Hacker Cinema
Twilight
2008 · Film · 122 min
Part of Twilight Collection
Directed by Catherine Hardwicke
When Bella Swan moves to a small town in the Pacific Northwest, she falls in love with Edward Cullen, a mysterious classmate who reveals himself to be a 108-year-old vampire. Despite Edward's repeated cautions, Bella can't stay away from him, a fatal move that endangers her own life.
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88 comments on Hacker News
Zombies who eat brains are the mentally ill.
Bram Stoker was gay, and so are his vampire characters.
Sparkling Twilight vampires are Latter-Day Saints.
Zombies and vampires existed long before these novels and films got made, but pop culture has a way of wiping out and superseding local folk culture in the modern minds of new generations.
And yet, it's not unusual that a poorly written book gets a decent movie adaptation. Sometimes it's not even a good plot OR well written, sometimes a book is just popular and the execs cash in on its popularity.
I'm thinking things like Da Vinci Code, 50 shades, Twilight, neither of which (the books) are particularly good or tasteful or whatever, but they were very popular, appealing to people who normally don't read books.
> "Everything Everywhere All at Once are not lowest common denominator movies"
Is too. It's a stroppy teenage girl who is lol so random[1] and has discovered teenage nihilism because her mom doesn't understand her. It's written to be relatable to the stressed mom, the middle/highschool kid, the immigrant fighting government bureaucracy, and the "I wish my life was exciting" Waymond. It's sci-fi but not good quality deep sci-fi. It's a comedy but not full of jokes or skilled physical humor, mostly 'random' silliness. It's a drama but the characters are shallow 2D people with one attribute each, all done in a Disneyfied "bagel with everything!" style.
In the way that Bella in Twilight is a placeholder for the everywoman reader[2]. Compare The Substance which is beating you over the head with "Society treats ageing women badly" but is not a movie for everyone - the topic is of interest to fewer people, the nudity and the physical body horror and gore will turn away a large section of potential audience. There's not much action or chase scenes like Everything Everywhere tries to throw in, and there's no happy ending like EEAAO either.
[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/im-so-random-lol-so-random-so-random
[2] https://theoatmeal.com/story/twilight
>Too bad there hasn't been any genre defining Solarpunk movie yet
Twilight! did you see Edward's skin in the sun!? you do realize the fact that you omit this marks you as Team Jacob, so much for your opsec.
I also dislike the mindset that reading == intellectual. I know plenty of people who read a LOT but it's all Twilight or 50 Shades of Grey type stuff. And I know people who never read books, but are constantly watching documentaries or otherwise always learning.
People should be able to have hobbies and self improvement separate and each one delivered in whichever medium they happen to prefer.
(And I'm not trying to say bad things about either of the books I mentioned, but rather illustrate that certain types of books aren't going to make you a scholar, just because you read a lot. Read what you enjoy.)
I downloaded it in the UK.
Here, there's not that much high quality TV content on it that isn't available on the free VOD providers (BBC iPlayer, ITVX, Channel 4) for the free-to-air TV channels. If I click on to the 'Series Spotlight' and look at the TV series on offer, they're all strange low budget things ('Bad Girls Club', 'Evil Killers', 'Z Nation'...) and I've not heard of the first 19 of them. The 20th one is a 'Gordon Ramsey: Uncharted' National Geographic show that I have access to through Disney+.
For films the picture is much better in that there are popular ones that if not blockbusters were at least things I'd heard of, but it's still mostly older stuff (Donnie Darko, Kick-Ass, Pacific Rim: Uprising, Twilight, Saw, Kill Bill).
The "pleb" part is specifically about consuming music like one does McDonald's. And the problem isn't eating McDonald's, it's eating only McDonald's.
I've always found strange that judging musical taste (or lack of it) is so controversial compared to other forms of art. If you say that people who only watch MCU movies or haven't read more than Harry Potter/Twilight are "plebeians" (or whatever less offensive word you want to use... philistine?), you'll get way less outrage than by stating something similar about music.
In the end, I think the disagreement may stem from two points: "plebeian" is automatically seen as an insult, not a possibly accurate (if condescending) descriptor and the usual extreme relativism that caring about music is should as universal as caring about tractors.
The point was in your scenario the student doesn't save any money at the end, in both cases they spend $40 to briefly own the book.
If they bought it used for $120 and sold it back for $80 after use vs buy for $120, photocopy, then sell for $80 it's the same overall outcome.
The reason I drew a distinction between school books and others is with some books the infringer might want to keep the photocopied material - I didn't realize we were talking about what is effectively a book exchange anyway (whose profits are the same either way).
Where if I bought Twilight, photocopied it and then returned it, that's a lot different than photocopying a math book that I return anyway - that people return so often there's a system designed around it at the campus bookstore.
This was never solved by lawyers or trials anyway, it was essentially put on ice by e-books and largely overtaken by the music/film piracy conversation and advent of the internet. Could have been a more interesting article is all!
I've already seen that one. One of the best Rifftrax along with The Room and Twilight, fellow Person of Culture. Me and a bunch of friends used to be zealous bad movie watchers, though we don't do it as often now that we're all scattered.
surely you mean a new Twilight book/movie. /s
The first paper in the literature review and its citations argue how popular tv shows like "The Twilight Diaries" and "Riverdale" normalize rape and violence against women, I can't take it seriously.
This was interesting, although I feel the author was making two separate points here. One point was about the popularity of young adult (YA) fiction with adults, and the other was something to do with a book about queer kids being criticized and an attempt to remove it from a public library because children might find it. The thread that connects them was supposedly that the library system circulates 135 copies of 50 Shades of Grey, but how exactly that related to YA lit I'm not sure. The link is certainly weak, or lost on me. (The author started writing fan-fic for YA novels?). Smut has existed forever, certainly before the arbitrary transition period the author of the article has come up with, so I'm not sure I understand the link.
Anyways, of the two points, I find the latter one boring and tired, and so I'd prefer to talk about the first one. The author states:
> My husband and I spent several years putting on pleasant faces when talk over cocktails drifted to “Which Hogwarts house would you belong to?” It all felt so juvenile and regressive. And I believe it was.
