Hacker Cinema
Vanilla Sky
2001 · Film · 136 min
Directed by Cameron Crowe
David Aames has it all: wealth, good looks and gorgeous women on his arm. But just as he begins falling for the warmhearted Sofia, his face is horribly disfigured in a car accident. That's just the beginning of his troubles as the lines between illusion and reality, between life and death, are blurred.
3 negative12 neutralfrom 15 commenters
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15 comments on Hacker News
Absolutely. It serves as a filter, if people are being honest. It also highlights the bizarre dating culture and view of life we've adopted. This dating culture has produced a good deal of rotten fruit.
The ultimate purpose of dating is to meet your future spouse. We're turned it into some kind of senseless sexual escapade, and this has poisoned the relations between men and women. It makes them exploitative and dehumanizing in spirit: sprinkling them with the waters of "consent" doesn't change that, as the subjective cannot abolish the objective. We've reduced sex to something that is merely pleasurable and contradicted its intrinsic and essential function which is procreative by employing an array of technologies that impede and interfere with healthy procreative processes. This creates a mindset not unlike that of a drug user who is obsessed with getting another hit with no thought given to the damage, or the bulimic who wants the sensual satisfaction of eating, but not the calories.
The psychophysical reality of sexual intercourse is much more than some passing physical pleasure. It mobilizes processes in us that are completely oriented toward bonding and the strengthening of the relationship in preparation for children. Whence the stereotype that men will often exit quickly in the morning after a one night stand with a strange woman? Because both can feel, if only subconsciously, that the processes of bonding are taking place, and who wants to bond — and in such a profound and intimate way — with someone they've just met? In this regard, the character of Julianna in Vanilla Sky makes an astoundingly profound and accurate remark for a movie coming out of Hollywood: "Don't you know when you sleep with someone, your body makes a promise whether you do or not?" Our capacity for sexual intimacy is likewise dulled.
(Masturbation is even worse. Those processes bond us with a fictional harem of the imaginary and close us within ourselves. For social animals like us, this is a recipe for misery.)
We thwart and ignore our biological nature to our own detriment. The procreative prime spans the mid-twenties into the early 30s. Statistically, most people should be having families by their mid-20s. Our culture confuses people and creates a pointless obstacle course that leads them to postpone such things either because they're too immature (and encouraged to remain so, also by this unserious dating culture) or because they believe they must achieve some arbitrary milestones first. Furthermore, family and community support has been dashed by a culture of hyperindividualism.
The causes of demographic decline are not a mystery. People simply either don't think deeply enough, or they don't want to make the cultural changes necessary to restore normalcy.
I think that the numbers are in-house red team fuzzing attempts against the implant, with the goal being lower mean time between failures of the implant. It could also represent a debugger IDE, with the “spooky” numbers that we see jumping around onscreen on the workstation representing some kind of bad data that doesn’t pass tests that the normal numbers onscreen do pass.
I’m reminded of the in house help desk tech support that someone calls for in the film Vanilla Sky, analogously.
The Conet Project: Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations is a four (later five) CD set of recordings of numbers stations and noise stations released by Redial-Discs beginning in 1997. Numbers stations are shortwave radio stations believed to be operated by government agencies to communicate with deployed spies. The collection of recordings is primarily the work of Irdial-Discs founder Akin Fernandez, who began recording the transmissions of numbers stations in 1992.[1] The original 4 CD set was released in 1997 and reissued in 2013 with an additional 5th CD.[2]
The recordings have been sampled in various artistic projects, most famously in the 2001 film Vanilla Sky and Wilco’s 2001 album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. In keeping with its “free music” policy, the label made the entire collection available for free to download as a collection of MP3 files (along with a PDF version of the included booklet).[3] Redial-Discs has since discontinued the hosting of said files, but still provides links to alternative active hosts.[4]
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conet_Project
I believe this, because of how successful TT was w infinite scroll, auto-play.
RE: Vanilla Sky
There are interesting moments to that film, (like the holographic jazz player at the fancy party) but it isn't worth sitting for to see Cruise if you haven’t already seen Top Gun, Mission Impossible, Day After Tomorrow and Minority Report.
Every passing minute is another chance to turn it all around - Vanilla Sky (the movie) :)
Hollywood does this with productions from other countries, for example "City of Angels" [1] for "Der Himmel über Berlin" [2], or "Vanilla Sky" for "Abre los ojos" [4]. And not only do the use American casts, they re-shoot the whole movie.
