I first saw this movie in the mid-90s, and it sparked a mild fascination with how cryptography (specifically, RSA) works, that arguably influenced my career path.
Fun fact: Leonard Adleman (the A in RSA) drafted the words and slides used for the lecture scene: https://molecularscience.usc.edu/sneakers/
One of the few movies to have a mathematical consultant in the credits!
1. Relate to a blind student in our school when they could hear things differently than the rest of us.
2. Realize that social engineering is thing and I tried to practice it in high school to gain access to computer rooms where the "fancy" computers were.
3. Realize that a government can steal or in general can be sneaky/secretive.
We realized that door bolts are easy to manually jimmy if not precision-fit.
Thankfully, our computer lab overseer was a hacker at heart, congratulated us, and got the door fixed.
I miss the 90s.
It was, and for anything not requiring an essay-style answer it also had the keys. This one really isn’t impressive to any sophisticated user. They removed the shell from the user menu list of programs, but they left the shell-to-DOS functionality enabled in a few programs they left enabled. The shared drive directory structure was straightforward to navigate, and being DOS had no real security once the user was at a prompt.
Many of us would spend our in-class lab time playing Scorched Earth or other games installed into hidden directories the students had created.
Don’t look, listen.
Then he taps two tuning forks together.
We had a Corvus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvus_Systems) and I managed to call them and pretended to have trouble with out system and they asked no questions. Ended up sending a manual to the school and I just watched out for it in the Librarians mail slot.
Then I formatted the Corvus after copying the various software packages I wanted to use on my Apple IIe.
A couple of scenes:
Carl: We've got customers.
Martin: Shoes?
Carl: Expensive.
Martin: *fixes tie* Look busy, guys.
*after apparently inconveniencing Liz, the group is walking out*
Cosmo: We'll call you a cab.
Liz: "Thank you. This is my last computer date."
*Cosmo stops walking, falling behind*
Cosmo: "Wait."
*the group stops and turns*
Cosmo: "A computer matched her with him? I don't think so."
*Liz's face falls as Cosmo's henchman start slowly walking up behind her.*
*dramatic music as we cut and zoom in to Cosmo's face*
Cosmo: "Marty."
*Cosmo turns and runs toward his office*When I first watched this movie, I felt like this was a weak moment in the film. "Computer dating" at the time was laughably bad, so seeing a character regard it as infallible ruined the immersion.
With age and experience, I now see that some people just throw themselves behind certain technologies, and fail to find flaw. So maybe this character was just a misguided computer dating evangelist, blind to the technology's failings.
"...Fellas. Fellas, look at this man's trash. He's not looking for "buff." The man who folded this tube of Crest...is looking for someone...meticulous. Refined. Anal. ...What?"
I think Cosmo's comment - note he's extremely vain, how he dresses, his office is practically a modern art gallery, he's got the organization's Cray sitting on display, etc - just further shows how vain he is, thinking someone as attractive as Liz couldn't possibly be a good match for a nerd like Werner, when it's established that they're actually quite alike/compatible.
One could imagine that Liz also obeys all speed limits and comes to complete stops at every stop sign...
Cosmo has been in prison for a long time. His perception of dating service implications are unlikely to be contemporary.
I had learned from the store owner that you can tell so much from someone's shoes, often more than from their clothes.
Combined with that line in this very formative movie (for me), I still to this day can't help but check someone's shoes when I first meet them.
You can make educated guesses based on apparel of all sorts - but you are always guessing.
Shoes are indeed a valuable source of information about a person. I knew at least one BH case manager who really paid attention to them.
Shoes are expensive, very durable, and typically one of those items that people have only a few pairs of. So while someone can easily change their outfit to match a situation, place, or mood for the day, they may be less likely to change their shoes to match more than a basic purpose.
And shoes tend to accumulate evidence of where someone's been. Are they muddy, dusty, spit-polished?
Personally, I own about five pair of shoes. I have a pair of Oxford dress shoes, a very nice pair of white New Balance with hook-and-loop, some hiking boots I picked up at JC Penney, and a few others. My clothing, on the other hand, is mostly Adidas and Columbia and some tee shirts, but I don't own any Adidas or Columbia shoes. So you can tell a lot about me, no matter what I'm wearing, by studying my shoes for a while.