I was unable to escape this feeling at the time when Harry Potter was sweeping through the world. I'd just finished Lord of the Rings and, while I picked up a Harry Potter book, I just found it tough to get into. Then I watched the same thing happen with series like Eragon, Wheel of Time, Twilight, Song of Fire and Ice, Hunger Games and more (might have the order mixed up). I've read at least a single book from all those series (except Twilight) and while I've gone back and re-read Lord of the Rings 4 times since, I've never felt compelled to read those series, or watch the movie/TV adaptations.
I've spent actually a not insignificant amount of time wondering why those books never clicked with me, while watching them become sweeping, generation-defining cultura phenomena. It's bothered me, because I've been left out of a lot of "which Hogwarts house are you" type of conversations. But the thing that's really strange is that I kept waiting for everyone to outgrow those books and move on. On the one hand, I understand mass appeal, and I understand not understanding mass appeal. Not everything is truly for everyone, and it never bothered me that those books missed me, but what bothered me was that we never let go of them as a culture. I still know people who call other people "muggles", for instance, even though we're all well into our 30s by now.
There are a lot of things I liked in my youth that I look back fondly on now, but realize they aren't for me as an adult. Music, movies, TV, books (I had my own YA novel preferences), that, at some point, I just walked away from. Some of them were quite good, some of them were of broad appeal, but eventually, I outgrew them. What confuses me so much is society's inability to outgrow a lot of these recent YA novels. The same way I'm confused about how Taylor Swift is still so popular with her original demographic.
There used to be a certain strategy that if you paid attention to, many media companies (especially Disney) would employ: They'd release some media series, say, Star Wars. Then they'd wait until the people who originally were kids/young adults got older, had their own kids, and they'd re-release the property, or release sequels/prequels, etc. (Star Wars being a good example because they've done this 3 time now, with the originals in the 80s, prequels in the early 00s, and the latest batch in the 2020s). You could see clear generational gaps between surges in popularity. But that seems to have just gone away now.
All in all, it's not a real problem. I'm still just as tired of these media properties as I was a few years after they came out, but it's not like it really affects my life. It's just really strange to see the level of persistence, and I can't find any historical comparisons.
> the first Twilight and Harry Potter movies came out 4 years after their books, and I could definitely see movie studios just waiting an extra year to cut out the original authors.
So Rowling only gets to be some 8 figure millionaire instead of a 10 figure billionaire? That's so unfair.
> My ideal world would see original authors retaining these kinds of royalties for prolonged periods of time (
The prolonged period of time should be 18 months. I don't think the concept of "royalties for adapting someone else's work" is severable from the concept of copyright. These things are either the same, or royalties are some subset of copyright.
Even just re-typesetting a book is an adaptation as far as these things are concerned.
> Why allow them to extend it at all?
Marvel's an interesting choice, because the comic book depiction of Iron Man (for example) came out in the 60's, and almost certainly didn't make anywhere near the kind of money that the movies did. I'm not generally opposed to copyright holders getting some revenue from the later adaption of their work, especially in situations like that.
5 years is cutting it really close for your typical film adaption of a book: the first Twilight and Harry Potter movies came out 4 years after their books, and I could definitely see movie studios just waiting an extra year to cut out the original authors.
My ideal world would see original authors retaining these kinds of royalties for prolonged periods of time (maybe 40 years or the life of the author, whichever's longer), but losing their monopoly rights in a much shorter timespan: basically, for the first 5-10 years copyright works the way it does today, but beyond that anybody's allowed to make derivative works, in exchange for some legally-mandated revenue slice.
Out of curiosity... why not alt.startrek?
Other than the "not a lot is happening there now", but there's some activity.
The most recent posts on the server I'm on:
The Lower Decks crossover to live action in Strange New Worlds Star Trek Discovery Canceled ‘Galaxy Quest’ TV Series in Early Development at Paramount+ Jack Crusher is how old? Star Trek The Lower Decks S03E09 was everything I wanted. (spam - into the kill file that poster went) TOS Film marathon (crossposted trolling - more kill file material) Captain Burnham mob/cops/big city episodes (Star Trek Discovery) (crossposted trolling - figured out how to do more complicated rules - "cross posted to more than 3 groups and newsgroups match \.politics\." with this reader) (crossposted trolling - even more kill file material) Ode to Spot. (this post is from 2012) When will the new Star Trek merge with the Twilight movies? (this post is from (2011)
No emoji. No reaction gifs. No memes.
Just text content.
edit: and as I write this, a new post just showed up in the past 2 minutes about Strange New Words S02E01.
>that movie runtimes - even though they're getting longer - just aren't a good medium for complex stories like this that rely on heavy background and backstory
Peter Jackson would disagree. If you can't get it done in a single "getting longer" movie runtime, just make it into 3. Harry Potter did it in 2, Twilight did it in 2, etc. So the precedent of using multiple movies is there.
I also now see Pattinson's involvement in a film as a sign it's gonna at least be worth a watch.
All I can figure is the script and director demanded wooden, bad acting in the Twilight films, for whatever reason.
Depends on one's goals. Marvel Cinematic Universe movies are formulaic as hell and rack incredible amounts of money.
Anybody who just wants to write can drop their thoughts on a blog and call it a day. People who want to make money writing have to account for shaping the message to part people from their dollars.
Fifty Shades of Grey started as Twilight fanfiction. In that form it couldn't be marketed. A few name changes and some reframing and it has sold over 150 million copies.
I agree with some other commenters; this is a lot of cherry picking. You could just as easily compare Nosferatu (1922) with Blade (1998) with Twilight (2008) and ask why culture gets happier and less serious as time goes on, “aren’t we all becoming like Brave New World???” Comparing Adam West’s Batman with today’s Batman is just lazy. They’re apples and oranges at this point: different genres, different climates (today the more “fun” stuff is Marvel), different film technology. And if we want to get into it, it’s not “depression” that’s trendy; it’s realism. 60’s Batman dealt with all the same “dark” themes as current Batman: mafia, crime, trauma and grief, etc. But the visual portrayal was different because it was a “comic book” before comic books adaptations were commonplace blockbusters. That doesn’t mean all of 1960s cinema is somehow a comic book movie. Hello: Psycho (1960), Dr. Strangelove (1964), The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly (1966).
