Hacker Cinema
Top Gun
1986 · Film · 110 min
Part of Top Gun Collection
Directed by Tony Scott
For Lieutenant Pete 'Maverick' Mitchell and his friend and co-pilot Nick 'Goose' Bradshaw, being accepted into an elite training school for fighter pilots is a dream come true. But a tragedy, as well as personal demons, will threaten Pete's dreams of becoming an ace pilot.
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162 comments on Hacker News
I agree PHM was great (and I loved the book before the movie). But as a VFX person, please be careful not to buy into the currently popular studio PR line: "it's all real, almost no CGI". Media and influencers love this line and often unknowingly muddle the studio's very carefully crafted press release wording into outright lies by paraphrasing and making assumptions. The problem is these aren't just white lies, they deprive some very talented VFX artists from getting credit for amazing work.
PHM did use real sets (like most movies) and they were able to avoid using green screen for some of the ship exteriors but the backgrounds were still digitally replaced with CGI rendered elements, they just didn't use green screen to pull the matte. Instead they used a black backdrop with careful lighting and some hand rotoscoping to extract the digital mattes. Doing it this way had the advantage of not needing to digitally remove green spill on reflective surfaces by hand and it saved money over doing a StageCraft volume at that size. Done well, green screen would have produced the exact same shot but it would have cost more and taken longer.
About the puppet: A real Rocky puppet was indeed used on set and some of the puppet is sometimes seen on camera. But most of the puppet was digitally replaced or enhanced in most of the scenes. However, using a much more realistic puppet on set was a notable technique but not because the character wasn't CGI. The puppet IS worth talking about because it directly enabled the final mostly CGI character be really good CGI. It's so good because it gives the VFX character animators an ideal reference that's "grounded" in the physical reality of the set. The subtle interplay of light, shadow, texture and specularity are all physically grounded. It also gives actors something closer to reality to interact with. It's a wonderful technique and should be celebrated instead of obfuscated to promote a falsehood that trends well on social media.
But influencers and media are unintentionally perpetuating "No CGI" myths instead of focusing on the actually interesting, more nuanced reality. The same movies you hear these "No/little CGI" claims about actually have tons of digital VFX, they're just good VFX. And they're usually good because what these films are doing is providing extended environments and plates which help the CGI be "grounded" in reality.
Similar "careful wording" grew into outright lies around Top Gun. Tom Cruise truthfully said in interviews that he was flown in a jet right alongside other REAL jets doing simulated dog-fighting. The lost nuance is that all the other jets Cruise flew with those dog fight scenes were Soviet trainer jets that are pretty small and look quite different than real MIGs. So exactly zero pixels of those jets are ever seen in the final film. They were entirely replaced by CGI jets. And you couldn't tell because the weird-looking trainer jets provided grounded reference for the CGI pixel that replaced them. Just about the only recent mainstream release that can reasonably claim "no CGI" is Nolan's Oppenheimer (it's not quite fully true but it depends on technical definitions). But every film I've seen social media "No CGI" hype around is chock full of hundreds of CGI shots. So let's just celebrate using grounded on-set and in-camera references to assist rendering outstanding, realistic CGI because it's great work by talented people.
Can't watch the video at the moment, so here's a fun tidbit about everyone's favorite propaganda piece, Top Gun: 94,878 people enlisted in the Navy in fiscal year 1985/86 compared to 87,593 the previous year (~8.3%). Enlistment then fell 2.1% the next year[0]. The Navy's general advertising budget nearly doubled in this time, so it's hard to attribute it to the movie, but I can't help but think it had some effect. It certainly made me think flying fighter jets was the coolest thing ever when I was a kid.
[0] https://www.aap.com.au/factcheck/maverick-top-gun-stat-turns-out-to-be-a-real-goose/
That's certainly why the Navy supported Top Gun.
At the same time, you certainly could reasonably read the film as being very dubious about the military. It opens with the psychological collapse of Maverick's wingman when a MiG locks on to him, Cruise's character has to defy orders to save him, and gets chewed out for doing so.
Maverick's original motivation is clearing his father name, not patriotism. Goose dies in a pointless accident. The final dogfight is random "rescue mission" against an unnamed foe in "hostile waters" in the Indian ocean, and Cruise's character almost abandons the fight due to PTSD.
Yeah, the almost pornographic love the camera shows to the jets probably made the actual story all be irrelevant to the Navy's recruiting success. But it's easy to imagine all the whining from the Fox news personality cosplaying as Secretary of "War" about such a film if it were made today.
Cheney was sensible enough to take the win.
> The original Top Gun (1986) was describe at the time as the US Navy's most successful recruiting campaign ever, noted in this 2004 account citing 1990 correspondence with then Secretary of Defence Dick Cheney: <https://archive.org/details/operationhollywo00robb/page/180>.
Sure, but was that the intent of Tony Scott when he made the film, or was it just a side effect of watching exciting air wing navy operations portrayed on the big screen?
I can easily see a young man wanting to be not just a fighter pilot, but one of those guys on deck standing in the wind, dancing and pointing and saluting F-14s off the catapult.
Or, maybe they just like volleyball.
> 2 tickets, 2 sodas, 1 popcorn. > $86 dollars. > Don't know if I'll ever go to a conventional movie theater again.
We almost never go to regular theaters anymore. IMAX feels worth it for something like F1 or Top Gun where it’s all about the visual spectacle, otherwise meh.
We go to Alamo Drafthouse a lot tho. A little pricey but the experience of watching a movie in comfy seats over a fairly decent restaurant dinner is fantastic for certain kinds of movies. Peaky Blinders was the most recent. Tommy Shelby paired with a good cocktail or two, fantastic.
Also I don’t know how Alamo achieves this, but people there are really good about noise and other bullshit. I think it’s because they do in fact kick people out for being annoying.
To be fair, there's plenty of that in older films and TV series as well, particularly "golden age" material from the 1940s -- 1970s, which played strongly off WWII, Cold War, and pro-business themes, with occasional ventures into counterculture works for the latter.
The original Top Gun (1986) was describe at the time as the US Navy's most successful recruiting campaign ever, noted in this 2004 account citing 1990 correspondence with then Secretary of Defence Dick Cheney: <https://archive.org/details/operationhollywo00robb/page/180>. Similarly endless war, cowboy, biblical, and rom-com films of that period.
No conspiracy necessary. The CIA bought the rights to the 1954 film Animal Farm, modified the ending to fit propagandist ends, and it went undiscovered for four decades. The original Top Gun was intended to recover the image of the US Navy after the Vietnam War. Etc etc etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military%E2%80%93entertainment_complex
You're right.
And the military in movies used to be depicted as inflexible, stubborn, paranoid, incompetent, and usually either "the bad guys" or authorities that impeded the progress of the main characters. (With exceptions; I'm not forgetting about Top Gun).
Then there was a sudden switch, with the military shown with cool gadgets, airplanes, tech, heroics, and generally being glorified. The transition must have happened before the first Transformers, but it was in full swing by then.
Were one of a conspiratorial mind, one would guess massive amounts of money were spent in changing this image.
Few franchises that span generations?
The entire current zeitgeist of popular media is about zombifying your parent's IP. It's Nintendo's entire business in fact. Sure, usually they are doing good work with that IP, but they are the outlier in the industry. Everyone else is shitting out remakes of what your daddy played that don't even understand the original material, or like Halo, remakes of what your daddy played which was already a mediocre remake.
Halo 1 came out the month after 9/11. It's old enough to have graduated college and started a family. It will be resold soon.
Jurassic Park was dug up out of the grave to crap out several more movies. Star Wars is inflating a couple good plot lines into an entire Universe of "Content". Even reality shows are made up of people who were contestants on older reality shows. Pixar is making yet another Toy Story.
Aliens is still going, long after it's reanimated corpse was overplayed.
One of the premier television series, that just finished, was all about nostalgia for living in the 80s, with some silly plot tacked on that apparently even the writers didn't care about.
Even our propaganda, like Top Gun, is basically the same script as an 80s movie with minimal changes.
It feels like the entire media ecosystem is designed around reselling content to my parent's generation before they finally kick the bucket or satisfying the nostalgia of that generation's early children. Even the President's administration bitches about things like the 90s USDA food pyramid that only affected that 13ish year segment of the population and was deprecated, twice, since then. Our authoritarianism is nostalgia based, for the time that generation was children, and things were "Simple" and "Good", because they were children and got to live the lives of kids.
You're mixing up a lot of things that don't really belong together here.
To the broader point, Star Trek is a major cultural export of the USA, and has always shown what are now considered to be anti-right-wing ideals, from the Cage daring (by the standard of the era) to have a woman in a senior role in the command hierarchy rather than a traditional gender role, to the main series putting a Japanese officer on the bridge in the shadow of WW2 racial tension, a black woman on the bridge as a main-cast role even though US domestic politics were the Civil Rights era, and a Russian officer also on the bridge despite the US international politics being the Cold War era.
By the films (perhaps sooner, IDK I'm not that nerdy), the canon was the Federation no longer used money.
Later, Top Gun and Stargate SG-1 are both on-the-nose US military propaganda; the latter achieved success even though Sam Carter was not at all a traditional gender role, even introduced with stereotypical gender hostility before Jack O'Neill accepted her as an equal. Stargate Universe failed despite pushing the civilian scientists into military training, IMO because it was trying to be reboot-BSG with different set dressing, putting off all the people who wanted more Stargate without attracting anyone who wanted more BSG, but again, BSG itself managed to be a major cultural export despite the not-traditional-gender-role-conformant characters of Laura Roslin, Starbuck, and (even if they were not really human) Number Six and Number Eight.
In specific details of what's mixed up and why it doesn't work together:
> Yes, the "far right christian ideologies", such as masculinity, traditional gender roles, patriarchal values, self sacrifice and fighting for your kin and country, protestant work ethic and entrepreneurship, protecting your borders against foreign invaders, hierarchical social structures based on merit, the same values and ideologies that built and made the western anglo-european civilizations the envy of the world superpowers, that got us to the moon, and where the rest of the world wants to emigrate to.
Some of that is indeed far-right (masculinity, patriarchal values, and what is currently seen as "traditional" gender roles while actually missing both what those were and why they were fundamentally changed by inventions such as the washing machine and childhood vaccination).
"Self sacrifice", "fighting for your kin and country", and "protecting your borders against foreign invaders" are basically everywhere, those didn't help differentiate "the western anglo-european civilizations" from anyone else, you'll find the former in every culture we have records for, and the latter two (if you accept "territory" rather than "country") even more broadly in species whose most recent common ancestor we share was when dinosaurs still ruled the earth.
"protestant work ethic and entrepreneurship", I mean the Catholics would like a word about the former, let alone historical references like the Islamic golden age having already finished three centuries before the Protestant reformation and China being busy as the Middle Kingdom for most of world history right up until the west surprised them with the Industrial Revolution; and if "entrepreneurship" is limited to "far right" then the USSR getting to space first and China doing pretty well in the last few decades are also counter-examples.
"hierarchical social structures based on merit" covers everyone except anarchists and hereditary rule, I think?
> and where the rest of the world wants to emigrate to
No we don't.
At this point, lots of us are skipping the USA even just for holidays and business trips, let alone migration.
Where's the demographic data in this piece? Moviegoing isn't the 'same' but it seems like there's a segment of the 'younger generation' that gravitates towards the 'event' aspect of some bigger draws. Taylor Swift movie? Barbie? Minecraft? etc
And what is 'older generations'? Maybe that's not the elder millenial-Gen X portion of the market, but maybe 65+ have a lot of time on their hands to go see Oppenheimer etc. Top Gun? Just some off the top of my head that seemed to have an impact culturally and box office-wise.
There's something to be said about the quality of films and/or the role of the blockbuster level ones. Maybe the result is only the mega films are what the cinema is for in the end.
Meanwhile just last month Zootopia 2 set single-day record for a Hollywood open in China.
Top Gun is obvious stuff. Recently they are doing SEO too. "Project Monarch" for example is mostly known to the younger generation as a (fictional) CIA project to kill Godzilla ... I love the openning sequence of that film - obfuscating all sorts of stuff. Nothing wrong with "high brow conspiracist" which in straight forward language is more like 'looking into top down efforts to social engineer society and control masses'. Or you going to actually argue that has never been a thing in US and the West?
This is just high brow conspiracist stuff.
I find it fascinating sometimes that both the left and the right are fundamentally conspiracist in their worldview. For the left it’s a Marxist class conspiracy and for the right it tends to be a variety of conspiracies by out groups (Jews, gays, supposed devil worshippers, etc.) to undermine the social order. The failure of far left and far right experiments is always explained by conspiracies. And of course the far left and the far right are conspiracies from each others point of view!
They truth is the US state promoted and funded all kinds of US culture to boost US cultural exports and influence the world, hopefully away from the Soviet sphere. What the culture was was less important than the fact that it was not Soviet.
It wasn’t some sophisticated conspiracy. Bureaucracy gets a mandate: promote America as a product. Bureaucrats look for things that are American or Western that don’t seem to be too “red” and fling money in their general direction. The bias against anything that seems “red” explains the funding of modern “aaaaht” devoid of coherent intellectual content. Art backed by bureaucrats always tends to be bland since it’s always a safe choice in the bureaucracy.
Not saying it was great. They funded a lot of shite which probably distorted things and boosted a lot of stuff that would have been footnotes in art history otherwise.
There’s also a long history of military recruitment propaganda through Hollywood. It’s basically a genre of film. Some of them are damn good popcorn movies but it’s obvious that they are propagandizing young men to join up. Top Gun comes to mind.
A lot of modern movies are metamodern. The example on the Wikipedia is Bo Burnham's INSIDE, which is very metamodern. But I'd argue most movies are at least somewhat at this point self aware, fourth wall breaking commentary. Top Gun is an example of a modern movie - not metamodern, where there is diversity but it's not at all self aware, fourth wall breaking or commentary.
