Hacker Cinema
The Shawshank Redemption
1994 · Film · 142 min
Directed by Frank Darabont
Imprisoned in the 1940s for the double murder of his wife and her lover, upstanding banker Andy Dufresne begins a new life at the Shawshank prison, where he puts his accounting skills to work for an amoral warden. During his long stretch in prison, Dufresne comes to be admired by the other inmates -- including an older prisoner named Red -- for his integrity and unquenchable sense of hope.
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110 comments on Hacker News
Apt Pupil! Yes, I remember reading that and loving it. Didn't know they made a movie of it. Stand By Me was originally titled The Body in Different Seasons. I must have read that 30+ years ago.. might need to re-read that some day. Wait.. wasn't Shawshank from Different Seasons too? Called something like 'Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption'.. I may be trippin .. don't feel like web searching it lol
I remember when I read the original story by Stephen King, I thought it was one of the best stories ever.
A year later, I saw the movie at a rental store. I had totally forgotten the name of the Stephen King story and rented it only because I knew it had been nominated for the Oscars.
30 minutes in, I said "This seems familiar!" And then "Oh, I bet this will be a great movie." It was.
I think it's worthy of being amongst the top. It has elements that appeal to a broad audience (not boxed into a specific genre). Great story. Great narration. Great cinematography and sound.
The only other movies in the Top 10 that I think could be ranked higher are The Godfather (which for many years was the top ranked), and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. For both of these movies, I know a lot more people who didn't like them. I only know one person who didn't like The Shawshank Redemption.
Here’s how it applies to the top 10 movies on IMDb
Shawshank redemption: the well liked male protagonist righteously murders his wife for cheating on him
The Godfather: pretty much encapsulates all of my requirements
12 angry men: no women
Original LOTR: Does women characters incredibly well
Pulp fiction: Mia is in there for a few key scenes, no nonsense
The good, the bad and the ugly: self explanatory. Great male characters
Forest gump: Jenny might be the greatest villain ever for her promiscuity
I can go on and on. All these movies have gravitas. You won’t see any movie post 2015 even crack the top 100 (besides Parasite but that isn’t Hollywood) because that’s about when they lost the plot.
I remember reading the letters of Cicero about Gaias Julius (Later known as Cesar) how he complains how the he and his gang is acting all amoral and wearing ridiculous scandalous clothes, waring the togas in provocative feminine fashion.
There are accounts from all over history of how "the times were more thoughtful and moral in the good old days" But here we are, thousands of years later, still complaining about the younger members of our species and how they will bring ruin to us all. Perhaps they will, but it all seems so human to complain about that.
I remember the art of the 90s - when my part of the world got access to marvelous pieces like Thunder in Paradise, Barbed Wire, American Ninja, Bay Watch ... at the time it was considered the pinnacle of art by teenagers like me, and despised by my parents. But at the same time we had things like The Matrix, The Shawshank Redemption, Leon ... We remember the good stuff and the forget the fluff.
There are some real gems being created all the time, maybe not always from Hollywood but human creativity soldiers on.
The Good Place, The Expanse, 3 Body Problem, Horizon Zero Dawn, Expedition 33, Project Hail Marry. There is a constant stream of incredible thoughtful stuff being produced - books, games, movies, essays, videos, podcasts - the medium might change but humans always try to find ways to discover, understand and express the world around us in novel ways, one just needs to listen/watch.
> With something more descriptive like, "Escape from Shawshank" or just "Prison Break" people would have been more interested to see it.
But maybe that would have killed the real market for people who wanted a deep subtle movie.
Despite its disappointing box-office returns ...
...It went on to become the top rented film of that year.
also
While finances for licensing the film for television are unknown, in 2014, current and former Warner Bros. executives confirmed that it was one of the highest-valued assets in the studio's $1.5 billion library.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shawshank_Redemption
> It is a strange comment to make about a film set inside a prison, but “The Shawshank Redemption” creates a warm hold on our feelings because it makes us a member of a family. Many movies offer us vicarious experiences and quick, superficial emotions. “Shawshank” slows down and looks. It uses the narrator’s calm, observant voice to include us in the story of men who have formed a community behind bars. It is deeper than most films; about continuity in a lifetime, based on friendship and hope.
I think Ebert is a brilliant reviewer; here I think something is overlooked: I agree about the emotional tone but not about the effect or the truth behind it. The prison is a fearful, traumatic place, of rape you can't stop, where life hangs by a thread, you take risks (for example with the bookkeeping) living on a razor's edge. The constant danger hangs over everything - you might not survive the day, you might be assaulted again, today might be the day they look more closely at what you're doing and you're caught.
That belies the calm narration and friendship. They provide an island of hope and love amid the trauma, in stark contrast to it, in constant tension with it.
You might say the narration is a device to make it palatable to middle-class audiences. That's something I notice a lot in Hollywood. First, the protagonist is someone they can identify with - a banker, a middle-class job - wrongly convicted, in this horrible situation. They are not, for example, a homeless person or someone semi-employed doing manual labor (someone much more likely to be wrongly convicted) - that would be a different movie and much less empathetic for many viewers, though objectively exactly as horrible. Then you have this calm, warm, reasonable voice telling the story - not a voice of terror or hate or trauma; that would be too much; the voice says 'it's ok'.
As Ebert says,
> The movie avoids lingering on Andy’s suffering; after beatings, he’s seen in medium and long shot, tactfully. The camera doesn’t focus on Andy’s wounds or bruises, but, like his fellow prisoners, gives him his space.
And I think also the following claim goes much too far:
> His film grants itself a leisure that most films are afraid to risk. The movie is as deliberate, considered and thoughtful as Freeman’s narration. There’s a feeling in Hollywood that audiences have short attention spans and must be assaulted with fresh novelties.
Sure, it's not the Avengers but it's a movie where the main plot elements are prison violence, a prison escape, and a grand con. This isn't Tokyo Story or In the Mood for Love.
Cool Hand Luke, which I prefer, has its protagonist sentenced to a work camp for an absurd crime.
A more recent prison movie which made me feel similarly to Cool Hand Luke and Shawshank Redemption while watching it is "I Love You Phillip Morris" (starring Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor).
The translations of the title (Finnish, Greek, others?) referencing Rita Hayworth make more sense if you know the title of Stephen King's novella the movie was based on (Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption).
"Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption" is one of my favourite Stephen King short stories (From "Different Seasons"). I actually read it after watching the film (which is just amazing) and still ended up liking the short story more than the film. I would highly recommend it to just about anyone.
I get the allure of the hypothetical future of video slop. Imagine if you could ask the AI to redo lord of the rings but with magneto instead of gandalf. Imagine watching shawshank redemption but in the end we get a "hot fuzz" twist where andy fights everyone. Imagine a dirty harry style police movie but where the protagonist is a xenomorph which is only barely acknowledged.
You could imagine an entirely new cultural engine where entire genres are born off of random reddit "hey have you guys every considered" comments.
However, the practical reality seems to be that you get tick toc style shorts that cost a bunch to create and have a dubious grasp on causality that have to compete with actual tick toc, a platform that has its endless content produced for free.
Yea but those are typically self selected sets. People that are interested in that particular type of movies watches it and rates it highly. But if you only offered that movie to the entire population, likely a large portion of the population won't want to watch it.
For example, The Shawshank Redemption has very high rating on IMDB, but also many people have never seen it and are not interested in watching it.
I disagree with the author saying silksong breaks the definition of a game because what it offers is challenge instead of "fun"
Thats like saying shawshank redemption isnt really a movie because its not fun like the original charlie chaplain films
I think the vast majority of games are meant to be digital toys, the way early movies were mostly cheap entertainment. But just like movies evolved as an art and artists began to become more comfortable with the medium, games will also become more artistic and less like toys.
The interactive nature of games is so innovative in the art world that it hasnt really caught on how to use it. But its evolving. Dark souls, the spiritual ancestor to silksong and pther soulslikes, is harder and that was a response to games like call of duty which felt like they were just trying to get the player through the level with as little friction as possible, with the pakyers actions being an inconvenience the game has to overcome so as to give them their dopamine hit. Dark souls responded to that by respecting the player and trusting them with a challenge they can be proud of solving.
This idea of one peice responding to another is exactly how art works. And the fact that the interactivity of the medium is what is being played with in these peices is a sign that we are moving towards art evolving to embrace interactivity like it did video
Another example is DDLC. That game did amazing things with making the narrative meta that non interactive media simply cant do. A character in a movie turning to face tue camera and addressing the viewer is trippy for sure, but a character telling you your steam username is way fucking trippier, and sells the meta aspect way better
Games arent just toys, they can be art. Art just hasnt evolved enough yet, but its on its way
"Best movie" lists tend to have films with both critical acclaim and audience appeal.
It got critical praise but was a flop at the theater. The home video market redeemed it (haha) with audiences. From the article:
"Despite its disappointing box-office returns, in what was then considered a risky move, Warner Home Video shipped 320,000 rental video copies throughout the United States in 1995. It went on to become the top rented film of that year. Positive recommendations, repeat customer viewings, and being well received by both male and female audiences were considered key to the film's rental success."
All 3 movies (It's a Wonderful Life, Groundhog Day, and The Shawshank Redemption) had critical praise upon their initial release. Groundhog Day was even a solid hit. But no one could've predicted what they became later.
Your summary of the reception of The Shawshank Redemption doesn't seem to fit the wikipied article you linked to
> Leading up to its release, the film was test screened with the public. These were described as "through the roof", and Glotzer said they were some of the best she had seen
> nominated for several Oscars in early 1995
> It went on to become the top rented film of that year
It's funny - I watched the Shawshank Redemption for the first time a couple years ago, after hearing forever about what a great film it is, and thought it was so lackluster I wasn't sure if I was missing something.
"Did he die in the end? Was it a dream sequence?" But no, both the intention of the creators, and by far the most common interpretation from viewers, is that it's all literal.
I tried watching Groundhog Day just once, and couldn't make it though it because (I assumed) it had aged so terribly.
Your comment made me reevaluate this though. I assumed the main appeal of these gonna was just nostalgia, and I've missed a key window, but perhaps it's the repeat viewings and predictability that make these films comfort food.
The Shawshank Redemption has a similar story. Didn't do well when released. Its video release fared a little better, maybe because people could re-watch it at home. Then Turner picked up TV distribution rights cheaply and showed it again and again.
