Hacker Cinema
xXx
2002 · Film · 124 min
Part of xXx Collection
Directed by Rob Cohen
ActionAdventureThrillerCrimeDrama
Xander Cage is your standard adrenaline junkie with no fear and a lousy attitude. When the US Government "recruits" him to go on a mission, he's not exactly thrilled. His mission: to gather information on an organization that may just be planning the destruction of the world, led by the nihilistic Yorgi.
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7 comments on Hacker News
[not the OP]
I find it quite amusing what many people (including myself sometimes) have a pretty blurry memory about when we moved from VHS.
But I think it mostly contributes on what for some people VHS were a dominant media for quite a while, because they didn't had the means to see the digital media.
It's easier to understand what the first [commercially] successful DVD player was PlayStation 2, which became available ~2001. Before that DVDs were quite a costly[0] endeavour.
But at the same time people with the access to a computer (and a local 'everything for $15' totally-legit-shop) had the benefits of DivX ;) releases on a plain CD-ROMs, which every home computer had.
Some anecdata: I first seen Blade (1998) on VHS, but The Matrix (1999) on DivX rip, yet (I think) Spirited Away (2001) on VHS. I frequented a local VHS rental (because a friend worked there and so it places it up to 2002? 2001?) so I had seen a lot of films on VHS, but again, by 2002 it was a meme how people searching for XXX on DC++ got XXX (2002) instead.
[0] https://www.hometheaterforum.com/community/threads/your-1st-dvd-player-vs-1st-blu-ray-player-how-much-and-when-did-you-buy.273256/
I'm fairly certain that neither XXX movie franchise nor the XXXX beer are as popular as these views would suggest.
Possibly the same reason why half a dozen other most popular pages (for all periods) have 'XXX' in them—from those Vin Diesel films (one of which holds the 18th most visited in Yearly), to a beer brand.
Made me think. What are non-obviously bad names that were allowed to stay and weren’t?
Off the top of my mind:
- Siri means ass in Japanese. Apple kept the name and except for some initial memes people seems to be used to it.
- Colgate apparently sounds similar to hang yourself in some Spanish dialects (Argentinian according to google). I’m a bit uncertain if it kept its name there
- Kalpis (Japanese soft drink) changed its name overseas as marketing feared it sounded too similar to “cow piss”
- Moana/Vaiana. Disney used different names for this movie between America and Europe, allegedly because of a name clash with an Italian politician/adult movie star. The name change wasn’t an afterthought as the original cast recorded all relevant lines and songs with both names for a simultaneous release across markets.
- the 2002 movie “XXX” was read by many as an word for pornography and top result on google for the name returns porn sites along with IMDb. Unabashedly the studio went on to create 3 movies in the franchise. I think that shows even obviously bad names can work. XXX was advertised on billboards and prime time TV across territories.
I wondered for a time if the action movie XXX[0] chose that name because it would be very hard to search online.
[0] http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0295701/
Well, sometimes this is exactly what you want - try to find a pirate copy of the movie xXx :)
Yes, there's quite a lot of it in fact. It's usually called "volumetric", as "voxel" tends to imply volumetric data that is represented by a regularly spaced 3D grid.
Volume rendering is an entire sub-field of computer graphics that deals with many representations of 3D data.
CG clouds are often volume rendered using continuous noise fields. CG haze and smoke are sometimes volume rendered using shape descriptions of the boundary, and 3D modulation functions.
Google "Volumetric siggraph" to find a ton of papers about other ways to do 3D volume rendering. Check the images tab for lots of examples of volume rendering.
*edit: btw I can tell you stories about volume rendering non-voxel data from CG production if you want. I used several non-voxel volumetric rendering techniques for fire, smoke and water on the Shrek and Madagascar movies.
A fun presentation I remember from siggraph was when Digital Domain presented their volume rendered they called "Voxel Bitch" and talked about rendering the avalanche sequence in the Vin Diesel "XXX" movie. IIRC, voxel bitch was a volume renderer, not limited to regular 3D voxel grids.
https://www.siggraph.org/conferences/reports/s2002/tech/filmprodtech.html