What do you think the latest Top Gun installment was? When did WWII movies start calling it "World War Two"?
Hardcovers last longer, resource use is real. Cheap things is a regressive tax on the lower incomes who have to replace cheap stuff faster. They can’t save for better stuff.
When it comes to media like movies… really? Still? The resource use of Top Gun and Star Wars is bonkers. Can’t we just have local theater and you know socialize?
Do we need the movie to come together and socialize over?
I so thought we were done with that stuff around Spider-Man 3. MCU and Star Wars sequels made no sense to me.
Is our attention always going to be coupled to Saturday mornings in 1990s?
Boomers did all the drugs and made music and corny fun shows like SNL and somehow convinced us to stare at computers iterating on word problems like it’s fucking middle school while staring at these over the top delusions of grandeur to borrow from Han Solo.
Where did I refuse to watch anything? No amount of this attitude is going to make Casablanca or The Godfather or Pulp Fiction or Infinity War or Star Wars or Fight Club or 2001 or Top Gun be in any framerate other than 24fps.
If they start making films in higher frame rates today, that won’t change that fact. Do you think people are going to stop watching films from the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s?
It would take a concerted effort, beginning now, at least an entire generation (30-50 years) to remove or reduce the cultural impact of the 24 frames per second widescreen tradition. No such effort is presently underway, because higher framerates don’t help movies’ visual storytelling, and they may hurt it.
The Hobbit was Peter Jackson’s attempt. It went nowhere.
https://gizmodo.com/the-hobbit-an-unexpected-masterclass-in-why-48-fps-fai-5969817
I have had a question for a long time, and this may be my one chance to ask someone who actually knows how these things work.
When you were working on this, have you considered playing music that (and please don't take this the wrong way; this may be exaggerated but maybe you will understand what I mean) pre-retirement non-musicians would listen to, where the composer is still alive, and that hasn't been played in the same venue a hundred times? Looking at the Gewandhauses schedule right now, there's absolutely nothing for me.
The San Francisco Symphony plays a top-tier movie (Top Gun, Titanic, Lord of the Rings, etc.) with the film music performed live by the orchestra every few months, and I go to many of these. I got tickets for the Game of Thrones series finale concert (different venue). I absolutely loved Video Games Live, which actually has been in Leipzig too, but in the Arena, and well over a decade ago. I went to a Lindsey Stirling concert, who I knew from YouTube.
So my question is: Why can't the Gewandhaus do something like that regularly? Why can these events only be available in large cities like San Francisco? It's actually frustratingly difficult to find such events in smaller cities. Is it licensing/artist fees? Not interesting for the local musicians? Events like this reliably book out large venues several times in a row, so can it really be lack of demand? Maybe only from the wrong customers?
What I thought was funny about Top Gun 2 that the site they attack is pretty much based on the uranium enrichment site at Natanz in Iran. But in real life this was not attacked by hotshot pilots but by a computer virus. Pretty telling how it lives in the past. But yeah it's a movie of course and top gun 1 wasn't intelligent either as you say.
The new Star Wars mess makes it trivial to do a better job than the originals. It's been done before - recent (to me, because I watched Too Gun 1 to prepare for 2) example: Hot Shots has some clever humor, Top Gun is really a pretty dumb movie.
(Top Gun 2 is like a juvenile action flick for adult sensibilities - if that sounds good, you can watch it. It's a quality effort in many aspects.)
Reminds me of China trying to pass off Top Gun movie footage as real.
That movie was such a foundational document for me, and (obviously) for many other nerdy GenX kids.
I found this site years (decades!) ago, and was happy to discover it's still there:
https://monkeybagel.com/culture/movies.html
The blurb there for _Real Genius_:
"The most accurate portrayal of geeks in the wild I've ever seen. The geeks in Real Genius LOOK, ACT and TALK like geeks. And Jordan gave me hope that I'd someday -- just maybe -- kiss a girl on the lips."
I remember a discussion of this film on a long-running private listserv back in the late 90s or early 00s about possible real-world antecedents for some of the characters, including and especially Jordan. A proto-web site existed for this person where she elaborated on her connection to the writers of the film, and more or less confirmed that she was "Jordan", or at least the inspo for it, but of course I can find no trace of this now.
Anyway, between TOP SECRET, REAL GENIUS, WILLOW, TOMBSTONE, HEAT, and TOP GUN, he's about as inconic as an actor can get. For a dose of maybe less blockbustery work, seek out 2002's THE SALTON SEA where Kilmer is joined by Adam Goldberg, Luis Guzman, Anthony LaPaglia, Peter Sarsgaarad, BD Wong, R. Lee Ermey (!) and in a spectacular turn Vincent D'Onofrio.
There are actors I developed an affinity towards. I don't know for sure whether it was their role or acting in that role. I don't think so. I just think I saw some of them when I started exploring cinema from the world, outside my country, and hence in the beginning that meant mostly from the USA. I think it is just early familiarity. Kilmer is one of them.
And - they never seem to age to me. Maybe it's the makeup or what not. I remember him from Heat and even in subsequent films somehow he stayed that old or young - like in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, or Salton Sea, there was this with Michael Douglas, and some more. don't remember Top Gun for Cruise, hell I don't remember any Tom Cruise film for Tom Cruise. If I noticed him in a film I'd just assume I'd like that film and that kinda seemed irrational but I did like the film. There was something about him. There are few more actors like him. It's sad. They never look older to me, they just die one day and that becomes more shocking. In a way it reminds me of my own mortality harder compared to maybe if I would have noticed them steadily growing and looking older. I will miss him.
This is the thing about Top Gun and the mission impossible movies.
Tom Cruise still remembers that we go to the theater to be entertained. And he delivers on that above everything else.
And he knows how to give the fans what they want, all the way up to the gimmicky use of an F14 in Top Gun 2. Or seeing IceMan again.
Also "Willow", one of mine, and IMO one of the best fantasy movies Hollywood ever produced.
And of course the iconic role in "Top Gun", and the silly but classic "Top Secret"
As the article notices, he really had a wide range. Probably my favorite actor of his generation.
The article doesn't mention his starring role in "Real Genius", a comedy about life at Caltech. One of my favorite movies.
He managed to outshine Tom Cruise in "Top Gun". I've enjoyed his movies. Well done.
Thought it was viral marketing for Top Gun 3 for a second there. But thanks for the interesting read. It's a pity such a dramatic real world event never made it into either of the Top Gun movies.
So in response it wrote a heroically tall mountain of bullshit, laced with falsehoods of the sort that even some neanderthal natcon would be unable to dream up, then served it as an abysmally long, overdubbed narration to the next Top Gun movie set in the same future as Idiocracy.
I'm not sure sad old Gen X folk like me, who were relatively starved for entertainment and found Bond via 2nd hand bookstores and repeats on tiny TVs are much of a market these days.
I think what they did with Top Gun was pretty good - it's still kinda about Maverick but set it up so the universe expands a bit. The po faced Craig films just got boring. I will re-watch the Moore films occasionally for the goofy nostalgia but I can't even remember the names of half the Craig movies.
> Tell me you commented without watching the video without telling me you commented without watching the video.
I didn't watch the video. I watched the gaming landscape evolve over the past 20 years and I personally witnessed which games succeeded and which did not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_games
The only bestseller on that list that predates the Wii with a female protagonist is Pokemon. The reason? Before the Wii, the entire market for games was masculine individuals. It was pandered to in it's entirety because it was not perceived that women used or wanted to use consoles and computers. The advent of the Wii (and moreover, the smartphone) radically upset that assumption. The market literally changed, and the approach businesses took changed along with it. Borderlands went from being a slapstick must-play to a goiter-sized shame pimple on the aging face of gaming overnight. There really are hundreds of such series that never stuck the landing when the market changed. To name a few, Quake, Spec Ops, Deus Ex, Need for Speed, Outrun, Tom Clancy, Star Fox, F-Zero, Oddworld, Crysis, Skate/Tony Hawk, Saints Row, Postal, XCOM, Shadow Warrior, Serious Sam, Red Faction, Unreal Tournament and Conkers Bad Fur Day all didn't survive. Meanwhile, Animal Crossing, Fortnite, Minecraft, Terraria, Stardew Valley, and Among Us are more popular than ever. Touhou outlasted Space Invaders - what does that tell you business-wise?
> There's absolutely nothing wrong with having entertainment made officially for one gender or the other
Not between us consumers, but for businesses there absolutely is; it makes less money. Why make a big-budget Barbie movie that men will be disgusted by when you can shit out another Star Wars film that couples and families will rush out to watch? The reason we don't see more Barbie like movies is that people don't think feminist mass appeal is enough to get significant audiences out the door, and they're absolutely right. People want Avatar, people want Jurassic Park. Horror flicks do well too. Anything that doesn't divide people along critical lines is much more profitable and has greater potential for mass-appeal. Top Gun is a funny pull since it's a movie that was only funded after the Navy realized it was a propaganda piece. As an indie script it went nowhere.
Look - I don't want my favorite series to go woke. But that ship sailed when Kojima left Konami, and the case is probably the same for your favorite series as long as it's owned by private capital and shareholders. I'm just telling it how it is, because you and I both know games are going down the shitter but we apparently disagree on what the motive is.
> Yeah you can. Warhammer 40K Space Marine 2, Black Myth Wukong, Dragon Ball Sparking Zero, etc
Quite famously, Warhammer is both a blatantly moronic series and a demonstrably woke one as well. Unless "non-woke" simply means "violent" to you, then I'm not sure what you mean here. Warhammer as a series is against imperialism, pro-diversity, pro-LGBT, is apologetic to communism, creates fictional races of bug-people to squash and mostly just ends up pitting different queers against each other in frilly painted outfits. Fitting that it's a series descendant of model-painting tabletop pansies. Eric Cartman says it best: "We're playing 40k, dude!" https://youtu.be/rIo7UYVwcAU
Black Myth Wukong is a poor man's pittance of a soulslike, and it'll be lucky if people mention it in the same breath as Lords of the Fallen. It pulled punches (much in the same way Warhammer as a franchise does) because it's a mass-market game that can't make subversive statements without pissing off the Chinese market. If you think both of these are tentpole "non-woke" games to you, then I have to admit that woke gamers are getting much better content than us masculine men are. At least they can tolerate Elden Ring without accusing it of being historically inaccurate for putting women in armor and making men hug one another.
Oh, and since you made it this far here's a blackpill; queer and diverse voices are destined to succeed in gaming because the entire market is hyper-saturated with manly titles that nobody wants to play. Even utterly dogshit games like Fortnite attain mass appeal by ditching the Call of Duty desaturated look and pitting Snoop Dogg against a dude in a bannana costume. Undertale charmed 10s of millions of gamers with a cat that needed money to pay for college. Non-manly games are a gold mine, and if the success of mobile gaming is any indication it's a vein that goes quite deep. It's not that men are inferior as an audience, it's that they've been pandered to for too long with little ROI. It makes no business sense trying to chase this shrinking audience, especially if it means more Cyberpunk 2077-like releases that just waste everyone's time and money.
A fun variant of this is that the log can be taken at variable intervals and as long as it is sufficiently detailed, it can still capture all salient details.
Similarly a simulation run at some "tick rate" can also be run at 2x the rate while taking 1/2 the step per tick. Within the universe nobody would notice, as long as the steps were fine enough to begin with.
I think it was in Diaspora (or Permutation City?) that Greg Egan proposed that any tick rate would be unnoticable to that simulated beings, including "none".
In other words, the movie Top Gun will continue to exist as-is, no matter how many copies are made of it, including none. Encoded as a digital file it is just a number, a pure timeless concept, it doesn't have to be written down to exist. It always existed on the number line, even before Tom Cruise was born. In fact, every encoding of Top Gun exists on the number line, in every compression format, in every resolution, even a future 16K resolution that was never filmed and has no display devices made for it yet. Its encoding as a 400GB long number is there, already, and will always be there.
In other words, and simulation, an log of events, any experience already exists in mathematics, in every encoding... somewhere on the number line. This includes the entire physical universe. This isn't hypothetical, it's necessarily true! Anything that can be represented by a finite amount of information must be on the number line.
Even if you assume the Universe lasts forever, you can break its history up into a sequence of states, each of which is finite. Then the series will exists on the number line as a set of points heading off to infinity.
The West also has paid shills promoting is propaganda - this is very true of course.
But it's usually either comparatively benign (promoting fluff films like Top Gun), or quite transparent (like RFE/RL which makes no effort to hide the fact that it is government supported). And it usually doesn't lie outright, but prefers to use much more subtle forms of manipulation (e.g. "nation-building" and all that).[0]
Russian/Chinese propaganda meanwhile is incredibly blatant, and has no compunction at all against straight up lying, or saying the sky is blue when it's actually orange. Or in Russia's case, that a war of naked aggression that was very much optional for them is really a defensive war that was forced on them, and so forth.
The point is here is not that one side is "good" and the other is "bad". But to suggest (as you seem to be doing) that there's some kind of basic equivalence at play, in terms of the scale and kinds of propaganda used by the respective parties is very naive.
[0] The insane lies and other propaganda used to promote the 2003 Iraq war were a major exception to this general tendency, of course. In that sense, they were much closer in spirit to Russian/Chinese-style propaganda.
This hasn’t been my experience. My kids have loved Star Wars, Harry Potter, Space Jam, Looney Toons, Muppets, Uncle Buck, Top Gun, Ghostbusters, My Neighbor Tuturo, all the classic Disney movies, Mary Poppins, Get Smart, and others I’m sure I’m missing. They even like some of the light westerns thier grandparents put on. It’s not everything, but it’s most of what I’ve tried.
They currently love playing classic arcade games on a cabinet I built.