Seems too easy to game.
If I were a far-right provocateur, I would claim to burn a Koran but have it be an empty book. Or simply burn a book without saying what the book contains.
Or, if the ban is on burning a religious text, I would use a paper shredder, or chain saw, or drive nails through it.
> “History has taught Jews what can come next when you start burning books,”
I'm from the US, where book burning is surprisingly common.
"Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, church youth groups coordinated book burnings and music bonfires to purge their world of evil art." points out https://religionnews.com/2020/06/17/evangelicals-perfected-cancel-culture-now-its-coming-for-them/ .
A college roommate of mine was one - he burned his SF/fantasy books after a visiting preacher to his religious group encouraged them to get rid of an earthly thing they loved, to spend more time with God.
Here's a pastor recently "encouraging parishioners to toss books like "Harry Potter" and "Twilight" into a fire to denounce what he described as "demonic" materials. " - https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/pastor-holds-bonfire-burn-witchcraft-books-twilight-rcna14931
There's been several Harry Potter burnings, like "In 2001, people held a bonfire in New Mexico to burn the [Harry Potter] books because they believed the novels perpetuated the idea of satanism." - https://www.polygon.com/2017/2/1/14474054/harry-potter-books-burning-jk-rowling-twitter
In Poland too! https://people.com/books/harry-potter-books-burned-by-polish-priests/
It seems that what can come next when you start burning books is have some Hollywood movies made about the books.
BTW, if people really believe the Harry Potter books are Satanic, then doesn't that make them religious texts?
This is funny, you've got half mathematically, but logically you've got the second, fourth and sixth sixths of the feature!
When I was still working as a projectionist, for big releases (like Twilight) the film courier would often bring three reels on Monday and three reels on Tuesday, so you could make it up Tuesday night and test before the film opened on Thursday (or Wednesday night for midnight releases). I suspect that is why you have what you have...
I'm in Vietnam, the results are wrong.
I put the movie "Twilight" (the vampire cheesy movie) and the results show me that there is no option, while it is on Netflix.
https://www.movieofthenight.com/movie/Twilight/1912
https://www.netflix.com/search?q=twilight&jbv=70099113
Millions of people seem to have purchased the Fifty Shades books/movies, and some portion of them did not read/watch Twilight, so…
Because his argument is not good. The structure is “If there is no X, then there is no Y. Because Y, X.” This is circular reasoning which is more obvious if we use the same structure as
“If carbon exists, then carbon-based alien life forms exist. Because carbon-based aliens exist, carbon exists.”
Logically, not wrong, but you missed the most interesting part of the proof: aliens exist?! PG missed proving the most interesting part of his post: that good taste exists. I don’t think reductio ad absurdum really works here because there are millions of possible explanations for the “effects” of good taste. In his example, the fact that people have non-random responses to art.
The problem here is just the fact that people have consistent responses to art does not suppose that there exists some inherent reasoning called “taste.” In fact, many popular things are abhorred as poor taste. I think we can agree that liking Citizen Kane more than Twilight would be called “good taste.” The problem here of course is that “taste” is a sociological construct - not a logical or philosophical one - designed by humans to distinguish class upon non-obvious signifiers. Perhaps you could dress a lower class person in fancy dress and perfume, but any upper class person could snuff them out in a moment by any hundreds of small little signifiers.
PG seems to want to talk about taste without having to say any of the unfashionable things about it, not naming any specific art works or signifiers of taste. He wants to “prove” taste exists without ever even defining it. Without a single example in this framework that lends credence to his ideas. By his logic, Marvel movies and Twilight should be more tasteful than Vertigo because more people more consistently like it. In reality, taste works the opposite way, but it’s not that simple either. Most people would hate Tommy Wiseau’s The Room, but that does not mean that liking it means you have good taste. Rather the opposite in fact. The truth here, of course, is that “taste” is a cultural, social, and economic property and lens, not a logical one. You have to get into real world to argue about taste, which PG seems entirely uninterested in doing.
If I may be a bit tongue in cheek, I would advise Paul that if you want to start talking about taste, you must first talk about scarcity and then irony.
> No customer wants to spend X on Shudder, Y on Netflix, and Z on Prime, plus Hulu, HBO, and your cable/satellite fee either. Paying 200 GBP/USD a month is utterly absurd.
When we’re done talking about the quantity of movies, let’s talk about quality.
If an awesome movie goes to the cinema, like Twilight, you’ll be able to watch Werewolf on Netflix. With abysmal plot and acting. If you type Mission Impossible, you’ll certainly get Suits.
The search is so abysmal, always suggesting the same 40 series on and on, that people exchange numeric codes which allow them to discover new categories (but half the titles will be already seen). A/B testing probably shows that after seeing a title for 6 weeks and dodging it, you end up watching it, because, there’s only that.
It’s not that I don’t want to pay $40 a month for 4 services, it’s that even at that price, I still can’t watch the quality movies.
And let’s not even start with ideology-pushing in movies.
Sigh, do I really need to do this?
I'm not going to go over the anecdata of "but for every outspoken fan, there are a dozen closeted ones".
There are some numbers in this Telegraph article: https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2008/nov/06/twilight-film-demographic
95% women, ~60% below 25 or younger. Didn't find any other fast sources of data, other studies are welcome
Figures for viewership of Premier League matches:
https://insight.globalwebindex.net/hs-fs/hub/304927/file-2593818997-
Males are roughly twice the number of females, between 19-25% are 25 or younger.
If you find some actual numbers to retort with, that'd be great.
> Was Barney hated? By whom?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Barney_humor
There was no reason at the time to think it was better/worse for kids than other age appropriate programs. Adults just hated it.
Twilight movies are garbage. Teen girls can do better. I can't remember if the books were hated.
Emo culture however is an example of something hated that shouldn't have been. But the author of the article seems to rule this out for 'teen girls'.
So what am i supposed to do, love those things?
I hate Twilight and 50 Shades and the current crop of superhero movies that I can't even remember the name of.
Let whoever enjoys them enjoy them but... don't force ME to enjoy them.
Edit: Oops forgot. Hate Disney Star Wars too. It makes me miss Jar Jar Binks.