Now, just like It's a Wonderful Life, it's considered one of the best movies ever made.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shawshank_Redemption#Critical_reassessment
Groundhog Day is like this too. Although it was a "modest" box office success its critical reputation grew massively as the years went by. To the point that again it's consistently on best-ever movie lists.
"[12 years later] Ebert raised his original score for the film from three stars to a full four stars [saying] that he had underestimated the film"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groundhog_Day_(film)#Post-release
It's befitting that watching Groundhog Day again and again makes you like the movie more.
Btw I mentioned It's a Wonderful Life's copyright situation in my original post.
Well, I was reassured I'm just a cynical old bastard, so that's worth something, I guess. To me all the videos I saw, around a dozen, were all (by accident?) emotional cheap-shots, the low-hanging fruit of manipulation. For example: When I see a clip of Brooks Hatlen, the elderly librarian from The Shawshank Redemption, make his final voyage after being released, I get shown an old man take his own life (spoiler! but the movie is 30 years old now, so c'mon). That itself is somewhat sad, yes, but the feelings come from the context of the movie and what the viewer is shown before. So the clip falls flat, even with knowledge of the movie/book. Simply getting shown sad things does not make me cry, especially in short clips out of context.
Jaws. The Shawshank Redemption. Alien. The first Jurassic Park. My Cousin Vinney.
I would say that there is not a single scene that can be removed from these movies without negatively impacting the story/theme/narrative.
Some say that Star Wars IV and V fit this definition but I would say there is some eyecandy fluff that could be cut.
What?
I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to say?
How exactly does one "judge a work in its own merit?"
How do you determine whether a movie is good or not? In a vacuum? Measuring its traits against itself?
How can anything at all be judged "on its own merits" without considering the scope of other things related to it?
How does this person writing the article judge the story against itself when they make the claim that this story is bad because men are never sexually assaulted in stories. I can name 2 popular movies off the top of my head (Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption) that had graphic depictions of men being raped and sexually assaulted.
The writer measured the story they were reviewing against the broader world. Not against itself. Therefore, considering the broader world, there's nothing particularly miscreant about a story portraying violence against a human being (male or female).
The writer's incorrect belief that men are never sexually assaulted in film and TV shows is simply limited by their immaturity and lack of knowledge of the many stories that have been told in different mediums for decades.
I find it interesting that I like a lot of movies based on Steven King's writing (The Shining, Stand By Me, Shawshank Redemption, and Misery are top of mind), but I don't particularly care for Steven King's writing style or many of the books that are considered his best. I didn't care for 'IT' at all. It's like Lovecraft, I appreciate the ideas, body of work, and talent, even if it needs a different style for me to get into it.
For convenience, I asked ChatGPT to create this table, which summarizes how many times each movie has been mentioned in this conversation so far. It got a few counts wrong (as usual), but it still gives a good sense of the frequency. I hope it can be useful to someone:
| Movie | Number of Mentions | |-------------------------------------------|---------------------| | The Matrix | 9 | | Lord of the Rings Trilogy | 8 | | Pulp Fiction | 8 | | Alien | 7 | | Fight Club | 7 | | Ghostbusters | 6 | | Die Hard | 5 | | Back to the Future | 5 | | Inception | 5 | | Star Wars Trilogy (original) | 5 | | Groundhog Day | 5 | | Terminator 1 & 2 | 5 | | Jurassic Park | 4 | | The Thing | 4 | | The Fifth Element | 4 | | Monty Python and the Holy Grail | 4 | | Ghost in the Shell | 4 | | Interstellar | 4 | | Casablanca | 3 | | Office Space | 3 | | Shawshank Redemption | 3 | | The Godfather Trilogy | 3 | | The Blues Brothers | 3 | | Blade Runner | 3 | | Mad Max: Fury Road | 3 | | Unforgiven | 3 | | Total Recall (1990) | 3 | | The Crow | 3 | | The Princess Bride | 3 | | Akira | 3 | | The Big Lebowski | 3 | | Guardians of the Galaxy | 3 | | American Psycho | 3 | | Indiana Jones Trilogy | 3 | | Kiki’s Delivery Service | 2 | | Ratatouille | 2 | | A Clockwork Orange | 2 | | Mission Impossible (various) | 2 | | Casino Royale | 2 | | Skyfall | 2 | | Ferris Bueller's Day Off | 2 | | Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan | 2 | | Apocalypse Now | 2 | | The Shining | 2 | | Groundhog Day | 2 | | Donnie Darko | 2 | | Dune (2021) | 2 | | Gladiator | 2 | | Predator | 2 | | Seven/Se7en | 2 | | The Dark Knight | 2 | | Snatch | 2 | | Prometheus | 2 | | Schindler’s List | 2 | | The Wolf of Wall Street | 2 | | Dr. Strangelove | 2 | | Silence of the Lambs | 2 | | Kill Bill | 2 | | Real Genius | 2 | | Top Secret! | 2 | | Tenet | 2 | | Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy | 2 | | The Adjustment Bureau | 2 | | The Expanse | 2 | | Pulp Fiction | 2 |
While there are only a few movies that I have seen in their entirety several times (5+); there are several scenes from certain movies that I have probably seen more than a dozen times.
1) Court scene from 'My Cousin Vinny' 2) Court scene from 'A Few Good Men' 3) Last 20 minutes from 'The Shining' 4) Escape sequence from 'Shawshank Redemption'
I do not need to read an opinion to know what to think about The Shawshank Redemption. I can think for myself.
I like the movie, it's one of my favourite films of all time, and I am sorry you feel I and a large contingent of people are misguided because they have a different opinion than yours or your favourite critic's.
I have rewatched it in the past 6 months BTW.
My criticism of Shawshank redemption is indeed particularly in response to it being placed number one on the IMDB list of greatest movies of all time. I believe people ranked it there as a result of emotional catharsis rather than ranking based on whether a movie best realized its potential, and I think my response is validated: the script for Shawshank redemption could have portrayed the characters as more three-dimensional than as recorded.
I've never read the book, but perhaps this criticism applies to the book as well. King certainly has a tendency to push fetishized characteristics that take the place of earnest characterization. This is certainly true of the Stand, the Dark Tower series, the Shining, Insomnia, Green Mile, and probably many others of his works. This is not an original take. See one popular opinion here: http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/stephen-kings-super-duper-magical-negroes/
I get that it's cool to dislike what's popular, but I don't think we've seen the same Shawshank Redemption film.
> they will aggressively try to remove your property rights from it.... similar to the NYC squatters rights thing.
I think that's bad-faith reading of the quote from one arborist, not the CA Governor or Treasurer or Dept Director of Parks and Recreation. The way I read the article is that it was implied the state should have considered buying out the owner of the forest (or at least part of it) with state money and convert it to a park. I don't know whether that would have been economically viable and I don't understand people discussing here how forestry policy on redwoods changed after that, but it would be good to see numbers on all this, even if the answer was no.
FYI Lucasfilm shot the Endor scenes in Del Norte in Apr-May 1982, a year before release of RotJ. So, another huge errorbar would be estimating the film's popularity (if there's a deadline on the property being destroyed, as in this case).
99.999% of movies aren't memorable or profitable like the Star Wars trilogy, so they add no value. Also, this stuff isn't predictable at shooting time before the film's release. Compare e.g. 'The Matrix Reloaded' (2003) car-chase scenes were filmed in Oakland, but aren't that popular. But also the Boston Public Garden Bench from "Good Will Hunting", a low-budget $10m film by two young guys people had never heard of [0], or the prison location from 'The Shawshank Redemption' (the closed Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, OH).
[0]: https://www.livethemovies.com/home/the-boston-public-garden-bench-from-good-will-hunting
But they only had two films to base it on; they would have had to make that decision a few months after the RotJ scene filming ended but before it released. And presumably since the forest was privately-owned, somebody would have had to pay $$$ to acquire it then make it a park (and that somebody would have to be the state of CA, not Del Norte + Humboldt Counties).
In those counties the state already had RNSP (Redwood National and State Parks), a complex of one national park and three California state parks (139,000 acres; 560 km2). [0]
This makes me curious about the economics of when are the rare occasions it makes economic sense to use public money to buy and preserve popular movie locations on private property/land (as opposed to paying a premium for sentimental or tourist value). For example the famous 'Friends' apartment exterior in NYC is still private property. 'Shawshank Redemption' on its initial release bombed at the box office. Scranton, PA has a self-guided tourist trail [1] for the US version of 'The Office'. Only rare places like Punxsutawney, PA [2][3] (the town 'Groundhog Day' is set in, although the film was entirely shot in Woodstock IL [4]) make $. For the hardcore tourists there's Tataouine, Tunisia.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redwood_National_and_State_Parks
[1]: https://www.visitnepa.org/things-to-do/self-guided-tours/the-office/
[2]: "Groundhog Day: Punxsutawney’s Million Dollar Holiday" https://nation.time.com/2014/02/01/groundhog-day-punxsutawney/
[3]: Punxsutawney Phil’s town misses Groundhog Day boost (2021) https://apnews.com/general-news-d4a183fdd599322fb9b23a5cb2147f33
[4]: "Groundhog Days in Woodstock, IL" https://woodstockgroundhog.org/
I just did a quick search on Walmart.com for DVDs <= $6 and found plenty of mediocrity but also:
- Shawshank Redemption - Despicable Me 1 & 2 (for $5 total) - Scream 1-3 (again $5 total) - Beverly Hills Cop 1-3 (same) - Tombstone - Unforgiven - ET - A Star is Born (2018) - Sleepless in Seattle - The Thing (1982) - Seabiscuit - Once Upon a Time in Hollywood - Titanic
I would say any of these movies is better than 95% of the movies available for streaming on Netflix (conservatively).
And the Shawshank Redemption movies will stop being made. Or if they are being made, they will be ignored.
I read a blog today and it was high-quality long form tech journalism - something I haven't seen for a long time, tucked away on a no-mark site in a far corner of the Internet.
I didn't agree with all of the content, but it was so good to see something written at that level. 50 years ago it would have been normal for tech publishing. Today most tech journalism is gossip and clickbait. It's not thoughtful and referenced long form analysis of where the industry may be heading, written with original critical insights.