It depends on the kid, but I don’t think it’s just a generational thing. The limits tend to be very old movies with sound issues, which was my limit as well.
> For the volleyball scene for both Top Gun movies, the men spent months in the gym.
Don't even start me on the insanity of the physical regimen for the actors in Spartacus (the TV show): https://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/spartacus-strong-cast-of-spartacus-got-in-gladiator-shape.html
> unrealistic beauty standards
Hollywood does that for men, too. 6 foot, ripped abs, improbably large muscles, chiseled features, hair. A shirtless scene is inevitable, and the lead actors need to deliver.
To compare, watch an old Paul Newman movie with a shirtless scene. How standards have changed!
Brad Pitt was once excoriated for showing off doing pushups between takes. What he was actually doing was getting his muscles pumped for the next shot.
For the volleyball scene for both Top Gun movies, the men spent months in the gym.
No, there are two different strategies. One is to promote your own worldview as good. The other is to make a lot of noise and confuse enough people that nothing happens.
Current example of the first: "Absolute Loyalty to the National Interest".[1] This is a propaganda movie from China. It even says so in the credits, which list "Publicity department of Quindao Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China", "Publicity department of CPC Yunnan Provincial Committee", and "Propaganda Corporation". Tencent distributes it. This is classic old-style heavy-handed self-promotion. The classic of that genre is "Sky Fighters" (2011), when the PLA air force made, directly, their very own ripoff of "Top Gun". It's considered the worst movie ever made about fighter jets. Since then, most Chinese movies have some propaganda content to keep the censors happy and get the Golden Dragon stamp of approval, but newer content is 90% entertainment, 10% propaganda. There might be a plug for the cops or COMAC.
Examples of the second are so easy to find today that it's not necessary to list any.
[1] https://viewasian.co/watch/absolute-loyalty-to-the-national-interest-2021/watching.html?ep=1
* Flesh out a movie about x following the Hero's Journey in the style of Notting Hill.
* Create a scene in which a character with the mannerisms of Tom Cruise from Top Gun goes into a bar and says "...."
Isn't this because the mid range is going straight into the streaming services, rather than through (an I assume expensive) distribution process into theaters?
Theater going is expensive (I think it's expensive), the alternatives are "pretty good", so that impacts overall theater presence.
Having a "block buster" that can justify the expense of marketing and distributing to the now weaker theater market seems like a prudent thing for the studios and it's just part of the current reality of entertainment.
I know I don't see many movies in the theater. I don't know if I've seen anything since Top Gun. I was hoping to see Dune 2, but it's delayed. I will be seeing the Ferrari bio-pic, simply because I'm a Mann nut. Otherwise, we rented Barbie. We rented GoG3, we'll be renting Oppenheimer.
And whatever other random stuff I sleep through from Netflix.
> Top Gun is the emblematic dumb romance subplot. I feel like mostly everyone who watches this movie today for the first time feels similarly negative about it.
You should really see Hot Shots. It has one of the best sex scenes i have ever seen.
Top Gun is the emblematic dumb romance subplot. I feel like mostly everyone who watches this movie today for the first time feels similarly negative about it.
But I also know a bunch of older folks who are insistent that it was an amazing romance. I’m not clear when and how this perspective changed.
I can’t think of a single cinematic romance that I really cared about (although I’m sure there are a few examples?). But I also hate the annoying hypervirgins you get in stuff like anime where it’s just kind of annoying that characters can’t just release their palpable and constant sexual tension and start acting like someone who is normal and confident.
At the end of the, I feel like anyone in film whose whole character thing is trying to figure out love ends up being a really annoying and unrealistic character.
> Tom Cruise finished filming Top Gun: Maverick years ago, but people are still streaming, renting, and purchasing that movie bringing in massive profit for the studio.
This is also true of the original Top Gun, released ~37 years ago. Very little software has that kind of long-term earning power, further supporting the idea that software work is not all that unique as work goes.
> Why would anyone hire 20K people for a movie today?
To make better art. I've seen most of the films in that list are they're incredible films that stick with me and give me a sense of awe today. Watching 1000s of real life people in a scene just creates a sense of spectacle that is just not achievable with current CGI - the brain is just not fooled or impressed like it is when you watch those old films and see the amount of work and effort that must have gone into them. Sergio Morricone hired the Spanish army to build the cemetery at the end of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly and it took them several days to make. Nowadays it just takes someone a few clicks of a mouse but it fucking shows as well. Maybe with AI we'll actually get to a point where the brain can be tricked because it gets the lighting right, but at the minute it just doesn't and the films are worse because of it.
Just look at how incredible this location is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpVaoA8RfIk
It's even more awesome when you watch the film in it's totality because it builds up slowly, with bigger and bigger scenarios until it culminates with this.
And even in potato cam resolution, how impressive is this scene from Cleopatra:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_rLwuVP9Zw
They just hit different when they're actually real.
What's hilarious is that the execs still don't fucking see it. Christopher Nolan is one of the only ones out there still pushing for practical effects and he rakes in the money at the box office more consistently than just about any other director other than Cameron or Spielberg. It's because the films are actually worth watching. Before Oppenheimer, what was the last big film? Top Gun, which also used a ton of real life flight footage.
If I want to watch an animation, I'll watch an actual, awesome animation that takes full advantage of the medium like Into The Spiderverse or something from Studio Ghibli. If I want to watch a movie, I want to watch a real flesh and guts movie. Yet 99% of the stuff Hollywood puts out is some weird hybrid shit that is the worst of all worlds.
If Hollywood starts making better art, people will start going back to the movies. But they've got greedy. In any other industry, if you made a product, and you got 100% more for it than what it cost to produce you'd consider that a success. But these arseholes don't. They want 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x and they want to milk it for all it's worth and turn it into a fucking "universe" until it just collapses into a heap of shit and no-one even remembers why they liked the original.
This effects not only the movies we see, but also influences which movies get made in the first place. There's little telling what kind of anti-war movies we might have gotten, which withered on the vine because producers knew it wouldn't be possible to make the movie on a reasonable budget to the standard audiences have come to expect (e.g. real aircraft instead of mediocre scale models or CGI.)
Try making an anti-Navy response to Top Gun; you won't get access to real fighter jets so your movie is doomed to look like second-rate shit, while simultaneously requiring a huge special effects budget to even get close. Bigger budget for an inferior product is a recipe for a commercial failure, so it just doesn't happen.
Russia-funded source?
Look at what Russia and China inject into their citizen's brains. It is literally 1984, no exaggeration. I don't care if "the Pentagon and CIA" fund Top Gun wank films.
https://worldbeyondwar.org/the-pentagon-and-cia-have-shaped-thousands-of-hollywood-movies-into-super-effective-propaganda/
The Pentagon and CIA Have Shaped Thousands of Hollywood Movies into Super Effective Propaganda
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/how-hollywood-became-the-unofficial-propaganda-arm-of-the-u-s-military-1.5560575
How Hollywood became the unofficial propaganda arm of the U.S. military
https://www.militarytimes.com/off-duty/military-culture/2022/08/04/new-documentary-scrutinizes-pentagon-hollywood-relationship-but-is-it-propaganda/
New documentary scrutinizes Pentagon-Hollywood relationship — but is it propaganda?
https://www.jstor.org/stable/45129369
The Historical Roots of CIA-Hollywood Propaganda
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/may/26/top-gun-for-hire-why-hollywood-is-the-us-militarys-best-wingman
Top Gun for hire: why Hollywood is the US military’s best wingman
https://netzpolitik.org/2022/dude-wheres-my-privacy-how-a-hollywood-star-lobbies-the-eu-for-more-surveillance/
How a Hollywood star lobbies the EU for more surveillance
The European Union debates a new law that could force platforms to scan all private messages for signs of child abuse. Its most prominent advocate is the actor Ashton Kutcher.
Op-Ed: Why does the Pentagon give a helping hand to films like ‘Top Gun’?
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-05-30/top-gun-maverick-memorial-day-tom-cruise-pentagon-propaganda
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theaters_of_War
Pay No Attention to the G-Man Behind the Curtain
https://www.theatlantic.com/membership/archive/2018/03/pay-no-attention-to-the-g-man-behind-the-curtain/555839/
In the ‘90s the U.S. Government Paid TV Networks to Weave “Anti-Drug” Messaging Into Their Plot Lines. Here Are the Worst Examples.
https://www.columnblog.com/p/in-the-90s-the-us-government-paid
Education Dept. paid commentator to promote law
https://web.archive.org/web/20100722051019/http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-01-06-williams-whitehouse_x.htm
https://www.gao.gov/products/b-305368
I think it’s just a cheap cherry picked argument. Iron man is largely about humility. His relationship stuff is mostly not even off screen, but between films entirely.
The MCU has a fair chunk of horny characters (horniest being overt sexual chemistry, not sex scenes). The horniest off the top of my head being Garfield’s Spider-Man (more Sony, but still), She Hulk, Captain America, most of the guardians of the galaxy, etc.
Top Gun is the emblematic stupid sexual chemistry for no reason film of the 90s for me. It’s dumb. It’s forced. It’s behind the scenes shameful.
I'm currently struggling through "Our Glamorous Time", which is about the modern fashion industry in mainland China. There are several romances, and the romantic scenes mostly involve food. Business dinners are a big thing. The social scenes involve food buffets. Everybody is thin, except one bad guy, and he gets shot.
(There's no sex. Not even close. This stuff is heavily censored and has blatant propaganda about the Belt and Road Initiative and the COMAC airliner. The feeling I get is that the writers have certain boxes to check to get past the censors, and once they do that, they can make entertainment. As long as they stay away from the no-go areas.
There used to be junk such as "Sky Fighters", a Top Gun movie clone made by a film unit of the PLA. That was so awful that the PLA stopped trying to make entertainment. More than half the Chinese dramas today are historical costume epics, which don't get censored so much. If you like that sort of thing, watch "Princess Agents", which is perhaps the best of that genre.)
> Willis in Die Hard, Smith in Independence Day, Cruise in Top Gun-- they all exhibit more depth to me than Jordan in Creed or the Rock in whatever.
Idk man I think you've got some seriously rose tinted glasses. Most everyone I know who was born after that time thinks Top Gun is a formulaic piece of trash. It's very hard for me to think of this film as something that gives an actor a good opportunity show off their acting talent. There are plenty of good films from the 90s but Top Gun was like a generic DC superhero spectacle film.
Die Hard holds up. Jeff Goldblum is enough to salvage independence day but its largely dropped from popular consciousness among young people.
>Actors showing range are not doing big movies because big movies mostly don't ask for range.
They don't explicitly ask for it but I think it's a little more subtle than that.
Taking an example you gave, I don't think Michael B Jordan will ever reach the star power of peak Will Smith simply because I don't think he's as talented an actor frankly.
Willis in Die Hard, Smith in Independence Day, Cruise in Top Gun-- they all exhibit more depth to me than Jordan in Creed or the Rock in whatever.
Chris Pratt's "short" career has more or less been Parks and Rec -> Guardians of the Galaxy -> Jurassic Park. I thought he was pretty great for the first two but the scale of jurassic world being generic trash has managed to completely undermine any interest I had in him. I'm not clear where he stands on public opinion.
I also think Office Jim being Jack Ryan is strange. But I don't think people care about the amazon shows. His news thing and production of a Quiet Place was interesting. People fucking love Office Jim if they could put him in something that was not action man.
I find it kind of hilarious to highlight keanu reeves as an actor with range, as someone who loves reeves movies good or bad. Or tom cruise for that matter. The titles that made most of the "big actors" big were not things showing range. It's shit like top gun. Actors showing range are not doing big movies because big movies mostly don't ask for range.
Young actors don't tend to have that much star power either. That comes after a career. I feel like I can't agree on your entire framework here. But I guess if we had to target actors under... 35 that people want to see I would say it's probably shifted a fair bit to women. Perhaps Margot Robbie. Anya Taylor Joy. Jenna Ortega. Emma Stone.
off picks for men: Michael B. Jordan largely for the Black community. Harry Styles perhaps.
So that's why Top Gun did so well? Or any blockbuster movie recently, particularly action movies?
How dare they put military coolness into a top gun movie
Are you talking about no copyright for DERIVATIVE works or no copyright on actual works themselves?
- No copyright on derivative works mean I can finally make my 'fan fiction' Top Gun movie. - No copyright on actual works themselves, mean's I can be streaming Top Gun for free to the world. (only bandwidth/server costs)
Copyright terms are way too long, but who's going to spend big money on production when you potentially get to sell ONE copy before it's 'free' for someone else to distribute (sell) to the rest of the world?
> “Born to Fly” is the highest-profile flick of this type to normalise the notion that the present-day PLA’s mission is to fight and kill Americans.
Meanwhile in Hollywood:
>> It is defended by ... and fifth-generation Su-57 fighters as well as older F-14 Tomcats.
Makes me wonder who could be the people manning Su-57 and F-14? Martians?
> Told by radio that they are in an area under China’s jurisdiction, the foreigners retort: “We can come and go whenever we want.”
Ask the recipients of the US' bombs for the last 30 years how they feel about that.
> <small>PLA</small>
Really?
> Alas, “Born to Fly” is closer in spirit to the first “Top Gun”. That film from 1986 shows obnoxious young pilots helping a hegemonic America enforce its will, without concern for the niceties of international law.
It's quite amusing to see this after all that bashing of evil Sino filmmakers.
I know it isn't strictly what they are designed for, but I always go for movie questions which is what I tend to search for a lot.
Impressions: was very underwhelmed previously with charGPTs ability to tell be plot summaries for obscure films. It almost always made it up, even when prompted with a source (e.g. Wikipedia). Asking vague questions like "I can't remember but I'm looking for a film like war games but with a tiny helicopter" chatGPT always presented me with very popular films and could never quite key in on the "toy" or "small" bit of the query.