> "We've seen more than our fair share of bad action movies, bad movies geared toward men or 13-year-old boys. And you know, the reviews are like ‘OK that was crappy, but a fun ride.' But no one says ‘Oh my god. If you go to see this movie you're a complete xxxxing idiot.' And that's the tone. That is the tone with which people attack 'Twilight'."
People say this about boyish movies all the time. I never read the twilight books, but I did see, what I think was the last movie. I recall two things about it. One was a hilariously PG sex scene with visual sparkles to imply an orgasm. The other was a long, hilariously cheap fight scene where every other character got rapidly decapitated.
Was forced to watch the Twilight movies.
They named the child Renesmee...
Some criticism is valid. The movies are bad. I can’t speak for the books...but the movies are very bad. I think it was the 3rd movie that I’ll say is the 2nd worst movie I’ve ever seen.
There are plenty of things that teenage girls like that don’t fall in the category of Twilight. Buffy the Vampire Slayer just as an example. Very similar premise but executed with a great story and acting.
Twilight movies are just bad. It’s a valid criticism.
I've only seen the first Twilight, and it was at least enjoyable up to maybe 2/3 the way in before it went off the rails. I would question the notion that these movies would appeal to anyone who enjoys fantasy. Maybe the sequels, IDK. To me it's pretty clear the aspects of the original that appeal to the teen girl psyche; an ordinary girl who's low on the social hierarchy gets recognized by an attractive but dangerous guy who brings her into his world that's more exciting than hers. It's not difficult to understand how that appeals to its target audience.
Was Twilight not a huge, mainstream, industry transforming blockbluster? The film series pulled in billions of dollars, and led the way for quite a few high-grossing YA series adaptations.
Darn I misread the title to imply it was going to go into the psychology of teen females vs other segments of population. To explore why those differences exist. Not the rhetorical question it is.
I liked the Twilight movie I watched (no idea which one). I bet people who like pretty much any fantasy would too, if they weren't first told they were suppose to "hate" it.
Two quotes from the article (both are actually quotes in the article as well):
> turn a butter-wouldn't-melt teenage girl into a rabid, knicker-wetting banshee who will tear off her own ears in hysterical fervour when presented with the objects of her fascinations
> We've seen more than our fair share of bad action movies, bad movies geared toward men or 13-year-old boys. And you know, the reviews are like ‘OK that was crappy, but a fun ride.' But no one says ‘Oh my god. If you go to see this movie you're a complete xxxxing idiot.' And that's the tone. That is the tone with which people attack 'Twilight'.
The first quote is about the reaction of girls, while the other is about the content or value of some media product intended for boys. My only point is that they're taking the first as proof of belittling the content (Twilight, One Direction, etc.) instead of a comment on the reaction itself.
Just as a note, I have no thoughts one way or another about the "hysteria" displayed by teenage girls, but I'm curious why the same kind of hyper-excitement is rarely seen in boys. Presumably it's throwned upon them expressing themselves like that, even for something that excites them?
EDIT: Maybe I just haven't seen that hyper-excitement in boys, I'm open to a contrary suggestion :D
The article spends a lot of time on mentioning that things like Twilight and One Direction are looked down upon, before finally explaining what the problem here actually is.
This quote from the screenwriter of the Twilight movies really gets the point through:
> "We've seen more than our fair share of bad action movies, bad movies geared toward men or 13-year-old boys. And you know, the reviews are like ‘OK that was crappy, but a fun ride.' But no one says ‘Oh my god. If you go to see this movie you're a complete xxxxing idiot.' And that's the tone. That is the tone with which people attack 'Twilight'."
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.
Business success isn't a function of technical/artistic quality in any field. There's a loose correlation sure, but there are hundreds or thousands of examples where poorly written/made books, TV shows, music, films, games etc also did really well commercially as well as the opposite. Many would say something like Firefly is better than something like Twilight, but one made millions of dollars and the other got cancelled in two seasons.
Knowing what to make and who to market it to will usually matter a lot more than how you build it.
I was thinking of Twilight. Was the choice of actors, location, fight directors etc. relevant to the success of the movie?
Or was it down to the plain jane Mary Sue the viewer could inject themself into that a sexy vampire was in love with for no real reason? (And in the sequel, a sexy werewolf is also in love with Mary Sue for... ...reasons?)
Like, I feel you could've cast this movie entirely differently, or had a different director, and so long as SexyWishFulfillment McVampire was good looking enough, you'd make bank, so long as you catered well to the demographic watching this dross.
I feel psychology has way many ways to help us. If you happen to open to new things:
- Personality psychology is insanely powerful and useful when it comes to understanding people / situations. An introduction to theories of personality Book by Robert B Ewen is gold.
Have you ever had gut instinct about how someone acts/a phenomena but lacked the words to express it? A distrust/discomfort, déjà vu, or feeling someone is being motivated by dredging up an issue from their past and trying to recreate it with you, to "try it on" you like a Cinderella slipper? (Could be in a good or bad way)
When you grasp the concepts, it can go well into looking at your family / upbringing, yourself, selecting a partner, personalities to distrust/avoid, etc.
Also you may find yourself liking concepts from Freud / Jung / Adler / Horney / Bowlby+Ainsworth and so on. That alone can give you a more informed perspective on behavior.
- Here's an example of professor using the above tools to dissect Twilight (haven't saw the movie or read it yet): Deconstructing Twilight: Psychological and Feminist Perspectives on the Series New edition Edition by Donna M. Ashcraft. She also written a personality theories workbook.
- Object relations stuff is absolutely awesome. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Myk352wMSs. IMO it's far easier to digest if you grasp psychodynamic theories above.
- Projective identification: https://youtu.be/cBnZiP3W3ao?t=1215
- You can then take it into individual (like schema therapy https://www.guilford.com/excerpts/young.pdf) and family therapy methods (e.g. Bowenian https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLQOWoom2d0) where the concepts on the stuff above occur
As a former writer, the only market with real cash to spend for writing is commercial b2b/b2c. Everything else is a pittance unless you're the next twilight that hits critical mass and sells off the movie rights. if you're writing for the creative thrill, b2b works a good way to kill the soul.
creative writing basically has no real market, and even the best are going to be scrounging mid 5 figure incomes.
