Hacker Cinema
Total Recall
1990 · Film · 113 min
Directed by Paul Verhoeven
ActionAdventureScience Fiction
Construction worker Douglas Quaid's obsession with the planet Mars leads him to visit Rekall, a virtual vacation company that manufactures memories. When something goes wrong during Quaid's memory implant procedure, his life turns upside down, leading him to question what is reality and what isn't.
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123 comments on Hacker News
With Musks ideas I often think I saw that movie/read that book. For his Mars plans I see the Mars colony from Total Recall, the Schwarzenegger film
Like Zuckerberg‘s shift to VR that looks like he came out of the theater of Ready Player one.
I'm more cynical here. I suspect these are films (or many of them at least) are ones "they" don't want you to see... ever. It's censorship, so no remastering.
"due to our content licensing agreements" .. this is just Sony placating to someone else's demands. The question is who are "they" and why these films? Maybe these films end up being revised with alternate endings or tweaked characters.
If you see these films, what sort of person will you become? Is that someone who is undesirable?
Terminator 2, Rambo 1, Cliffhanger and Total Recall. We can't have that!
It's just a theory.
Are PlayStation users younger than average? That's important to note too.
Also interesting: recently YT removed the ability to see Likes in one's uploaded video list, only views and comment counts. The message could be: "be well-known, but don't be popular" Why?
Yet I think "Sort by Likes" would be a boon for YT creators and that never even existed, with the Likes column even removed a week or two after I suggested it.
I was referencing the one you were implicitly defending that started this line of chatter: https://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/top10 Most of the books from that list are widely available and easily accessible. The 'under threat' rhetoric is just from them being removed from some schools due to content being deemed age inappropriate. Those pg13 movies with nudity tend to be things like a few seconds of sideboob in a shower or whatever.
The top book on that 'challenged' list is a diary style book of a 13 year old girl who is sold into sex slavery, repeatedly raped, abused, and so on - with descriptions of each 'encounter.' The book is meant to be, and indeed is, extremely disturbing as it's part of the author's activism against sex trafficking throughout the world - as it was based on real events as per her research. In any case, it most certainly is not PG13 by any stretch of the imagination. It's much closer to something like Requiem for a Dream than it is to Tomb Raider.
I also think that's a great book to have on top, because it emphasizes that the issue isn't ideological, but content. I think there's few people who would claim Sold doesn't have tremendous value, or that it should be banned. But there's going to be a lot of people that don't want books like that anywhere near children. And for good reason - it's the same reason I wouldn't really care if my kids wanted to watch Total Recall or Terminator, but no way would I let them watch Requiem for a Dream. The violence and triple titted aliens of Total Recall are borderline comical, but I don't think stuff that gives you that awful 'ughhhh' feeling like Requiem for a Dream (or indeed - Sold) is something that's going to be at all healthy for a child's development.
If you enjoyed the Fifth Element absolutely watch Jodorowsky's Dune
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1935156/
On the cover it's a story about the failed production of Alejandro Jodorowsky's Dune script but the deeper story was the aggregation of an unbelievably talented pool of visual artists including Jean "Moebius" Giraud (mentioned as central artist in 5th element), H.R. Giger, Chris Foss, Salvador Dali, & Dan O'Bannon.
That group would go on to centrally influence the visual style of a huge body of science fiction work including Alien, Blade Runner, Total Recall, Star Wars, The Matrix, Guardians of the Galaxy, etc etc.
The art and creativity on display in the film is absolutely sonic.
Kind of like the original PayPal mafia!
I'm guessing from the title that it took some inspiration either from the film Total Recall or the short-story the film was based upon We Can Remember It for You Wholesale.
Publishers make choices the author had no say in all the time. One of the things commonly mentioned about Phil Dick is that while the movies you've probably seen based on his work (such as "Blade Runner" and "Total Recall") have different titles than the stories they are based on, those stories weren't published under his proposed name in many cases either.
This feels just a few steps removed from bringing the technology from the 1990 film "Total Recall" to life. Clients are able to purchase completely custom memories, choosing the exact characters that will appear in their "vacations", their ages, and appearances.
Quite a lot of Philip K Dick's stories mess with your sense of what's real, quite intentionally.
The short story "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale", on which Total Recall is based, is a fun read - it's not quite the same as the movie.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Can_Remember_It_for_You_Wholesale
I think the confusion about Total Recall's reality is intentional. My view: there are scenes in the movie that are not from Quaid's point of view and that Quaid could not have direct knowledge of. That seems to imply that it's real.
I liked the idea of Screamers, how the robots started self replicating and took over. Also liked Total Recall, I was never sure if the whole second part of the movie was real or in his head.
Dick is one of the writers that accompanied me in my youth, along with the Golden Agers (IA, RAH, AC etc.). His books are the base for many SF tv/movies. Total Recall, The Man in the High Castle, and others. This story, written in the fifties, is eerily evocative of todays drone warfare.
Ask Russian-speakers to recommend a fun iconic movie to watch, and Ivan Vasilievich comes up all the time. I don’t see why, but it does.
Diamond Hand too.
It would be ridiculous if the same were true about Hollywood.
A Russian asks an American what movies to watch, and 8 out of 10 people go back to 1969 to recommend the same one? Impossible.
You’d get everything from Citizen Kane to Hitchcock to Rocky, etc. But you’d also get about 150 great picks from the 80s and 90s, and another dozen from after 2000.
And forget the greats. You’d get Zoolander, Demolition Man, Total Recall, Gremlins, Scream, John Wick, Legally Blonde even… there’s such a wide pool of fun iconic popcorn movies for any person.
Not to mention your Star Wars/Trek/Gate.
These movies aren’t “good” in the sense of being art. They’re good in the sense of people wanting to watch them.
Every n years I rewatch Commando, Con-Air, The Last Starfighter, etc just for kicks. It’s not pure nostalgia- they’re fun movies.
With int’l movies from any given country the list of recommendations is extremely shallow. It’s always one or two iconic revelations from a given decade. Or a couple auteur directors who won all the awards for their think-pieces about the human condition.
I just posted some historical info about Chuck Moore's work for HOMER and Associates on a real time visual mixing console that produced many music videos that ran endlessly on MTV back when they actually played music videos, and special effects for blockbuster films like RoboCop and Total Recall to the discussion about abstractions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42532404
The real time visual mixing console that produced many music videos that ran endlessly on MTV back when they actually played music videos, and special effects for blockbuster films like RoboCop and Total Recall, wasn't a "simple thing".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29261868
DonHopkins on Nov 18, 2021 | prev | next [–]
Coco Conn and Paul Rother wrote this up about what they did with FORTH at HOMER & Assoc, who made some really classic music videos including Atomic Dog, and hired Charles Moore himself! Here's what Coco Conn posted about it, and some discussion and links about it that I'm including with her permission:
Peter Conn:
https://web.archive.org/web/20230516102928/https://imgur.com/a/4Bmb4xu
Homer & Associates (1982):
http://leftbrain.us/rotherHistory/homer.html
Peter Conn Papers at Stanford:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190603111701/https://library.stanford.edu/blogs/special-collections-unbound/2019/05/peter-conn-papers-available-research
https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8n303pn/entire_text/
George Clinton - Atomic Dog (Official Music Video) HD
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMVZ36VA0wg
Steve Miller Band - Abracadabra
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tY8B0uQpwZs
Steve Miller Band - Bongo Bongo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NrsRZdMI-A
Flying Logos for 1989 Siggraph Electronic Theater:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hIOfEiy4lc
>First shown at the 1989 Siggraph Electronic Theater to a rave response, this 3 minute humourous film went on to win several top computer graphic awards that same year including Niccograph of Japan.
>Coco: This was a show favorite at the SIGGRAPH film show that year. The year before the conference committee decided that showing demos wasn't the way to go anymore. Peter wrote Flying Logos as a way to sneak our demo reel into the show by turning it into a story. It worked and we made it into the film show.
>Don: I truly believe that in some other alternate dimension, there is a Flying Logo Heaven where the souls of dead flying logos go, where they dramatically promenade and swoop and spin around each other in pomp and pageantry to bombastic theme music. It would make a great screen saver, at least! Somewhere the Sun Logo and the SGI Logo are still dancing together.
----
Peter Conn and I [Coco Conn] had a company called HOMER & Assoc. which was located at the Sunset Gower Studios from 1977 until we closed shop in 1997. We made music videos, commercials & computer graphics/special effects for feature films. One cool note, we worked with Paul Verhoven on both RoboCop in 1986 and the x-ray scene for Total Recall in '89.
HOMER was actually a real time visual mixing console that our in-house engineer spent 1978 - 1981 designing and building, from scratch. The name HOMER stood for "Hybrid Optical Montage Electronically Reproduced." I helped as well, soldering the LEDs on the console and running cables. Peter built his own optical printer and three years into the build we also bought an early computer paint system. Our engineer finished building the console and promptly decided to move to England. We hadn’t used it because we still hadn’t found the right software to run the system. Luckily that’s when Paul Rother joined the company.