Bard seemed better in that while it couldn't quite get the movie right (for the record google itself gets the movie easily, Defense Play) it did eventually give me the right plot. Same with Ghost Fever which no matter what I did ChatGPT would always hallucinate the plot of. Unlike ChatGPT, Bard gave me the specific Wikipedia link quite often as well. It did make up the people and box office of obscure films pretty much universally.
Bard was actually really impressive for returning obscure results (which ChatGPT always seemed reluctant to do). I asked for another ghost film from 1987, and it happily returned Ghost Riders a film with a scant 200 votes on IMDb. Whenever I asked ChatGPT to give me bad or obscure films it would give me movies like Top Gun no matter how much I insisted I wanted something obscure.
I wouldn't trust either really, but Bard seems slightly closer to what I would hope a search/GPT integration felt like. But again I'm probably using it much differently than is intended to how others might interact with it.
Yes just a coincidence everyone in the thread seems okay with NATO national intelligence and military submitting patches to Linux.
But definitely Russian, North Koreans and Iranians shouldn't.
It's like I'm stuck in a Top Gun movie...
Nobody has a free media market. China isn't unique in this. You think Top Gun, ww2/holocaust movies, etc are from a "free media" market? You think all the anti-japanese, anti-soviet, anti-chinese, anti-muslim, etc media during the past 100 years was from a "free media" market? The media is how you control the population. You think the elites don't control it?
Everyone accuses china of copying and stealing from the US. Looks like they are copying hollywood.
I’m also skeptical of these reports, but I think you’re being maybe a little smug here, and you’ve overextended yourself a bit as well in a few places. So I’m going to play devils advocate and nitpick a few points.
> The F-18 have boxes like the AN/ASQ-228. A multi-sensor, electro-optical targeting pod with thermographic camera, low-light television camera, target laser rangefinder/laser designator, and laser spot tracker with a range of 40 miles. But all images we get from these UFO look they were taken with a cheap grainy amateur camera...
Have you ever seen gun camera footage from a fighter jet? Or thermal camera footage in general? That’s what it all looks like, especially at high levels of zoom. Also, I don’t even know how the laser designator is supposed to improve the image quality.
This stuff isn’t designed to capture footage for a Top Gun movie, it’s designed to detect targets, primarily using parts of the spectrum that are invisible to the human eye.
> These UFO seem obsessed with the US military and the United States.
Setting aside the possibility that other countries might be keeping sightings secret….
The US Air Force is the biggest in the world. The second biggest air force in the world is the US Navy. And they are also two of the best trained air forces in the world, measured in flight hours per pilot. Which means the US is overwhelmingly in the lead when it comes to cumulative military flight hours.
As you pointed out, military aircraft tend to have sophisticated targeting sensors that aren’t installed aboard commercial airliners. Specifically, air superiority fighters have targeting sensors that are designed to detect and lock onto other targets that are in the air. Spy satellites are looking at the ground, while observatories and amateur astronomers are gazing into the stars, but fighter jets are uniquely positioned to look for flying objects in the air.
And when it comes to the ocean that covers about 2/3 of the earth’s surface, the US Navy is practically the only group of people flying fighter jets over that area. The US has eleven supercarriers; the most any other country has is one. Some countries have smaller aircraft carriers, but the US has some of those as well.
I don’t know what’s going on here, and I very much doubt that it’s aliens, but there are plenty of reasons that US Navy fighter pilots would notice this sort of thing and report it more than anyone else.
This is all about the amount of money going into these movies. With hundreds of millions of dollars at stake it's much safer to rehash an existing franchise like Top Gun than to give directors and screenwriters the creative freedom they need to come up with interesting new stories. Wokeness is just a symptom of producers putting money where they think ticket-buyers want. If they thought there was more money to be made appealing to MAGA they'd do that instead.
The stuff coming out of Korea, Denmark, France, Finland, etc, is made with much lower budgets. They can afford to take risks.
Top Gun: Maverick, a movie so woke that they made the baddies an unidentifiable country
Was the original Top Gun also woke? Pretty sure they didn't identify the "baddies" in that one either.
The bigger question is how many people go to the movie theatre (cinema). In 1930s America, about half of people used to go to the cinema on a weekly basis. By the 1950s it was 30%, by 1950 it bottomed out at 10% [0]
Today it's very rare. This is not because of the relative quality of the films, it's because there's more choice.
While most people who go do the cinema occasionally, nowhere near "Everyone" saw Avatar, Top Gun, Endgame, etc. In the UK there were 13 million cinema admissions last July, which would be just 1 in 5 people even if everyone who went only went once, and they only went to see Top Gun.
Same with watching TV. In the 90s about half a given population would watch primetime tv, today it's nearer 1/10th, there's more options to entertain. .
In the UK cinema dropped like a stone in 1955 [1], when ITV started broadcasting.
[0] https://ecommons.udayton.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1023&context=pol_fac_pub
[1] https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/6693/business/cinema-attendance-in-uk/
Not OP but one I cannot look past anymore is when the movie has dialogue that is only there to spell out the plot to the audience.
Usually it's very small things - some background character gleefully shouting out the obvious in the only line they have in the production.
"Maverick's re-engaging, Sir!" From the radar operator in Top Gun.
"It's gonna blow!" In every bomb scene ever.
Etc.
I never liked Top Gun, but when others spoke fondly about it, a Maverick-like movie was what I always wanted. Reasonable character arc, lots of practical effects, good story. It is a script that would have worked in the 80s and fits in that style of concise, well paced action movie, but it’s far superior to the original, imho.
EEAO is very unusual; it's an "indie" "arthouse" film that's stuffed full of references to other bits of non-Western cinema, as well as having lots of SFX action sequences. It had a budget of under $15m (per wikipedia), which is much less than the $170m of Top Gun: Maverick. I'm very glad that somehow it got made, but there's a real drive to not make any middle-budget movies like that any more.
> Top Gun: Maverick feels like it could have come out thirty years ago.
I've not seen it, but to what extent is that because it's a remake of a film that came out 30 years ago?
At least you'll get to (re)watch both Top Gun movies!
This thread is absolutely fantastic. It's hitting all the obscure spy thrillers. First sandbaggers now Len Deightons game set match. What next, Mr. Palfrey of Westminster? ?
That said, you're watching James Bond wrong. Watch it as a porno. There's a quick excuse for a plot, then you see the "spy" doing all sorts of cool and exotic stuff.
Same thing with movies like top gun, ignore the story and just watch it as an excluse to fly $50M planes near the edge.
Hong Kong used to be the equivalent of China for cheap production, hence the top gun quote of 'flying rubber dog shit out of Hong Kong' in the original 80s movie
> how Top Gun is both entertainment and propaganda
The recent conscription of Mr. Cruise to showcase air superiority is an insight tactically granted at the behest of American government as a reaction to international upheaval. A reminder. After the success of "Star Wars", Mr. Ford fulfilled a similar role in a film about infrastructure sabotage (hydroelectric dam and bridge - Force 10 from Navarone).
I always appreciated the Top Gun franchise because there are many scenes showing a large group of people enjoying each other's company.
I always loved the F-14. Top Gun was of course a big reason (and I'm glad they brought it back for the newest film). But before Top Gun, there was Macross (or Robotech in the US). The variable state of the Tomcat influenced the variable state design of VF-1 Vaklyrie fighters in the anime. And I'm sure the AIM-54/AWG-9 Phoenix missle system (with the ability to fire on multiple targets almost at once) influenced the multiple missle launches seen throughout the TV series. Here's a clip I found: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZazVwBlz9fc
> (Only applies to major powers)
>> Saudi Arabia, Iraq and others being clear counter-examples to such democracies
I thought I was pretty clear. At best, those are regional powers. And clearly fell into the "subordinate dictator" mindset. When Iraq stopped being a proxy-war launching pad with USSR backed Iran, it quickly was removed from even being a major regional power.
Saudi Arabia has far more than regional economic power, but that fits more into "the royal family is a rich family" in the US than "Saudi Arabia as a country is powerful".
>> EU has made several attempts at establishing an actual army to back up its economic strength with some actual muscle
That point was about EU economic power. China has clearly influenced many economic activities. Look at the removal of Taiwan's flag in the new Top Gun or the way John Cena apologized in Chinese as examples of the movie industry being pushed around.
I could go further than movies easily. It's just that they are a really visible example by design. They are not the biggest worry.
The EU could pass laws that really mess with the US, but they don't seem to.
>> including rant on casting living off of IP as anything other than rent seeking
I actually cannot tell read whether you are opposed to or supportive of the framing that living off IP is rent seeking. I can tell you are strongly on one side, but the exact wording doesn't parse for me.
Based on the canyon, they were trying to simulate the top gun movie. While entertaining, this is not how real fighter aircraft fight. The tail fighter in this scenario would have been 30k feet higher, 10+ miles away, and traveling at at least Mach 1.5.
The only time fighters are in direct contact in this situation is a dog fight. Which the above video is not. Checkout the YouTube category for “DCS BVR” as well as “DCS dogfight”. There are a few videos analyzing cobra in both as well as the use of terrain. TL;DR there are some interesting uses of terrain at the end of both engagements, however in a realistic setting the pilots would head home rather than risk dying to a “maneuver kill” where they accidentally crash into the ground while trying to “out rate” or “out turn” the other fighter.
Our culture is biased in ways that helped it survive harder times.
The bloodlust is easy to explain. The tribe better at war survives. Veneration of honorable warriors runs deep in our veins. Sales for Top Gun, Marvel movies, action games continue to soar.
The puritanical outlook developed to create stable monogamous families. That bit of artifice is dissolving now. More polygamy means the top men hoarding reproductive access, which historically leads to instability. Sexual socialism was an interesting run, but with the demise of religion, I'm not sure how we could save it.
Well, we live in the age where the story hardly matters. I saw Top Gun the other day, and was shocked at how bad it was. The aerial stuff was superb, but everything else looked so amateurish. Acting was hideous, the story was so predictable and boring there was hardly any substance to the film. And yet it got an 8,5 rating at imdb.
What? Plenty of movies are super critical of the military and the 3 letter agencies in tons of ways, heck there is a whole genre out there about Government military agent realizes he's doing bad things and goes rogue to correct those misdeeds.
Then you've got things like Full Metal Jacket, which I don't think is getting anyone to sign up for the forces.
Like Top Gun did well recently, but is one of the only movies I can think of in the past couple of years that actually portrayed the US military in a mostly positive light rather than the usual gamut which runs from ineffective bumbling ossfied and useless to straight up evil.
I'm just saying you can make whatever you want in the US and portray pretty much any idea or theme, that doesn't mean people will like it, but you can make it. In China there is no similar comparison they'll take your studio at best or imprison you at worst.
> The argument would be that you can find critical views of the military - just not in a blockbuster movie.
You can, in fact, have critical views of the military in blockbuster movies in the US. But not if you want to use US military bases and aircraft and ships as sets for those movies, or to get support of the US military in making the movie. Depending on the particular movie, this could be a make-or-break deal for them (Top Gun, for instance, would be pretty shitty with stock footage of US aircraft carriers and aircraft instead of actual footage staged for the movie).
You are thinking about games the way Apple and Meta think about games - purely about the $$$.
It's this exact reason why they can't crack the market despite a large number of attempts.
"Cracking the market" for an art form like video-games isn't a matter of revenue, think of it more like tv, film or books.
The best games are made by the most talented developers, alongside the best game designers and directors targeting the most powerful consoles. These are the factors of making the best experience you can make in the video-game world.
You can't - I'd wager won't ever - find something like the Last of Us on a mobile, yet anyone who knows anything about gaming knows that is a game that will sell millions of consoles.
You play crap games on your phone for 5 minutes at a time because you can, but you go out and buy a console because you want to be immersed in the latest the art form has to offer because you want to.
A simple framing question; do you want to watch the new Top Gun on your 5 inch screen iPhone screen?
Top Gun won't exist, just people's memories of Top Gun.
And memory is fallible. It changes over time. People will all remember the movie differently.
The memory of Top Gun != Top Gun.
The h264 movie Top Gun is purely information, but it’s also derivative and with information loss, right?
From our perception at least, it seems like Tom and Val were a part of the earliest & highest fidelity information that makes up Top Gun when they were part of shooting it day to day. Or somewhere around there, the movie that the h264 derives from requires daily shots + editing/effects etc. If Tom & Val are in-universe observers, then wtf happened during those shooting days, and in their argument I’d imagine, the ideas & experiences they’d had on how they portrayed their parts?
> our universe requires a "sustaining cause" (as with a picture on a TV set).
The movie doesn't cease to exist because you turned the television off, only the projection of it into those particular photons.
Top Gun will continue to exist even if you break every Blu Ray of it into tiny pieces, crush those pieces to powder, and melt the result into a formless goo.
Movies are purely information, a sequence of bits. Those bits can have manifestations such as copies on a hard drive, blu ray, or whatever. The bit sequence doesn't stop existing just because we delete every manifestation. A sequence of bits is just a very big number, and all numbers continue to exist whether we write them down or not. We can discover specific interesting numbers, such as the number 'T' that is the H.264 encoding of the Top Gun Blu Ray movie. It is 40 billion bits long, but it's still just a number. It has adjacent numbers, integer factors, and everything.
Here's the thing: the number 'T' existed before Tom Cruise was born. It existed before the evolution of humanity and will exist after the heat death of physical universe. It exists independent of time. It didn't come into existence at any point in time, or "before" time, or any nonsense like that.
Similarly, if[1] you believe that the universe follows strict, mathematical laws of physics[2], then you can imagine it as pure information, like a Mandelbrot set. Fractals in fact might be a very good analogy. They're actually very simple things, exist independent of time, and yet can produce intricate detail if you look closely. That detail may appear chaotic, but "seems" to follow oddly consistent rules, much like physics.
