollywood have a grand tradition for satirizing themselves mercilessly - from Sunset Boulevard to Tropic Thunder. They don't shy away from presenting powerful Hollywood producers as drug users, as in True Romance, and in The Player you have cameos of Hollywood personalities playing themselves in a movie which present the business as deeply corrupt and opportunistic. I dont' think anybody is as openly cynical about Hollywood as Hollywood itself.
> conclusion is that there is something definitely wrong with the way some movies are rated. I'm not sure if there exists a fix for that, apart from us, the "normal" viewers, just starting to ignore reviews and movie-critics and then watching movies with no preconceptions.
That seems like a big takeaway from one false negative. And I agree on Booty Call, I've long put it as one of my funniest movies from the 90's. That's said I didn't watch it in the theater and if the wife and I had gone I'm not sure she would have called it a good 30-40 bucks.
There are probably 3 issues here, critic blind spots (because the median critic is probably over 40 and has some cultural lenses that are hard to shake), the lack of information you can convey with one bit of data (which is an overall goodness bit not a "funniness" bit for comedies), and perhaps the sample size (this movie has only 12 reviews on RT and half are from no-names, more reviews might not change this score though it matters for some others).
FWIW Roger Ebert loved Booty Call and gave it 3 stars so, going beyond the one bit of fresh/rotten, it can lead you to critics that like movies you do and you can follow those personally.
And RT does pretty good at giving you good movies in general - their best comedies of the 90's rightly include Toy Story 1 & 2, Groundhog Day and The Player all of which are purchase worthy.
I know this just sounds like me being jaded and cynical but being completely open and honest: I feel like filmmaking lost me some time in the last 10 years or so. Might be because of age, I don't know, but I used to be a huge film buff, huge. If you had me filling out a bio about myself and asked me to list interests then "Movies" would be right up there at the top of the list. I loved going to movies, I loved watching them at home, I loved talking about them, I loved knowing little facts and details about them. I used to be able to tell you the name of any major production company from the first half-second of their intro. I used to watch individual scenes over and over again until I memorized them.
Filmmaking was always a delicate balance between creators and business, and I feel like the 2000s are when business finally took over. I'm reminded of the famous morning meeting scene in Robert Altman's "The Player" where a new hotshot producer explains why he thinks creativity should be removed entirely from the filmmaking process, and proceeds to describe an alternative that is horrifyingly close to what we have today.
I have absolutely no illusions about Hollywood prior to my disillusionment. It's always been a cesspit, but it was a beautiful cesspit that seemed to create wonder in spite of itself. Now it's basically just Disney-in-screen-form, everything - and I mean everything - is carefully driven by the beancounters. The last little vestiges of creativity and brilliance were finally squeezed out by the arrival of global markets. Bland, boring sells.
And I read threads like this where people argue about how lazy filmmaking isn't really lazy filmmaking because X Y or Z and all I think is you're moving deck chairs on the titanic. This isn't about soundtracks or sound effects, it's about movies-as-business rather than movies-as-entertainment.
I get it makes the companies major bank, and I get that there's no going back. I'm not ranting saying we should regress. But speaking personally movies went from a big part of my life to something I find extremely off-putting, boring and frankly a little stupid.
I miss enjoying movies.
Even if you didn't care about learning business through film, I would recommend these. Most are classics and highly enjoyable. I left out the great ones already mentioned.
Risky Business - going from idea to execution in a very short time
High Fidelity - small business, vertical expansion, labor relations
There Will Be Blood - "I have a competition in me."
Office Space - process reengineering, efficiency, employee motivation
It's A Wonderful Life - customer service, community building, ethics
The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit - work life balance
The Player - handling office and industry politics
Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room - ethics (and the catastrophe that befalls those without them)
* If you've already read Cryptonomicon (see more here: http://jseliger.com/2006/11/29/cryptonomicon ), you're going in the right direction, but you should skip the Baroque cycle and Anathem.
* David Leavitt's The Indian Clerk deals extensively with math (http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2007/12/14/the-indian-clerk).
* Joel Spolsky's The Best Software Writing isn't fiction but is worth reading.
* I'll reiterate Tom Wolf's The Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full.
* Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy is nominally aimed at adolescents, but people of any age can enjoy it.
* Michael Tolkin's The Player is partially about the business of film, as is its sequel, The Return of the Player.
If you're curious about more, send me an e-mail; I write a book blog at http://jseliger.com , and a lot of the reviews/commentaries would probably be of interest to hackerish types.