The joy stick on our console would bump you to the next line of code (being a command or sequence of events: fade, cut, dissolve, etc.) The console had touch sensitive fader pads. There were no dials. I think they were made by Allison? Each channel (which controlled either a slide projector or a film projector) was touch sensitive. After recording a sequence we could then tweek the current version using additional effects the channels offered such as momentary, additive, on/off, etc. For instance if you wanted to crossfade two images, you could either program it or perform it. Of course everything you did was recorded and would play back on the next round. You literally performed a sequence of visual effects with your hands. Peter would do countless passes until everything was perfect. This performance would then be played back to IP film on the optical printer. Each slide tray or film real would be individually run, one by one, to IP film. Sometimes there would be 10-15 or more passes to get all the elements transferred. Once that was done we would then convert the IP film to video and do additional video editing and effects. A totally nuts analogue system. But it worked.
---------------
HOMER Explained by Paul Rother, in-house programmer, (1982):
The photo is Paul sitting in front of the Optical Printer 7-bit Paint system, Homer and Associates, circa 1982. Homer and Associates was really one of a kind kinda of company. Founded by Peter Conn, originally I got hired to program Homer II, a visual realtime mixing console. Homer I is another whole story, but before my time. Homer II consisted of 16 slide projectors, 4 movie projectors, a 4 track tape recorder, 24 visual channels (each with its own Z80) touch sensitive sliders, a master Z80 S100 bus system and featuring "the joy stick bumper " control, which looked liked the gear shift right out of a 1964 mustang convertible.
The idea was that you would program a visual sequence, then play the sequence in sync with the sound track on the joystick, including cascades, bumps, cuts, etc. The whole thing would be recorded, and if you wanted to, like an audio mixer, go back and do over dubs, making corrections. Then once you had the perfect "hero" recording, you take the 8" floppy disc with the hero recording and the trays of slides to the optical printer, and record it to IP motion picture film, making multiple passes, one tray at a time. Now that I think about it, it was a crazy idea. We actually got the whole thing to work. And it worked great!
Forth & Charles Moore
We hired Forth, Inc. and got Charles Moore, the inventor of FORTH to program the console host computer. I learned FORTH and worked with Charles. I programmed the 2K byte EPROM in each visual channel. On the Master Z80 system we ran PolyForth a multi tasking system in 32K bytes. We had an extra 16K RAM for buffers and things. If I remember right, the system ran four tasks, but that was 20 years ago, my memory may be hazy.
Anyway, I learn not only FORTH from Charles Moore, but also how to factor code in to small reusable routines, WORDs they're called in FORTH. I learned Object Oriented Programming without knowing it. Also a lot of use of vectors. Its a cool language. Charles Moore was a great inspiration to me, and really taught me a great deal that they never taught me in computer programming school.
CAT-700
After we got the basic Homer II working and were able to record on the optical printer, Peter had another idea. He wanted to be able to see the movement of the optical printer, and see a prior frame compared to the current frame. We already had a video assist on the Fries Mitchell 35mm. What we needed was a Frame Buffer. We heard of S100 video board called the CAT-100, which was 1-bit frame buffer, good enough for what we needed. Somehow we never found a 1-bit version, but we found 7-bit version in the recycler!
We flew to Reno, rented a car and drove to a log cabin up in the hills of Truckie California. We got a demo of the thing. The guys were super secret and didn't want us to see the controlling program. It worked, so we bought it, and then flew onto Palo-Alto and met the French guy who designed it. They checked it out and it was OK. This was the days before computer designed boards, and all the traces on the board were curvy, kinda like a Van Gogh painting. We learned that it was 7-bit (CAT-700) because it would have been an 8-bit, but they could not get the 8th bit to work. We spent the night in Palo Alto with a Stanford friend of Peters working on a crazy secret Apple project, the Lisa. 32KByte Paint System
So I got the CAT-700 frame buffer to work, programmed in FORTH. So in that 32K we had an optical printer control system, and a paint system, all in one. (Also the OS, compiler, debugger, etc.) We later hooked up a Summigraphic Bitpad (before the Watcom tablet) and were able to draw on top of digitized frames. It got to the point where we needed TWO optical printers, one to digitize from film, and the other to record to film. Rube Goldberg is not strong enough descriptive to describe the system, with the filter wheels and all on stepper motors, it made music. The first use of the system was effects for Steve Miller Music Video, Abracadabra. I also remember using it on the George Clinton Video, Atomic Dog.
This photo was taken right after we got the system to work. I had hooked up an analog slider box, which controlled things like color. There were 4 color maps we could switch between instantly We did a lot of work in planes, using 2 planes for the original image to be rotoscoped, and the other 5 planes to draw onto. This photo was taken for an article in Millimeter Magazine. The photo ended up being a two page color spread, and I think Peter was pissed, cause I got premier exposure.
TTL logic
At Homer and Assoc. I also learned TTL logic and designed a number of computer boards for the S100 bus. One that controlled stepper motors with a timer chip (Motorola 6840). Another to control the Slide Projectors also using the same Motorola timer chip to control the lamp triacs. My favorite thing, about the system, was the use of the cassette storage interface as a cheap timecode reader/writer.
RoboCop (1987) - IMDb https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093870/
Total Recall (1990) - IMDb. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100802/
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (best of the grandiose classics imo)
Deep Impact (the only good asteroid movie?)
Jurassic Park + Independence Day (peak Goldblum)
Total Recall + A Scanner Darkly (best Philip K Dick adaptation)
Gravity (great visuals / perseverance story)
For convenience, I asked ChatGPT to create this table, which summarizes how many times each movie has been mentioned in this conversation so far. It got a few counts wrong (as usual), but it still gives a good sense of the frequency. I hope it can be useful to someone:
| Movie | Number of Mentions | |-------------------------------------------|---------------------| | The Matrix | 9 | | Lord of the Rings Trilogy | 8 | | Pulp Fiction | 8 | | Alien | 7 | | Fight Club | 7 | | Ghostbusters | 6 | | Die Hard | 5 | | Back to the Future | 5 | | Inception | 5 | | Star Wars Trilogy (original) | 5 | | Groundhog Day | 5 | | Terminator 1 & 2 | 5 | | Jurassic Park | 4 | | The Thing | 4 | | The Fifth Element | 4 | | Monty Python and the Holy Grail | 4 | | Ghost in the Shell | 4 | | Interstellar | 4 | | Casablanca | 3 | | Office Space | 3 | | Shawshank Redemption | 3 | | The Godfather Trilogy | 3 | | The Blues Brothers | 3 | | Blade Runner | 3 | | Mad Max: Fury Road | 3 | | Unforgiven | 3 | | Total Recall (1990) | 3 | | The Crow | 3 | | The Princess Bride | 3 | | Akira | 3 | | The Big Lebowski | 3 | | Guardians of the Galaxy | 3 | | American Psycho | 3 | | Indiana Jones Trilogy | 3 | | Kiki’s Delivery Service | 2 | | Ratatouille | 2 | | A Clockwork Orange | 2 | | Mission Impossible (various) | 2 | | Casino Royale | 2 | | Skyfall | 2 | | Ferris Bueller's Day Off | 2 | | Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan | 2 | | Apocalypse Now | 2 | | The Shining | 2 | | Groundhog Day | 2 | | Donnie Darko | 2 | | Dune (2021) | 2 | | Gladiator | 2 | | Predator | 2 | | Seven/Se7en | 2 | | The Dark Knight | 2 | | Snatch | 2 | | Prometheus | 2 | | Schindler’s List | 2 | | The Wolf of Wall Street | 2 | | Dr. Strangelove | 2 | | Silence of the Lambs | 2 | | Kill Bill | 2 | | Real Genius | 2 | | Top Secret! | 2 | | Tenet | 2 | | Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy | 2 | | The Adjustment Bureau | 2 | | The Expanse | 2 | | Pulp Fiction | 2 |
Original Star Wars trilogy. Lord of the Rings American Psycho Total Recall (1990) Blade Runner Love Actually The Fifth Element Unbreakable Pulp Fiction Four Weddings and a Funeral Guardians of the Galaxy X-Men X-Men the Last Stand Showing my age here, but I started to lose interest in movies after the 2000s. No I do not want to watch a remake of [Blade Runner, X-Men, etc...]. Also X-Men was great, but my interest didn't stretch to Captain America and Iron Man, so the MCU was a loss for me.
Hey, Total Recall. The movie. They did a thing like that.
The movie poster for Total Recall hit a core memory. I am gonna need to re-watch that classic tonight.
The brandong is also dumb and immediately rings a bell for whoever remembers the Total Recall movie.
Its getting really boring now.
God knows how many years we have been promised the fantasy Cyber-accident taxi's.
I wont ever get in to one those killing machines just in case a random kid runs across the road and the AI has a kernel panic and forgets to brake.
Or the AI swerves out of the way of a granny crossing the road a ploughs into a bus stop full of childen on their way to school.
when I was about 10 years old I remember always wanting my own hover back pack or personal hovercraft so I could fly around everywhere. where did they go?
After all I saw them on tv and in films.
The only robo-cab that I have seen is the one in Total recall with Arnold. The one where arnold ripped out the steering column and manually drove it.
Lone's robo-cab's may look smarter but underneath that flashy exterior they are just the robo-cabs from total recall.
This was covered in the 1990 science fiction action movie Total Recall, was it not?
VC funding led by Cohaagen however is in a race to find and incapacitate the terraforming reactor in order to keep people in perpetuity paying for apps to escape their current lives.
From Wikipedia…
> Popular films based on his works include Blade Runner (1982), Total Recall (adapted twice: in 1990 and in 2012), Screamers (1995), Minority Report (2002), A Scanner Darkly (2006), The Adjustment Bureau (2011), and Radio Free Albemuth (2010).
If you’ve not heard of P.K. Dick before it’s kind of weird to be worried about “is this a talented artist”… you really need to push your boundaries in any way possible.