So this is my point of view: The Universe is "just" mathematics, and mathematics exists independent of time, making the Universe necessary. As in-universe observers, we're part of the mathematics, not any particular manifestation or representation of it. Even if there were some sort of God scribbling the bits down on a napkin that represent the state of the Universe, he's discovering the numbers, not creating them. If he destroys the napkin, the bits will not cease to exist. Inside the universe, we would never know anything had occurred.[3]
[1] Granted, this is a "if"!
[2] The more we know about the universe, the more this seems to be true.
[3] This entire point of view is the main theme of the book Diaspora by Greg Egan, which I highly recommend.
Even inside of Big Media you can see the relative commercial success or failure of a movie like Toy Story compared to a disinterested one like Top Gun
One of my memories of my teenage years is a fellow highschool student stringing together random stereotypical nerd words. I assume he was mocking me.
Hollywood gets most professions wrong: Maverick could face up to the death penalty depending on the exact political situation in Top Gun; nobody would send miners into space instead of training astronauts; and the CSI TV shows have very little in common with actual crime scene investigation.
It's easy to impersonate any group when the audience is unfamiliar with that group.
What is impressive is that this fools domain experts:
"""Even knowledgeable philosophers who are experts on Dan Dennett’s work have substantial difficulty distinguishing the answers created by this language generation program from Dennett’s own answers"""
and from top gun since it's a fairly classic movie, I'd say
> Cruise taped a "thanks to coming to the theaters" thing that ran before Top Gun when I saw it, and it definitely looked about a decade older.
Yeah I noticed this too. His speech was slower and forced (it seemed like he was having trouble breathing). The skin around his neck was tight in a way that you only see in more elderly folks.
The movie was nothing like this but in that tape it was just completely obvious he was a 60 year old dude. Nothing wrong with that of course you just don't normally see him looking like that and didn't even in the movie itself.
He was in ridiculous shape for Top Gun, I could hardly believe it.
I should add my favourite detail about the movie - during and after any pilots perform a manoeuvre, listen to their breathing.
Boomers? I'm only in my 40s and have a whole lot of 80s and 90s nostalgia that Hollywood is milking the F out of. I'm hoping I won't die any time soon. Tom Cruise and Ed Harris are just the stars of some of my favorite movies from when I was a kid. Jennifer Connelly one of my first crushes. Not sure Top Gun is just targeting boomers.
Top gun is probably the best example. It was a love letter to the fans, and made a billion dollars
Video games are expensive too make. Many triple A games cost more than movies. Comparing them to movies is an extremely fair comparison.
Tom Cruise is a really bad example, because he actually does have a pilot license since 1994 and is allowed to fly some jets. [0]
I'm not looking for advice on how to make a good movie (or how to fly a plane, for that matter), but on some perspective how (un)-realistic those movies are. I think overall that sort of scrutiny does some good in terms of making movies less unrealistic (compare 80's action movies like Rambo to modern productions), producers consulting not only ex-soldiers but also physicists, doctors,...
[0] https://inews.co.uk/culture/film/tom-cruise-can-fly-fighter-jets-when-pilot-licence-how-much-top-gun-flying-real-1652812
So the original Top Gun wasn't political? Weird why there were Navy recruiting booths in halls. Must be a coincidence.
Name me a war movie that isn't political.
That's why the new Top Gun is such a monster at the box office. It's a "woke zero" movie in which you believe the characters are actually competent because you watch them train. They're believable and you want them to succeed. It's just a fantastic action movie and is even better than the original. A great reminder of what Hollywood can do when it's firing on all cylinders and isn't distracted by trying to do ideological brainwashing.
I sort of assumed Top Gun doubled back on appeasing the Chinese censors because the Chinese censors wouldn’t really be interested in a movie that glorifies the US military in the first place.
Top Gun Maverick’s pacing, while nowhere as meandering as its ‘80s predecessor, was actually not frenetic until perhaps the terminal velocity climax. It’s a very character-based film, not only a special effects extravaganza. It harkens to a slightly older type of action flick.
How was Top Gun an attack on formulaic films?
Oh, I don't know. My respect for Cruise has gone up quite a bit. The MI series is formulaic but he does put a lot of effort and soul into his work. Top Gun was a slap in the face to formula films. Some of his smaller projects (like Jack Reacher) were fun to watch too. Collateral is an underrated classic though.
Last week's "Bloomberg Law" on radio touched on this -- unfortunately can't find a link that contains it, but it was at the end of the episode broadcast over this past weekend.
In a nutshell, law prof said the article (Top Guns) was a non-fiction work, didn't bear much resemblance to the movie (no competition, no RIO dies, no female manufacturer rep, no MIGs, etc., really just a day-in-the-life of two guys at Top Gun), and Paramount likely didn't need the license for the first movie either.
Also touched on differences re what copyright covers for non-fiction v. works of fiction, a even if it was held up in court what the $$ damages would be (in a lot of cases the courts look to the past to establish a value of such a license, and in this case they have the exact example from the first movie re what the willing seller agreed to with Paramount).
According to a recent tweet[1]:
> Top Gun made $357 million at the box office.
> But its biggest impact – a 500% boost to Navy recruitment.
It's not that surprising but does show just how powerful movies can be in influencing the public perception.
https://twitter.com/nathanbaugh27/status/1533061609488367616
Ah yes and this was more noticeable in Top Gun Maverick compared to the original. Almost the whole second movie is about training a team of pilots for a specific mission.
One of the interesting things about TOPGUN is that it wasn't there to train pilots. It was there to train flight instructors. TOPGUN graduates were expected to give presentations on flight technique, tactics, and principles and were graded very strictly by a panel of judges: if you couldn't make the Navy's latest knowledge of aircraft weapons systems pellucidly clear to the average pilot, you didn't pass. The idea was that the best pilot in a unit would be sent to TOPGUN, then return to their unit to teach the other pilots how to fly to the needed standard.
We see Maverick do this in Top Gun: Maverick, but both movies seem to reinforce this notion that TOPGUN's purpose is to train elite pilots to fly difficult missions when that's not really the case. It's kind of like Interpol in the movies, when you see "Interpol agents" going undercover or conducting investigations. Interpol doesn't have field agents of its own; its job is to coordinate communication and collaboration between national law enforcement agencies.
I suspect the pilots and ground crew save their energy to fight about the things they are likely to say over a radio and let the engineers do whatever they want with the rest.
Unstart is a lot less evocative than “flameout” as used in the Top Gun movie. Flameout sounds like the plane is on fire. Especially if garbled.
Meanwhile, if your righter pilot sounds like he said engine start while flying? That’s only gonna happen if the engine already shut down. So that’s only ambiguous until the pilot keeps talking, in which case you know he was able to restart the engine before losing consciousness, versus the end of that conversation.
It's a Top Gun reference. Goose, similar to Jim, dies in the first movie, and his son is a main character in the new movie.
> The cost of VHS tape in the 80s is one reason I think VHS tapes are an underrated collectible. But Gen Xers are more nostalgic for their video games than for movies, at least for now.
They're an overrated collectible. There's no great quality-of-media benefit to VHS tapes, versus say the audio record market (where there is an argument in terms of the audio experience).
People are in fact quite nostalgic for movies, not VHS tapes. The author is confused on the difference.
Nobody is buying Ikari Warriors 1/2/3 (old NES games) for $50 on the PS5 today; but people have been buying Top Gun on DVD, then Blu-ray, then 4K, and paying retail prices to do it. They do it because there has generally been a quality increase. The rare exception is a few hyper popular games from the past that eg end up on Steam (Final Fantasy 1/2/3/etc games, or Age of Empires) or on a Nintendo repackaging hardware device.
Most NES video games for example were not endlessly repackaged with each generation of video game machines. The companies make new games, the old games largely stay in the past (in part due to the vast improvement in the quality of the games, the graphics, the size of the games, etc). The same is not true of movies. I can buy a superior copy of the movies The Color of Money or Heat on disc today vs the same movies on VHS, and that's why nobody cares about collecting VHS tapes, the same exact movies are reproduced at often dramatically better quality vs the past. They're not merely reproduced, it's typically a superior offering (certainly moving from shoddy VHS tapes to modern discs, when they're done well by the studio, is a vastly superior consumer experience).
I'm 99% certain it was Top Gun, and also, IIRC, it was because it had a Pepsi ad bundled with it before the movie (a somewhat groundbreaking move at the time). That subsidized the 'cost' of the movie on tape, reportedly.
EDIT: looked a bit more. Diet Pepsi, not Pepsi, and it was 1986. Article I just found said it was only dropping the price from $29 to $26, so the bigger price drop was likely/possibly something else before that. My memory was that that Top Gun / Pepsi thing was the big deal that changed the VHS pricing, but it's been 30+ years so I'm likely misremembering...
EDIT 2: maybe it was TG after all... https://www.everything80spodcast.com/how-the-top-gun-vhs-changed-home-video-forever/ ?
In me memory it was "Raiders of the Lost Ark" that was released for less than $30 that blew the VHS movie market wide open. Maybe it was "Top Gun" or "E.T." though.
It was pretty crazy though when movies were like $99 on VHS.
Of course, I'm also old enough to remember seeing a single Japanese import of "Wings Greatest Hits" on compact disc for like $300 in a high-end audio store.
And going further off topic, I remember that when the CD was released and cost around $20, the record companies assured us the price would drop to that of the vinyl record (which was often about $12 or so at that time).
There have always been some sort of price games in the entertainment industry. When you have the rights to an artist, finding the same thing cheaper somewhere else just isn't an option.
Well, except for piracy. I also remember a store in the college town I went to that rented records (and CD's?) and sold blank audio cassettes....
Those are all pre-modern people before the invention of vaccines and antibiotics and who had terrible health and suffered by now preventable childhood diseases. Their 35 is not our 35. Shakespeare, I believe, wrote about joint pain, aging, and losing his memory and mind at 35, which is not typical of a modern 35 year old. Substance abuse and artistry go hand in hand and a lot of these artists were addicts and drunks who badly damaged their brains. Many of them had mercury poisoning from medical treatments of their day and other edge cases not common today.
Not to mention these people were elite global competitors, so if they felt less sharp at 35, that means they were merely just the top 1% instead of being the top .1%. They still were amazing thinkers and producers after 35.
Just off the top of my head, Stanley Kubrick's career peaked with his decade plus long Lolita, Strangelove, 2001, and Clockwork Orange period in the 1960-70s, which was around his 30-40s. Then nearly 20 years after Lolita, well into his 50's he made The Shining, which is considered an important American film, perhaps not as groundbreaking as the others, but something miles ahead of his younger competitors. So even as these people supposedly age out of their peak years, these super high performers are still amazing. The Oscar winner that year? Kramer vs Kramer, a largely forgotten piece of art and "safe pick" that played to social issues of the time. The best screenplay? Breaking Away, a completely forgotten movie. The Shining is still a beloved classic, cultural icon, horror master-class, an iconic actor's defining role, and a movie studied in film school religiously today and for the foreseeable future.
Then almost a decade later in 1987 at age 59, he directed Full Metal Jacket, a lesser work, but considered one of the best anti-war films, arguably stealing or matching the crown from beloved critic favorites like Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter, long after the 60s and 70s fad of anti-war movies faded away and Vietnam a now faded memory and during the right-wing, pro-military, pro-interventionist foreign policy Reagan administration. This was a bold and provocative move you'd associate with a younger director trying to get attention and not a man close to retirement. So even "old" Kubrick was competing on a world class level and doing interesting and challenging things.
A genre horror film from a famous director who hasn't delivered a great film in a decade? An anti-war film in the late 80s on the tail of Top Gun? Both of these genres were fads once and decidedly uncool at the time of their release. This on paper sounds almost foolish, but in practice, an artist of his calibre pulled off something very special in both cases.
For modern people, career peaks are mid-30s. The "wisdom" of two hundred old plus composers and poets is a nice toilet read but isn't scientific at all. Science has its own ideas about aging:
The journals Psychological Science, Science Direct, and Harvard claims various mental peaks come later in life. New vocabulary peaks at 67, learning new information at 50, concentrating at 43, learning new faces 32, etc.
https://nextluxury.com/mens-lifestyle-advice/what-age-do-men-peak/
So yes 35 is not only a good age, its the start of a peak, and a 35 year old modern worker has still another two decades of high performance waiting for them.
Red Dawn and Top Gun.
I guess some people don't realize that stuff like the Transformers movies were all done with help from the US Military as well.
Probably the same people who don't make the connection with the military displays associated with sporting events (and the national anthem and its military theme before domestic sporting events). Stuff like the Blue Angles. It is all very Roman Empire the way we display our weapons of war, but lots of people can't even see it.
However, that act didn't seem to have an effect in publishing media like: Top Gun movies and the America's Army videogame.
Not sure how the VoA programming looks like (sounds like I guess) but I don't think outlets for government promotion were lacking even before the act was overturned
When I joined the (Canadian) military in the mid 90s, many of the guys there cited anti-war films such as 'Apocalypse Now', 'Full Metal Jacket' and 'Platoon' as inspirations for signing up.
Nobody cited 'Rambo' or 'Top Gun'
I believe this, because of how successful TT was w infinite scroll, auto-play.
RE: Vanilla Sky
There are interesting moments to that film, (like the holographic jazz player at the fancy party) but it isn't worth sitting for to see Cruise if you haven’t already seen Top Gun, Mission Impossible, Day After Tomorrow and Minority Report.
Was it Facebook? I always remembered OkCupid as having that quote and a bunch of other 80s movie quotes.
Aside from being from Top Gun, what it refers to is a principle of fire control of being "danger close," meaning you or other friendlies are within the collateral damage radius of a weapon. When one fighter jet is close enough to an enemy that blowing it out of the sky might also blow themselves out of the sky, they switch to a less destructive weapon with a smaller collateral damage radius.