Most of what is made is not that good. For every shawshank redemption we have 20 'leonard part 6' movies or worse. People just do not realize how much content there is out there in the big budget space. In the low budget space that ratio is even worse. Most of it is not good. We are going to see the volume of low effort items cranked to 11.
True, the on-demand part is better, but I'm mostly talking about the breadth of the catalog. Turner was able to get broadcast rights to a whole bunch of movies that the studios didn't really know what to do with. This is partly why The Shawshank Redemption is now one of the most beloved movies of all time. It was pretty lackluster at the box office, but then in the late 90s and 2000s it was just on TV all. the. time. A lot of people who might not otherwise have watched it got to see it.
On demand is not that helpful if you don't want to watch any of the things that are available.
The continuous movie was the source of one of my dad's favorite movie experiences. He and his friends arrived late to The Manchurian Candidate and missed an important scene, so they spent the rest of the time trying to piece together what had happened until the "big reveal" on the next showing. It turned a suspense movie into a full on mystery.
Before streaming you used to get a similar experience on basic cable channels where they would play the same movie a few times in a row. I remember first seeing The Shawshank Redemption that way.
Shawshank redemption is a movie, a fiction. It never happened and characters are made up.
That being said USA have rather high reoffending rates while Norway has a low one. And Norway has more pleasant prisons (and makes it easier to find a job after you have been in prison).
For anyone wondering apparently this is a play on a quote from Shawshank Redemption, (I've never seen the movie!)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111161/characters/nm0000151
Better would be to ask everybody who watched Shawshank Redemption: ‘were you satisfied with the movie?’. A 9.2 on imdb is not equal to 92% satisfaction due to granularity in the answer options
> America’s favorite holiday, Thanksgiving, enjoys 82% popularity according to a 2023 survey by Statista. Memorial Day comes in second at 77%.
> The three most popular movies of all time on IMDB are The Shawshank Redemption, The Godfather and The Dark Knight. They have ratings of 9.2, 9.2 and 9.0 respectively.
These examples are so orange and apples it’s baffling the authors even came up with them.
You compare the most advanced personal pocket computer of all time with a patriotic holiday (assuming patriotism as an absolute value) or a movie about inmates escaping a prison. Like, really?!
> 99% of the book is the musings and activities of an old lady, which are not interesting to say the least. It's not until the last page that the whole story is tied together. If you removed the last page, it wouldn't be a great book
I've read books/watched movies like that. They are certainly memorable, but one problem they have is they're not very re-watchable. For lack of better example I'll mention Shawshank redemption. It's a great movie nonetheless, but the reveal scene is so great that the rest of the movie by comparison feels like a slog you have to put up with to get to the big reveal. Because of that I might've watched it only 3 times in my entire life.
After spending a few days with Bard and being a user of ChatGPT since release. Bard is definitely better is ways.
The first major noticeable improvement is Bard is way more human like in it response. ChatGPT often spends time writing thing it doesn't need to write.
For example, If you ask them: "If you had to pick one movie to watch today what would you pick?"
Bard give you one single movie, "The Shawshank Redemption", and explains in depth why it liked the movie.
ChatGPT gives you boilerplate response saying it can't have an opinion because it an AI and then lists 5 popular movies with basic explanation of the movie. Not very useful.
A lot of the time using ChatGPT I'm waiting for it to get to the answer I'm looking for because it spends a lot of time writing useless text instead of being more human like and understanding what the user really want in the answer.
I know a lot of people shit on Google because they hate Google, but this is a good product if they can solve some of the bad knowledge but it's more impressive than ChatGPT IMHO simply because they are wiling to allow it to learn new data all the time. While ChatGPT is still using the same dataset from 2021.
Funnily enough I share same sentiment about Beatles as about Citizen Kane, I forced myself to watch it together with Casablanca and few other "classics" and it's horrible movie by nowadays standards and I'd say you don't need to see it even once unless you are really movie nerd.
Back in the day it was revolutionary and important I guess, but by nowadays standards it's utterly mediocre movie despite people praising it as something amazing, but to be fair I don't think I'd find movie from CK era which I'd like while I have no problem to find better artists from Beatles era whose music I enjoy much more and like them even nowadays compared to present day music.
And one more unpopular opinion from someone who experienced jail like environment I think even recent highly rated Shawshank redemption while very good and enjoyable movie is romantic unrealistic fairy tale (for women) and I'd rather recommend everyone to watch Das Experiment to see more realistic display of prison I can sign, yet I've of them is rated asking best movies in history and the other is pretty much unknown.
The milestones (from the source code):
//<10 seconds 'A single frame of a film': 100ms, 'It would take light to go around the Earth': 133ms, 'A blink of an eye': 400ms, 'The time it takes light to reach Earth from the moon': 1255ms, 'The fastest Formula 1 pit stop': 1820ms, 'The fastest 1/4 mile drag race time': 3580ms, 'The fastest Rubik\'s cube solve': 4221ms, 'The fastest 40-yard time at the NFL Combine': 4240ms, 'The fastest 1 liter beer chug': 4370ms, 'A skippable Youtube ad': 5000ms, 'A full bull ride': 8000ms, 'The fastest 100m sprint': 9580ms, //10 Seconds 'The Wright Brothers first flight': 12000ms, 'The fastest 200m sprint': 19190ms, 'The fastest 50m freestyle swim lap': 21300ms, 'The Westminster Kennel Club dog agility record': 28440ms, 'A typical television ad': 30000ms, 'The fastest NASCAR lap at Daytona': 40364ms, 'The fastest 400m sprint': 43030ms, 'The fastest NASCAR lap at Talladega': 44270ms, 'The fastest 100m freestyle swim lap': 47050ms, //1 Minute '"Just a minute"': 60000ms, 'The fastest Formula 1 lap at Monaco': 74260ms, 'The fastest Formula 1 lap at Monza': 81046ms, 'The fastest 800m sprint': 100910ms, 'The fastest 200m freestyle swim lap': 102960ms, 'The fastest Kentucky Derby time': 119400ms, 'An NHL penalty box time for slashing, tripping, or holding': 120000ms, 'How long it takes to drive across the Golden Gate Bridge (without traffic)': 135000ms, 'The duration of the "Millenium Force" roller coaster': 140000ms, 'The longest Super Bowl national anthem': 156000ms, 'One round of a boxing match': 180000ms, 'The average song length on Spotify': 183000ms, 'The fastest 1,500m run': 206000ms, 'The song "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley': 215000ms, 'The fastest 400m freestyle swim lap': 220140ms, 'The fastest 1 mile run': 223130ms, 'The duration of the "Steel Dragon" roller coaster': 240000ms, 'The duration of "The Beast" roller coaster': 250000ms, 'The song "4:33" by John Cage': 273000ms, 'The longest sky diving freefall': 276000ms, 'The Any% speedrun of Super Mario Bros for NES': 294948ms, //5 Minutes 'An NHL penalty box time for fighting': 300000ms, 'The average duration of a typical sky dive': 330000ms, 'The average time for a drive-thru order': 356800ms, 'The time it takes Jeff Bezos to make $1 million': 402000ms, 'The fastest race car lap around the Nurburgring': 403300ms, 'The time it takes light to reach Earth from the sun': 500000ms, 'The time it takes a rocket ship to reach outer space': 510000ms, 'A typical marching band show': 515000ms, //10 Minutes 'The length of the first space walk': 600000ms, 'The longest a human has held their breath (non-oxygen assisted)': 695000ms, 'The average duration of popular Youtube videos': 702000ms, 'The time it takes an average human to walk 1km': 710000ms, 'The fastest 5K run': 757350ms, 'The average time to bake a pizza': 810000ms, '1% of the entire day': 864000ms, //15 Minutes 'A typical commute in the United States': 960000ms, 'The fastest superbike lap of the Isle of Man TT': 1002778ms, "MLK's \"I Have A Dream\" Speech": 1020000ms, 'An average baseball inning': 1200000ms, 'The song "2112" by Rush': 1233000ms, 'The first angels to appear in the movie "Angels in the Outfield" (1994)': 1275000ms, 'An episode of The Office, Seinfeld, or Rick & Morty': 1320000ms, 'The time it takes to drive the entire Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel': 1380000ms, 'The song "Octavarium" by Dream Theater': 1440000ms, 'A typical Super Bowl halftime show': 1500000ms, 'The fastest 10K run': 1584000ms, 'It takes for Bobby Boucher to get his first game snap in the movie "The Waterboy" (1998)': 1719000ms, //30 Minutes 'The average time to bake a cake': 1950000ms, 'The time it takes until the launch in the movie Apollo 13 (1995)': 2081000ms, 'It takes WALL-E to arrive at the Axiom in the movie "WALL-E" (2008)': 2164000ms, 'The shortest war in history (Anglo-Zanzibar War)': 2280000ms, 'It takes Harry Potter to arrive at Hogwarts in "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer\'s Stone" (2001)': 2381000ms, 'The album "Thriller" by Michael Jackson': 2539000ms, 'The album "Dark Side of the Moon" by Pink Floyd': 2589000ms, 'An episode of Breaking Bad, House, or Firefly': 2640000ms, 'The boot camp sequence in the movie "Full Metal Jacket" (1987)': 2730000ms, 'The album "Abbey Road" by The Beatles': 2823000ms, 'It takes Simba to become an adult in the movie "The Lion King" (1994)': 2849000ms, '10% of a typical work day in the United States': 2880000ms, 'The album "Kid A" by Radiohead': 2996000ms, 'The time limit for the essay portion of the SATs': 3000000ms, 'The time it takes a standard ice cube to melt at room temperature': 3150000ms, '0.01% of an entire year': 3155692ms, 'The album "Fearless" by Taylor Swift': 3221000ms, 'The time it takes for the basketball game to start in the movie "Space Jam"': 3222000ms, 'An episode of Game of Thrones, True Detective, or The Sopranos': 3300000ms, 'It takes Harry and Lloyd arrive in Aspen in the movie "Dumb and Dumber" (1994)': 3394000ms, 'The album "Jagged Little Pill" by Alanis Morissette': 