Hacker Cinema
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
2017 · Film · 115 min
Directed by Martin McDonagh
After seven months have passed without a culprit in her daughter's murder case, Mildred Hayes makes a bold move, painting three signs leading into her town with a controversial message directed at Bill Willoughby, the town's revered chief of police. When his second-in-command Officer Jason Dixon, an immature mother's boy with a penchant for violence, gets involved, the battle between Mildred and Ebbing's law enforcement is only exacerbated.
4 positive5 neutralfrom 9 commenters
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9 comments on Hacker News
I mean, there are superhero films, and then there are Martin McDonagh films like In Bruges (2008), Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017), and The Banshees of Inisherin (2022). Or a movie like Tár (2022).
I wonder if it's less a function of 1980 vs 2020, and more a function of genre, and which genres have been more popular at the cinema in which decade. Or which genres you personally happen to be aware of or watching.
I mean, it's not like the original Star Wars (1977) was slow-paced and thoughtful.
Plagiarism done for profiting from book sales is a symptom of copyright in this form (punishment over monetary loss, not lack of attribution).
Having consumers of the artworks (if they aren't commissioned) donate to the author along with severe enforcement of attribution requirements (especially bans on claiming other's work as one's own, so the donations wouldn't go to the plagiarizer), doesn't require bans on copying/reproduction.
Yes, it would change what art gets the funding: e.g. less Marvel Avengers (dominated by casual consumers), more art house cinema (say, something like "Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri"). Less autotune'd popstars, more "Nirvana"/"Taylor Swift"/"Marina and the Diamonds".
But in the realm of the "useful arts ", we're talking more about commissioned works, be it the way an architect is commissioned by a bank that needs a new HQ, or be it the way a fan base causes so many sales of the new Final Fantasy that the creators make a sequel (the commissioning tactic would be one exhibited by, for example, "Dropkick on My Devil! X" (the third season of a splatter (in the way Doom is) comedy anime, which reached its crowdfunding goal in 33 hours)).
I strongly believe that for useful arts, like, say, engineering reference books and ISO standard documents, crowdfunding could sufficiently cover cost of creation, using for example selling of voting power in the ISO standard creation process for individual standards as the incentive to coax industry into paying up-front instead of afterwards for their paper/digital copies. Or have that industry's guild/association sponsor the standard writing.
After all, IETF RFCs prove that standards don't need to be paywalled to continuously be created.
Since you mentioned Cars, there's an interesting thing I noticed when Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was in theatres. At that time, when I try to search the movie on IMDb, typing "three" (and I have to emphasize that I typed "three" not "3"), IMDb's first search suggestion was "Cars 3" instead of that Oscar winning movie that was playing im theatres at the time. I'm pretty convinced that Disney payed IMDb for that placement or something like that.
Plenty of recent movies do that. Sorting by release date: The Father, Joker, Parasite, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Hacksaw Ridge, Room, Gone Girl, Whiplash, Prisoners, 12 Years a Slave, Django Unchained.
* https://www.imdb.com/chart/top/?sort=us,desc
And that's just going back ten years.
Movies: - 12 angry men - Whiplash - Prestige - American Beauty - The Thing - V for Vendetta - The Grand Budapest Hotel - Gone Girl - Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - Parasite - ... Tarantino or Scorsese movies
Anime: - Howl's Moving Castle - Spirited Away
Not a movie but both great series: - Love, Death & Robots - Black Mirror
There's an excellent movie along the same lines, called 'Three billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri'
I would like to see a comparison between Thor: Ragnarok, Black Panther and Avenger: Infinity War that supports your hypothesis (the three most recent films besides the very recently released Ant Man and the Wasp).
I'm not arguing the Marvel movies are the perfect movies or that they should displace and divert funding from other movies like say Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Dunkirk, or The Big Sick, and maybe 3 of them per year is a bit too much, but c'mon, "sterile as still packaged surgeon gloves"? Marvel's Overhyperbolic Universe?
As someone who doesn't like the Marvel movies and is losing interest in Star Wars it feels like the are fewer movies for me to enjoy in the cinema than there was even just a year ago. There were times my wife and I went to the cinema twice on one weekend because there was so much stuff we wanted to see. This year we've watched Isle of Dogs. Before that was Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri which was in December. Last summer we had Dunkirk, Babydriver and shortly after the new Blade Runner. This year everything seems dominated by Marvel and SatWars. Even upcoming movies on IMDb look bleak to me.
I dunno, I think parts of their coverage would seem to demonstrate otherwise.
For instance, consider their Oscars article:
https://www.theknifemedia.com/world-news/how-did-the-oscars-coverage-rate-hint-it-was-biased/
Scroll all the way to the bottom to find their attempt at an "unbiased" article ("the raw data"). Now, maybe Oscars reporting is a special case and you can't do this for other kinds of articles, but isn't it worth a try?
Full article follows:
> The 90th Oscars awards ceremony airs to an estimated 26.5M viewers
> Jimmy Kimmel hosted the 90th Academy Awards ceremony on Sunday night. The “Oscars,” or Academy Awards of Merit, are given annually to “honor outstanding artistic and scientific achievements in theatrically released feature-length motion pictures,” according to the awards’ website.
> This year’s show was aired live from 8 to 11 p.m. eastern on ABC, to an estimated audience of 26.5 million viewers. It is the lowest number since the 1990s when the viewership data began being collected. The 2017 awards had 32.9 million viewers.
> Besides speaking about the nominated films and filmmaking, some presenters and award recipients spoke about other topics. While hosting, Kimmel made jokes about Fox News, President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.
> Best actress award winner Frances McDormand spoke about “inclusion riders,” a stipulation that actors can put in their contracts to ensure gender and ethnic diversity among cast and crew members of film projects that they work on. Presenters Kumail Nanjiani and Lupita Nyong’o spoke in support of “Dreamers,” referring to recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. Award winner Kristen Anderson-Lopez spoke about diversity and gender representation in the songwriter category.
> Award winners include:
> Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape of Water” won for both Best Picture and Best Director. > Frances McDormand earned Best Actress for her role in “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.” > Gary Oldman won for Best Actor for his role in “Darkest Hour.” > Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez received the Best Original Song award for the track “Remember Me” in “Coco.” > Alexandre Desplat won Best Original Score for “The Shape of Water.”
> Sources: Breitbart, Fox News, The New York Times, The Oscars
One thing in there that has a tiny whiff of bias is mentioning the huge drop in viewership. IF there is some more favorable way of estimating the event's impact or importance, then including that bit would count in their framework as "slant". Did I miss anything else?