Hacker Cinema
The Wicker Man
1973 · Film · 93 min
Directed by Robin Hardy
Police sergeant Neil Howie is called to an island village in search of a missing girl whom the locals claim never existed. The investigation is further complicated as Howie’s religious views clash with those of the island’s residents.
4 positive1 negative7 neutralfrom 12 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
12 comments on Hacker News
> But producing that digital good costs time and money (anyone on HN care to disagree?)
Not disagree, but it is more nuanced than this I think. I spend a fair amount of money going to movie theaters, usually independent movie theaters but sometimes big ones, to see new releases. As I understand it, the production and funding model relies almost entirely on the box office numbers. I think when dealing with older releases, the waters are much murkier.
I end up seeing new things in person and paying a huge premium to do so. I won't pretend I do it for moral reasons or even strictly to support the creators (although I do it in part to support the independent theater itself). It does keep me from feeling bad for also running a media server, on which maybe 1% of the content is newer than 5 years old, though.
I have almost never bought a physical copy of a movie -- and in my mind the IP holders are usually terrible curators of their own content. Physical media is provided in a horribly limited and anti-consumer format, tied to ephemeral standards and technology and often embedded with advertisements and few subtitle options. Digital products are, somehow, worse. Tied to a walled garden, with no true 'ownership', sometimes platforms like Amazon video will even make their own edits to movies, removing crucial parts for no apparent reason (the wicker man, avatar) and without marking it as abridged. They often make decisions that scream 'cash grab' (i.e. years ago when TNG came on netflix, I went to stream it and was shocked at the potato quality. Later re-releases were released in an un-cropped widescreen that included things like boom mikes because of the original intended aspect ratio of the show.) DRM is a nightmare. The product I want -- a file containing the media and only the media, which I can view however I want without logging into anybody's servers -- does not exist. And if it did exist, well, I do also take issue with paying full price for a file of a 40 year old movie, for example. I know there are costs associated with remasters, etc, but most of these are not remasters (and those costs are also much much lower than outright movie production).
A notable exception is outfits like Vinagar Syndrome, who as a labor of love dig up lost media and often re-cut or remaster / distribute it, and due to the low scale and lack of demand likely do not make much if any profit off it. I often do see showings of Vinegar Syndrome releases at my indie theater though or rent them from the one remaining video rental place (I'm unsure whether or not that benefits the production company).
It probably gets more hairy for people who watch a lot of new serialized media, which I do not.
I kind of wish people would think critically about the gradient of potential consumption habits when making their media choices rather than separating into pro / anti piracy stances, because it's an interesting and multi-faceted topic with a lot of considerations to be made.
I punched in 1972 and there were some fantastic movies that year (The Godfather, Deliverance, Cabaret, Solaris, Jeremiah Johnson, Aguirre - the Wrath of God, The Last House on the Left, Silent Running, The Heartbreak Kid, Fat City, etc.).
Also tried 1973 — same (The Day of the Jackal, Soylent Green, Westworld, The Wicker Man, Papillon, American Graffiti, The Sting, Serpico, Mean Streets, High Plains Drifter, Don't Look Now, Badlands, The Long Goodbye, Jesus Christ Superstar, The Three Musketeers, Fantastic Planet, etc.).
I think they simply made better movies decades ago.
Maybe you can refresh my memory? The ark in raiders was a macguffin. The only overtly religious character I remember was the imam. If you mean temple of doom with the Kali cult, that's closer except for one important detail. Other movies are careful to mentally distance depictions by having cults be underground or otherwise abnormal and isolated. Think midsommar, wicker man, etc.
The narrative of apocalypto is literally the mainstream Maya priests kidnapping and torturing people to sacrifice them before the protagonist is saved by the distraction of Spaniards arriving. I would consider the same thing with Christianity swapped a bit distasteful as well, but I can't think of any movies like that. Handmaid's tale would count, but that's a deliberate critique rather than unintentional stereotyping.
I thought it was pretty clearly inspired by the film "The Wicker Man": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wicker_Man
It's now very fashionable to hate Elon Musk. I knew this would happen back when it was fashionable to worship him and compare him to a comic book superhero. It's the natural progression, like a cultural version of the film The Wicker Man.
I was thinking "Wicker Man"
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0070917/
Ah this is great: The *police in Wicker Man is played by the same actor as the old neighbourhood watch guy in Hot Fuzz!
Edit: He would have been about 42 at the time of filming Wicker Man
I'm no gwern, but here's how I do discovery. To find a page on the internet, you need to hand a search engine something that can be reasonably expected to be on that page. So if you want to find an interesting film blog, you should not use that as a search term, because you'll find lists of blogs, not the blogs themselves. Rather, you should probably use the titles of interesting movies.
There are many ways you could seed that search, but as totally-not-a-movie-buff I decided to check IMDb's list of lowest rated movies [1] and chose a title further down the list (The Wicker Man), on the theory that only dedicated people would be talking about movies that are bad, but not bad enough to be the worst. Searching for blogs (as identified by inurl:blog) mentioning "The Wicker Man" [2] does turn up a few promising results, like [3].
[1] https://m.imdb.com/chart/bottom
[2] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=inurl%3Ablog+%22The+Wicker+Man%22
[3] https://blog.vrv.co/kaiser/4826/the-wicker-man-was-almost-lost-to-history/
Hot Fuzz, U-Turn, Dogville (others already mentioned them).
Deliverance (of course)
The Lottery ( https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116924/ tv movie, based on a great short story)
The Wicker Man
Twin Peaks
Cold in July
The Animatrix. The best reason to watch the live action trilogy is to be sufficiently informed to watch this. It delves far deeper into the philosophy and psychedelia of technology than the live action films. And it's made and voiced by the same people.
Big Fish. How will you live if you know the exact moment you're going to die?
The Wicker Man. Weird. Christopher Lee apparently said it was his best work?
Waking Life.
The Big Lebowski.
A Serious Man
O Brother Where Art Thou.
Lee also has nice things to say about his performance as Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man, which I recommend you watch back to back, later movie first, with the Nicholas Cage remake they're in my eyes oh god the bees. Both are very easy to stream online.
The original Wicker Man actually holds up surprisingly well; I'm surprised it got made when it did.
Edward Woodward's performance in it is so bad that it elevates Lee, so it's a pretty good showcase for non-Saruman non-Dracula Lee.
I laughed hard at this one! The Hamptons is basically a vacation destination in eastern New York state for very very wealthy people, who don't want any riff-raff cluttering up their picturesque vacation views. 'The Wicker Man' is a film (+ a remake) about a police officer who goes to investigate a crime in a remote idyll where everyone knows everyone else and runs into...problems. Translation: let's ensure that the 'wrong' people stay away.
Well the Congressional Cinema Club could put on some special showings and ask for sponsorship
- Car Manufacturers Lobby: Bullit
- Anti Car Lobby: Duel
- Trans-Atlantic Airlines Lobby : Titanic
- Construction Lobby: Bridge over the River Kwai
- Elon Musk : Iron Man 1 or 3 (but not 2)
- The Hamptons Tourist Board: The wicker man
- The Banjo Players association of America: Deliverance
- Tesla Car Showrooms: Death of a salesman
- Climate Change Deniers Lobby: Some Like It Hot
- Liberal Atheists for a kinder America: Any Harry Potter