3443000ms, 'The fastest half-marathon': 3451000ms, //1 Hour 'An episode of Top Gear': 3600000ms, 'The inception of Robert Fischer begins in the movie "Inception" (2010)': 3847000ms, 'Riding the longest subway line in NYC from Queens to Inwood': 3900000ms, 'The time it takes Jeff Bezos to make $10 million': 4017600ms, 'It takes before Sean Connery says "Welcome to the Rock" in the movie "The Rock" (1996)': 4022000ms, 'A flight from Syracuse to New York City': 4140000ms, '5% of the entire day': 4320000ms, 'The album "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" by Elton John': 4580000ms, 'The album "Scenes From A Memory" by Dream Theater': 4626000ms, 'The movie "Primer" (2004)': 4740000ms, 'It takes to fully charge a Tesla (at 440V)': 4788000ms, 'The ferry duration from Long Island, NY to New London, CT': 4800000ms, 'The movie "Toy Story" (1995)': 4860000ms, 'A drive from Syracuse, NY to Rochester, NY (87.5 miles)': 4920000ms, 'The movie "The Lion King" (1994)': 5280000ms, 'The longest State of the Union address': 5280000, //Duplicate time... //1.5 Hours 'The movie "Mony Python and the Holy Grail" (1975)': 5460000ms, 'The movie "Monsters, Inc." (2001)': 5520000ms, 'An average duration of a soccer game': 5700000ms, 'The movie "Reservoir Dogs" (1992)': 5940000ms, 'The longest Innaugural address': 6300000ms, 'A drive from Orlando, FL to Tampa, FL (84.6 miles)': 6660000ms, 'An SR-71 flight from New York City to London': 6896400ms, 'The movie "Alien" (1979)': 7020000ms, //2 Hours //'25% of a typical work day in the United States': 7200000ms, 'The average duration of an NCAA basketball game': 7200000ms, 'The movie "Star Wars: A New Hope" (1977)': 7260000ms, 'The fastest marathon time ever ran': 7299000ms, 'The time it takes to listen to every studio album by Nirvana': 7667000ms, 'The movie "Dogma" (1999)': 7680000ms, 'The average duration of an NBA basketball game': 7860000ms, 'The movie "The Matrix" (1999)': 8160000ms, 'The movie "Fight Club" (1999)': 8340000ms, 'The movie "The Shawshank Redemption" (1994)': 8520000ms, 'The movie "Forrest Gump" (1994)': 8520000ms, 'A drive from New York City to Philadelphia (94.6 miles)': 8520000ms, '10% of the entire day': 8640000ms, 'The movie "Inception" (2010)': 8880000ms, 'The movie "Avengers: Infinity War" (2018)': 8940000ms, 'The movie "Pulp Fiction" (1994)': 9240000ms, 'It takes Voyager 1 to travel 100,000 miles': 9360000ms, 'The movie "Avatar" (2009)': 9720000ms, 'The average duration of an NHL hockey game': 9750000ms, 'The movie "Saving Private Ryan" (1998)': 10140000ms, 'The movie "The Godfather" (1972)': 10500000ms, 'The movie "Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring" (2001)': 10680000ms, //3 Hours 'The average duration of an NFL football game': 10800000ms, 'The total time limit of the SATs': 10800000ms, 'The movie "Avengers: Endgame" (2019)': 10860000ms, 'The average duration of an MLB baseball game': 11280000ms, 'The time it takes for a standard ice cube to freeze in a freezer': 11700000ms, 'The movie "Titanic" (1997)': 12600000ms, 'A drive from Boston to New York City (215.9 miles)': 13560000ms, 'Alex Honnold\'s free solo climb of El Capitan': 14160000ms, //4 Hours 'Half of a typical work day in the United States': 14400000ms, 'The flight time from New York City to Los Angeles': 19800000ms, 'The time limit of one session of the Bar exam': 21600000ms, 'It takes Voyager 1 to travel 250,000 miles': 23400000ms, 'The fastest swimmer to cross the English Channel': 24900000ms, //>8 Hours 'A full typical work day in the United States': 28800000ms, '0.1% of an entire year': 31536000ms, 'The time it takes Jeff Bezos to make $100 million': 40173000ms, 'The time it takes to assemble a car': 57600000ms, '1% of an entire year': 315360000ms, 'It takes for the Lōʻihi volcano to rise above the surface of the ocean becoming a new Hawaiian island': Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER //285,616 years
I’m not necessarily disagreeing with your list, even though some of those are mediocre at best, but yeah I did mean per year, and limited to Hollywood (Parasite for instance not counting). And no, ok, I will also straight up disagree with the second Knives out Movie which I thought was absolute trash. A perfect example of poor storytelling and the form over substance of modern cinema.
But just taking say 1992 you have Last of the Mohicans, The Unforgiven, My Cousin Vinny, Malcolm X, Bad Lieutenant, Scent of a Woman, Reservoir Dogs, Dracula, Chaplin.
And then a bunch of fun schlomp like Arizona Dream, Basic Instinct, Sister Act, Army of Darkness, Home Alone 2, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Mighty Ducks, Wayne’s World.
These are all undoubtedly great movies.
And then another huge bunch of watchable stuff easily comparable to some of your mentions like Watcher or High Life.
And 1992 is not an outlier.
In 1993 you have Jurrasic Park, Groundhog Day, Whats Eating Gilbert Grape, Scindlers List, Meanace 2 Society, Alive, Dazed and Confused, Falling Down, In The Name of The Father, True Romance, Demolition Man, Carlitos Way, The Secret Garden, Philadelphia, A Perfect Workd, Cool Runnings, Short Cuts.
In 1991 Silence of The Lambs, Ternimator 2, JFK, Point Break, Thelma and Louise, Boyz in the Hood, The Doors, My Own Private Idaho, Barton Fink, The Fisher King, Naked Lunch.
In 1990 Goodfellas, Hunt for Red October, Total Recall, Edward Scissorhands, Home Alone, Godfather 3, Dances with Wolves, Tremors, Back to the Future 3, Awakenings, The Witches, Wild at Heart, Jacobs Ladder, Nikita, Slacker, Millers Crossing.
And the quality difference is massive too, not just somewhat better. Like just Millers Crossing is miles better than anything that has been made in the last 5 years, and I’m picking at random.
In 1994 Shawshank Redemption, Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, The Lion King, Speed, Ace Ventura, Dumb and Dumber, Stargate, Natural Born Killers, The Crow, Clercs, Maverick, Ed Wood, In the Mouth of Madness, Interview With The Vampire.
I could go on.
And this is not even talking about how the 80s is a better decade for cinema, or how the 70s is the peak of the power of the author with far more experimental, artistic, and substantial productions.
Has quality declined? Yes. Massively. Humongously. Stupendously.
I have two mantras that I heard at some point early in life and they have immensely helped me over the years:
1.) "Just remember that it's a grand illusion." - Dennis DeYoung.
Human society is a made up thing job titles and heirarchies or castes, companies, governments, money, opinions, labels ("gay", "straight", "married", "healthy", "insane", "impossible")... the whole lot of it - all made up by humans. There is no difference between you, your boss, your CEO, the leader of your country. The truth is, we are all humans living on this earth, eating-feeling-surviving. The rest is something humans just made up.
2.) "...all it takes, really [is] pressure and time." - Red (character in movie Shawshank Redemption).
This montra has never steered me wrong. Something I truly want to achieve may take months or many years, but if I stick to it, it eventually tends to come to fruition. Interestingly, the opposite is true, when I've given up on some opportunity or idea I thought was particularly worthwhile, but I ultimately gave up on and succumbed to the pressure of naysayers and my own weariness, I have seen others succeed on these same ideas/opportunities. It's not a garuntee, but a very strong trend I've observed over my 40+ years on earth.
As a child, I wanted to be a scientist (I've always been an inventor and explorer at heart) but was guided towards enlisting the military due to lack of money and honestly, I did not do well in grade school. After maturing, I've pressed on to course-correct and after 20 years I am finally a well respected research scientist in the field I'm passiknate about. It just took pressure and time (years of pushing through grad school rejections, arduously learning concepts that didn't come naturally to me, ignoring naysayers, etc.).
Sometimes, you won't break through, but I contend that the journey is still worthwhile. I have a HARD math problem that I've been picking a way at for over 10 years and I've made peace with the fact that I may never solve the riddle by the time I'm dead. However, with persistance I've made incremental progress - and I can see that I'm on a road that is being revealed in front of me inch by inch as I apply continuous pressure. Even if I don't know how long that road actually is - if I could live long enough, eventually I know I would solve the puzzle. This montra has helped me keep pushing ahead, despite not truly knowing when a break through will happen, and simply walking the path has led me to observe what feel is great natural beauty. The journey itself can be very rewarding.
There are quite a few recommendations for the classics, but if someone doesn't enjoy the slow burn of those deep books, maybe they should start with something lot more dopaminergic: animes and movies!
PsychoPass, Akira, Cowboy Bebop, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Attack on Titan.
So, movies. I only saw The Shawshank Redemption a few years ago, and it's really really good. Classic. Human. Touching. I'm not even sure how to characterize it except yes, really go see it, it's really at the top of the power distribution of movies.
12 Angry Men. At this point it's the cliché of old but good movies. At this point it's a satire of a socially interesting movie due to its naivete, yet for someone who seems a bit close minded it might be just the right thing. (Or not? :D)
The Pianist. Again, simple. Brutal. Or the recent Joker.
. . .
But really when it comes to AI and fiction.
Blade Runner. If that's not fiction that's worth investing time into, then what is? Even typing this I've got the chills thinking about Roy Batty.
Just a recollection you stirred up I had not thought about in years: my freshman (and sophomore) roommate in college could only fall-asleep with the television on, but of course did not want it playing all night, so every evening he would start a Shawshank Redemption VHS tape from the beginning when getting in bed. He did that for two entire academic years, never changing the movie. I used to have the first 12-15 minutes of it memorized.
Maybe I was too young to know any better, but I loved the 90s movies - from T2 all the way to matrix including 5th element.
> but I believe that after Terminator 2 and Jurassic park there was garbage for a few years
But lion king, toy story, pulp fiction, shawshank redemption, fargo, forrest gump, etc were released soon after jurassic park. Garbage isn't the word I'd use to describe these movies.