Part of the problem is derivative works. I don't think even Disney cares too much if people stream Steamboat Willy - but if MGM Studios wants to create a new Mickey Mouse film that could be a problem for them.
Still I have little sympathy - it's hard to argue that endless Twilight fan-fiction did the franchise any harm. And there's plenty of non-canon James Bond films that have no impact on the main franchise.
Total tangent. Amazon Prime's video library here in Australia disapointed me to such an extend that I unsubscribed within minutes of subscribing.
The dashboard has recommendations. In those recommendations, on this single page, Twilight appeared 26 (TWENTY SIX) times.
Any other page I'd go to would also have several instances of it recommending me a Twilight movie. I literally couldn't find enough decent movies because almost every other movie was from that series.
It was the shortest lived account I've ever owned.
Apologies for the rant. Am disappointed.
That's sometimes true for the old ones. On the plus side, I've found that I can watch some newer movies that I would never otherwise be able to see. Never know when having seen Twilight might come in handy...
If you like MST3K, definitely check out the Master Pancake series at the Alamo Drafthouse - https://drafthouse.com/austin/series/master-pancake . To be honest, it's one of my favorite things about living in Austin. It's live comedians heckling bad films. I've seen a ton of movies this way. Some movies, this is the ONLY way I'd watch them (I saw their mock of the second Twilight film--even they couldn't make that movie compelling to watch.)
The only negative is that they are so popular that tickets often sell out nearly a week in advance. It's a great way to spend a Friday or Saturday night in Austin.
10% seems high. From google: "Women Comprise 7% of Directors"
.93^87 = 0.0018
However, what's the ratio among films not just directors? (can't find)
How about women among top grossing films of all time? http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/domestic.htm vs. http://www.thewrap.com/15-highest-grossing-movies-directed-by-women/13/ So: Frozen, Shrek, Twilight, Kung Fu Panda 2
.96^ 87 = 2.9%
Looking at the top grossing list for women you see a lot of chick flicks and kids films. Arguably that's bias, but not vs. the director.
That's illegal as hell in Nevada, and I would assume in most jurisdictions in the US that permit casino gambling. The machines are very, very carefully engineered to give exactly the odds reported to the regulator. If you don't, that's a corporate death sentence; if Nevada refuses to certify your machines you can't sell them anywhere.
The difficulty of certifying a machine / game / etc is so high that the industry mostly uses a few basic games which are proven (both from a legal and operational perspective) and then reskins them endlessly to keep players coming back. Vampires were in for the last few years, apparently, thanks to Twilight. (Anecdata based on walking through a few casinos while in town for Microconf. It's vampires, TV shows appealing to older Americans, and a lot of very very obviously US-company-attempts-to-do-China games.)
It might be worthwhile to examine this phenomenon in a larger context. For example, I know a girl who is obsessed with watching sticky sweet romantic shows and movies like "twilight" and "the bachelor". The romance portrayed in these shows is extremely unrealistic and I feel it gives her unrealistic expectations of romantic relationships. Certainly there are no shortage of young men smoking too much marijuana and watching too much internet porn and generally not trying in life who wonder why they can't find a female partner, but likewise there are a lot women who are overweight, unclean, disorganized and generally not exciting (or even downright repulsive) watching romantic shows or reading sexy novels and thinking their world should be that way.
The larger phenomenon is, in my opinion, media substitutions for reality. It's like to much sugar and causes certain individuals problems. But it's not a problem isolated to porn and young men.
I'm guessing that the Twilight book and movie series has something to do with the rapid rise in popularity of the name "Isabella."
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=isabella
I don't think it would make much odds for IMDB. Sure you'll maybe negate the overly high proportion of extreme votes, but I don't think that effect is large. I did once take the top films on IMDB and remove the extreme votes, and the effect was marginal - a few films shuffled a place or so. In exchange, if you use the median, you could have polarising films - like Twilight, having their ratings change markedly over time, as people decide to start warring over it and the numbers swamp the small number of ambivalents.
For your other point, there will be voting patterns for various demographics and certain groups of people prefer certain movies. But I think the phenomenon I'm describing is a bit too extreme to be merely a bunch of old women disproportionately taking a dislike to Ikiru and then rushing onto the internet to tell the world they hate it. It is the smallest demographic IMDB has, so it's not hurting the ratings of the films in general, it's just an oddity.
Funny that overrated movies is dominated by Twilight. I suspect boy-friends who were forced to watch them together with their girl-friends are responsible.
>If you see many, many people getting obsessed with a game, and you think it's boring, it's usually a sign that you're not understanding something.
I love chess, but this type of thinking is flawed. Using this logic, the Twilight movies are misunderstood masterpieces, Justin Beiber is the millennials' Mozart, and WWE style wrestling should be in the Olympics alongside the decathlon.
Here is a place where it's helpful and guessing wrong is ok. Consider a movie information site, which for some reason knows your name (but nothing else).
Male homepage: Die Hard, Star Wars, Bridget Jones.
Female homepage: Bridget Jones, Twilight, Star Wars.
Both males and females are shown primarily movies they are more likely to be interested in and your bounce rate goes down.
>Right. You're the center of the universe
No; but you are at the center of a strawman.
Didn't the fact that I already wrote that "Twilight is targeted at teenage girls" stop you from writing all those dreadful "counter-examples" (as if I believed that the fictual setting of a show automatically and necesarrily determines the target audience?)
If I followed the strawman logic you accuse me of having, I'd have said "Twilight is targeted at vampires and girls having affairs with them". I did not.
As for your rude question, no, I'm just at the center of a big enough and profitable demographic -- geeks, semi-geeks, etc that have come out of the woodwork ever since the mid-nineties/early oughts, and for which tons of media content is produced, from J. Abraham's and Josh Whedon's stuff, to the nth comic book movie and down to Kevin Smith's Comic Book Men TV series.
The "counter-examples" that you provide, are workplaces and professions, that have served as generic backdrops for drama for ages. They are not about a specific demographic, and their content and references are not targeted at them. On a medical drama, for example, the content is all about relationships, tension, love affairs, etc, not the practice of medicine. They characters might as well be lawyers and the show would still work, whereas in BBT the content is all about the geek references, and nothing is generic and universal.