I met another BH professional who said he owned 52 pairs of Crocs. He said that he'd kicked an addiction habit, but it seems he traded something unhealthy for perhaps a less-detrimental dependence on collecting shoes. To each his own, I suppose, and surely a lot of information could be gleaned about this fellow if you paid attention to which pair of Crocs he'd selected for the day.
Maybe that used to be true, but modern shoes while expensive are not very durable, and most people have several pairs today.
Someone wearing pristine white Jordans, Red Wings boots, or bottom tier Cole Hann dress shoes can all say things about a person.
* It's not about computers and them (Liz and Werner). It's about Cosmo.
* Computer dating is about algorithms and pattern matching. Cosmo didn't have any suspicion of Liz and Werner going on a date; even if he saw a type-mismatch, humans are complex and multi-faceted. But when he learned a computer program ostensibly made the match, his alarm bells went off.
I can’t help but notice that a number of older and very prominent shows on streaming services are clearly ripped from a video cassette.
For example, the older Simpsons episodes on Disney Plus. Some of the episodes have very prominent dot crawl which is unacceptable for a digital format that you pay for.
I also can’t imagine the film masters were trashed, or that the show was composited to video tape. Were studios really that reckless with their properties?
So many shows very much were composited to analog video tape. I personally worked on edit sessions where multiple film-to-tape transfers were composited to 1" then BetacamSP then digital formats like DigiBeta and everything that followed. I get it is hard to grok for eople without direct experience only ever knowing digital comping with modern software packages without ever hitting tape. But us ol'timers remember the pain
> Were studios really that reckless with their properties?
yes. while it might not have been done out of malice, but just lack of future thinking. for a studio making the first season of an animated title, they might not have even considered their show would be so successful. also, there's no way that they could have predicted HD=>4K and digital streaming. they are only human and just trying to stay on schedule with barely enough time to meet deadlines. meeting air date deadlines are much more strict than whatever dot release your PM is pushing for in whatever software product you might be working.
Content owners suddenly had a vested interest in making their content look better, and now there's a way to get compensated to have better sources made to provide to those streaming platforms. To find the original film from old SD TV shows would be very rare. Feature films have been scanned from negative many many times. I was part of scanning a studio's entire library to HD. They've since gone back and scanned (or are scanning) again for 4k. Each time the scan is done, money is spent (and it's not cheap).
Now, the streaming platforms have the clout to refuse "subpar" sources now, and can demand that these restorations are the preferred source
They had a killer render archival server with archives from 2000-onwards show casing what the studio had studio made. Cartoons, Movies; a collection of praised possessions.
It pains me to think that the studio has handed this over to the liquidators only for it to be shredded and now how many OG copies have now been destroyed.
if the content is unreleased, there's other complications. you'd then be using the likeness of any talent involved whether that's their voice performance for animated content or for live action their full person. you'll be susceptible to those issues for releasing it.
As a registered library, they can do this, and even make (at least some) works publicly available.
That said, yes, generally I'm more familiar with IA archiving published or broadcast works. Several of those collections are listed here: <https://archive.org/details/tv>.
Brewster Kahle addresses unpublished works in this essay, in part:
The traditional definition of a library is that it is made up of published materials, while an archive is made up of unpublished materials. Archives play an important function that must be maintained — we give frightfully little attention to collections of unpublished works in the digital age.* Think of all the drafts of books that have disappeared once we started to write with word processors and kept the files on fragile computer floppies and disks. Think of all the videotapes of lectures that are thrown out or were never recorded in the first place.*
<https://blog.archive.org/2020/10/07/on-bookstores-libraries-...>
(Emphasis added.)
That said, I haven't found any specific calls for donations of unpublished works, though my search was quite cursory.
That older content just had no concepts of ever being used for anything other than the original broadcast, or eventually, hopefully, syndicated broadcasts. People survived off of royalties from syndication which is why it was a big deal reach that 100th episode. Once they reached 100, they could phone it in. That's why so many older shows had 20+ episodes per season to get to 100 faster.
times have changed. the quality of home video is so much better than it was, and now people pay attention to those details. compare a 4k HDR with surround to a VHS with maybe HiFi stereo audio tracks played back on most commonly the speakers on the TV itself. The timeline from VHS->DVD->HD->4K is not linear which is something I think a lot of people do not appreciate.