I’ve added some movies I love too :)
Books ‘The Alchemist’ by Paulo Coelho ‘Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress’ by Steven Pinker ‘Designing Your Life: Build a Life that Works for You’ by Bill Burnett, Dave Evans ‘Exhalation’ and ‘Stories of Your Life and Others’ by Ted Chiang
Movies ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’ ‘Dead Poet’s Society’ ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ ‘King Richard’ ‘Shawshank Redemption’ Anything Studio Ghibli
I don't know about in sync but I think there might have been more common ground in the past. Movies like The Godfather, Jaws, Goodfellas, Pulp Fiction or Shawshank Redemption sometimes feature highly on both critics and the public's favourite movie lists. I doubt many serious film critics are going to be putting any of the Marvel movies in their top 10 of all time yet there are large numbers of people out there who would.
A few more great books that beget great films:
* The Silence of the Lambs * The Shining * Shawshank Redemption (novella but I'll allow it) * Brokeback Mountain (same) * No Country for Old Men * Little Women (there are a few versions to choose from but I would choose the 1994 adaptation myself, thought he 2019 version was very good) * Requiem For a Dream * Lolita * Roots (mini-series but I think we should allow it)
That's what I can think of off the top of my head.
I haven't read "The Godfather" but the films are truly fantastic. That said there are several other examples of adaptations that outshine the original - "Shawshank Redemption", "Bladerunner", etc. Among recent productions there's many readers who say "Station Eleven" was better than the source material.
Yup, The Day After feels like willy nilly optimistic romantic comedy next to Threads, I have same feeling about extremely overrated romantic movie The Shawshank Redemption compared to much more realistic Das Experiment (judging by my military experience which was sort of prison).
Thing you haven't mentioned is that with no oversight, no transparency no counter, no clear your name, the tyranny which wants to ruin your life doesn't need to build a CSAM scanner to do it. A tip-off to the police, a falsified claim from an "eye witness", an "accident" putting your name on the wrong report to get the machinery rolling and it will, as you say, roll by itself. See what actually did happen to Sir Cliff Richard[1] where "a complaint to the police" got his house raided and his name dragged through the media and despite not being arrested, not being charged, case being dropped, him suing the media and winning, suing the police and winning and the media apologising, he says his reputation will never be completely cleared - and it probably never will be, and it didn't require any specific tech.
"The System" didn't need to wait patiently for a big tech company to build a complicated system with dastardly moustache-twirling weaknesses before it could affect Sir Cliff, anymore than Big Brother in 1984 needed to wait for Winston to be seen taking action on the telescreen in his house before the system crushed him. If "The System" wanted to accuse you, it could accuse your car of having been seen on a nearby road at the time, your likeness being seen on CCTV, and if you get rid of licence plate recognition scanners and CCTV then it would be "an anonymous witness" seeing you in the area at the time or "overhearing you discussing" something.
> "Most people don't understand how life destroying a false accusation is"
Citation needed? Because we were forced to read 1984 and To Kill a Mockingbird in school and I'm pretty sure a lot of other people were as well; we've seen cult TV series like The Prisoner and The Fugitive focusing on the lives of the trapped trying to escape "the system". Blockbuster films have been made about the power of "The State" chasing people such as Enemy of the State with Will Smith. Films in the pattern "wrongly accused must fight to clear his name" and "stalwart good guy fights the system gone bad" are practically genres on their own - The Fugitive as a film with Harrison Ford, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, The Shawshank Redemption, and specifically about someone falseley accused by a child, The Hunt with Mads Mikkelsen which is in the IMDB Top 250 films.
Are you also, for example, complaining about the system where doctors and social workers are mandatory reporters if they have any evidence or suspicion of children being abused? That's a "their word against yours" system which pervades the nation, has no oversight, has no objective criteria, no explanaiton of the workings of the brain behind it, relies on humans when we know for certain that there are doctors who make mistakes and errors of judgement and at least some who would look the other way for money.
At least with the tech company CSAM scanners we can potentially have a society wide discussion about how they work in detail, whether that's reasonable, who could and should oversee them and how, what kinds of data cloud companies are obliged to know about their customers and what is reasonable for them to not know, etc. But even in tech circles we can't actually have those discussions, most of the attempts to discuss the details of how it works are drowned out by people who haven't a clue what Apple announced, misunderstand massive parts of it, conflate two or three different systems, don't seem to understand that other tech companies already do this with much less careful design, and cry tyranny and blame China.
Hypothetically, iMessage or any chat system could be built end to end encrypted, any cloud file sync or file storage could be. One end of the spectrum is that they should be. If that's your position then "the system" will probably work around you, that's the "opt out of modern life" position of the "return to the woods" lifestyle. You can't unmake billions of cheap ubiquitous cameras, you can't unopen Pandora's box, and you probably can't stop people emotionally reacting strongly to topics of child protection. If your reaction to that is "not listening, no no no" then it doesn't seem likely to sway "the system" very much at all.
> "CSAM is a dastardly and effective way to establish a totalitarian rule by fear of life in jail, nothing more.
America has effectively incarcerated a lot of people into for-profit prisons without needing this. China has effectively added a lot of population control by rule of fear without needing this. You don't need a high-tech murder-detector to make people fear being thrown in jail for murder.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_Richard#Property_search,_investigation_and_BBC_litigation
That's not really true historically. There's the whole Wild West ethos that still makes its way into pop culture (Star Wars, Breaking Bad, Clint Eastwood, Toy Story 2, Back to the Future Part 2, etc), which glorifies outlaw life and people making it through their wits rather than the support of authorities. There are cities like San Francisco and Las Vegas, basically built on criminals building a local civilization. Prison movies like Shawshank Redemption, the Green Mile, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest have us rooting for the inmates. We keep electing Kennedy clan members, even though the family fortune is built on Scottish distilleries and securities manipulation. American history includes bomb-throwing anarchists, 3 revolutions, massacres by private security forces, hippie communes, the KKK, police forces bombing their own citizens, and plenty of extrajudicial lynchings.
I think that the time period where this is true is the post-WW2 prosperity. There was a large premium on order and social stability here, along with creating institutions that kept (white, suburban, middle-class, male) Americans safe and gave them a stable upwards trajectory. Much of the support for law & order comes out of the demographic that grew up in this time period, with subsequent generations being much more skeptical of law enforcement and sympathetic to criminals. You don't see 20-somethings flying thin-blue-line flags, but you do see them calling to defund the police.
Properly blending it in is a form of art, and a surprise in itself. For example, [spoilers] the rock hammer in The Shawshank Redemption, or more literally, the rifle on the wall in Shaun Of The Dead. A good gun makes you go "oooooh!"
On the other hand, building up readers' expectations with details that turn out to be irrelevant is just deception. See the last season of Game of Thrones, for instance. All those characters that were carefully built over the last seasons get discarded without any explanation.
There's sometimes stuff like that in Tarantino movie, like the outlaw lady in Django.
>I prefer the grittier SV myth stories a-la Ben Horowitz which mention all the times you’re vomiting in your bathroom...
"There were so many depressing nights alone that often I would watch my favorite movie, The Shawshank Redemption, over and over, mindlessly."
Yikes. One of the first articles I see on that subreddit is a long, curated list of "race and gender swaps" in movies, such as the "blackwashing" of casting Morgan Freeman as "Red" in The Shawshank Redemption, with several hundred examples, each lovingly attributed in a changelog. Ethics in gaming indeed!
I'll go further than this, and say that this is practically the only use case I would have for a movie theater.
As-is, movies air in theaters for only a couple months, and then they're gone. Like, what the hell. Every time in recent memory that I've ever suggested to someone that we go see a movie, I've had to find out that the movie was no longer in theaters, or was even already available for streaming. That's basically a non-starter for people with jobs. Not that I haven't also gone to a theater with no particular movie in mind and just watched whatever was playing, but if anything that seems way more niche to me.
The last times I went to the movies were March 2019 and October 2017, and both of those were special cases (the latest installments in a series I was heavily invested in, Fate/stay night, each with a limited one-day release and a long expected wait before it would be available for illegal download via Blu-Ray rip). I haven't been to the movies with any kind of regularity since I was a teenager.
Anyway, point being, I think movie theaters would actually be more compelling for more people if they included a revolving door of well regarded classics, rather than only whatever films happen to be the latest releases. I'm unlikely to wander into a theater with no idea what's playing or whether any of it is worth watching*, but if I could rely on them also having one or two that were known great and/or on my bucket list (Citizen Kane, Fight Club, Matrix trilogy, Dark Knight trilogy, Star Wars, Pulp Fiction, Schindler's List, Shawshank Redemption, etc.) then I might just take the gamble that something playing will be worth the time.
*: I suspect that this is also a generational gap in play. Older folks who primarily watch traditional TV with ads probably have a much better idea of current and upcoming movies.
This reads like an episode from a Shawshank Redemption TV series.
I can get how a place can become home when you feel like your links to other places fade, but a hint that it might be more healthy to move around is that you you're sticking to the "recognizable." It seems like you would always be living in some place from the past (which is an illusion because it never really was what you believed it was and it was always changing) which you feel nostalgic for. At the same time, you're building a new place at your other home. Once the romance with the first place becomes destroyed, then the back-up comes forward. I would bet the back-up could have an even greater hold over you if it's a highly controlled (slower changing) environment such as a military base or a prison.
>Let me get this straight - you think current prison system doesn't incentivize leaving prison enough?
Yes, it doesn't. Many have nothing to look forward to outside of prison. I hate to use a movie as an example, but take a look at Shawshank Redemption. They should leave having gained something, maybe prisons can help inmates find employment for the skills they gained as they reach the end of their sentence.
>Because it creates a whole lot of perverse incentives that simply shouldn't exist around the prison system.
I view nothing as immune to corruption. It's just a matter of better alternatives. Ideally inmates are allocated more to prisons with high rates of success after serving their sentence, which gives prisons an incentive to get their inmates out and with marketable skills.
>taking cash bribes to send people to for-profit prisons
This is not exclusive to for-profit prisons. Prisons that have higher number of inmates can make an argument for a higher allocation of tax dollars.
>Just like schools shouldn't be making profit, just like hospitals shouldn't be making profits - they are utilities for the society, not profit centres
You've said this more than once, but I still don't see why they shouldn't be. All I hear is "they just shouldn't make money". Why? They're just going to play games to get more tax dollars if they're forced not to make any money themselves. Bad schools are allocated more funds, take the LA Unified School District for example -- some of the worse performing schools in the nation, yet some of the best funded public schools! If I'm pessimistic enough, I would even imagine the teachers and administration are not doing their job on purpose.