Just last night I was lying in bed and thinking about a scene from Total Recall, towards the end, when Quaid, after being forcibly shackled into the chair of the Rekall machine, uses the power of anger to rip himself free of the heavy metal brackets binding his arms to the chair, before brutally killing several lab tachnicians.
I was thinking "There is no way a mortal human could realistically rip one of those brackets off, they're way overbuilt" They should have designed those brackets to be plausibly destroyable by a large, angry man. It seemed like a plot weakness in an otherwise tightly designed film. I asked "Who was responsible for designing that chair?"
Sometimes you ask the universe a question, and the universe answers. Ron Cobb designed that chair.
They are humorously cheaper.
A friend's kia ev6 parked up, I had an instant flashback to the electric taxi car Johnny Cab from Shwarznegger's Total Recall.
The movie car has this really weak sounding electric motor whirr/whine, just like the EVs.
Just in case you don't get it, I think this is a quote from the movie 'Total recall'
Baudrillard saw it all in the late 1970s, in his book On Seduction that extrapolates the importance of video games from Pong and his later Simulacra and Simulation which outlines 13 parables for the information age, each of which could be the basis for an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. (e.g, Terminator as a study of the post human, Total Recall for the reality bending power of technology, Last Action Hero is in the liminal space between reality and fantasy)
Easily top 2 sci-fi for me. I'm not sure if it's my age (born in 84) but I prefer almost all the late 70s and 80s, early 90s sci-fi movies over newer stuff.
Predator, Thing, Total Recall, Alien, Aliens, Terminator, Original Star Wars, all in my top sci-fi films.
Given an emphasis on internalized documentation, these could be significantly better, especially over time than a lot of automated support in place for a lot of companies. As long as there is some kind of escape hatch for escalation.
That said, the reality is closer to the "Johnny Cab" from the first "Total Recall" movie.
I instantly loved this film the moment I saw vintage cars with futuristic engine sounds. Simple genius.
Compared this to an example such as Total Recall, where cars were designed to look futuristic. Looked great when the film was released, but terribly dated now. It affects the re-watchability for me.
I think that at least one of the reasons is that the topic of many of his stories/novels is blurring the boundaries between the reality and non-reality (however that is defined in each novel). This is a recurring theme, with neither the reader nor the protagonist(s) being sure about things:
* DADoES / Blade Runner: Who is an android/replicant and who is a human? * WCRIfYW / Total Recall: Which memories are real and which are implanted? * Ubik: Who is dead and who is alive?
The filmmakers love this concept as it has many parallels with making films - see Inception and Matrix as examples.
I’m not necessarily disagreeing with your list, even though some of those are mediocre at best, but yeah I did mean per year, and limited to Hollywood (Parasite for instance not counting). And no, ok, I will also straight up disagree with the second Knives out Movie which I thought was absolute trash. A perfect example of poor storytelling and the form over substance of modern cinema.
But just taking say 1992 you have Last of the Mohicans, The Unforgiven, My Cousin Vinny, Malcolm X, Bad Lieutenant, Scent of a Woman, Reservoir Dogs, Dracula, Chaplin.
And then a bunch of fun schlomp like Arizona Dream, Basic Instinct, Sister Act, Army of Darkness, Home Alone 2, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Mighty Ducks, Wayne’s World.
These are all undoubtedly great movies.
And then another huge bunch of watchable stuff easily comparable to some of your mentions like Watcher or High Life.
And 1992 is not an outlier.
In 1993 you have Jurrasic Park, Groundhog Day, Whats Eating Gilbert Grape, Scindlers List, Meanace 2 Society, Alive, Dazed and Confused, Falling Down, In The Name of The Father, True Romance, Demolition Man, Carlitos Way, The Secret Garden, Philadelphia, A Perfect Workd, Cool Runnings, Short Cuts.
In 1991 Silence of The Lambs, Ternimator 2, JFK, Point Break, Thelma and Louise, Boyz in the Hood, The Doors, My Own Private Idaho, Barton Fink, The Fisher King, Naked Lunch.
In 1990 Goodfellas, Hunt for Red October, Total Recall, Edward Scissorhands, Home Alone, Godfather 3, Dances with Wolves, Tremors, Back to the Future 3, Awakenings, The Witches, Wild at Heart, Jacobs Ladder, Nikita, Slacker, Millers Crossing.
And the quality difference is massive too, not just somewhat better. Like just Millers Crossing is miles better than anything that has been made in the last 5 years, and I’m picking at random.
In 1994 Shawshank Redemption, Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, The Lion King, Speed, Ace Ventura, Dumb and Dumber, Stargate, Natural Born Killers, The Crow, Clercs, Maverick, Ed Wood, In the Mouth of Madness, Interview With The Vampire.
I could go on.
And this is not even talking about how the 80s is a better decade for cinema, or how the 70s is the peak of the power of the author with far more experimental, artistic, and substantial productions.
Has quality declined? Yes. Massively. Humongously. Stupendously.
This is where I start to give credit to a lot of Mars conspiracies. I know that the cameras on the Viking probes were tested and calibrated on Earth to give accurate colors, the probes themselves had color calibration chips on their hulls that the cameras could use for testing and recalibration, yet for some reason the sky and ground on mars was always shown as red hued (like in the 80s Total Recall movie), or maybe the sky was a little yellowish - until it wasn’t! Suddenly one day Mars had a blue sky and most of the rocks are grey, and only the soil is red. Not any real explanation I’ve ever heard, just oh by the way the sky on Mars is blue, in other news…
Some classify Truman Show as sci fi.
And depends on what you mean by "supernatural". There are many many movies without magic, but with possible future inventions. The category of hard scifi.
Europa report, primer, deep impact, robocop, starship troopers, blade runner, matrix, eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, total recall, arrival, Jurassic Park, the man from earth, ...
But yeah, Gattaca is still my favourite movie.
Most of verehovens films have the same mechanism where the viewer has a question about if something or someone is legit or not.
Total recall classic example where the viewer never really knows if Quaid is having a mental break or not. Even showgirls has the signature ambiguity.
> God help us if he colonizes mars and has total control of air water and heat.
We've already seen this play out in the movie Total Recall: https://youtu.be/X8lT-Sn-HqE
Part of the problem with that adaptation is that We can Remember It for You Wholesale would be best adapted into an almost comedic Outer Limits episode, as written. Total Recall at least manages to keep a lot of PKD's general themes intact despite seriously diverging from the story, and brings in ideas from his other stories to an extent.
The writer talks about Ubik but does not mention the pervasiveness of corporate power/role in the daily life described (at least from my interpretation), this is well portrayed in Total Recall, also based on a Philip K. Dick story which varies enough from the movie to be read as separate work.
Short story not mentioned but is worth reading if one has not, Second Variety.
Yes, when growing up watching Hollywood movies my parents always joked that showing a naked body was not done, but insane aggression (eg beheadings / limbs falling off / etc) was perfectly fine. I think that was while watching Total Recall somewhere in the 90s.
GP's comment was a pun based off Total Recall, a science fiction movie with Arnold Swarzenegger set on the red planet. Unless yours is a pun within a pun that flew over my head.
I feel this article misses a lot of the historical context when RoboCop was created, it's themes and why it fit this time. I don't see how you can talk about RoboCop without mentioning the cultural climate at the time.
Rewinding to the 1980s.
Reagan was president for two terms, Giuliani was cleaning up the mob using RICO during these time periods. The War on Drugs was raging. Communism was still enemy #1 (See: Rocky IV). It was truly a very right-wing time. For whatever, themes around individuals taking power into their own hands to "Reform" corrupt systems (cities). Like Frank Miller's Sin City, these are absolutely right-wing themes. "Cleaning Corruption" is one of the most conservative motivations from a psychological standpoint.
Others here have mentioned the slate of 80's action movies but it felt like 100% of the culture was heading this direction. Frank Miller's Batman approaches at the time, for example, were strongly echoing similar themes: Vigilante justice in the backdrop of political deterioration. Rambo, Predator, Commando, Total Recall, Scarface.
I think it all started with movies like Dirty Harry and Serpico and then just got more and more extreme leading into the 1980s.
You also cannot leave out Judge Dredd comics. There are similarities between Judge Dredd and RoboCop, I have a hard time believing there was no influence. Judge Dredd also had this magic gun that could do different tricks like shoot through walls etc, lived in a corrupt mega city of the future.
I feel in some ways RoboCop was almost like "Serpico + Dirty Harry if you turn everything up to 1,000." Serpico also had this theme of the good cop who is nearly killed and sent to the hospital due to corrupt system etc.
> and how perfect the soundtrack, sets and underlying themes work in the movie.
Basil Poledouris is a true genius
Not surprisingly he worked with Milius on many other movies besides "Conan the Barbarian" and Verhoeven, who directed Total Recall.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basil_Poledouris
> Total Recall
and all the Verhoeven movies 1985-1997
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Verhoeven
Not based on P.K. Dick works but heavily (and beatifully) inspired by them I'd also mention "Dark City" directed by Alex Proyas (The Crow, I Robot)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_City_(1998_film)
You can piece together the entire movie by watching clips on YouTube. I try out a lot of movies this way, but Total Recall is the one I loved the most. It's a whole different world.
>I'd also mention Total Recall in a a positive light (and an example of something that Hollywood doesn't do anymore). The most unique thing about that movie is that it's effectively two different movies. I saw that movie when I was young and found it satisfying
Me as a 12 year old: The lady has 3 boobs !