You even seem unaware of the fact that shows can be targeted a specific demographic, like, say, Friends created for 20-somethings, or Sex and The City created for 30+ women.
Seems to me that Bella, and Twilight in general, are very anti-feminist. She's only strong when it is a plot-point to get herself into trouble where she can be rescued by a man. The movies struck me as the worst sort of teenage princess fantasy.
Hollywood writes strong female characters because it can't write realistic women characters (something like 90% of produced scripts are written by men). All it can do is caricatures: Bella from twilight on one hand and the Kung-Fu princess on the other.
It's just the flip side of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bechdel_test; http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/features/10-famous-films-that-surprisingly-fail-the-bechdel-test.php; http://thehathorlegacy.com/why-film-schools-teach-screenwriters-not-to-pass-the-bechdel-test/.
One of the shows I really like is Orange and Black. By setting the show in a women's prison, the writers are forced to develop a range of female characters who don't just sit around talking about men.
Tilda Swinton's character in Michael Clsyton is also great. So is the female Israeli soldier in World War Z.
I know that reality shows that I'm not in the majority, but the majority often has terrible taste. That's why things like Twilight, The Transformer movies, and Justin Beiber are popular.
Visit any thread on reddit that mentions BBT. It'll be full of highly-upvoted hate comments. It's a a close third hate object after Justin Bieber and "Twilight".
I wonder if the psychology student message boards also raged same way about "Frasier" (also an award-winning comedy with a live studio audience).
To me, BBT is great and I've just finished a second run through its 5 first episodes on Blueray. That Jim Parson is in no way a true geek makes his performance even more hilarious.
Amusingly the reddit snobbery over BBT can be found within BBT itself: the way Sheldon absolutely despises "Babylon 5" while fawning over "Star Trek" etc.
Relying on porn to teach kids about sex is about as reasonable as relying on the Twilight movies to teach them about how to have healthy relationships.
All due to piracy? If you look at the 10 top grossing films of 2012, we have: 3 comic book movies (The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises, and The Amazing Spiderman) where the characters have already had several movies, 3 movies that are either the 3rd or 4th in an original series (Madagascar, Ice Age, and MiB), and 4 based on books (Twilight, Skyfall, The Hobbit, and Hunger Games). Maybe people are tired of rehashes of the same IP over and over again, especially when they spread one story over several movies, just to get more money out of you? (I'm looking at you, The Hobbit)
My favourites, not in order:
Cabin in the Woods
Looper
The Hobbit
House at the End of the Street
Can't remember much else really. Also seen Twilight but I'd only really recommend that as a date movie.
It couldn't possibly be that those titles that you want to see are not being developed because few people want them?
http://vgsales.wikia.com/wiki/Video_game_industry#History_of_video_game_industry
You do not get to define market demand for particular types of games. People are willing to spend money on games.
The music industry is figuring out that, unlike the 90's, they can't put out a cd with 1 or 2 hits and expect people to buy the whole thing. So yes, sales are down. How much are they saving by shipping fewer CDs?
Book sales may be stagnant or declining, but units are up, and a similar argument applies: how much of the falling gross revenue is offset by reduced distribution costs?
How will any position on copyright enforcement cause people to forego watching the latest Twilight movie, or buying Harry Potter books, and instead buy the sort of high art or higher art that you seem to think they should be buying?
There is no shortage of people willing to buy the FPS clones, pulp fiction books, and popular music that you would decry. Your complaint lies with those people, not pirates.
"For instance, reading all of the Harry Potter books is getting something done too. Flipping channels on the couch all day, not so much."
I've always found it interesting that reading, as a form of entertainment, always seems to be held on a pedestal compared to television, cinema, or videogames. It's a kind of elitism that the literati hold over everyone who doesn't find reading as enjoyable as them. Consider this: one person reads the entire Harry Potter series and another reads the entire Twilight series, both are reading but the quality of the material is completely different. Assuming that literature is de facto superior to any other form entertainment is completely ignorant and wrong.
In this case, swap "flipping channels all day", which could include watching informative shows such as Bill Nye, How It's Made, or Mythbusters, with "watching Jersy Shore all day" and confusion about entertainment quality preferences are removed.
Our algorithm tries to things: to flag the bad torrents so they're not displayed, and to not penalize the rare torrents you get for old/unpopular movies.
Moon has bad results because the title is only one word, and Twilight's sorry excuse for a movie happens to be the same year.
We'll definitely look to improve that, thanks for the feedback.
It certainly looks nice, but it's not really accurate. E.g. the page for Moon links to Twilight torrents: http://movies.io/m/9t
Interesting hypothetical.
Lets take a recent blockbuster. The first Twilight movie made $392,616,625 in the box office, $194,881,773 in DVD sales for a total of $587,498,398 (almost 600M - pretty good rake)
In your $5 they'd have to sell 117,499,679 of those $5 streams in order to make that equivalent revenue (so roughly one in every 60 people in the world need to buy a stream).
For more fun take the last Twilight Movie (Eclipse) which was a bigger draw ($826,423,724 total revenue). Then you'd have to sell 165M streams to get to those numbers.
Considering the $5 stream scenario could be shared across a family - I honestly am not sure your assumption that a studio could make more money is correct. The real X-Factor here is the cut the various distribution chains take.
I'm not sure your price point is right, but would you perhaps pay $20 for the same stream?
EDIT: Also I don't think the 4-weeks after theatrical release is going to work I don't think theaters are going to show your movie if you're going to kneecap them 4 weeks out.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twilight_Saga_(film_series)#Box_office_performance
Even producers spend time consuming content. I'd expect that we all consume far more content than we produce. It's worth optimising that experience as well.
If nobody consumed these media, what would be the point of producing them?
I am more interested in what are you consuming - news.ycombinator.com or news.fox.com? "Twilight" movies or "The Wire" TV series?
>That does not provide the same utility for riaa as the avatar.mp4 did for Joe blow.
Good old Adam Smith teaches us that value in exchange is often the opposite of value in use. (His example is that we pay very little for water, which is vital for survival, but lots for a diamond that has very limited value in use, in comparison.) Joe's utility for watching the movie is thus almost irrelevant to the question of how much he should pay for the privilege.