Sure, I feel like this is an authentic question and since people are misunderstanding me. I'll answer this, but then I'll leave this thread.
I can't speak from the context of someone who has schizophrenia because as far as I know I don't have it. So I'll speak more generally.
"Get busy running" is a mindset. It was a reference to "Get busy living" from Shawshank Redemption (Great movie). I don't know your situation, or how horrible it is to live with schizophrenia. I just hope there are still things you can control in your life. No matter how small or minuscules they seem, focus on that. Focus on the things you can do better.
There is nothing wrong with wanting help or helping other people. However, from the perspective of an individual(who is suffering/disadvantaged) it's a safer bet to focus on things you can control. So, yes, I am putting the ownership of your life, in your own hands. Isn't that empowering? I find it is. Also, it doesn't have to be alone. Maybe, the way to help yourself is you find people that can help you. Allowing people to help and accepting help is big.
No one asked for life. You're just given it. All the beauty and suffering. I said a race, but there is no finish line. You try or you don't. To everyone who is trying to make the world a better place. Thank you. I support you. I want the same thing. I'm trying to help in my own way. You might not agree, but that's okay.
lol I hate how philosophical and cheesy I sound, but that's what I feel.
> Apollo 13 - I think few films come close to capturing how ingenious some people can be
I agree, I also like The Martian and The Shawshank Redemption, which both have similar premise of human ingenuity solving difficult problems.
1) how? I consider The Shawshank redemption romantic movie for women, if you want more realistic portrayal of prison and impact it does on people I recommend German Das Experiment. I served in military which was sort of like prison where you were totally under someone's control and I experienced changes shown in Das Experiment first hand, when your are noob and older dudes bully you and later you turn into them
Just because someone writes a long analysis of camera work, color correction and sound recording in Shawshank Redemption, doesn't mean that they don't believe that there are emotional and philosophical aspects to the movie also. Just that the object of that work was a particular kind of analysis.
Just curious: how is "clodui" pronounced?
At first I read Cloud UI, but after pausing a little I realized it was not Cloud UI.
I mention this because I think names matter for word-of-mouth recommendation. In many interviews, Morgan Freeman would recount that The Shawshank Redemption bombed at the box-office because back in the day word-of-mouth was still dominant way of getting movie recommendations, and people couldn't say or remember the word "Shawshank".
There's a lot of junk. I imagine if you could name books or storyline games, etc...someone could recommend a few films with similar appeal.
Of the movies I like, "Shawshank Redemption" is often cited by others.
I seem to recall from the film the “Shawshank Redemption”:
Red: That tall drink of water with the silver spoon up his ass.
There are movies I want to see multiple times and movies I truly loved but only needed to see once. I would assume block blusters fit the "multiple times" category which is why they make so much money, because people go more than once.
A drama like Shawshank Redemption (a favorite of mine) is not the type of movie I would have paid to go see multiple times in the theatre. Where as I saw The Matrix 6 times in the theatre back when it came out. Every friend who wanted to go see it I went with.
Shawshank Redemption joins Office Space, Fight Club, and It's A Wonderful Life in the ranks of films saved by being shown on TV (whether via cable, DVD, or obsessive rebroadcasts over the holiday season before It's A Wonderful Life got snatched out of the public domain) after having bombed in theaters. They eventually found an audience even if the vagaries of the theater world kept them from making much in box office sensu stricto.
> Just make a good movie. That seems obvious- but good movie does not mean high grossing blockbuster. Shawshank Redemption made less than the Bee Movie.
I'm french, we have one of the weakest offer in the netflix world. It's still way, way more content I could (sanely) consume in my entire life.
I think the problem comes from something else.
Regularly I watch movies with friends: they can't appreciate many good movies anymore. They need fast attention catching stuff. Otherwise they get bored, they loose focus (even watch their phone), and it snowballs since they miss pieces of the movie used to construct it that eventually gives it life.
I see plenty of netflix watchers that do it on the side, while browsing the web, in the background of a social activity, or even watching another movie (!).
You cannot taste "Scott Pilgrim", "The Shawshank redemption", "12 monkeys", "Forest Gump", "Pain and Gain" and "Life is beautiful" if you watch them the way you gulp "Rogue 1", get drunk on "Avengers" or skim "Transformers". Just like you don't eat a burger and osters the same way if you want to enjoy both of them.
In fact, you can't appreciate anything special that way. The problem here is not netflix. It's that the way many people consume things now will always leave them unsatisfied.
Also, there is a quantity effect. You can now watch more than you should, and many do. But it will make you numb.
And to finish on a more positive note, the fact we have watched so many things now also educated us more to what's quality and what is not. It's fair we have now higher expectations.
> Video games weren’t simply an alternate form of media, but the most bankable form of entertainment. 20 years later, and video game sales surpassing movie box office profits is no longer news.
Yet playing old video games is significantly harder than watching old movies. Nintendo sells copies for a few years but then resigns their products to memory. Imagine if The Shawshank Redemption had been abandoned by 2006 as Ocarina of Time had.
Have you seen the movie "Shawshank Redemption"? It makes an interesting point about becoming institutionalized. There was an inmate that was released after ~50 years,he committed suicide because he couldn't adopt to living outside of the prison system.
What they call the loneliness epidemic these days is a bit like that. In fact,I would say loneliness is social imprisonment. For one reason or the other individuals end up lacking the skills needed to develop meaningful social relationships,the opportunities are there but the skills are lacking.
Much like becoming institutionalized, prolonged loneliness becomes a dependency in itself. At first you try everything you can to escape from the prison,then you learn to tolerate it,then you can't function outside of it.
I said all this to make one important point: For most people who experience prolonged loneliness,It's not lack of solutions or opportunities that keeps them lonely.
Not just in the US or the west but for all people,the importance of teaching children proper social skills needs to be communicated much like communicating the importance of good nutrition and hygeine has reduced preventable diseases throught the world.
For adults,I honestly don't know of any solution other than to continue creating opportunities for social interactions. It takes a lot of time,patience and practice to learn to make more friends and socialize once you settle down as a working adult.
I sorta agree. A flawed study says nothing about any conclusions. Neither for nor against.
Is it an interesting question? I think so. But right now I see no evidence that I trust one way or the other. Instead, I see a ton of posturing.
This is akin to picking a movie like Shawshank Redemption and claiming it proves something of human nature. No. It doesn't. I feel it helps me relate to and accept some behaviors. But it proves nothing. As it is fiction.
"Different Seasons" is my favourite collection, and out of the 4 total stories in it, 3 became movies (The Body became Stand By Me, Apt Pupil, and The Shawshank Redemption). Can't recommend this collection highly enough.
I've often wondered if optimization of content for higher ranking or worse yet, engineering content based on what's trending, defeats the very purpose of a search engine: to provide relevant, high quality content. It's like everyone in Hollywood making superhero movies because they make money. We'd never have movies like Walk the line, Shawshank Redemption, life of pi
I couldn't disagree with that at all. I enjoy reading Stephen King books, at times, but there aren't that many of them that have become great films.
Off the top of my head the best King films have been "The Shining", "Misery", "Pet Semetry", "Stand by Me", & "The Shawshank Redemption".
So many more films have been terrible (I've not seen the recent version of "It").
We lost so much behind the scenes history/trivia with the removal of IMDB comments. Some frequent users migrated their comments to www.themoviedb.org but it's nowhere near the amount of what was there from what I can tell. Top movie listed has 1 post, Shawshank Redemption has 11.
I should have clarified: there's no sampling bias. These are incredibly popular movies. Here are some movies not on Netflix streaming that I've wanted to watch this year: Gladiator. Star Wars IV. Shawshank Redemption. The Wizard of Oz. When Harry Met Sally. The Princess Bride. All Star Trek movies. Goodfellas. Lord of the Rings. Gone with the Wind. All Godfather movies. Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Airplane. American Graffiti. The Usual Suspects. All Jim Carrey movies except a bad one (the Grinch) and one I've never heard of (the Number 23). Toy Story. There's Something About Mary. All Austin Powers movies.
The last time I tried searching for a good movie to watch on Netflix streaming, I gave up after 10 minutes. I'd think of one movie after another after another. Nothing was there. All it could suggest was "related titles," as if that's what I would want.
Philosophy/Psychology:
The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind, / Julian Jaynes. Hard to tell if crazy or genius, but well worth a read. Read at 38, wish I had read this at 20 or so. Most of us take our inner voice for granted, but should we really? And what if there was evidence supporting the idea that there's another inner voice, but our modern upbringing suppresses it (but it does reappear with some illnesses, under duress, etc)?
Fiction:
Different Seasons / Stephen King. A collection of four stories, NOT your usuall King horror genre; one of which became the movie "Stand By Me". another became "The Shawshank Redemption", the third became "An Apt Pupil", and the fourth will likely never become a movie. All are excellent. I actually read it at 16, which was the right time, but I'll list it here anyway; if you've seen the movies and liked them, it's worth reading - the stories are (a) much more detailed than the movies, in a good way, and (b) related in small ways that make them into a bigger whole than the individual stories.
Management (software/hardware oriented):
Peopleware / Demarco & Lister - read after I was already managing dozens of people. Wish I had read it long before. This book is basically a list of observations (with some supporting evidence and conclusion) about what works and what doesn't when running a software team. Well written, and insightful.
The mythical man month / Fred Brooks - wish I had read this before first working in a team larger than 2 people. Written ages ago, just as true today; A tour-de-force of the idea that "man month" is a unit of cost, not a unit of productivity.
WOW..This was the book that helped me through a very tough period.
"When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves."
"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way."
This is also the reason why "Shawshank redemption" is my favorite movie. Very similar concepts.
> Is journalism so, so much more expensive to produce than entertainment?
There's a temporal component here that's much more important for journalism than it is for those other two forms of entertainment.
For example, The Shawshank Redemption was made 23 years ago and is still a fantastic movie: People will still pay to watch that movie. In contrast, very few people will pay money to read a news article from even two days ago (let alone 23 years ago).
Sony could never produce another movie again and have a sizable revenue stream just from distribution rights on their existing film catalog. The NYT can't really do that, the demand for old news articles just isn't that great.