Me watching as an adult. Great sci-fi movie !
Total Recall has it all: The rather bloody action and shooting, the gimmicks (digital nail polish! Live X-ray scanners!), abstruse ideas and images (Kuato lives!), Arnie delivering zingers with an Austrian accent. And then, once you grow up and read Philip K. Dick, you actually understand how much of his ambiguous mind games made it into the movie, and watch it a couple of times with that additional perspective. There are very few films which deliver similar amounts of cinematic joy, unfortunately. The last two that I watched were Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men, and surprisingly a Tom Cruise film, Edge of Tomorrow. Both highly recommended if you like Total Recall.
In spite of the article's somewhat backhanded reference to such, I'd also mention Total Recall in a a positive light (and an example of something that Hollywood doesn't do anymore). The most unique thing about that movie is that it's effectively two different movies. I saw that movie when I was young and found it satisfying because of how it was advertised: action, Schwarznegger, explosions, and 3 titted Martians. Watching it 3 decades later, I only then realized what an amazing movie it really is.
The story is insightful, heavy on philosophy, extremely ambiguous, and digs into interesting questions about a very viable future technology. On a superficial level one can take the ending (which does provide closure) at face value, but it was intended to make one think. It's based on a Philip K Dick short story, "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale", and it shows.
It's a grandiose story, but only on the surface and only due to the fact it's set in the future. The plot is something that will affect everybody at some point. If you haven't seen it yet, I'd strongly recommend going in blind.
The amount of creativity here is astounding. Just imagine all the decisions the AI made in incorporating Kermit into the movies: the clothing it's chosen, how the character wears the clothing, the facial expressions, how to make Kermit himself look similar to the other movies characters. Should he be lanky? pudgy? Even simple decisions like obliviously Kermit in Wall-E is going to be a robot, it has to figure out what he looks like as a robot, what his mouth looks like, that his eyes should be enlarged.
It gets a lot of things wrong, like I'm not sure why kermit has a plastic texture in many of the pictures. If you showed me ten pictures of Kermit and ten frames of total recall, and for some reason 8 of your pictures had a plastic Kermit, and asked me to combine them in my head, I'd probably imagine something on-par or worse than what Dalle has managed to do. But I wouldn't be able to show anyone what I'd made!
90's Movies
Matrix Terminator 2 Robocop Total Recall
would you download a car?
theft is when you take something from someone, when you download a movie, Netflix users can still watch it, Netflix can still stream it and they don't lose anything.
In fact their profits have gone up, despite helping piracy by releasing more and more content easily sharable outside of their platforms.
Netflix alone made 7.5 billions in the third quarter of 2021, up from 6.4 billions in the third of 2020.
someone really believes that leaks are unfortunate? have you seen a single image leaked from the next Indiana Jones movie? Do you know the title?No? you know why? because they'll work next year on the post production and are keeping everything under rigorous control. leaks will be useful only when they are ready to launch. When Luca..ehm Disney wants to take secrecy seriously, they absolutely can and will.
Anyway: I pay for prime video, because it's included with prime. I rarely watch other streaming services nor download their content.
Last exception was Foundation from Apple, thank god I did not pay for that!
Usually it works like this: I wanna watch an old movie, say Total Recall, some streaming service bought it for Christmas or whatever occasion together with all Schwarzenegger movie, to release a "member berry" bundle
I probably already have it, ripped from DVD, when it comes out I download it again because I'll probably find the x265 version which is smaller or the 2160p (or 1080p) restored version.
Coco Conn and Paul Rother wrote this up about what they did with FORTH at HOMER & Assoc, who made some really classic music videos including Atomic Dog, and hired Charles Moore himself! Here's what Coco Conn posted about it, and some discussion and links about it that I'm including with her permission:
Peter Conn:
https://imgur.com/a/4Bmb4xu
Homer & Associates (1982):
http://leftbrain.us/rotherHistory/homer.html
Peter Conn Papers at Stanford:
https://library.stanford.edu/blogs/special-collections-unbound/2019/05/peter-conn-papers-available-research
https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8n303pn/entire_text/
George Clinton - Atomic Dog (Official Music Video) HD
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMVZ36VA0wg
Steve Miller Band - Abracadabra
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tY8B0uQpwZs
Steve Miller Band - Bongo Bongo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NrsRZdMI-A
Flying Logos for 1989 Siggraph Electronic Theater:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hIOfEiy4lc
>First shown at the 1989 Siggraph Electronic Theater to a rave response, this 3 minute humourous film went on to win several top computer graphic awards that same year including Niccograph of Japan.
>Coco: This was a show favorite at the SIGGRAPH film show that year. The year before the conference committee decided that showing demos wasn't the way to go anymore. Peter wrote Flying Logos as a way to sneak our demo reel into the show by turning it into a story. It worked and we made it into the film show.
>Don: I truly believe that in some other alternate dimension, there is a Flying Logo Heaven where the souls of dead flying logos go, where they dramatically promenade and swoop and spin around each other in pomp and pageantry to bombastic theme music. It would make a great screen saver, at least! Somewhere the Sun Logo and the SGI Logo are still dancing together.
----
Peter Conn and I [Coco Conn] had a company called HOMER & Assoc. which was located at the Sunset Gower Studios from 1977 until we closed shop in 1997. We made music videos, commercials & computer graphics/special effects for feature films. One cool note, we worked with Paul Verhoven on both RoboCop in 1986 and the x-ray scene for Total Recall in '89.
HOMER was actually a real time visual mixing console that our in-house engineer spent 1978 - 1981 designing and building, from scratch. The name HOMER stood for "Hybrid Optical Montage Electronically Reproduced." I helped as well, soldering the LEDs on the console and running cables. Peter built his own optical printer and three years into the build we also bought an early computer paint system. Our engineer finished building the console and promptly decided to move to England. We hadn’t used it because we still hadn’t found the right software to run the system. Luckily that’s when Paul Rother joined the company.
The joy stick on our console would bump you to the next line of code (being a command or sequence of events: fade, cut, dissolve, etc.) The console had touch sensitive fader pads. There were no dials. I think they were made by Allison? Each channel (which controlled either a slide projector or a film projector) was touch sensitive. After recording a sequence we could then tweek the current version using additional effects the channels offered such as momentary, additive, on/off, etc. For instance if you wanted to crossfade two images, you could either program it or perform it. Of course everything you did was recorded and would play back on the next round. You literally performed a sequence of visual effects with your hands. Peter would do countless passes until everything was perfect. This performance would then be played back to IP film on the optical printer. Each slide tray or film real would be individually run, one by one, to IP film. Sometimes there would be 10-15 or more passes to get all the elements transferred. Once that was done we would then convert the IP film to video and do additional video editing and effects. A totally nuts analogue system. But it worked.
---------------
HOMER Explained by Paul Rother, in-house programmer, (1982):
The photo is Paul sitting in front of the Optical Printer 7-bit Paint system, Homer and Associates, circa 1982. Homer and Associates was really one of a kind kinda of company. Founded by Peter Conn, originally I got hired to program Homer II, a visual realtime mixing console. Homer I is another whole story, but before my time. Homer II consisted of 16 slide projectors, 4 movie projectors, a 4 track tape recorder, 24 visual channels (each with its own Z80) touch sensitive sliders, a master Z80 S100 bus system and featuring "the joy stick bumper " control, which looked liked the gear shift right out of a 1964 mustang convertible.
The idea was that you would program a visual sequence, then play the sequence in sync with the sound track on the joystick, including cascades, bumps, cuts, etc. The whole thing would be recorded, and if you wanted to, like an audio mixer, go back and do over dubs, making corrections. Then once you had the perfect "hero" recording, you take the 8" floppy disc with the hero recording and the trays of slides to the optical printer, and record it to IP motion picture film, making multiple passes, one tray at a time. Now that I think about it, it was a crazy idea. We actually got the whole thing to work. And it worked great!
Forth & Charles Moore
We hired Forth, Inc. and got Charles Moore, the inventor of FORTH to program the console host computer. I learned FORTH and worked with Charles. I programmed the 2K byte EPROM in each visual channel. On the Master Z80 system we ran PolyForth a multi tasking system in 32K bytes. We had an extra 16K RAM for buffers and things. If I remember right, the system ran four tasks, but that was 20 years ago, my memory may be hazy.
Anyway, I learn not only FORTH from Charles Moore, but also how to factor code in to small reusable routines, WORDs they're called in FORTH. I learned Object Oriented Programming without knowing it. Also a lot of use of vectors. Its a cool language. Charles Moore was a great inspiration to me, and really taught me a great deal that they never taught me in computer programming school.
CAT-700
After we got the basic Homer II working and were able to record on the optical printer, Peter had another idea. He wanted to be able to see the movement of the optical printer, and see a prior frame compared to the current frame. We already had a video assist on the Fries Mitchell 35mm. What we needed was a Frame Buffer. We heard of S100 video board called the CAT-100, which was 1-bit frame buffer, good enough for what we needed. Somehow we never found a 1-bit version, but we found 7-bit version in the recycler!
