Hacker Cinema
The Punisher
2004 · Film · 124 min
Directed by Jonathan Hensleigh
When undercover FBI agent Frank Castle's wife and son are slaughtered, he becomes 'the Punisher' -- a ruthless vigilante willing to go to any length to avenge his family.
1 negative5 neutralfrom 6 commenters
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6 comments on Hacker News
This is not specific to Silicon Valley. It's human nature.
People take the "vibe" from a work and assume the vibe is the meaning. Look at how things like Fight Club, The Punisher, and Wall Street are viewed in the general culture.
The Great Gatsby is a famous cautionary tale of the danger and pointlessness of unchecked pursuit of wealth. It's studied widely in US high schools. When the movie came out, all over the US people held "Gatsby Parties" which were 1920s themed parties focuses on ostentatious displaces of wealth.
No matter how profound and important the message, most people won't look beyond the vibe.
>as its content is user generated
Content on TV stations is also mostly third party generated. Channel 5 didn't make The Punisher, they bought the rights to play it on air. Radio 2 didn't make In da Club, but 50 Cent did, they're just playing it on air. Newspapers also publish letters and content from readers, yet unlike social media they're the ones responsible for that content.
Because in many countries, content is age restricted per times of day, so the TV and radio statins need to edit the songs and movies they play to cut out various swear words, violence and sex scenes if they want to air to to general audiences, otherwise they get fined.
So why are social media companies allowed to wreak havok?
> Why pay cops if I’m not being murdered or robbed?
Why pay cops, they're already being bribed by criminals (batman, punisher, etc cops anyway :D )
> Why keep nukes behind launch codes, nobody’s trying to launch them?
Because if you get rid of launch codes you'll decimate the Hollywood Political Thriller movie industry
> Why eat every day, I don’t start to die until like 3 days in…
Why do you hate farmers?
:D
I have a working theory that mass appeal ruin the original content.
To your credit, as a non-Punisher patron of geek arts, you're probably right. The spirit of the original comics is likely expressing a deeper message than most people could understand from a cursory glance and watching one of the dumbed-down movies.
To your discredit, the population at large generates a mythos that transcends the character and strips away all sense of subtlety. To anyone who doesn't know the comics intimately, The Punisher is a guy who's like Batman with more brutality.
And, at the risk of redundancy, I'm convinced this is true of pretty much any character, fictional or non-: caricaturization of their greatest qualities, then memorialized as a god of [subject matter expertise]. The _only_ time I've ever seen a deviation from this is when a character is hard to place because they're all over the map (e.g., Ben Franklin, Christopher Lee).
Spasibo for the review. I'll have to watch it beyond the "is power money or truth?" scene now :) Incidentally, your last sentence reflects upon the US police problem, because some of them seem to have taken a comic-book anti-hero "The Punisher" as an inspiration, or at least someone whose symbology to wear.
I agree that bad ideas should be allowed in discussions[1]. If we're still talking about the same poor idea, it's probably a good idea if one quashes the ideas (whether poor or good) that run afoul of a platform's violence[2] policy https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/glorification-of-violence "You may not threaten violence against an individual or a group of people" (maybe reword your poor ideas to avoid saying "the shooting starts" in a country that distinguishes between assault and battery?) before publishing on that platform. I believe Theodore Roosevelt found his office a bully pulpit (note: not a bully pulpit) despite his lack of FB and TWTR.
Thanks also for the clarification of russian culture[3]. That sounds more advanced than anglophone (I am guessing the UK is not significantly more advanced than the US on this front, as Orwell makes it abundantly clear in both his fiction and nonfiction that he is a product of the english middle class), but I have no good suggestions for anglophones beyond education, which takes time. (not to mention that in the world of unvaccinated coronavirus, a two-student schooldesk is unlikely to be introduced in the US), time which is probably beyond the US Buxton Index[4].
[1] an advantage earlier US politicians had is that journalists would routinely rewrite even their on-the-record spoken comments to be more palatable in print. ("more" is an important qualifier here; Earl Butz resigned despite the fact that his jokes had been edited for taste when being reported)
[2] one amusing thing comparing US and USSR 70's and 80's movies is the completely different censorship. On one side you get very little blood, on the other very few breasts. (as for beasts, they're either scary or befriended. both systems agreed pirates are always villains) I was surprised by the ending to White Sun of the Desert because it was the first I'd seen a soviet shoot-out.
[3] I've learned some russian from Lavrov's poetry. Does anyone have suggestions for which pieces of Pompeo I might improve my english with?
[4] I learned of the Buxton Index from Dijkstra. Something else that stuck with me is that he said, as a young dutchman, he was educated to never start speaking a sentence before one knows how one is going to finish it. Maybe the equivalent for twitter should be "don't start typing before you've thought through the 140th character?" More cynically, the old IBM slogan ought to be revived: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/how-five-letter-word-built-104-year-old-company-180955899/
> I notice in Ebert's reviews an appreciation of films as mere entertainment in cases where is what they intend to be, and an appreciation of films as art if that is what they aspire to. In fact, one of my annoyances at his (often excellent) reviews is that he seemed to apply consciously lowered standards when he thought that a film wasn't aiming too high, which led to him recommending films that were close to mediocre, because they hit the mark they were aiming for. There is a certain integrity in this, of course.
I think he did a great job voicing his own standard, which I think makes a lot of sense, in his review of Shaolin Soccer (https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/shaolin-soccer-2004):
> "Shaolin Soccer" is like a poster boy for my theory of the star rating system. Every month or so, I get an anguished letter from a reader wanting to know how I could possibly have been so ignorant as to award three stars to, say, "HIDALGO" while dismissing, say, "Dogville" with two stars. This disparity between my approval of kitsch and my rejection of angst reveals me, of course, as a superficial moron who will do anything to suck up to my readers.
> What these correspondents do not grasp is that to suck up to my demanding readers, I would do better to praise "Dogville." It takes more nerve to praise pop entertainment; it's easy and safe to deliver pious praise of turgid deep thinking. It's true, I loved "Anaconda" and did not think "The United States of Leland" worked, but does that mean I drool at the keyboard and prefer man-eating snakes to suburban despair?
> Not at all. What it means is that the star rating system is relative, not absolute. When you ask a friend if "Hellboy" is any good, you're not asking if it's any good compared to "Mystic River," you're asking if it's any good compared to "The Punisher." And my answer would be, on a scale of one to four, if "Superman" (1978) is four, then "Hellboy" is three and "The Punisher" is two. In the same way, if "American Beauty" gets four stars, then "Leland" clocks in at about two.
> And that is why "Shaolin Soccer," a goofy Hong Kong action comedy, gets three stars. It is piffle, yes, but superior piffle. If you are even considering going to see a movie where the players zoom 50 feet into the air and rotate freely in violation of everything Newton held sacred, then you do not want to know if I thought it was as good as "Lost in Translation."