The equivalent of a news subscription then isn't really Netflix or Spotify: It's going to the movies, or going to a concert, or buying an album. All of which are notoriously considered to be expensive affairs.
I'd even go so far as to say the NYT would probably absolutely let you read older articles for cheap (a few $ a month), but the demand for that is non-existent so it's silly to even offer.
Even if you just consider the film classics based on his books (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, The Shining), he'll have staying power as people will find his books through the films.
Then there's the cultural impact he's had. Stranger Things was basically a Stephen King novel and even directly name-dropped him.
You can find them in a few anthologies.
Those two were published originally in Different Seasons, which had three of its four novellas adapted into movies. (Stand by Me, The Shawshank Redemption, and Apt Pupil)
And here is 'The Shawshank Redemption' http://www.netflix.com/title/70005379 that loads a lot more, does not recommend any movies and has no watch movie button. Permissions are hard to get right. I guess the developers assumed no one would navigate to movies they don't have permission to watch.
Pursuit of Happyness is definitely one of my favorite.
Another one which I regularly watch is Shawshank Redemption. A choice quote from the movie:
Hope is a good thing, may be the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.
mainstream: American beauty, Pulp fiction, No country for old men, American History X, Saving Private Ryan, Taken, The pianist
classics: Lawrence of Arabia, The Shawshank Redemption, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Terminator I & II
hipster: Knife in the water (Polanski), Come and See (Idi i smotri - best war movie I've seen), Haute Tension (french horror movie), Requiem for a Dream, Trainspotting, City of God, Blue Is the Warmest Color, Goodbye Lenin, The cube
The problem here is that the punishment doesn't fit our collective understanding about the relative immorality of various crimes.
Years ago there was a movie review site called moviecritic.com (a demo site for early collaborative filtering technology). After you rated a movie from 1 to 10, it would show you your rating for several other movies and ask you if you're sure. Half the time you would think "wait a minute, no, I really didn't mean to rate this better than The Shawshank Redemption" and adjust the rating.
A guy robbed a bank. His friend who died understood the risk he was taking; his death is morally "on his own head", even if the "unlucky" robber may have a hand in it. The punishment for this needs to be put next to the punishments for "violent rape", "assault+battery", "willful murder" and adjusted accordingly. Otherwise the whole system feels unfair and arbitrary.
I really enjoyed King's On Writing. I was a huge fan of his fiction as a kid and into young adulthood, and kinda grew out of it. But, I read and then listened to On Writing as an adult, and really enjoyed it both times. King is extremely effective at his craft, whether one enjoys the resulting work or not, and I learned a lot from his process.
I think King (like Asimov and a few others) is proof that being prolific is at least as valuable as being great. If you do something enough, you're far more likely to have lightning strike and result in something like Shawshank Redemption; which is unarguably a beautiful work, in both prose and film form. Most of King's work isn't that good, but for most authors none of their work is that good, because they haven't produced enough to find that piece of brilliance (if they have such a piece of brilliance in them).
I've been working on being more prolific, lately, in all things I do. And being less of a social media junky, which conflicts with being a prolific creator.
Yes, I have seen the film and it is quite good. The story itself and the cinematic execution are definitely above par, I'd give it 4 out of 5 stars for entertainment and quality.
Also, I'm reluctant to call it an underdog story. It's more a "coming of age" story, which is a different thing. There are many, many emotional aspects to the film (family dynamics - multiple generations in a home, absent father or a deported mother) which serve to enhance the overall themes of what happened.
Lastly, it's one of the few films I've seen recently that doesn't rely on CGI to show off important parts of the story. As the credits indicated, there were teams of robotics professionals who built the units used in the film.
I recommend the film and will buy it to have in my house to put on in the background when the mood strikes me. Others that fit that bill for me are Rush, Shawshank Redemption, The Crow, and The Big Lebowski. YMMV.
as you have completed the statue, all the surrounding trees are felled by a freak storm
Oh come on, you're displacing the moral agency for willful infringement of copyright via new technology onto nature - an elaboration of 'everyone else is doing it so why shouldn't I?' The freak storm in your metaphor is actually the aggregated behavior of individuals. You might as well ascribe it to destiny, divine will, the inexorable forward motion of the proletariat, etc. You're essentially invoking a religious entity as the external embodiment of your own consumer desire...
You should be doing something like selling them hot dogs. If that is not sufficient revenue, try something else, like taking up a collection for your next project. But suppose that none of the many possible methods for raising capital work; then, maybe the time of large statues is over, and you’ll have to do something else with your efforts; something for which there is an audience willing to pay.
...and then adopting a hectoring moral tone to berate the producers of statues - the people who make the very thing you like to stare at - as if not one, but all previously obscure statues had suddenly been exposed by this 'freak storm'. You want someone who has invested considerable time, skill, and material in creating a durable commodity to switch their efforts to also supplying you with a perishable one (which is a reflection of your consumer relationship with the film, as a temporary entertainment) in order to recoup their initial investment. Then you suggest they could try begging for money - which is workable in some contexts, but definitely not for anyone producing something new or for the first time; crowdfunding essentially surfs on someone else's prior marketing investment but that's hardly a viable strategy for the first time statue sculptor who's trying to raise revenue without any sort of functioning residual model.
Then you conclude by suggesting that maybe the era of large statues is over, and they have no value. this is obviously false, because your metaphor depends upon people voluntarily investing their time in looking at said statues. Given the opportunity cost of that time at minimum wage, it's clear that the aggregate value of the time spent on statue-gazing adds up to a significant sum; for each of the many viewers - and you're the one who posited a large crowd of them - the utility of gazing upon the artwork clearly exceeds the marginal utility of more economically productive activity for the gazer. So you're saying that producers of these highly attractive statues are entitled to the attention of the viewers (insofar as they are willing to spend time gazing upon the artwork) but not one cent of positive expenditure over and above that.
The very idea of intellectual “property” is extremely suspect in these days of zero-cost copying. “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”
But ideas are not copyrightable; expressions of them are. And by focusing on the extremely low marginal cost of copying, you are completely ignoring the enormous fixed cost of production. Films are a particular pain point because while they are quickly consumed (in the space of a few hours) they require enormous amount of time to produce (often measured in years) and a great deal of money.
So if we're talking about, say, The Matrix, we can share the idea cheaply enough: 'hey, have you ever considered that our actions, social roles, and our very identities are actually illusions fed to us by an inhuman mechanism which perpetuates itself by extraction of energy from our physical bodies? That our lives are actually no more meaningful than those of fish in an aquarium or battery hens in an egg farm, notwithstanding the apparent uniqueness of our subjective experience? Here, check out authors like Marx and Baudrillard and imagine what they would have made of the computer age.' Certainly, sharing of intellectual ideas has been a foundation of progress since ancient times.
But actual movie known as The Matrix took about 5 years and $60 million to produce. Now of course everyone who invested in the film has made their money back in that case, but that's not relevant unless you adhere to an economic philosophy of price control and a planned distribution of wealth. Why should the people who invested the substantial labor and capital required to create such an elaborate work not enjoy a property interest in it? If you do think it's because they have already recovered their investment and then some, doesn't that mean that Mark Zuckerberg and everyone else with a significant stake in Facebook should have their holdings liquidated up to some substantial cash amount, and the firm and its codebase should all be open-sourced.
And what of films that have not yet become profitable, notwithstanding their significant cultural quality? Just the other day we had a longish thread about The Shawshank Redemption, based on an article that observed it did quite poorly at release and only found an ensuring audience after it entered the secondary and tertiary distribution markets (home video and TV, in a nutshell). If that film were released today, it might still find an audience via file-sharing, but not the revenue to recoup its production and launch costs, meaning no residual income for the actors, director, or producers. Nor would it serve its ongoing function of cross-subsidizing other films of limited commercial success during their releases, some of which in turn may not yet have found their own audience.
Shawshank Redemption is one of the most "American" of all movies, the movie Frank Capra allways wanted to make but never did.
When I first saw this movie, in theaters, in 1995 I found it highly enjoyable, with a narrative very well built, but certainly not a classic. It is very conventional and I didn't see anything revealing or innovative about it.
Now I understand that its virtues are exactly its conventionalism. Its message is the same belief that drags people to churches and self help books: "preserve and you will prevail". The storytelling is perfect: a slow and steady stream of setbacks until a liberating end. It has a Morgan Freeman voice over, what can be more reassuring than this? That voice is so reliable that the man played the role God more than one time and Nelson Mandela.
Whenever you're unsure, confused and insecure about what you think or believe "Shawshank Redemption" is the most reassuring and comforting of all movies. Not even Frank Capra could do better.
>Maybe it's the "star rating" system that's broken.
While less so for product reviews, I feel like restaurant/hotel reviews are more like movie reviews. Just like Battlefield Earth, there are some bad restaurants that universally will get panned. And there are some just wonderful establishments everyone will love, just like Shawshank Redemption.
But for everything in between, it's a matter of taste, which is why Netflix tries to infer your tastes and predict a star rating for _you_ rather than gives you an aggregate rating.
Someone might give a dive bar a one-star review because it's smoky, they only accept cash, and they only sell Bud Light. However that same person might give a 5-star review to a craft beer bar that refuses to sell mass market lagers.
On the flipside, someone might give the dive 5 stars because the drinks are cheap and it's one of the last places in town where they can go out and still light up. And they might give the fancy bar one star for being too pretentious.
Neither opinion is wrong, people just like different things. Glomming this all into an average star rating just seems to give me useless information.
Reading this article reminded me of the scenes from the film, Shawshank redemption. You know, where Brooks got released, but was institutionalised for so long that he couldn't cope with the outside world and commits suicide? And which was then used as a suspense moment when Red also reaches for the chair and goes to the same beam?
EDIT: Not to mention, how Red narrates how hard it was for him to go on loo breaks without asking for permission :(
The IMDB example in the Entertainment section is showing a pretty weird result for "Shawshank Redemption". Instead of the well known movie, the highlighted result is an episode of a quite obscure TV series ("Dating a Puppet").
-- Edit: I've just noticed the query goes straight to imdbapi.com, which returns the same results when searching for "Shawshank Redemption", without the "The" prefix. Which is still a bit weird, but has nothing to do with DDG.