We flew to Reno, rented a car and drove to a log cabin up in the hills of Truckie California. We got a demo of the thing. The guys were super secret and didn't want us to see the controlling program. It worked, so we bought it, and then flew onto Palo-Alto and met the French guy who designed it. They checked it out and it was OK. This was the days before computer designed boards, and all the traces on the board were curvy, kinda like a Van Gogh painting. We learned that it was 7-bit (CAT-700) because it would have been an 8-bit, but they could not get the 8th bit to work. We spent the night in Palo Alto with a Stanford friend of Peters working on a crazy secret Apple project, the Lisa. 32KByte Paint System
So I got the CAT-700 frame buffer to work, programmed in FORTH. So in that 32K we had an optical printer control system, and a paint system, all in one. (Also the OS, compiler, debugger, etc.) We later hooked up a Summigraphic Bitpad (before the Watcom tablet) and were able to draw on top of digitized frames. It got to the point where we needed TWO optical printers, one to digitize from film, and the other to record to film. Rube Goldberg is not strong enough descriptive to describe the system, with the filter wheels and all on stepper motors, it made music. The first use of the system was effects for Steve Miller Music Video, Abracadabra. I also remember using it on the George Clinton Video, Atomic Dog.
This photo was taken right after we got the system to work. I had hooked up an analog slider box, which controlled things like color. There were 4 color maps we could switch between instantly We did a lot of work in planes, using 2 planes for the original image to be rotoscoped, and the other 5 planes to draw onto. This photo was taken for an article in Millimeter Magazine. The photo ended up being a two page color spread, and I think Peter was pissed, cause I got premier exposure.
TTL logic
At Homer and Assoc. I also learned TTL logic and designed a number of computer boards for the S100 bus. One that controlled stepper motors with a timer chip (Motorola 6840). Another to control the Slide Projectors also using the same Motorola timer chip to control the lamp triacs. My favorite thing, about the system, was the use of the cassette storage interface as a cheap timecode reader/writer.
This sort of story always reminds me from a bit in Seinfeld where Kramer's phone number is one digit off from the Movie Phone number. He would say something like "press 1 for Total Recall, Press 2 for...". Of course he would not be able to determine which button was pressed, and would say "why don't you just tell me the name of the movie you want to see?"
I feel like we are creating really unpredictable, and hard to implement UIs in the name of "magic". Would a button in the UI been better? I think it would have been, at least for me.
I don’t know if hollywood has ever been anything else. I watched a documentary recently on the action movies of the 80s and 90s [1]. The part that was eye opening was the interview of Mario Kassar, who produced some of my favorite movies as a teenager in the 90s: Rambo, Total Recall, T2, Basic Instinct, etc. He talks about what he puts in his films literally like a farmer talks about grain for his pigs.
It has always been primarily a business targeting the lowest possible common denominator of the largest possible audience. And as the developed world expanded, that denominator shrank. Hence everything Marvel now.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8840400/
Their success might be the main reason I no longer go to the movies. I like sci-fi action movies like Starship Troopers, Terminator, Alita: Battle Angel, Total Recall, Avatar, The Matrix and such.
But these days no one seems to care for such products. What makes the big bucks seems to be super heroes made by disney. Would have been fine had they not have completely taken over the market now.
Yes, I'm an old fart and movies/TV is targeting the young population. Totally normal. But am I just old and bitter, or is this superhero trend just marketing? I think it's mainly the latter.
Alien, The Matrix, 12 Monkeys, Terminator, Fight Club, The Fifth Element, The Sixth Sense, Back to the Future, eXistenZ, Gattaca, The Arrival, 2001 space Odissey, the Shining, Trainspotting, Ground Hog day, Dune, Dark city, Tron, Demolition man, Total Recall, Robocop, The city of lost children...
Nuanced, scify, full of smart details or mind bending films are not new.
In fact, it's really hard to innovate now, because so much as already being covered.
It depends on the film. Without getting into a long rambling film analysis, there are certainly films (Inception is probably one), for example, in which the ending really is ambiguous and those assert otherwise are probably looking a little too deeply into discerning patterns in the tea leaves. There are others (probably including Total Recall) where there is a logical argument to be made as to why the film actually ended in a particular way.
I saw the Robocop (2014) remake on telly the other day. I couldn't help but wonder why the movie even existed. Its production values were vastly higher than the original, but it was just a completely boring movie. It's like the Total Recall remake. They just have no soul. There's just nothing there in terms of writing. Nothing witty, no great lines. In the original a guy rips his face of revealing his skull, and collapses. Completely daft to be sure, but it was funny. There's a creative spark that current films just don't seem to have. The characters have no personality. The actors have no charisma. Let's face it, Arnie is not a great actor. But he does have onscreen charisma.
There's just a different level of acting in the original Total Recall. Arnie, Ronny Cox, the growling Michael Ironside, Sharon Stone. The other supporting actors bought something to the table. With the remake? Nothing! Colin Farrell was boring, and his wife was leagues behind what Stone portrayed.
Maybe the problem is with the film certificate. RoboCop was a 12A, so I guess the executives thought "to hell with the writing, writing is hard."
Hollywood occasionally gets it right, I guess. Joker (2019) was pretty good, despite being a 15. I thought it was a very cohesive film in the way they chose characters like the dwarf, why Fleck committed the murders he did, and how the whole thing developed. You could tell there was a whole lot more thought put into the script.
> Then there's "it's all remakes now"—but 1) it's not,
It really is, if by "remake" you mean all ways of leveraging existing IP. Here are the top ten box office films of 2020:
* Bad Boys for Life (sequel) * Sonic the Hedgehog (videogame) * Birds of Prey (comic book) * Dolittle (book) * The Invisible Man (book) * The Call of the Wild (book) * Onward (original) * The Croods: A New Age (sequel) * Tenet (original) * Wonder Woman 1984 (sequal, comic book)
Two originals. Now go back 20 years:
* Mission: Impossible 2 (sequel) * Gladiator (book) * Cast Away (original) * What Women Want (original) * Dinosaur (original) * How the Grinch Stole Christmas (book) * Meet the Parents (remake) * The Perfect Storm (book) * X-Men (comic book) * What Lies Beneath (original)
Four originals. Go back another 10 years:
* Ghost (original) * Home Alone (original) * Pretty Woman (original) * Dances with Wolves (book) * Total Recall (short story) * Back to the Future Part III (sequel) * Die Hard 2 (sequel) * Presumed Innocent (book) * Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (comic book) * Kindergarten Cop (original)
Five originals. Another ten years to 1980:
* The Empire Strikes Back (sequel) * 9 to 5 (original) * Stir Crazy (original) * Airplane! (original) * Any Which Way You Can (sequel) * Private Benjamin (original) * Coal Miner's Daughter (original) * Smokey and the Bandit II (sequel) * The Blue Lagoon (book) * The Blues Brothers (SNL sketch)
Five originals again. I'm going by top box-office gross here because I think that's a good proxy for what is successful. You can look at other years, but there is a very clear (but not overwhelming) trend towards movies based on familiar content. It's not clear whether studios are leading audiences or vice versa. Probably some iterative process of both.
There's also a clear trend away from dramas. I think that's because drama (and non-slapstick comedies) tend to rely heavily on specific cultural norms for their effect which makes them translate poorly. There is a very clear trend especially in the last decade or so of Hollywood focusing on movies that will also do well in China in particular.
I strongly recommend reading Ubik. To me it is his strongest and most consistently good book.
I used to love The Three Stigmata too, but when I tried to read it again recently I couldn't get in to it either. I do think you have to be in the right mood to savor a Dick book, so maybe I was in the wrong mood that time.
The other first-tier PKD book for me is Martian Time-Slip.
Second-tier PKD books for me are VALIS and Galactic Pot Healer.
Third-tier are Maze of Death, Eye in the Sky, and Divine Invasion (the 2nd in the VALIS trilogy.. didn't like the 3rd in the series, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer at all).
Many of his other books, like Lies, Inc, also have great parts in them, but are kind of inconsistent.
Some of his short stories are excellent. My favorites:
- Beyond Lies the Wub
- Roog
- The Father Thing
- Faith of Our Fathers
I didn't really like A Scanner Darkly, nor Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep and would consider them of minor import had not movies been made of them. Other books in this category are Now Wait for Last Year (made in to Total Recall) and Time Out of Joint (made in to The Truman Show.. though the book is much darker). The movie Minority Report was based on another minor short story of his, as The Terminator might have been partially based on his story Second Variety.
Virtually all of the movies made from his work only bear only a very slight resemblance to the originals, which tends to be a lot darker, a lot less action-filled, and much more thought-provoking than the Hollywood adaptations.
The Running Man is great on so many levels including deepfakes. Arnold really was ahead of his time with those action movies including Terminator, Total Recall and Running Man.
Is it? Earth is, or was, extremely hospitable to humans. Mars is, and will be for a very long time, extremely inhospitable to humans. If we can't even take care of the Earth, what hope is there of taking care of Mars? The more likely scenario is that greedy Martians destroy their own Martian environment very quickly and make themselves extinct. It's much easier to destroy Mars (for human life) than it is to destroy Earth.
We need to focus on sustainability, otherwise Mars will also be unsustainable.
Just wait until oxygen itself becomes a commodity, like in the film "Total Recall". Except unlike in film, there's no deus ex machina native ancient technology to suddenly make the entire atmosphere breathable.
I've seen this movie before, Total Recall.
Not really, depending on the thing. There (maybe) comes a point where the accounting of who owes what becomes more expensive than the thing you're tracking.
It can also go the opposite direction. Air is free right now, but then see the movies Total Recall and The Lorax (not joking).
Total Recall movie being prophetic?