It's sort of interesting to think that something like this meant anything except early web 2.0 pioneers were largely xennials raised on Top Gun, Terminator, and John Hughes movies.
It's a quote from the movie "Top Gun" if that helps.
My memory is weird!
As I was reading this link, i suddenly thought of the movie 'Top Gun' - which I have'nt watched or discussed this decade!!
And then a few minutes later, it dawned on me!
There is this character called 'Goose'!
I've always felt Bond's success was due to Sir. Sean Connery.
I don't think it was about race at all, it was about charisma.
I even go further and say we would probally not have a Bond theatrical legacy, if it wasen't for Connery's decision to be an actor.
Oh yea, Rolex owes so much advertising dollars to the estate of Connery.
That iconic wrist shot sold millions of Oyster Subs.
I repair watches part time. There are guys who bring me their overpriced broken watch, and when we meet at the door, I would swear they were brought up watching Bond movies.
Most sub owners just want a working quality watch, but there are others that take on Connery's persona in little ways.
Kinda like the young guys who wanted to be fighter pilots after watching Top Gun, or be Bud in Urban Coyboy, or living Tony's life after watching Saturday Night Fever. Most of you are probally to young, but after Saturday Night Fever, America became disco dancers. After Urban Cowboy, Stock brokers were doing the two step, and had a slight accent overnight. It was funny. And yes--I bought a polyester shirt. And yes--I bought cowboy boots. I let it go though. I'm embarrassed even writing about it.
My point is certain charismatic actors are the reason certain films are great.
The color of America is changing, and there will be actors that out shine some of our greats.
(I am a total movie snob. I don't think Bond movies are magic. I do think Connery, and Travolta, had huge natural star power though. All my great movies were are in black, and white. I've noticed The Last Picture Show is on tv today. If you haven't seen it you must. Peter Bogdonovich captured a certain time in Texas brilliantly. All the actors did a phenomenal job. Billy is Timothy Bottons brother in real life. Have a good weekend guys.)
> It's also interesting to watch old American movies like Rocky or Top Gun where the Soviets are portrayed as the more technologically advanced nation but Americans prevail thanks to their spirit and courage.
I don't recall the USSR being portrayed as a more technologically advanced nation in Top Gun, and they absolutely weren't in Rocky (in Rocky IV they were portrayed as more committed to using the power of the state without ethical boundaries in sport)
> When you come to the end of the 90's and the beginning of the 2000's you have movies like Fight Club and Matrix denounce technology as the destroyer of the society or humanity.
Maybe the Matrix; Fight Club focussed on consumerism and blind capitalism, not technology (and even then, the attack on it was literally a manifestation of mental illness.)
That's probably because of Sputnik.
I'm not old enough to remember but from what I've read, when the Soviets launched Sputnik, the American public was shocked having SSSR machine passing over them and they can't do anything about it and don't have anything to match the soviets. They believed that the USA was the frontrunner in technology but the Sputnik demonstrated that this may not be the case.
So from my understanding, the technology become a populist agenda as a result of that.
It's also interesting to watch old American movies like Rocky or Top Gun where the Soviets are portrayed as the more technologically advanced nation but Americans prevail thanks to their spirit and courage.
Maybe after the collapse of the Soviet Union, science and technology got a pushback in popular culture? When you come to the end of the 90's and the beginning of the 2000's you have movies like Fight Club and Matrix denounce technology as the destroyer of the society or humanity. You even have Lord of the Rings trilogy that tells an epic story about an industrialist who dares to start a mass production and tech research, meritocracy instead of race but "the good guys" are those who are deeply involved keeping the world as-is for thousands of years and value separation between races, masters and servants.
And what we have now? Red pills, blue pills, black pills from the Matrix, quest to restore the manliness from Fight Club, race separation, leader worship and and looking down to technology and multiculturalism from Lord of the Rings. Half Joke, half serious of course :)
The Expanse did a great job showing space battles on screen with a rather approriate distance. Star Wars and others, and I am a full blown Star Wars freak, did a good job with space battles. After the Expaense, it became little bit ridiculous, so. I resembles the problem films like Top Gun have with modern aerial combat. Already in that case, distances are so great that on-screen, the viewer is seeing nothing. For space battle, the enemy would maybe show as a small blip, if at all on screen. Especially with all the hyper advanced tech from Star Wars and Star Trek. This is also the reason why I igonre any stab at estimating weapon ranges based on on-screen scenes.
I dunno, I see two sides to it. like it or not, popular shows/movies/books have a powerful influence over the way people see the world. having a large audience does come with a certain responsibility.
but if you accept this idea, why stop with the examples presented in the article? what about all the biopics that exaggerate or entirely fabricate conflicts in people's lives to suit the structure of a typical plot arc? what about the fighter jets in top gun that fly way too close together so they can actually fit in the camera's FOV?
I think example 2 (Poor Heroes Have Expensive Lifestyles) is going a bit in this direction. is it misleading that jerry seinfeld, a more or less unknown comedian in NYC, has a huge apartment on the show? yeah, probably. would it work to film all the apartment scenes in a 450 sqft studio? probably not.
Prime and Crunchyroll have the same problem as Netflix: they don't own (much) of the content they offer. And are entirely at the mercy of the content hoarders like Disney and Warner Brothers.
Just checked. In Sweden the featured videos in Amazon Prime are: Shrek (2001), Red (2010), Twilight (2008), Top Gun (1986), Life of Pi (2012) etc. with a hodgepodge of Amazon's own content and recent-ish movies ranging from Madea's Farewell Tour to Amazon's Chemical Hearts to SCOOB!
Yeah, nah. I get the same crap with Netflix.
Top Gun the Movie is actually pretty accurate when you look at the last 30 years of "no fly zone" enforcement, which was the mission in the movie.
Many dozens of times over multiple decades in multiple theaters against multiple opponents, the vast majority of stereotypical NFZ engagements have ended in "two american planes primary and wingman have a brief dogfight against enemy aircraft to obtain ideal firing positions, involving visual identification, then end the fight with short range IR guided sidewinder missiles". There are, of course, occasional exceptions but the VAST majority of NFZ aerial combat stories look like this.
Its interesting that for 30 years NFZ ROE documents have been classified and are generally still classified and only rarely can you find an ROE illegally posted on wikileaks. HOWEVER the secret squirrel types seem to have ignored the internet and OSINT in general. So you can't legally find a piece of paper titled RoE describing how visual ID was necessary and BVR generally prohibited for all practical purposes, however, its trivial to read on wikipedia the stories of about a hundred NFZ engagements and then reverse engineer the classified ROE to match the large number of mostly identical individual engagements.
Or to summarize the above, the RoE for NFZ operations for the last 30 years remain classified, although the results of seemingly all air to air engagements have been publicly released, and traditional OSINT techniques applied to hundreds of "isolated" public anecdotes can easily reverse engineer the contents of those classified RoE documents, and the reverse engineered RoE documents pretty much mirror the fight scene at the end of the Top Gun movie; get close, dogfight into missile launch position while performing visual ID, end fight by launching short range IR missiles.
What's interesting to me - I thought I was a pretty big fan of Top Gun, but now I'm not so sure.
I did not pick up there is an argument about whether or not dog fighting still was needed.
The only "argument" I recall was the recap of how pilot deaths increased after training stopped, and decreased after training started. But it was a one off history lesson as part of the Top Gun school intro.
But the rest or the movie seemed very clearly - yes, the US needs dog fighting to defend its interests across the globe. There seemed to be absolutely no challenging of that idea within Top Gun.
>>the argument about the death of the dogfight, or that there is no need for within visual range engagements anymore is a tired one. There was a pretty popular movie in the ‘80s about that very argument, so I am not going to rehash it here.
Regardless of the actual merits of whether dogfights are a thing any more, I feel like "because Top Gun" is not exactly a sound argument.
> Comment was removed (why?), this loads it eventually:
> https://snew.notabug.io/r/worldnews/comments/h7ghoc/zoom_say...
This is what was posted: (some hyperlinks missing)
Fuck reddit and it's censoring.
Business Hall of Bootlickers:
Reddit: took $150M from Tencent. Removed threads like this
Activision Blizzard: banned player for supporting Hong Kong democracy protest. Confiscated all his winnings. Fired his interviewers
Apple: censors Taiwan flag emoji in iOS in Hong Kong
Apple (partial entry): censored Hong Kong protest map from App Store. Relented after backlash, now letting app into App Store.
Vans: censors pro-HK democracy design in its shoe design competition
NBA (partial entry): rebuked Rockets manager for his pro-HK tweet, saying NBA was "extremely disappointed with Morey's inappropriate comment." Backpedalled after backlash, now saying they support Morey's freedom of speech.
Disney / ESPN: forbids mention of Chinese politics when discussing Rockets manager's pro-HK tweet. ESPN hosts castigated Morey & speculated about his sincerity, but they will not talk about what caused the tweet: China's encroachment on HK
Viacom / Paramount: censors Taiwan flag from the jacket worn by Tom Cruise in the new "Top Gun" movie
Disney / Marvel: censored Tibetan monk from "Doctor Strange" and turned him into a white woman. Movie screenwriter: "if you acknowledge that Tibet is a place and that he’s Tibetan, you risk alienating one billion people who think that that’s bullshit".
ASICS, Calvin Klein, Coach, Fresh, Givenchy, Pocari Sweat, Valentino, Versace, Swarovski: details here
Marriott: apologized to China & changed "Taiwan" to "Taiwan, China" after China threw a hissy fit
Nike: removed all Houston Rockets products from their China webstore
Activision Blizzard: cut livestream when American University team held up pro-HK sign.
Apple: handed over iCloud data & encryption keys to China
Riot Games: censors the words "Hong Kong", forcing casters to refer to team "Hong Kong Attitude" as "HKA".
Cathay Pacific: fired employees for FB posts supporting HK protests.
Apple: minimized the seriousness of iOS exploits that enabled China to track Uyghurs, when 1M+ of them are rounded up by China in concentration camps
Google: censored pro-HK game "The Revolution of Our Times" from Google Play because it was about a "sensitive event".
Gap: apologized to China for selling T-shirts IN CANADA that didn't include Taiwan as part of China
Tiffany: removed tweet showing model covering 1 eye after China accused it of supporting HK
Marriott: fired employee who liked tweet from Tibetan group
Mercedes: apologized for quoting Dalai Lama on Instagram
American, Delta, United: deleted mention of Taiwan as a country from websites
Audi: apologized for using "incorrect map" of China that left off Taiwan
Muji: destroyed store catalogs that contain "incorrect" map of China
Zara: apologized for listing Taiwan as country
Medtronic: apologized for publishing "illegal content" that listed "Republic of China (Taiwan)" as country
Ray-Ban: changed "Taiwan" & "Hongkong" to "China Taiwan" & "China Hongkong"
Qantas, Air France, Air Canada, British Airways, Malaysia Airlines, Japan Airlines, ANA: changed "Taiwan" to "Taiwan China" on websites
TikTok: censor videos that mention Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence, Falun Gong
Sheraton: banned Taiwan National Day event. China called event "illegal & a crime against international law"
Disney: shrank/removed non-white characters from Chinese poster of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens”
Philadelphia Sixers: ejected fans for supporting HK
Princeton: doesn't talk about the 3 Ts: Tibet, Tiananmen, Taiwan
Leica: released ad on Tiananmen protest. Apologized & distanced itself from ad
Rockhampton, Queensland: censored Taiwan flag in student art project
Cisco: helped build the Great Firewall including module to persecute Falun Gong
MGM: changed Red Dawn's villain from China to N Korea to placate China
Global Blue: fired staff for calling Taiwan a country
L'Oréal / Lancôme: canceled concert of HK artist Denise Ho for her pro-democracy activism
After decades of opening up Western market to China while turning a blind eye to rampant Chinese IP thefts, forced tech transfers, & protectionism, we are looking at widespread control of Western firms by China. Firms that are not under outright Chinese control still kowtow to China out of fear of China's retaliation.
REVERSE ENTRIES:
Matt Stone & Trey Parker: South Park "Band in China"
Red Bull: released video supporting protests for freedom & liberty
Ubisoft: listened to fans, said no to China after initially saying they would tone down game content to be China-compliant.
Prague: cancel partnership with Beijing over 1-China principle
Immutable: offer to repay banned gamer's winnings that was confiscated by Blizzard, got cyber attacked as a result
That wouldn't surprise me. As a kid, airshows and movies like Top Gun & Iron Eagle certainly gave me a pro-military view. I did end joining the army after high school. On the first day of basic training, I also have very vivid memories of drill sergeants mocking us recruits for having bought into the "be all you can be" propaganda :)
My favorite memory of an airshow was seeing the SR-71 fly. Oh my gosh that thing was cool. It was so loud that its vibrations set off what seemed to be every car alarm in the parking lot. At the end of its performance, the pilot just pulled back on the stick and just flew straight up into the clouds. I don't know if this video is the airshow I went to, but imagine a kid with a love of military aircraft seeing this thing up close --https://youtu.be/aV82gbriMc8.
I also have fond memories of seeing an A/V-8B Harrier do a vertical take off and landing. The funniest memory I have was seeing the label on an Apache helicopter's 30mm cannon that said "do not aim at personnel on base".
My favorite first hand experience was getting to fly in a vintage WW2 B-25 Mitchell. I sat in the glass bubble where a gunner would sit at the front of the aircraft. This was in 2012. The owner said that all of the parts he ordered to keep the plane flying came in the original WW2 packaging. As of 8 years ago, somewhere out there was a warehouse full of WW2 era spare parts for 70 year old bombers!
Airshows are cool :)
Wow, I read your comment just as the movie top gun started on my TV. I really wonder what air-to-air unmanned dog fight would look like.