If we're talking single data points, The Shawshank Redemption is a good movie, but it's not the best of all time (as rated by IMDB), and I've rarely heard people talk about it in any context. Pretty much all the other members of the top 20 get attention in the public mindspace, frequently referred to outside of conversations on film.
a. We seem to have pretty bad (or at least predictable) taste in movies.
b. The list is missing the two most important movies to HN: The Shawshank Redemption, which is about how you're never going to close funding until you give up on ever closing funding, and Ghostbusters, the greatest startup movie of all time.
What a great way to trivialize a classic film. "It's like 'Shawshank Redemption', except at the end people can reserve a table at a restaurant without calling ahead."
This actually supports my theory that the 90s were the greatest decade in popular culture history. It jibes so well with the (arguable) Golden Age of Rap/Hip-Hop music as well as the Seattle Grunge and Hard Rock renaissance.
Rap in the 90s had Biggie, Tupac, Wu-Tang, NWA, Nas, Outkast, De La Soul, Snoop Dogg, Jay-Z and a Tribe Called Quest.
Rock in the 90s had Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Radiohead, the Smashing Pumpkins, Oasis, Weezer, Green Day, Nine Inch Nails, and Rage Against the Machine.
It also had some of the greatest movies of all time in the 90s as well: Goodfellas, Terminator 2, Trainspotting, Fight Club, the Matrix, Shawshank Redemption, Fargo, the Big Lebowski, Boogie Nights, Schindler's List, Rushmore, and Pulp Fiction.
Now, I may be looking through with rose-tinted glasses (and having my adolescence back then, how could I not?), but let's just make it official, and not only with just cartoons. It's almost empirical that the 90s were the greatest decade of American Popular Culture.
Firstly, thank you for your humanity.
There's a guy on Quora named Michael Santos that spent 25 years in prison for drug dealing. He was released last August. While incarcerated, he got his degree, got married, and wrote a book. He has written extensively on the prison experience, and how one can come out on top. He's also quite willing to answer any questions:
http://www.quora.com/Michael-Santos-4
You may have to sign up to Quora to read his answers, but it's totally worth it, if just for his perspectives alone.
Once again, I salute you for what you're doing. I don't know if you've seen the movie 'The Shawshank Redemption', but there's something very "Andy Dufresne" about what you're doing. Through your humanity, you're giving this man dignity. Salaam.
Honestly, this is the first time I've ever heard the words "godawful" and "Shawshank Redemption" in one sentence. We got ourselves a movie hipster, here.
I agree with these definitions. For some reason, most of the films I really like to watch over and over again are actually not the films I'd say are the highest in quality.
e.g. I'd consider The Shawshank Redemption to be a high quality movie, but I have no particular desire to watch it again (even though I enjoyed it). On the other hand I can't watch enough of Big Trouble in Little China even if it's a cheesy movie.
Some of my favorites though have both qualities, e.g. Blade Runner.
Marketing and distribution - this is an interesting piece. It's profit AND loss for the studio - they sell ads (or the theatre sells ads), and buy ads. It's like all the websites trying to make money on google ads, advertising on ... google ads.
You can bet that really stupid decisions are made here, because they can't save money without losing a revenue stream, or pissing off theatres.
And Box Office sales are really important, because they are the first figure to be released. If 10 million people watch the movie, it's a good movie, so the DVD shops it (doing free advertising for you), and the TV Channels will pay more (even if everyone thought it was awful). They want to "anchor" the movie as being a money maker, by maximizing Box Office sales.
If you shoot a brilliant movie, like The Shawshank Redemption and nobody goes to see it, then the DVD shops won't push it. This means you'll only sell copies by word of mouth, by which stage the price has gone down.
Oh get over trying to shame me for "deciding I know what your ethics are" (I did no such thing and wouldn't know where to start). I've never even seen Gilligan's Island, I didn't know it was ropey quality, only that the parent had dismissed it and the entire industry because he thought it lowbrow.
Funded by advertising is a bit different it can still be run like a traditional business, but where is the amateur TV as good as BBC Frozen Planet, or Sherlock, Wallander or QI? And they're just people talking in scenic locations - or in a big room, nothing requiring months of filming and hundreds of people.
Where are the part time charity funded films like Lord of the Rings or The Shawshank Redemption? The Shining? 2001? Kill Bill?
Amateur work can be good, but mostly it's worse than professional work that's the informal definition of the difference between amateur and professional. The formal one being "profession: paid work".
> video game violence develop a shitty moral compass.
You know, I think it depends on the message, not the medium. Books as a whole are an unreliable source of training, but there are some that we take seriously. I think great literature is better training than experience, as it reflects great insight.
You could say the same thing about movies, to a lesser degree. Some are 007, and some are Shawshank Redemption. I've heard of college level ethics courses being taught by watching and discussing heavy movies, and I don't think that's inappropriate.
Gaming as a genre is pretty young; it's only just beginning to cross the threshold of serious art. I think it has the potential to be serious literature as well; the single player mode of Starcraft 2, for example, struck me as though it was attempting to actually grapple with serious issues related to warfare -- and unique to games, it did so by asking the player to make serious choices. I won't say it crossed the threshold of great literature, but I will say it was heading that way.
Good catch. The Godfather (imdb: 2, 3); Shawshank Redemption (imdb: 1); The dark knight (imdb: 1) are not available on instant watch. The blog post says "All the IMDB 250 that are available on Netflix Instant.", not "IMDb Top 250 available on Netflix Instant" as the HN post (which I interpreted as all 250 movies).
Polarization is a measure of the assertiveness of an artist.. the degree to which they have executed an opinionated concept for a specific audience.
A niche film should be as highly opinionated as possible, with the objective of both catering to your chosen market and excluding all others intentionally.
For example, the musical act Prodigy do not do TV performances. This is a mainstream marketing method that does not appeal to their audience. By avoiding it, they increase their appeal to their true fans, while ignoring uninterested listeners. Likewise, the singer Adele does not perform at music festivals for the same reason.
The ideal niche product would repel exactly half the critics and attract the other half. This would create a core of hardcore evangelists, a bigger group of fans, a big group of uninterested bystanders and a small group of haters. The haters and bystanders can mostly be ignored, making marketing super-efficient.
Lack of polarization is a measure of beauty and popularity. Beauty is a measure of average-ness and normality. The most beautiful person in a given society is the one that looks the most an average of all the people. The most popular movie is the one that everyone can relate to.. the most profoundly average.
Case in point.. the Shawshank Redemption. This is a movie that is consistently voted one of the best ever made, but it's highly rated because of its familiarity. It's a near flawless execution of common mythologies that everyone can relate to: fall from grace, redemption, justice, freedom and so on.
Toy Story is another example. Pixar's entire methodology is to distill the world's archetypes and mythologies down into the "perfect" movie with every "i" dotted and every "t" crossed. The result is profoundly familiar, yet kept fresh with just enough plot twists and humour to keep it interesting.
Niche movies are just popular movies for specific groups instead of a general audience. Polarization is a measure of how effectively they achieved the goal.
One of my favorite movies that I watch quite often and belongs in that category is "The Shawshank Redemption" from 1994. Persist in adverse environments, make lifetime friends, resist to cruel authorities, develop side projects ;), use your skills in a good and moral way.
"Small Time Crooks" 2000 by Woody Allen. A movie about naive accidental lovable millionaires. Funny and sometimes bitter.
Touching the Void - I love this legendary true story of two mountaineers' first ascent of a peak in the Andes for the survival aspect of it. Grit, determination, and patience are three qualities I truly admire. It is a must watch even if mountaineering/climbing doesn't interest you.
Apollo 13 - for how ingenuity, teamwork, and a calm head can help you overcome the most challenging of problems. I wish I was born in that era and had the opportunity of working among that group of people. The pursuit of a cause greater than oneself.
Shawshank Redemption - much has been said about this movie.
Forrest Gump - odd choice I know, but it's a remarkable story of serendipity. We often fail to realize just how much of life is purely a matter of chance.
Quality, again, doesn't signal value to the consumer.
The three Evil Dead films have grossed ~38 mil profit (IIRC). The first film cost $375,000 to make, but pulled in ~2.5 mil on its initial release and has now made considerably more, about $30 mil by last figures (2006). Essentially it made ~80 times its budget, compared to the ~10 times Titanic has made.
Consider that The Shawshank Redemption barely made over double its budget, but is the #1 IMDB movie with nearly half-a-million votes. Titanic, by comparison, doesn't even appear on the top 250 by a considerable margin (lowest rated is 8.0, Titanic has a 7.3, the bottom 51 movies are all 8.0, assuming the same trend of ~50 titles per .1 (doubtful) it wouldn't even hit the top 500).
If the producers knew Shawshank would be the best made movie ever, they would undoubtedly have charge more for admission than Titanic, which would likely have made it tank.
You bring up some good points (although a couple actual paragraphs would have been easier to read ;), but I have to personally disagree on the replay value of good movies. I own many movies that I have watched countless times; I recently had to buy Fight Club again because we watch it a few times a week and the DVD was just worn out. There are numerous other amazing films that I can't get enough of as well. I have no idea how many times I've watched The Shawshank Redemption, as another example. I own movies like Transformers not because they're perfect filmmaking, but because I like to relive my younger years sometimes.
In general I agree that music has far greater replay value. I think that's partially because it's something that can be enjoyed basically any time, anywhere. I can't think of the last time I worked in silence for more than a few minutes at a time. That being said, I do my best to "pay tribute" to quality media by purchasing it. I'm sure I own quite a few movies I haven't seen in years, but I bought them because they struck me as worth paying for.
Finally, I think at this stage piracy (well, quality piracy at least) is still something that Joe Public isn't savvy enough to pick up. By the time the people who pay to consume all the horrible media out there (like, 90% of the total), I would hope a sane and intelligent response to the piracy issue will have found its way to "Big Entertainment."
Sorry for the poison of my comment, but it is annoying not to be able to, at the least, hide articles.
Your idea, and the way the ranking engine currently works, leads to the problem they're having on IMDB where people are strategically rating a movie (Shawshank Redemption) to punish another movie (The Godfather).
I don't want to be forced to up-vote other stories I don't particularly care for in order to punish one story. It feels like voting in a US or Canadian election, where you vote for the other party to punish the current party. But what if the other parties are just as bad as the current one? What if they're worse but you still want a way to punish the current party?