Movies like "Brainstorm": "The Final Cut" "Strange Days" "Total Recall" "Altered States" "Lawnmower Man" "Ex Machina" "The Thirteenth Floor" "The Truman Show" "Inception" "Selfless" "Flatliners"
There's a lot of good movies that people don't discover, but it seems to me to less be about age of the movie - in the era of algorithmic reccomendations, you will get quality stuff surfaced. (Ex: I logged onto Prime Video one day to see the original Total Recall recommended)
OTOH, really good films that are not free on streaming are often not known.
I think we're missing out by relying on algorithms rather than doing research or talking to friends to find good content.
And here I thought Total Recall was my favorite movie.
It looks like the truck has a lot of inspiration from the cars in the original Total Recall movie. It also feels like a Saab in aesthetics. You will either hate it or love it with little in between.
This will be popular in cartel country
We have those kinds of screens plastered all over public transport in Scandinavia too.
We have an extensive public transport system especially with busses, but now there are up to 12 screens of inescapable news and advertisements with short blinks of actual info in each one.
It's infuriating and reminds me of the dystopian scenarios in Verhoeven movies. I distinctly remember seeing the subway scene in total recall from 1990 and thinking, that's a bit extreme.
But here we are lol - it's amazingly dark.
Upvote for referencing "Total Recall".
My favorite line in the film was actually a clever aside, when Quaid is being solicited by one of the mutant clairvoyants with an offer to tell him his future, his sardonic rejoinder is, "how about the past?".
Was this named after Arnold Schwarzenegger's character in the movie Total Recall?
https://villains.fandom.com/wiki/Douglas_%22Doug%22_Quaid/Carl_Hauser
This reminds me of the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Total Recall.
I don't see the public interest angle here. This is merely entertainment. If even entertainment is something the government should be butting into because of unspecified "public interest" considerations, then what is outside the government's role?
Goodfellas, Dances with Wolves, Edward Scissorhands, Total Recall, Ghost, the Hunt for Red October, Back to the Future III, Pretty Woman, and the Godfather Part III were all released in 1990, 29 years ago. These were all created by a group of individuals, and studios spent millions of dollars paying those people to make those movies. The government had nothing to do with creating any of those movies. Why should the government be able to take those movies and release them for free?
It took me perhaps an entire minute before I realized something was strange about the voiceover and that it was synthesized, which, in my view, is quite impressive. Once I realized it was generated, though, I became much more attuned to the pitch-shifting artifacts, slight cadence irregularities, and cultural misses (like emphasizing the second syllable of "recall" in the title of the movie Total Recall).
Still, a few more years of progress on neural nets (can GANs be applied to vocal cadence and intonation?) and I won't envy the position of mid-tier voiceover artists.
That’s right, I had forgotten. Interesting that two PkD-based movies (total recall and minority report pointed out in a sibling comment) have self-driving cars. It’s been too long since I’ve read the stories to remember if that was the case in the books or not.
I used to be skeptical of very hires video but two weeks ago I got a System76 laptop with a 4K display - I love it.
I think that people are missing the value of 8K which in my opinion is home (or business) video walls as seen in the 1990 sf movie Total Recall. When walking up to part of the wall, you still get hires anywhere you look. And oh, I want that to be touch screen.
I have some Fuji Film on my desk right now, I'll have you know! But I get what you are saying. :)
I always thought the Total Recall product placement was intentional and looking around our present future it was spot on.
I just re-watched Total Recall for shits and giggles. It's worth it just for the "two weeks" scene.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XY5KTVA_2ys
I was astounded at the number of product placements in that film!
And that there were obvious placements for competing products, like Coke and Pepsi.
Some of them were hilariously anachronistic, like advertisements for Fuji Film.
I can't remember any other movie that was quite so frequent and obvious about product placement, and I definitely didn't get the impression they were trying to be ironic and channeling PKD's social commentary on the advertising industry. It just seemed like good old fashioned shameless marketing.
I googled around and apparently I'm not the only person who noticed it. ;)
TOTAL RECALL and the psychology of product placement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSt2Xbiypsk
He mentions that the book "Product Placement in Hollywood Films" estimates there are 55 appearances of 28 brands in Total Recall.
Best Western wasn't happy with the how their logo was used in the Martian Red Light District next to a pink neon ADULT MOVIES store sign, and how they only got 2.5 seconds instead of their expected 5 seconds of exposure.
https://imgur.com/a/aSaoN0w
If you've just read that collection, you have a lot of the most mind-bending PKD stories left. Try one of his novels. I'd recommend A Scanner Darkly and Man in the High Castle as two of the more accessible ones (the latter is much less sci fi - it's more alternative history).
His short stories are very variable in quality - a lot of his early stories makes you feel trapped in a 50's idea of a post-nuclear holocaust world because he repeats that setting endlessly as he churned out stories to pay the bills (but there are great gems there too), so the more curated antologies are good starting points. Pick up some more and you'll probably also recognize the plot of any number of movies you may have seen (direct adaptions from his short stories includes Paycheck - in your antology I think - Total Recall, Screamers, Adjustment Bureau, Minority Report and more), where a single idea from his stories was dense enough for a movie.
I've only seen about 20 minutes of the first episode and couldn't enjoy it. I'd like to at least finish the first episode before I make judge for myself whether this one's worth my time (though I'm gonna first watch The Man in the High Castle). Generally though as a rule of thumb: Nice CGI doesn't make up for a terrible story, but a good story can make up for the lack of good CGI. E.g. I did not find the story good in the follow-ups of The Matrix.
I fully underline your statement regarding PKD's Electric Dreams as well as all the Black Mirror seasons. Furthermore, let us not forget that several other of PKD's works have seen a movie adaptations. I can recommend Total Recall (both; watch older first), Blade Runner (both; watch older first), A Scanner Darkly (if you can stand the art style; personally, I loved it), Minority Report, and The Adjustment Bureau (Screamers was OKish). There are series adaptations as well. Check Wikipedia for all the adaptations [1]
I'm not aware of any motion picture adaptations of Stephenson's or Gibson's works. Although I just found out via Wikipedia that the game Netrunner [2] is a derivative work of the Sprawl trilogy, and also The Matrix heavily "drawn" from the Sprawl trilogy as well [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_adaptations_of_works_by_Philip_K._Dick
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android:_Netrunner
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromancer#Literary_and_cultural_significance
Perhaps we can start with reflecting our societal beliefs w'r't' this stuff via our media to reinforce peoples logical deductions of how to act in these areas. E.g. I think a friend showed me one of the 'revenge of the nerds' movies when I was fairly young, which, if you think of from a perspective this post is advocating, is basically just a movie about people being completely terrible, I guess. I mean, our brains are maybe basically similar to high capacity neural nets, especially before they gain the ability for logical reasoning (or if lost this ability for whatever reason via old age or idk, but seems possible), and thus gain an idea of 'what is acceptable' through the sum total of all relevant situations put in. This would be sort of an application of HN style tech to improving such situations on a more statistical level (I guess), rather than rigidly coding human behavior into a blockchain.
I mean, it would be nice, for the sake of all the people growing up today, if you took something like 'Total Recall' at 5:00 minutes and had them explicitly and robotically ask each other for consent. I think that would do a whole lot more good than having your tinder fling download a 20 gb blockchain onto their cellphone before the date. (Sorry to slightly make fun of this - I think the idea is good actually, and haven't played with it enough, but just wanted to make a point in this direction).
To address this app specifically though- wouldn't such an app not really matter in the direction of: you can always say 'no' during the course, and then the required behavior is to stop. I'm not sure if that would be reflected very well in the app, since the person could point to the consent and say it was given, when in fact, it may have initially been given, but the more important point was that it was (maybe the word is ) rescinded .
I have the same sentiment and when more apps run in the cloud, and all one needs is a fast web browser, that will make it more of a possibility to do coding, digital media editing, etc. from anywhere with available peripherals.
The entire home wall video monitor in the beginning of the movie Total Recall (first version) would be great to have everywhere. Just as you change music you could make your environment look like anything and this same technology would let you grab a little near by space to use as a screen. Too expensive now but in ten years, perhaps.
Books & movies can help you connect with your location or situation, they don't have to be a diversion.
When living in China I liked to watch dystopian sci-fi & anime based in large cities - Akira, Ghost in the shell, Oblivion, Dredd, The fifth element, total recall
Then grab some headphones and go for a wander around your megacity :)
PS this also works for other scenarios. Eg "Black cat white cat", or "Brother" if strapped for cash. "Fight club" if your job is getting you stressed.
I think lot of art is created by artists as a "cure" for their current worries. And their problems tend to be just like ours.
Not trying to be snarky, but what's complex about Inception? Once you're past the two premises (you can infiltrate dreams; you can dream recursively) this is just a heist movie without any significant plot twist, by which I mean there is no world-changing or premise-questioning event, and only one apect of said premises (the altered length of "lived time") is explored.
To use other Nolan movies as a point of comparison, Memento and The Prestige are much more accomplished in terms of fully exploiting their concepts. And within the domain of movies exploring the theme of "your lived experience is a dream/illusion", there are much more effective and/or complex examples[1].
I have a feeling that Inception is kind of like Interstellar in terms of public perception: people are psyched by the initial concept, so they don't pay attention to the fact that its underlying narrative structure is pretty run-of-the-mill.
I guess I sound like a buzzkill! If I've missed any deep concept within Inception, I'd be glad to be schooled/enlightened, since I like understanding what makes a movie tick. Also, I don't think it's a bad movie at all, just that it's not that complicated once we're past the initial disorientation.