>The question comes down to how much Joe blow WOULD have paid for avatar.mp4 had his only option been to purchase a DVD
Not true, considering our entire economy runs on consumer surplus:
http://www.cliffsnotes.com/study_guide/Consumer-Surplus.topicArticleId-9789,articleId-9756.html
For example, a rabid "Twilight" fan may readily spend a hundred dollars to see the movie, but will actually end up paying just as little as the guy who was dragged in by his fiancee.
I think DA did so well because there's a huge hesitation in people to play a "sci-fi" game. I have no clue why though. My wife even said "that [ME} is too sci-fi, but that [DA} looks interesting".
I don't get what the difference is between a Krogan and an Orc.
Being a writer, I know I could write a story where I could literally switch terminology and it be either a sci-fi or fantasy.
What really gets me is I can never get my wife to sit down and watch more than an episode of BSG, Stargate or something else, but over 3/4 of the movies she picks to see are sci-fi. So I spend a lot of time pulling my hair out on TV choices but for a film I don't even have to ask what it is (although I should keep track of when the damn twilight movies come out as I get sidelined every time).
I'm glad you brought up White Wolf v. Sony. I think Penny Arcade's response at the time summed it up pretty well:
Comic: http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2003/09/08
Post: http://penny-arcade.com/2003/09/08/
However, despite following the case closely at the time, I've never heard about any negotiations between White Wolf and Sony at any stage of the film's development. On the contrary, emails from within White Wolf indicate they were completely unaware of the film until the first trailer was released. Do you have a source for your claim that there were negotiations?
To answer your question: nothing stops a studio from piggybacking on someone else's concept, and nothing should. The Asylum's entire business model is based on it (though they also engage in the somewhat unethical practice of copying names, when they can). White Wolf has no claim to the basic ideas underpinning the World of Darkness. There's nothing unique or innovative there.
The same thing applies to The Vampire Diaries (books and TV show), Twilight (books and film), True Blood (books and TV show), and so on, of course.
Post production cost may be cheaper, but then you have to deal with distribution , marketing, PR, salaries for your cast ($20M per picture for a big movie star), crew, script, Etc.
And then you have to convince millions of moviegoers NOT to watch high budget competition such as Dark Knight Rising, Transformers, Twilight, Spiderman, etc.
Then you need to have something Millions of people want to watch this is the hard part :)
And then you'll kill Hollywood.
You need to convince millions of people not to watch Dark knight Rising, Transformers, Harry Potter, Star Wars, Twilight, Mission Impossible, and hundreds of other blockbusters and TV Shows, every year.
Then, the hardest part, you need to come up with something that is Waaaaaaaaaayyyy waayyyyy better than all those movies and TV shows combined -- and do it every single day.
Then, you'll kill Hollywood.
most comic book artists and writers are male, most readers are male, a big chunk are teens, and males like pretty/nude/curvaceous females, most teen males likes big breasts and many teen females want to have big breasts
The TV show Mad Men is set in the early 1960s USA, when the same thing could be said of the professional world. "Everyone who works here is men, our clients are men, our customers are men" etc. And yet there was a lot of discrimination and sexism then. And things have changed (in the professional business world) then.
the college/PC/lesbian/feminist litmob doesn't care about that, then it's not talked about
Sure they do. Here's a series of blog posts about how twilight has terrible characters. http://skepchick.org/2011/11/twilight-breaking-wind/
This article is built on a bunch of assumptions and stereotypes which is terribly ironic given the subject matter. Some of it may be true but some of it just very wrong.
Men can expect that their presence at an event won't automatically be assumed to be decorative or secondary to another man.
Not really. Ask the benchwarmers for a high school sports team.
Despite the growing presence of women in comics, as publishers, editors and creators as well as consumers, a preponderance of men will either treat women at conventions as inconveniences, booth bunnies or even potential dates.
I can't comment on comic books but in the books, movies and TV shows I want I've actually found the exact opposite is increasingly true. There's a strong temptation to make the female characters super-human creatures with a PHD and a shotgun. Always a witty comeback. Always the most moral and ethical characters.
Men are also not going to be automatically assigned into a particular niche just based on their gender.
Tell that to some straight guy who happens to like female-centric things. They're going to be assumed to be homosexuals most of the time.
And when they are seen as customers, they're often automatically assumed to be buying one of the designated "girl" properties
Perhaps in the same way a man strolling around certain types of stores popular with females would be seen?
One of these is welcomed into geek culture with open arms, the other has to justify their existence in the first place.
Says who?
makes women feel unwelcome in fandom
Tell that to all the rapid female Twilight fans.
Or: just go for the skinny pale look. Really works thanks to those twilight and social network movies.
Hah, you just described my wife, who is a very well educated attorney and international policy expert. If it has a vampire in it, she'll read just about any book.
Before, by some strange twist of fate, she finds me talking about her online, she did not read or endorse the Twilight books. She did want to watch the movie "with the vampires fighting the werewolves" but was rather put out that the fight was so short, cramming seventeen seconds of action in a twelve-hour movie.
Assuming the ratings have been made since the launch of the site, there's also a massive systematic error introduced by people being inclined to forget films they considered to be pretty rubbish a decade ago, whilst being determined to challenge popular opinion on the stuff they wished they hadn't watched last year.
Whilst people feel the need to use ranking systems to express their dismay at Avatar not being the experience they'd hoped for and correct their teenage daughter's friends' belief that the Twilight Saga is deep and insightful, it's mostly the people that actually consider themselves fans of Adam Sandler and Hugh Grant's stock characters that bother to go and rate Happy Gilmore and Four Weddings and a Funeral.
Then I'm not understanding the definition of "polarizing". By my thinking, a polarizing movie would have distinctly good ratings to go alongside distinctly bad ratings, i.e. Twilight is not polarizing if everybody agrees it is bad.
"[I]magine the possibilities for a Halo movie done right."
This seems a tall order, if you plan to base the story around Master Chief. Now that's not a necessity, of course... but this is Halo.