Are drone swarms a thing yet? a sky filled with drones would be terrifying. I would hope modern jets deploy drone like missiles manned by ground crew for dogfights,but if I learned anything about F22 and F35, they spend trillions to basically let middle parties steal the money and the tech is something designed decades ago.
If I was china I would pop out hundreds of thousands of cheap drones to augment radar capabilities all the stealth tech would be useless if the adversary has millions of eyes at different altitudes each capabale of visual/infrared/lidar detection of fast moving objects. US intel seems spread thin, I wonder if they do enough spying to know what their enemies are capable of. Chinese R&D has been catching up fast these last few years.
Somewhat related, my uncle was a “Phantom driver” (F4 Phantom II) in Vietnam. Flew a bunch of missions of varying types.
So Top Gun comes out, and my mom points out he had graduated Fighter Weapons School - my uncle is a real Top Gun!
So I asked him for tales of dogfights, war stories. He had exactly one: “they’d send us out to fight some MiGs, and as soon as we got in range and turned our radar on to start shooting, they’d turn and run.”
So not like the movies?
“Nope.”
Thanks about the reminder about the F-16s - wasn't aware that so many were still active.
I think that I remember that the F-5 was in the original "Top Gun" movie, that it was near its end-life when the movie was shown (I investigated after watching the movie), and that in the movie it had the role of a simulated MIG-antagonist. (gosh, I LOVED that movie when I saw it as a teenager)
Maybe the stagnation of engineering/production of F-35 and/or alternative models is caused by Russia/China not pushing for similar capabilities? There have been news about some new fighters but I didn't read anything about them being mass-produced... .
ROC and JP flags removed from upcoming Top Gun movie
https://twitter.com/markmackinnon/status/1152241649893945346
> This is an increasing factor in the US motion picture industry.
In the first Top Gun movie Maverick's (Tom Cruise's) jacket had the flags of Japan and Taiwan. Images from the upcoming sequel show that they're gone:
* https://www.indiewire.com/2019/07/tom-cruises-jacket-taiwanese-japanese-patches-in-top-gun-maverick-trailer-1202160078/
* https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/19/tom-cruises-top-gun-jacket-shows-how-key-china-is-to-film-industry.html
I wonder if they'll be any modifying done for the final release: one set of flags for China print, another set of flags for not-China.
You should watch Top Gun again. The Blu-Ray version is good, and parts of it were definitely cleaned up (eg the title cards), but there are plenty of film scratches and grainy moments throughout the film.
Cassettes aren't actually that bad. A local radio station I worked at for a while used them for reruns. With a good cassette deck, brand new chrome tapes and Dolby noise reduction, it's hard to hear much of a difference between that and a digital recording. Cassettes only sounded low-fi because most people listened to cheap tapes on cheap players with cheap speakers. Even some of the better portable players from the 1990s sounded very transparent if you attached them to a good pair of headphones or a good stereo system.
I feel we reached transparency for professional analog recordings some time in the 1980s, and I would argue that this applies to analog film as well. Pee-Wee Herman's Big Adventure (1985) and Top Gun (1986) don't look blurry or grainy at all. Analog media kept improving until they were made obsolete. Everyone was trying to approach digital perfection long before it actually existed. Actually wanting artefacts and colouration is more of a recent phenomenon.
I’ve heard this type of speech before. It’s a very candid almost scary talk designed to shake you up and get you focused. The gist was don’t think this degree is all you need. If you get lax some jerk with a history degree is going to take your job and you’re going to flying airplanes full of rubber dog poop from Hong Kong (sorry for adding the top gun reference... for me everything boils down to 80s movie quotes). And these speeches are right - you can’t rest.
This read reminded me of one of the famous TOP GUN movie quotes:
"A good pilot is compelled to always evaluate what's happened, so he can apply what he's learned. Up there, we gotta push it."
This was the conventional wisdom in the 1950s as well.
Which led to the huge, gun-less American fighters of the 1960s, the epitome of which was the F-4 Phantom II (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_F-4_Phantom_II).
Which led to embarrassingly bad kill/loss ratios over Vietnam (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_F-4_Phantom_II#Aerial_combat_in_the_Vietnam_War), when those big, porky fighters went up against smaller, more nimble, gun-still-included Russian planes like the MiG-17 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-17).
Which led to guns being hurriedly added back on to the F-4s, first in an external pod mounted on a hardpoint, and then internally on later production models.
Which led to the development of training programs to teach dogfighting skills like the Naval Fighter Weapons School at Miramar (the school immortalized in the 1986 film Top Gun), because it turned out that the conventional wisdom had sunk in so deeply that a whole generation of American fighter pilots didn't know how to fight with a gun, even when they had one.
Which led to the Lightweight Fighter Program (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_Fighter_program), an effort to use the lessons learned in Vietnam to design a maneuverable, gun-included dogfighter affordable enough to produce in volume.
Which led to the development of two new fighters, the F-16 Fighting Falcon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Dynamics_F-16_Fighting_Falcon) and the F/A-18 Hornet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_F/A-18_Hornet), both of which have been hugely successful in service and make up the bulk of the US Air Force and Navy's fighter forces to this day.
But the people who learned those hard lessons over Vietnam are all retired or dead now, so when people say "planes don't dogfight" nobody challenges it.
Which is how the conventional wisdom of the 1950s becomes conventional wisdom all over again.
I worked at a particular RadioShack store where the manager played the movie "Top Gun" over and over to demo the surround sound system.
The title here is misleading, I think the article is right.
I didn't get into tech because it was interesting, at least not initially. I got into computers because the movie War Games was cool as hell and I wanted to be like Matthew Broderick's character in that movie. I was 5 or 6 when I saw it.
It was only after I got a Commodore 64 that I learned that it was going to be really difficult to do the things in the movie. But the idea that with enough practice I could be like that was very appealing. I don't think girls today have anything similar.
Let's be honest, very few children are that into math or computer science where it becomes an end unto itself. That comes much later. Younger males in the industry today seem to have grown up in the gamer->modder->hacker path that didn't really exist when I was a kid, and certainly doesn't exist for girls today.
And if you're asking the tech industry full of nerds to fix this problem for kids of any gender you're going to get something completely misguided.
Complain to Hollywood. When the military wants to recruit people they don't change to be more appealing, they help make "Top Gun."
>publicly funded entities should not give benefit and preferential treatment to private and proprietary enterprises and systems.
It wouldn't be a "gift" from the USPS. It would be a mutually beneficial financial contract. (E.g. 5 year multi-million dollar contract to mount Google cameras.)
Similar to how private events pay the government for extra police officers to direct traffic or supplement security. Or how the Pentagon charged the Top Gun film production $25,000 to turn an aircraft carrier around.[1] Government entities have set the precedent that they will sell services to private companies.
The citizens' access to the USPS photos would a given and be part of the contract.
[1] https://www.quora.com/Why-did-it-cost-25-000-to-turn-the-ship-in-Top-Gun-during-filming
Awareness ain't everything, case in point: Millions of neo-Nazis are aware that the Holocaust happened, that still didn't and doesn't change a thing about their beliefs.
That's because it's about more than merely "being aware", it's also about taking responsibility and learning a lesson and sadly it looks like that hasn't really happened in the US yet, exemplified by statements like this one:
> If the US was really such an intolerant and unrepentant place, you wouldn't even have a debate about race.
It's funny how you think that's something positive when it's anything but. It's the year 2017, that's probably a couple of decades too late for a "race debate" which isn't even a debate at all.
What happened in Charlottesville wasn't a "debate", it was a show of force by the US American far-right, which only acts so emboldened because the US never really dealt with its race issues besides "being aware" of them and acting decades too late, Charlottesville was the result of this half-arsed behavior and I fear it won't be the only nor the last one.
> If it appears from the outside that the US sees itself in Hollywood good vs evil terms, everyone does.
The difference being that the US has such a massive and far-reaching cultural influence that the "good guy" tale ain't only influencing US Americans in their patriotism, it basically ends up brainwashing large parts of foreign populations.
Of course, Merkel believes she is on the right side, so did Hitler, so did Raegan, so did Stalin. The difference being: Merkel is at least aware that this ain't always true, due to cultural history, the same doesn't apply to the US to the same degree if at all.
The US, as a country, never has acknowledged or atoned for any "national shame", that's why "US patriots" feel so comfortable bathing in their ultra-nationalism while being hilariously unaware of how fanatic it makes them.
Yes, there are Germans who consider their own culture superior to others, the difference being: It's not socially accepted in Germany at all, people like that are usually considered bigots. This is because we Germans are not only aware of our past mistakes, we take responsibility by trying not to repeat them.
And one of the mistakes Germans made was following unfettered fanatism in the form of patriotism. Patriotism and national pride had both been major driving elements for the Nazis taking over power and being able to commit their crimes.
In that regard, the US shares many similarities with the Third Reich, more than most people would like to admit. Way too many US Americans are complicit in their countries crimes as they rather indulge in their patriotism about being "Number One" in "everything".
> US media at the same time is very ready to criticize such absurdities (see World Police, or modern political humor which is huge worldwide - Stewart, Colbert, Oliver).
I'm sure Colbert and Oliver have just as much international reach and influence as Hollywood blockbuster movies like Black Hawk Down, American Sniper, Top Gun or even Casablanca, which have been shaping world opinions about the US for decades.
> It's just annoying to hear people from outside cultures try and shrink down a nation of 50 mini-nations and 300 million people into some kind of comprehensive worldview. It's not reality.
The US ain't "50 mini-nations", the cultural, linguistical and geographical differences just don't support a statement like that. There's also a reason these states are United because they share "some kind of comprehensive worldview", which at its most basic level starts with the "American Dream" and at the extreme ends results with "America Number 1, America First" fanatics.
> I assume other countries aren't perfect places, but I'm not on French and German message boards telling Germans how they're just thieves and murderers and that's why they have been successful.
Excuse my naivety, but to me, this ain't a "US American message board", I rarely think in such terms when I'm surfing online, to me, it's foremost an English language message board devoid of any national connection. There are lots of international topics and people around here, just because somebody speaks English, or a board uses it as its language, does not make them US American.
In Top Gun (1986) the studio reimbursed the US Navy for flight time during filming. $7,800/Hr for the F-14 in 1986. The tech advisor was recently retired Radm. Pete "Viper" Pettigrew, a TOPGUN instructor who shot down a MiG over Vietnam. He was paid for his technical advisor role by the studio.
One key change at the Navy's request is Maverick dating a civilian instructor, not a women in the Navy, as that is against Navy regs.
In Independence Day (1996) The Pentagon withdrew support over references to "Area 51", the location of the USAF Flight Test Center (Detachment 3) that officially didn't exist.
Decisions regarding Pentagon support for movies are sometimes made by the Secretary of Defense, personally. If he doesn't like it, they withdraw support.
Not only Captain America. They had everybody from Horatio Alger to Joseph McCarthy, all the tele-evangelists and their ilk, all their popular movies, books, comics, tv shows etc with overly simplistic morality plays and nationalistic narrative etc. Even the 60s rock n' rollers just added some tamed dissent to an otherwise hook line and sinker adoption of the "american dream", all the way to Rambo, Rocky, Top Gun, and so on.
It's people like HST, Kurt Vonnegut, black musicians and writers, directors like Cassavetes and Kazan and such that embedded a dose of realism to the popular narrative. But anything really mainstream was always 80% sugary propaganda.
Those are mild examples compared to the trend that started with, IIRC, Top Gun, where the US millitary trades use of millitary assets as props in return for the "right" spin being put on the movie.
There is an excellent, if dated, Nova episode called "Top Gun and Beyond" that addresses this. Navy research showed that the (all male) fighter pilots responded much faster to a female voice, so that's what they put in the voice alerts.
This is a minor point in the program, though. It's really one of my favorite Nova episodes and I recommend it to anyone.
> most of Top Gun is perfectly suitable for a 5 year old...except some of the swearing and the sex
It's fascinating to consider the cultural differences that make sex the thing most unacceptable in a movie largely concerned with gigantic flying death machines.
And I'm not saying jets are not awesomely cool, they are indeed... But is the movie significantly different from an air force/navy recruiting advertisement?
> the art of dogfighting was deemed to have been lost for a brief period between WWII and the air war over Vietnam, and had to be re-engineered.
That's the premise laid out at the start of the Top Gun movie. That the Top Gun school was created to bring back the art of dogfighting.
Other similar experiments include Cinema 52, where a group of people agreed to watch the same movie, once a week for a year. Top Gun the first year, Back to the Future the second year and Avatar the third year: http://www.cinema52.com/the-experiment/
Also The Lawrence Julie & Julia project where one guy decided to watch the movie Julie and Julia every single day for an entire year: http://www.lawrenceandjulieandjulia.com/
Why bother doing that when you can just upload it to one of the many, many video hosting sites with dubious legal footprints?
Just to be clear, the Top Gun "frame by frame" tweeting isn't frame by frame, by any stretch. It's more like a series of panels in a comic, with each panel showing a piece of action or a line of dialog, typically one frame for every several seconds of the movie.
Fair use doesn't revolve around commentary/criticism/parody. That's just one factor. Not that the other factors are super favorable to @55uhz, but at least one of them (effect on market for original copyrighted work) cuts in their favor. Nobody's going to watch the movie in super (duper) slow-mo instead of buying/renting/streaming it. If anything, it's helping the market for Top Gun. The other factors are less favorable, and there's of course the question of how the user got the frames in the first place—if he ripped a DVD he might have violated the DMCA, which has no fair use exception.
No war stories here, just my two cents. It is unfortunate that the cost of defending against spurious suits can be substantial—even if the law is ultimately on your side. Basically, the movie studios are much better equipped to send out takedown notices than you are to respond to them. And as this article makes clear, movie studios may take action against many entities—even those that probably increase movie sales. After all, the twitter feed probably spurs interest in Top Gun (and the publicity around the takedown notice amplifies this effect even further). So tread carefully, and good luck!