[1] Before anybody asks, in no particular orders: In The Mouth Of Madness, Mulholland Drive, Paprika, Written By. In a different vein: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Hell, even Total Recall (1990 version) and The Matrix probably apply.
What about iTunes? [1]
[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/total-recall/id1040020260
Was this a subtle reference to the movie "Total Recall"?
> Sure the films in which he played didn't help
"Total Recall" and "Last Action Hero" are two of the greatest films made in the last 30-40 years, and I'm not saying that just because I'm a huge Paul Verhoeven and John McTiernan fan. The final action scene from "Predator" is one of the best from all time when it comes to action-movies.
Many "making of" shows him as a very very respectful and friendly (right amount of goof on set) person. His words about body building are also not shallow, he talks about the dedication and the inner exploration about your own limits. It resonnated with ideas I had in other fields that are much less "dumb" in the public eye.
ps: he's also directly responsible for movies like Total Recall, which were burried for years, and he arranged financial and directorial setups for it to happen because he loved the script and the filmmaker. I've heard it for other movies but my memory is in DDoS right now.
I think this goes for many Verhoeven's movies - lot of them contain a non-negligible amount of parody. But as the common wisdom says, working parody must be a good example of the genre it parodies and Verhoeven's movies are excellent examples of their genres.
At least, I think it works with Starship Troopers, Total Recall and Robocop. I'm not sure what to make of Basic Instinct and Playgirls.
I read a lot of PKD when I was in my 20's. It all started with Ubik. Then Androids. A Scanner Darkly. And about 10 other novels. The early Total Recall is one of the better movie adaptations wrt covering the core concepts of the story. Waves and Waves of revelations about the nature of reality. Minority Report, not so much. And of course, Blade Runner is tangentially related to the book. (It's a masterpiece, but it's not Androids)
Once I started getting into the short stories, I started getting pretty paranoid. There's one theme that repeats throughout that reality is not your perception of it, to your eventual downfall. Repeated over and over, across post apocalyptic wastelands, it leads to a somewhat bleak view of the future. (One in particular, I think it's The Fifth Variety, seems to be tailor made to describe computer security from here on out. Spoiler: _Everything_ is a trojan)
Being a child of the 80s, I was first introduced to PKD through Total Recall - the original, good one with Schwarzenegger in it. The mix of sci-fi, paranoia, and reality bending was mesmerising. Verhoeven is the only director who really got to the essence of what Philip K Dick was about.
With the exception of the occasional episode of Star Trek TNG, I didn't have much access to much mindfuck sci-fi, so whatever I could get would leave pretty deep impression on me. I didn't immediately read through his stuff, though. I wouldn't really be reminded of it until I got into Sonic Youth in my late teens and found out that the Sister LP was a loose biography. Sonic Youth's guitar rock/pop mixed with discordant feedback was basically the musical equivalent of PKD's paranoia.
After that I spent years going through a big chunk of his catalog. Obviously, a classic like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is worth your time. The Man in the High Castle is alternate history, and features what I still consider to be the best execution of a things-are-not-what-you-think-they-are ever. I've also been thinking of The Game Players of Titan recently, but that's probably because of the talking self driving car. Ubik is also really, really good, but I can't explain it to you at all.
If you want some fiction that will make you question your grip on reality, I highly recommend reading through his stuff. Just don't wait until you're too old - once your ideals are firmly set in place it gets a lot harder to get into it.
Offhand, my educated guess based on how much it costs /me/ to drive, is that for any form of transport the order of costs from greatest to least is:
1) The human driver. 2) The fuel. 3) Maintenance.
Even at a minimum wage, what really breaks bus routes is the human driver. You could send a smaller (more fuel efficient for low loads) vehicle on less profitable routes, but that doesn't modulate the biggest cost at all.
Google, Ubur, Lyft, all seem to see a future where (to borrow from the older Total Recall movie) Johnny Cab is able to eliminate a lot of public transit and ride-sharing issues.
I believe that the technical challenge is within our grasp (it'll be difficult but possible).
It might, with sufficient volume, be cost effective and when factoring in the difference in accident rates surely will be.
The hardest sell will be the truly glacial speed of modifying laws to get these vehicles on the road without drivers.
I find this era as fascinating as horrifying. It's surreal dreamy and timeless yet inhuman at the same time.
ps: some scenes of Total Recall were filmed in a military school in Mexico which such design. As a kid not knowing that school, it made 30% of the realism of that movie.
After watching the movie, "Total Recall" (first one) I wondered why anyone wouldn't want to live there... at least the first 1,000s of people.
It's hospitable to humans and mutants alike and it has a nice structure over the city, which is a security risk if penetrated to be honest.
This thought might be way off per seeing one movie, so I'd love to hear someone tell me otherwise..... like why inhabiting an enclosed city hospitable to humans isn't a good idea.
The problem with LeCorbusier era (IMO) is that few people may understand what he was doing, and large scale project and industries would have led to yet another clusterfuck. Also his big plan, like many utopic and euphoric ideas of this era are only good on paper or as set for SF movies (lookup where total recall was filmed)
Nope, Total Recall was based on "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale." I wonder what story you are thinking of?
Edit: yes, apparently: "In 1966, the late Philip K. Dick published the novelette "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale." A movie based on the story will be released next year; this book is a novelization of the script and the original novel" -- http://www.amazon.com/Total-Recall-Piers-Anthony/dp/0688052096
Perhaps you mean Piers Anthony?
And that was a full-length novel, later turned into a major motion picture, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Edit: it was adapted into that movie, then novelized afterward?
Edit2: http://www.amazon.com/Total-Recall-Piers-Anthony/dp/0380708744
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Can_Remember_It_for_You_Wholesale (adapted to film as "Total Recall" twice).
Quite a few of his stories have been made into movies with Blade Runner ("Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?") probably the best adaptation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_K._Dick_bibliography#Film_adaptations
The movie Total Recall has already shown us that if you yank off the torso of the robot driver, there'll be a joystick underneath that can be used to operate the car manually.
You know when you watch movies like Total Recall, or Blade Runner, or play a sci-fi game, and there's that pervasive company that seems bigger than any political super power? That's what I think of when one of the Four Horsemen (especially Google) looks like expanding territory blatantly outside their core offering.
In this case, I'm hoping they're just hiring technical people and not looking at cleaning houses, but it always brings that fictional megacorp to mind and makes me uncomfortable.
Comparing to Citizen Kane seems unfair as it's not an action movie. So here are some other action movies. (NB: There are multiple entries for some of these but I'm not listing them all).
Die Hard 4.5 Die Hard 2 3.1 Die Hard 3 1.8 Armageddon 2.2 -- at least he's ben consistently on the quick side Total Recall 3.7 -- original, 1990 Robocop 3.7 -- original Haywire 6 And I keep trying to search for movies they don't have in the database. So certainly for action movies (1980+), at least for some popular ones, the ASL isn't out of the ordinary.
But then I searched for Alfred Hitchcock and got some interesting results. This database has many duplicate entries and some wildly different values. The Skin Game had 3 entries at about the same time (17.1, 17.3, 17.4). However, Rear Window has an entry at 3.7 and another at 8.8, and several at 10.5. I suppose I need to read about their methodology to understand why there's so much variance.
Also check out the examples: http://lav.io/2015/02/audiogrep-automatic-audio-supercuts/
And this related project: https://github.com/antiboredom/videogrep
He already states the obvious idea to integrate audiogrep into videogrep, which at the moment just uses subtitle files.
> All the instances of the phrase "time" in the movie "In Time": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQMzOUeprlk
> All the one to two second silences in "Total Recall": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEtEbXVbYJQ
> The President's former press secretary telling us what he can tell us: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7pymdCU5NQ
See the difference in the dystopic visions of the two Total Recall movies. In the original, the slums of Mars felt like slums. They seemed rundown, there was trash everywhere. In the sequel, so much was created in CGI that it had a pristine look to it, even though we were told it was a rundown place.
Also look at how often they switch to CGI for action sequences, or CGI enhancement so they can zoom out and show a whole city block or office floor that never existed in reality. It feels off, the movements aren't based on actual body mechanics anymore. A character jumping from building to building moves in perfect ballistic arcs and rarely stumbles when they're generated in CGI. A real person, even skilled, has a clumsier appearance to their movement. They may not actually err, but the way the body moves varies with each step, they aren't just perfectly recreating the same running stride for the entire distance.
It's pretty bad luck that his books suffered from so much adaptation decay. If only the same studios and directors that produced movies inspired by Philip Dick were also interested in Gibson (blade runner, total recall, minority report, just to name a few), there might have been some cinematographic masterpiece.
I've found the vast majority of his stories to be pretty bad compared to his best books. Then again, the vast majority of his books are also pretty bad compared to his best books.
Hollywood has made some great movies out of his short stories (the original Blade Runner, the original Total Recall, The Terminator). But you have to realize that these movies usually have little to do with the short stories. The movies are more inspired by them than faithful adaptations of them.
This is for two reasons:
First, the stories have too little in them to make a movie out of if Hollywood was set on making a faithful adaptation of them. But this is how they like it, and why they choose the short stories rather than the books. The diretors and writers want to use a lot of creative license to fill in the gaps and flesh out some core idea that they might find interesting.