Master Chief is a vessel character, like Neo from The Matrix or, dare I mention it, Bella from Twilight. The idea is for you, the individual audience member, to slip yourself into that hollow vessel and become the character. Master Chief is me. I am Master Chief. We are one in the same. You are also Master Chief. Master Chief is also you. By design, vessel characters have literally no personality. They should say and/or do nothing which would upset the illusion that you are them. Neo never says anything smart, never says anything stupid, never makes a moral choice we couldn't all see ourselves making. Hell, he hardly even talks period. Same goes for Master Chief. Obviously, you can write for/around a vessel character. The Wachowski brothers did it. But can you write for a vessel character whose story has already been told? Try and imagine, say, a prequel story where we watch young Master Chief running around military school or whatever. Did you imagine something boring? I did.
No it's not. Even for fiction, the plot depth of the books I've read multiple times is incomparable to the plot depth of the movies on the all time best selling DVD lists. That is, unless you think that Avatar and Twilight had really deep plots.
Great observation. Didn't expect twilight is the top movie in an airforce base!
I'm not comparing it with Twilight as far as crap factor goes. I couldn't stomach more than 20 minutes of Twilight. I was able to sit through Titanic without feeling like I had wasted 3 hours of my life, but I wasn't about to see the movie in theaters 20 some-odd times either.
Well, that is why I watch Vimeo.Low-budget and good. And in general, that is very American way of thinking, that the best movies necessarily have to use most advanced technologies. For example, European movies are often low-budget, yet better than Transformers or Twilight, or similar stuff.
Requests latest Tarantino film as "my wife insisted we choose Twilight last weekend".
I wholly disagree for video games, but then I worked as a reviewer so I admit my view is likely very skewed from the average consumer. Near identical games come out sometimes months apart in video games, but similar happens in the film industry with Armageddon appearing 2 months after Deep Impact in cinemas in '98.
The new Harry Potter was held off last year because the produces were afraid two competing fantasy series could kill each other near a Christmas recession. Twilight, which is basically swept up in the box office and with Harry Potter 6 due out literally like a week later and cost almost 7 times as much to make.
However cooincidences occur frequently with movies and games due to waiting for the right market attention. I mean a G.I. Joe movie or Transformers movie could have been made whenever, similar with a lot of movies, however it's been impossible up until late to make live action movies with quality animation.
I personally see little difference between a lot of video games and movies. I'm uninterested in 2012, because I already saw it with Knowing and its about as meaningful as a movie on the millennium bug would have been in 1997. Then there's the whole Bedtime Stories following Inkheart (Which was due out in March 2008, but was pulled back to December 12 at least in the UK), and Bedtime Stories looked like it was rushed into production following the sale of Inkhearts rights.
Again, I'm probably not the best person to ask as I had a movie pass at like 13 (the pass cost $20 a month, I easily got $40 worth of movies per weekend). So I'll say there is a need for hype in the movie and video game industry, however I still believe there's a big opportunity for companies to rush poor quality movies into production to steal the limelight from another. This is especially true when some movies can take 3 years to produce and others are done and finished in 9 months and may wait another 6 months for release, but if you group movies too closely you end up with two distinct groups of movies (like plays) Comedy or Tragedy and then all grouping is meaningless.
Thanks for the updated link. The site gets about 200 new visits and 200 returning visits a day. While this is good it's a low turnout compared to how much I've linked it everywhere possible.
On the other hand my retarded anime episode crawler at crawlanime.com gets several thousands hits for a half ass'ed effort with curl. my roleplay site at Eliteskills.com/rp is crawling with people making god damn twilight roleplays at a depressing rate. I'm rewarded more often for making stupid shit than for making well designed sophisticated apps for improving actual skills.
That's where my frustrated statement comes from.
I think my hatred for Harry Potter isn't completely because of the fact that I hate the series. I believe it comes more from the fact that the English school system proposed placing it on the national curriculum's book list and were planning to remove either Of Mice and Men or The Lord of the Flies. Thankfully they completely changed this, allowing teachers to teach whatever books they want as long as they were established texts, which included Harry Potter.
I believe the rest of my distaste for the series came from when the books were initially released. There was such hype over a kids book and in my free time I was reading many of the sci-fi classics, and when I finally got to reading Harry Potter it was just an extremely campy version of Ender's Game. I believe even Orson Scott Card (who's a fan of Harry Potter) pointed this out when J.K. Rowling targeted her own fans for the Harry Potter lexicon for 'stealing her ideas'.
I'm fully aware of all that's wrong with the Twilight novels, but it never really bothered me and I've generally avoided books written in first person. However, I came from the UK so I never read or heard anything until I was ambushed into reading it by my (then fiancee) wife, I'd given her like my favorite book of all time to read The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin and she gave me Twilight, which wasn't exactly a fair trade: 200 page book at like 4x5 vs 500 page at 5x7. Then, of course, the movie came out and her friend just happened to have extra tickets for the opening night. I believe that's the easiest I've ever been tricked.
Although, rather ironically, I believe I've contributed more money to Rowling and the Harry Potter series as I have watched most of the movies and eventually actually paid to see the most recent one, and I've yet to give a penny to Mayer.
Well I'm trying to avoid sex as a matter of style, my main character is 17 so I think it would be tasteless anyway. I mean if the Twilight series can have such a rabid fan following, I don't believe there's a need for a sex scene unless there's an actual point to it.
I'd also say 95% of books and movies get sex completely wrong anyway because it's added in out of irrelevance. It's like the author had to add an extra 5,000 words to meet their contract and added in a random sex scene. I mean there's an actual award for worst sex scene, which kind of helps make my point.
I think very few books would actually be worse off without a sex scene.
I always thought Ebert was too lenient on movies (as he famously says, he goes to movies to enjoy them; I've always liked more critical film reviewers), but I've loved every article he's written for the Sun. It's made me appreciate his attitude a lot more.
In particular, his criticism for how the press handled Twilight. I lost my love for newspapers through 2006-2007 with their handling of the book series. If you haven't read them, the books are disgustingly bad; high schoolers have a better track record in terms of quality. And newspapers and "old media" never once referred to it. They'd focus only on the popularity and on the many people who liked it, which was a really self-serving story.
I really hope people start speaking up against that sort of news reporting. It's killing the news. And I think that old news is going to end up dead as the Internet gains prominent, but god - what an ugly death.