Most of the articles about Flappy Bird are frustrating. Everybody assumes that the developer somehow "hacked" the system, refusing to believe a phenomenon where sometimes just everything aligns and makes you successful.
What I find even pathetic is that people trying to explain how Flappy Bird hacked it's way by the means available to everybody - like botnets posting reviews.
I think in the reality it's just this: Sometimes people or products happen to be at the right time at the right place.
Think about celebrities. Are the most popular actors that much outstanding from many others? Or musicians? Or artists? Most of them just happen to be caught to the perfect storm and they shine. Think about an actor who was in few movies before, but this time he is the Top Gun - and now we have Tom Cruise. What He did in Top Gun that he didn't in Risky Business?
We like to believe that we live in a meritocratic society but most of the time glamour is about luck. I am not even sure that there is anyone or any product that is so outstanding that millions of people celebrate it for it's meritocratic qualities.
That's why sometimes an old song becomes a hit many years later, like the song Beggin' became popular again 40 years after it's first debut. Did Madcon somehow made an outstanding cover for first time in 40 years?
Sometimes it becomes a meme, like Three Wolf Moon becoming one after a review on amazon. Was this review first of it's kind or something really that outstanding? I don't think so.
Flappy Bird was caught by the perfect storm, that's it. The game had the qualities, just like many other games, and some chaotic chain of events placed the game to a position where it can run for the glamour.
The Navy actually charged Paramount Pictures for the costs of operating a carrier for the film scenes.
Paramount tried to get the Navy to agree to refund some of the cost if Paramount let the Navy run a recruiting pitch before the movie in theaters, but Naval officials concluded (correctly) that Top Gun itself was as good a recruiting film as anyone could develop, and charged full price.
Interestingly the US military involvement in Top Gun was a reaction to their contribution to Final Countdown.
A US Navy Commander was dismissed for having authorized the use of US Navy assets for the latter film without appropriate 'controls' ( and technically he wasn't of appropriate rank to have signed it off ) . That's not a mistake they made with Top Gun.
The last film to mock the U.S. military was Dr. Strangelove, after which there was no military-sanctioned Hollywood film until Top Gun, 30 years later.
After seeing "Top Gun" ca. 1986, I said to those I went with that Hollywood had forgotten how to make movies. It knew how to make commercials (TG is full of sequences that would fit right into a Navy recruiting commercial) and music videos ("You've lost that loving feeling"), but that was about it. The rest of the movie was negligible, though perhaps I should have added in video games to allow for the fighter-jet stuff.
But was it ever that different? The stuff we still watch is the exception. Hollywood cranked out a hell of a lot of stuff 80 and 70 years ago that nobody but a film studies graduate student could bring himself to sit through. Read for example S.J. Perelman on how the studios worked.
As for "adolescent men coming to grips with who they are", arrested development is one of Hollywood's favorite subjects. I noticed this in watching "Sideways", but would Dean and Brando have ever made their names without it?
[Edit]
On consideration, isn't "adolescent men coming to grips with who they are" a large theme in Western literature? (And I suppose, but can't cite, other literatures also.) The Odyssey kicks off with Athena inspiring Telemachus to independence. Shakespeare's Henry IV plays are all about Prince Hal becoming Henry V. War and Peace follows three men from adolescence to maturity, and one of them, Prince Andrei, to a couple of levels. And I think one could find examples of literature following adolescent women through.
Top Gun pilots can withstand 9G for quite a few seconds without a G-suit IIRC from documentaries on the topic.
"Are hollywood movies really motivating career decisions?"
You bet. When Top Gun came out, enrolment in the Navy and Air Force increased substantially. Wall Street in part fuelled the popularity in a career in finance and I'm willing to bet that Rounders was used in part to justify being a professional poker player for many people.
Also, I'm pretty sure that Blade Runner (at least subconsciously) contributed towards me going back to school and getting a masters in machine learning.
tl; tisfl (this-is-still-fucking-long): I'd like to pre-apologize for this rant, but Gruber is killing me. He's trolling for pageviews/loyalists and I hate that I keep reading his articles expecting insight and objectivity. Learn from my mistakes.
Also, I'm using grown-up words. Be warned.
Also, I stopped reading TFA at the "What I Hope..." section because my head started to throb.
From TFA:
But in short let’s just think about the ways that iCloud might be a major, dare I say game-changing, step away from USB tethering between iOS devices and iTunes running on your Mac/PC. Consider just the new out-of-box experience. Rather than “Take this out, plug it into your Mac or PC (after first making sure your Mac/PC is running the latest version of iTunes), wait for it to sync before you actually play with it”, you might get something like “Take this out, turn it on, sign into your iTunes account, and start playing with it.”
Really? Not plugging your phone into USB and then fucking about with iTunes is "dare I say game-changing". What decade are we in? Oh wait, maybe this quote was missing some critical bit of context... If so, fill me in. If not, FTFA.
But wait, there's more:
If Apple can work out (or, if we can dream, perhaps secretly already has worked out) a deal to allow movies, in addition to music, to be bought and stored permanently in your iCloud account, then the Apple TV 2 suddenly changes from a machine for renting movies into a machine for buying or renting movies. I like to buy movies, so here’s hoping.
The point of the cloud is that I don't have to "store permanently" movies in the cloud. A bit of data is stored that says I have permanent access to the movie. [I know that some might yell about DRM and what, but I really dig this access model and don't give a shit if I lose access to Top Gun. GrooveShark + PSN + NetFlix => no media files in my life.] And how could studios possibly agree to this insanity?! Oh wait. Netflix. (To which someone says, "but they don't have everything"; to which I say, "they will".) "Apple TV 2 suddenly changes from a machine for renting movies into a machine for buying or renting movies"... If I wait longer, will this sentence become not-dumb?
The launch of the first Space Shuttle happened April 12, 1981.
Top Gun, the movie, came out about five years later, on May 16, 1986.
Maybe the Space Shuttle launch did cause an increase in interest in aerospace programs, and maybe it didn't. I don't know. What I do know is that Top Gun did cause an increased interest in aerospace courses and programs.
I'd attribute part of the increase to what I call the "Top Gun Effect."
When Top Gun (the Tom Cruise movie) came out, there was a big increase in the number of students signing up for aerospace engineering courses and programs.
The trigger doesn't have to be a movie, just something in popular culture. In this case, I think it's all the positive media around Facebook, iPhone, iPad, Kinect, Google and more (including at least one Oscar-nominated movie).
I will put this out there:
Top Gun is a good movie (even if it is pretty shallow).
Twitter is a good technology.
This article points out that movies are now excessively marketing-driven, and suggests that the reason is that the generation born in the 1960s suffers from "arrested development" — i.e. psychological neoteny — to a unique degree, and that they now control Hollywood. Although it does not offer any evidence to support either of these propositions, it suggests that Top Gun or the Reagan administration might be the cause of the neoteny.
In reality, marketing-driven movie are nothing new. In the 1960s, they were called "exploitation" films; "exploitation" was the 1960s movie-biz term for "marketing". The crucial question is, why is so much of the movie business organized around exploitation films today? And an unsupported psychological hypothesis doesn't cut it as an answer.
Here's an idea that seems at least as good as the answer proffered by the article. The internet makes word-of-mouth travel a lot faster now. It used to be that the box-office receipts of a stinker movie would decline over the first few weeks after its release. Now, they decline even during the opening weekend. (I haven't verified that, but it seems like it ought to be easily verifiable.) People tweet about how bad the movie is even before they've finished watching it.
In turn, this word-of-mouth heightens the winner-take-all nature of the film industry; hit movies take home a bigger share of the total box-office receipts of the industry (unverified, but should be verifiable), with the result that more movies these days fail to even make back their production costs (unverified, but should be verifiable). In short, film production is a riskier investment than it used to be, and there's less that marketing money can do to rescue a stinker.
An economically rational response to this situation (assuming I'm correct!) would be to work harder to figure out which films are going to be hits and which are going to be flops, make the hits bigger hits, and spend less on the flops. For example, you could do any of the following:
• Value talent more highly. Talent can't stop a flop from being a flop, but it can make the difference between a hit and a mega-blockbuster.
• Don't spend anything on marketing. Release films in a single theater or a single city. If it takes off, print more copies. If GQ is to be believed, this would cut the cost of filmmaking in half, which would mean you could make twice as many movies.
• Release movies to audiences in episodes; start by releasing a half-hour pilot, and if it takes off, call the actors and director back to make another hour. This could cut the cost of filmmaking by more than a factor of 2, especially if the first part goes easy on the special effects, the music, that kind of thing. (In a way, that's what's happening with the sequel craze that the article is complaining about, but the difference is that you need to have the story arc planned out: Dune or Star Wars Episode IV or Babylon 5, not Fast Five.)
• Instead of a first episode, release an abridged version, maybe a half-hour. This has been done unintentionally and on a small scale for many years; think of Blade Runner and Blade Runner: the director's cut. The difference is that you can actually save money by not shooting the parts of the story that you leave out. Maybe instead of showing it in theaters, you can show it on Lifetime or HBO or something, or just on your web site.
• Instead of a pilot episode or abridged movie, do the first installment of the movie as a comic book. Comics have a lot in common with films: they're intensely visual and powerfully immersive, they even use cinematographic techniques, and a "graphic novel" is a lot closer in length to a movie than it is to War and Peace. These days, online, maybe you could even add a voiceover to your comic book. (Admittedly, filmstrips never really took off as a dramatic medium.) Again, in a sense, studios are doing this already; they're just not funding the production of the comics in the first place. They ought to. If there were ten times as many graphic novels coming out every year, they'd have a much better selection of audience-proven storyboards.
• Post trailers and teaser episodes on BitTorrent before you're done filming in order to see if they take off. It's no guarantee — lots of people will be willing to watch the movie for free even if they wouldn't shell out for a ticket — but if it flops there, it'll probably flop in the theater too.
• Cancel more films before they're even finished shooting. If your early indications are that it's not going to work out, don't try to rescue your investment by sending good money after bad, hiring a famous film editor to try to salvage something from the wreckage, nonsense like that. You need some kind of interim feedback on quality, of course, which is impossible to do reliably, although some of the approaches above might help. The big returns are going to go to the mega-hit films. Invest the money you would have invested in finishing the film in something that has a chance to be a mega-hit instead.
• Leave room in filming budgets for expansion. If early feedback (from the first episode, or just during screenings) is that the film is good, double the special-effects budget. Splurge on ADR and better music.
• Make more films, which means making a lot of low-budget films.
• Diversify your film investments; we should see more multi-studio films, just like we see lots of multi-VC-firm startups.
• Share the risk with the fans. Sell nonrefundable opening-night tickets before you're finished shooting, in order to raise money for the film. Give them cash back if the movie is a hit. Or sell the advance tickets in groups of four. (If the movie's worth watching, they can treat three of their friends for free.)
However, although as I said above, the studios are using some of these approaches, we're mostly seeing something else entirely. When you're used to a certain level of risk, and that level of risk goes up, your natural inclination is not to figure out how to take advantage of the new risk; it's to try desperately to push the risk back down. So, instead, we're seeing stupid moves like these:
• Release the film initially in more theaters, not less. That way, if it sucks, you might still make your money back before everyone sees their friends tweet about how it was so bad they walked out of the theater.
• Make films that people will want to see before they hear from anyone who's actually seen them: sequels, comic strips, toy brands. This is a necessary complement to releasing the film in a lot of theaters at once.
• Spend more on pre-release marketing instead of less. This slashes your maximum possible return on investment, but you have to do it if you're going to get people into all those theaters on opening weekend instead of a week later.
(The author's grudge against comic books is pretty embarrassing. Are you going to tell me Watchmen was infantilizing, not aimed at adults?)
Now, I admit I know little about business and nothing about the business of movies. So maybe these ideas are stupid.
Reading more...
The Top Gun era sent the ambitions of those who wanted to break into the biz spiraling in a new direction. Fifteen years earlier, scores of young people headed to film schools to become directors. With the advent of the Reagan years, a more bottom-line-oriented cadre of would-be studio players was born, with an MBA as the new Hollywood calling card. The Top Gun era shifted that paradigm again—this time toward marketing. Which was only natural: If movies were now seen as packages, then the new kings of the business would be marketers, who could make the wrapping on that package look spectacular even if the contents were deficient.
I see the same thing happening right now in tech. I see a lot of fairly vapid, not very innovative ideas being driven by a lot of marketing and salesmanship.
Top Gun : Movies
Twitter : Tech
When you put marketers in charge of everything, you get a culture of pandering and recycled old ideas. That's what we have.
A bit over 25 years ago, I saw _Top Gun_ and told my girlfriend that people had forgotten how to make movies, though they did know how to make commercials and music videos. I don't think that I was wrong, but I may have implicitly given too much credit to the movie makers of years past.There were a lot of awful movies made during times that at least the film critics look back on with nostalgia.
Yes but Top Gun was made on a budget of $17 million. The focus then was on low-budget, high-concept movies, based on a good story, NOT spending lots of money. Unfortunately, people now think of high-concept as meaning big budget, when that's not the case.
I went all the way back to the mid 80's, and the blockbuster back then was Top Gun, which apparently didn't even break 250 mil. Nowadays, we have huge blockbusters that regularly surpass 250 mil every season. Even though we have DVDs and can download copies (pirated or not), collectively, we're spending more on movies than we use to.
However, we don't know whether that's due to more people going to see movies, or merely just an increase in ticket prices. It'd be more interesting to see the graph adjusted for this so we can see if more or less people are going to the movies than before.
It also seems that movies that are series get a second hump, like Jurassic Park III, Harry Potter, etc.
IMAX movies have a looong shelf-life, compared to all other movie types. Mysteries of Egypt was there all the way from 1999 through to the end of 2000, when it had a small resurgence before disappearing.