Hacker CinemaTom Cruise
Tom Cruise
2024 · Film · short · 1 min
Directed by Marianne Pelletier
This film engraving project is an experimental artistic exploration based on images taken from the opening credits of a film starring Tom Cruise. It integrates several creative techniques such as film etching, drawing, cutting and the use of bleach to transform and recontextualize the source material.
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9 comments on Hacker News
True, asinine was too strong a critique. I am just not in favor of emotional decision making where it can be helped. I can despise Tom Cruise as a person while still enjoying many of his movies. I know that some can't do that. I have always detached the creators from the art and that makes AI slot right in for me.
It's not the "allowed looks" as much as the fact that they must be all super-fit and super-beautiful, which inevitably makes it look all samey. The young Al Pacino or Dustin Hoffmann wouldn't get roles today, because they're not conventionally attractive. Tom Cruise is particularly guilty of overcasting beautiful people in his recent movies, but he's hardly the only one doing that.
The last leading man that I can remember with non-conventional looks, is Vin Diesel - and he got there by muscling (eh) his way in, not by acting.
What's interesting to me is how Americans don't bat an eye on all the violence exposed in movies, music and games, but then become prudish when it comes to sex. And these are the traits of the exported American culture.
In my European country it is perfectly normal to have pictures of your children naked. It's also OK for them to see a nude body now and then, like at the beach (and yes I am aware that I'm not talking about all of Europe, some countries ban nudity in public). But do that in the US and you risk being labeled as a pedophile.
I love how freedom of speech is protected by the US constitution, certainly a model to follow for the rest of us, however banning adult content while allowing violence, white nationalism and xenophobia is a huge double standard that gets exported to the rest of the world too.
So as a citizen of an EU country that's not prudish about sex, why do I have to suffer from the censorship of US companies?
And honestly, do you like it when you see actors like Tom Cruise not kissing the girl in his movies, possibly because it needs to be played in China?
What about the second part of the line you quoted? What do you think about actor selection?
One of my favorite things is seeing a movie with an actor that I'm not familiar with and being blown away by their performance. Some big actors (like Tom Cruise) I never quite forget that I'm watching Tom Cruise act and that takes away something from the experience.
Gary Oldman is a counter example. He's so good that I often don't notice him.
> Rather than work hard only to see most of his earnings confiscated, he'd make just a few movies and then enjoy those profits instead of spending time on diminishing returns.
Sounds good to me. More actors, more variety. Maybe we wouldn't see every single sci-fi/action movie star Tom Cruise.
Sam Altman, of Y Combinator, said that, in the small world of Silicon Valley, the very idea of talent agents presents a “negative-selection problem”: “The actual 10x engineers don’t need or want an agent; people quickly discover they’re great, and they end up picking where (and especially with whom) they want to work. In my limited experience, the engineers that get agents are bad.”
That may be true now, but programming has a huge reputation management component. Negotiation isn't hard to learn, but it's always better to have an advocate than to negotiate for yourself (note: lawyers retain other lawyers) and detecting trends in technologies and finding work that helps a programmer's career is a full-time job in its own right.
By many measures, the star system didn’t work that well for Hollywood: it made moviemaking more expensive, which made studios more risk-averse, which led to inferior creative projects. And programmers are not movie stars—not yet, anyway. “Movie stars have their own brands,” McKinnon, the Okta C.E.O., said. “People will go to see a movie just because it has Tom Cruise in it. But programmers don’t really have that. No one’s going to pay for a product just because James Gosling built it.” (Gosling is one of the inventors of Java.) “Well, geeks like me will. But most people won’t. They pay for a service.”
In Hollywood and software both, value delivered is multiplicative rather than additive. A good actor in the lead role might add 10% to revenue. If it's going to be a $5 million film, that's only $500,000. If it's going to be a $250 million film, that's huge: now we're talking about $25 million. Of course, many of these multiplicative variables are latent and unknown until the thing's actually released.
Because of this, no one knows what "the base" is, or who contributed what, and there's wide room for negotiation.
I'm 6'2", have a few friends who are short, in the 5'5"-5'8" range, and have talked about this with pretty much all the women I'm friends with. Yes, this is true, you're right. It is almost certain to be a genetic thing. Everybody here saying they know some short guy who gets lots of girls or is a short guy and is happily married, well, this is not actually what the parent is saying. He's just saying there's a huge disavantage in being short. He's right. Try this mental test the next time you see a very short, slim, but quite good looking guy. Now imagine him in a 6'3" build. It to men who do this mentally, it drastically changes the appeal this guy has. This was told to me by a woman friend, and it happens everytime I think about it. Also, the Tom Cruise example is a bad one. Women see him in movies, where you can't tell their height. If you're successful, smart, a good person (or much more important: not a jerk), you can find a good person and have a relationship, a meaningful, lasting one, with her. But if you base your romantic success in how easily you get dates/get laid compared to taller guys, then you'll probably end up frustrated.
Hollywood stars have insane schedules when they're on a project. Those projects have deadlines, and when inevitable problems arise, they're not often fixed by pushing studio deadlines back and telling everyone to go home at 5pm or 6pm or 8pm, they're fixed by shooting into the night and starting earlier in the morning.
How do you think night scenes are filmed? During the day, in a building, with green screen and CGI? They have to film during much of the night. Even if a top star (like Tom Cruise or Christian Bale) can refuse to work more than 10 or 12 hours a day (I don't know whether even they set hours like that), they might be working one day and then the next day all night. That's not a family-friendly schedule.
Shooting on location is like a multi-week or even multi-month business trip.
"Without a lot of brand advertising"? How many ads do you think Tom Cruise buys to promote his personal "brand"? I think the relevant thing is the reputation, not the advertising that might or might not create a better reputation. The reputation is why Tom Cruise makes 50 000× as much as the actor in the community-theater play down the street from you. (Assuming they're even getting paid.)
When a producer is negotiating a contract with Tom Cruise, I don't think it enters his mind how much unknown actors in community theater make. I think he's thinking about how many people bought tickets to see the last Tom Cruise movie and his estimate of how many of them went because of Tom Cruise.
I don't know enough about hairdressers to know whether the same thing applies to them. It does apply to fashion designers, and in some cases it seems to apply to programmers.