Second, Hollywood still isn't ready to make a faithful adaptation of a Philip K Dick work, because his works rarely fit the Hollywood scifi formula. They are usually too dark, too depressing, and are rarely full of action, have too much dialogue, and require too much thought on the part of the audience. Scifi blockbuster material this is not. Not unless it's heavily altered from the originals, like most of the movies based on his stories are.
Blade Runner is a notable exception. But even it is pretty superficial and action-packed compared to the book. It's still a great movie, and (in my opinion) far better than the book. But it's not as faithful as it could be.
Regarding your disdain for his books, I can understand it. They're not for everyone. I happen to like weird books, and I think Dick has points he wants to make when writing them, but you obviously missed them. And since you missed them, I don't blame you for not liking them. I wouldn't have liked them myself if I thought that they were pointless. But they're not. I could write long essays on the points of each of my favorite PKD books, but I'll spare you.
I'll just say that they are great for people who enjoy reading and thinking about the following themes:
- what is reality? - what is the purpose of life? - what does it mean to be human? - is the world as it appears to be? - what, if anything, lies beyond the appearance of the world? - are non-human or "subhuman" lifeforms less worthy than the fully human or "superior" human beings? - what is the role of the mass media in our world?
Dick is also a great champion of the underdog and has a very strong sense of justice. In many ways, he is a very moralistic writer, who was deeply influenced by the Holocaust and the Civil Rights struggle in the US. His works reflect that.
He was also deeply interested in mysticism, gnosticism, and philosophy, and is one of the more philosophical science fiction authors I've ever read (as you can probably tell by the many of the themes listed above). If you are interested in any of those, you'll probably like Dick's best books.
Hollywood is fond of conflict because that's where drama comes from, as observed by Aristotle a couple of millenia ago. Nobody is interested in a story where the protagonist doesn't have any problems, which is why there's a genral shortage of utopian literature in the first place: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_utopian_literature
A good number of the films listed by Wikipedia as dystopian technology is working out just fine for most people while disenfranchising a few - much as in our own world. Insofar as dystopianism is aesthetically fashionable it's largely reflective of contemporary economic or political anxieties rather than being predicated on technology. Total recall (both versions) are listed as dystopian, for example, but those films are quite neutral on the impact of technology - the dystopian element is that of economic coercion resulting from a natural monopoly (oxygen on Mars in the original; the labor supply chain in the remake).
I could dig into examples at length and compare them with positive and negative views of the future from earlier eras of film, but I'm not sure it would be worth the effort given your needlessly snide tone.
I typed in a few ARNIE quotes:
Terminator: "nothing clean right" - no results "fuck you, asshole" - one result for Terminator, but the phrase occurs twice in the film. Predator: "If it bleeds, we can kill it" - Predator came up, and a few others (interesting). Total Recall: "Sue me, dickhead" - it got that one. Commando: "You're a funny guy Sully, I like you. That's why I'm going to kill you last." - no results.
I'm probably gonna spend all night on this.
EDIT: reformatted.
I really hope one of them licenses the Johnny Cab name from total recall, and the likeness of Don Knotts. It'd be really cool to see something from the movies come to life like that and it'd probably end up a great way for other companies to sponsor taxis and get more exposure to people.
> Exactly the same thing is happening in the movie industry.
And I personally hate it. I remember a time when "blockbusters" included stuff like Total Recall, Die Hard, Terminator II or Aliens, I just want that again. There's still the casual Sucker Punch or Watchmen, but they're too few and far between.
*Total Recall
Pretty much every movie involving amnesia.
> I realized that I don't rewatch movies I've already seen, so what is the point of "owning" a copy?
Apart from that there's a couple of films I gladly re-watch (for instance when a friend hasn't seen Total Recall or Waking Life yet), I also keep them around for another reason. It's nice to be able to remember a scene or a quote and be able to look it up easily. And sometimes I do a bit of hobby/amateur sound editing, and it's a great archive of cool soundbites :)
So yeah, I'm keeping around way more than I'll ever watch or re-watch, but the nice thing about having all that storage is you don't have to worry about which data you're going to need in the future.
And for music, there's the added trouble of remembering and finding all those titles. I lost a HD with about 50GB of mp3s on it once, messy but also sorted in various ways, and I'm never going to get that exact collection back. Just over the past couple of weeks I was wrecking my brain trying to remember what was that dark post-apocalyptic ambient album I used to have--though it was a nice exercise in memory, I asked my friends they didn't know, and suddenly one morning in bed it came to me (Bad Sector - Ampos, for those who wonder) ... it's really quite amazing what tidbits of memories one can dig up if you just try hard enough and mull over it for a couple of weeks :)
Still, this discussion is more about those multi-TB harddisks than it is about keychain USB sticks, right? Although 64GB is quite a chunk.
Total recall is more than 20 years old, and they had full body scanners entering mass transit. Granted, that's a movie. It never really happened. But people were exposed to the idea a long time ago.
I don't think the idea was as far fetched as you're making it out to be.
edit (sorry)
There's also the whole issue of schools having the issue solved. I don't think that's true. Schools and classes are getting bigger. I'm not sure how trustworthy a roll call is in a class of 40. There are ways to mitigate that, of course, but why waste minutes a day when you can just slap on a cheap technical fix. The old way literally wastes days of instruction by saying 'here'.
edit, again, because i'm an ass (sorry)
If you're putting your kids in the hands of the state, it seems odd worrying that the state is monitoring their behavior closely. It's not like kids have rights. The state is charged with care of those kids, maybe it's a bizzaro solution, but it's a strictly audited and accountable solution.
I saw it in a movie. I think it was called Total Recall :)
Inception was hardly a 'risky' movie, plenty of explosions, cool visuals, and a simple but slightly ambiguous plot. Think of the way 'total recall' ends, is this just the vacation he had paid for? If you think about it they are fairly similar movies, and fairly well liked. If anything, I think suggests that a good movie can also have mass appeal.
WALL-E lacks dialog for 1/2 the movie, but because Pixar could test it out ahead of time they knew it was worth making vary early in the process. Pixar's string of hits has a lot to do with constant refinement and feedback. Saying Hollywood needs to put out more Toy Story 3's is not a terrible thing when their done well. There is something to be said for the old script + 6 weeks of frantic shooting + cutting room floor style of movies, but it's a style that showed up when film was expensive and budgets where tight.
Somehow Total Recall (premise of the short story[1], as illustrated by the movies) seems a good starting point for this discussion: what do you want to remember for the first time? and have it unique to your experience?
([1] - We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, but everybody knows it as Total Recall.)
You think that you are being so extreme that it is ridiculous.
Well, lawyers already went there: http://www.plotpatents.com/
"A Plot or Storyline Patent application seeks to patent the underlying novel and nonobvious storyline of a fictional story. Such protection is to be contrasted from the copyright protection of one of millions of possible expressions of an underlying storyline. The field of possible applications is broad, and may tentatively be split into an entertainment-advertisement dichotomy. The epitome of an entertainment application is an original, thought-provoking, often shockingly unique movie plot. Several potentially patentable features may have been found in the plots of, Memento, The Thirteenth Floor, Being John Malkovich, Butterfly Effect, The Game, Fight Club, The Matrix, Total Recall, The Truman Show, Minority Report, The Village, Groundhog Day, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, to name a few. The epitome of an advertisement application is one of the many thoughtfully hilarious Super Bowl commercials."
Maybe I am missing the irony, in which case I will look like a fool, but P.K. Dick is one of the most significant SF writer, and one of his book is the inspiration for Blade Runner. Several of his books are master pieces, and quite a few have been adapted into movies (blade runner, total recall, scanner darkly, minority report). He died more or less at the same time Blade Runner was made.
I was half expecting memory implants and a reference to Philip K. Dick and 'We Can Remember It for You Wholesale' short story (basis for 'Total Recall' movie, story is good and differs from the movie).
That said, I don't regret a single over the budget experience I've had.
My pleasure - as for gore, it depends on the audience. I greatly enjoy international films, and personally think that less gore makes it much more effective as a tool - take a look at Japanese horror on one extreme, and compare it to a Schwarzenegger movie. In Total Recall, a guy gets a pipe stuck through his head, and it has no effect on the audience. But it was what was - a fun, man's man action movie. If you produce for intelligent people, you can potentially get a lot of hardcore and intelligent fans. But that means needing to break from the formulas and execute well, neither of which are easy. The mass market stuff works for the mass market of course - so have a think on what you're going for. Maybe take a look at some enthusiast forums or communities - that'd be a smart place to first promote yourself. What are their expectations? What do they like? You can always sell out to the mass market later once you get popular :)
As Rod Serling would say, "Submitted for your approval":
Eraserhead Forbidden Zone Gaslight Invaders from Mars Invasion of the Body Snatchers Laura Minority Report Mirage Rebecca Suddenly, Last Summer The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari The Devil's Advocate The Wizard of Oz Total Recall Vanilla Sky
Some are better than others, of course. And some fit the mindf definition better than others. Oh, well. These are some films that popped into my head.
Might as well throw in all the Philip K. Dick movies. Total Recall, Minority Report, Paycheck, A Scanner Darkly, and some others.
Of the collection, Paycheck is probably the most hacker-related movie, as the main character is a reverse-engineer.
Probably a book of Phillip K. Dick's short stories. If you want to inspire imagination, nothing's better than sci-fi short stories for a hit of imagination-crack, and Phillip K. Dick is a master.
You've probably seen movies based on his stories, including: the Minority Report, Total Recall, Blade Runner, Screamers, A scanner Darkly and a few others.