The result is inferior most of the time.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Angels_%28film%29
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wings_of_Desire
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanilla_Sky
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Your_Eyes_%281997_film%29
You just described the movie Vanilla Sky
The zombie film 28 Days set up a few shots like this in downtown London ... but with a movie budget and some official clearances they were able to get some sunlit shots, which appeared to be taken very early in the morning. It was a great Danny Boyle movie, incidentally.
Within the past 10 years, I remember seeing another another film set in NYC which showed a scene in Times Square, completely devoid of people or traffic. It was quite striking. Anyone remember what it was?
EDIT: I see from the other comments it was Vanilla Sky
Reminds me of the opening scene of Vanilla Sky where Tom Cruise is running through downtown Manhattan alone --
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DIsa_SLifQ
I always think it's cool when we're able to capture this sort of rare feat on film, in this case emptying out Times Square for a few brief moments
Funny you should mention that. Every time I think of Times Square being empty (which can happen at certain angles at certain very early times of day), I think of Roger Ebert's review of Vanilla Sky:
http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/vanilla-sky-2001
> Note: Early in the film, there's an astonishing shot of Tom Cruise absolutely alone in Times Square. You might assume, as I did, that computers were involved. Cameron Crowe told me the scene is not faked; the film got city permission to block off Times Square for three hours early on a Sunday morning. Just outside of camera range there are cops and barricades to hold back the traffic.
* Primer (fantastic puzzle movie, filmed on a $7,000 budget)
* Abre Los Ojos (Vanilla Sky is the shitty American remake of this film)
* Revolution #9 (best fictional depiction of schizophrenia I've ever seen)
* Memento (filmed backwards, about a man with a 5 minute memory)
* Fight Club
* The Game
* Naked Lunch (the last good Cronenberg movie)
* Videodrome
* Dead Ringers
* Zoo: A Zed and Two Noughts
* Last Year at Marienbad
* Requiem for a Dream
it is different in those ways:
* google has established business with presence in most countries where it does pay a huge tax. therefore this fact that they feed a government/police system alone makes them less vulnerable for through investigations
* google has tens of thousands employees and it would be very difficult to prosecute an individual. Given 150 engineers worked on google search engine to display links, would you want to see all of them behind bars? that would be bigger trial than Nurnberg's.
I dont agree with any of what I wrote. But unfortunately thats just the way it is -- to big to prosecute :( Basically there is no difference between Google and any other web to search and find links. Try to type any movie name using dot instead of space and add "torrent" [1]
[1] https://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=vanilla.sky+torrent&pf=p&output=search&sclient=psy-ab&oq=vanilla.sky+torrent
Inception isn't a classic. Or a masterpiece. It's a slapdash confluence of popular trends within the community of filmmakers:
* Dealing with unreality, with hinted-at promise of imagining fantastical worlds, but really providing an excuse for more car chases, explosions, and gunfire than is plausible within our current legal framework (The Matrix)
* Multiple levels of unreality and ambiguous ending (Vanilla Sky)
* Leonardo DiCaprio isn't sure what's real anymore, and is haunted by visions of his crazy dead wife (Shutter Island)
* Statement about filmmaking itself (perhaps every auteur film in the past ten years)
I did them several times in high school. Most of the time I just ended up in a very giggly, stoned feeling state. A few times I got completely messed up (in a good way). No life changing ensights, but nonestop laughter (to the point where your abdominals hurt from laughing, but you still can't stop, and then laugh even harder that you want to stop laughing but can't, and so on...).
Some random good memories, from various times:
- trees looked like they were breathing and I was sheltered under one from the snow and felt like I was communicating with it.
- my friends older brother had a goatee and was talking to us and he appeared to be a wise goat-human hybrid giving us advice, which sent me into a laughing fit.
- a really fat lady janitor at the movie theater reminded me so much of jaba the hut, it was so funny.
- it was snowing and my friends and me went tobagganning at night, I had all my snow gear on and felt like I was on another planet (too much fun to describe).
- Watching Vanilla Sky, it seemed like the craziest movie ever (have not since seen it sober - seemed absolutely magical in the theatre).
The only negatives were essentially being a little socially timid. I remember me and my friends did them at someone's house whose parents were away in the afternoon. They were throwing a party that night and I was pretty terrified at first when strange people began to pour into the house. My throat and mouth also felt sort of wierd - not neccesarily bad, but almost like there was a vacuum inside my stomach.
But most of the time, shrooms just weren't that intense. I think LSD is reputed to do more of what you describe. I hadn't thought about shrooms in ages, but I wouldn't mind doing them again. However, not being sure what your getting from a dealer is a deal breaker for me. I do not want to risk damaging my mind/body because some dealer added god-knows-what to the shrooms.
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.