I’m not surprised that some shows were never archived at higher quality, though. The entertainment industry has a lot of people who just want to get their job done and go home, just like any other industry. Many classic series were not instant classics, they were shoestring operations trying to get a product out the door on too little budget. Getting anything across the finish line was the objective, not archiving the highest quality for future generations.
I think another reason, in addition to yours, is that the entertainment industry sees their products are disposable, or want them to be disposable. This way they can pull the drain plug from the pool, so they can pump in new content into it. Otherwise, listening same good old songs will inevitably eat into profitability of the new releases, because you can watch/listen for so long in a given time.
BTW, I don't share the same views with "the entertainment industry". You can't get the good old albums from my cold, dead hands.
Happens more than you'd think (in the past, at least - it's obviously much easier now with digital storage.) Couple of examples I remember off the top of my head:
re: Adrian Maben making a Director's Cut DVD of "Live In Pompeii"[0]
"While searching in the French and English film laboratories for the unused negative we learnt of a disaster. On the initiative of the French Production Company, MHF Productions, the 548 cans of 35mm negative and prints of the rushes had been stored at the Archives du Film du Bois d’Arcy outside Paris. One of the employees, a certain Monsieur Schmidt, "le Conservateur," unfortunately decided that he wanted to make extra storage space on his shelves for more recent films and that the Floyd footage was without interest or value. The 548 cans of negative and the prints of the Pink Floyd unused rushes and outtakes were incinerated."
re: Dr Who missing episodes[1]
"Further erasing of Doctor Who master videotapes by the Engineering Department continued into the 1970s. Eventually, every master videotape of the programme's first 253 episodes (1963–69) was destroyed or wiped. The final 1960s master tapes to be erased were those for the 1968 serial Fury from the Deep, in August 1974."
[0] https://www.brain-damage.co.uk/other-related-interviews/adri...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes
Some were. Once the film made its money in the theaters it was then put in a vault and forgotten about. The theaters were supposed to return the release prints but sometimes the projectionist would "lose" them. The studio vault those films sat in sometimes catch fire or water leaks in. If the originals are destroyed then hopefully a few release prints are floating around in the hands of theaters, individuals (where those lost prints end up), or television stations. If not, then its gone forever.
In 2023 a 4K scan of a theatrical print was uploaded to Youtube and despite the slightly rough state of the print it remains the best quality you can view the film today. There's even a pinned comment under the video from the original director thanking the person who uploaded it to Youtube for preserving their film!
The vast majority of the people that commissioned them, including very successful series, wanted it done as fast as possible to get it to TV ASAP. Often they had toys lines up for Xmas that needed to be synced up with schedules. I know people that had worked on some very famous cartoons, including the 1980s Ninja Turtles, Care Bears, etc and the studios commissioning them were very willing to take errors, substandard, and otherwise less than ideal work to get it to market on time (much to the frustration of the artists who were being treated like factory line workers). They did say the creators of Ren and Stimpy were fantastic to work for and they had all sorts of fun Easter eggs added.
Anyways, it does not surprise me that a lot of the work from this era was not taken care of, especially some of the more forgettable episodes of popular shows. A lot of the early licensed work on Netflix was obviously copied from DVD/Blue Rays at the time, too. It can be a lot of work to properly deal with aspect ratios, colour correction, de-interlacing, as well as upscaling the very low analog resolutions.
Maybe AI can get good enough to fix it now, though.
semi-related: I'm visiting my parents with a Sony OLED, and the frame interpolation made parts of Monty Python and the Holy Grail look like it was shot on an HD video camera.
I believe the reason they were able to remaster lots of old Japanese anime OVAs in HD is because the animation was recorded to film first. I wouldn't be surprised if the Simpsons just used videotape instead.
Even though you need really great quality originals to make it work.
In fact there's an episode of the Simpson's where Bart buys an Itchy & Scratchy animation cel and is disappointed when it's just a segment of Itchy's arm (or something like that).
EDIT: https://simpsonswiki.com/wiki/Itchy_%26_Scratchy_animation_c...
The cel had Scratchy's arm, and it was in the episode "Lady Bouvier's Lover" (S05 E21).
I ordered an animation cel from Original Animation Art (Starshine Group).
You had to mail them a check and a description of what you were looking for, and hope for the best.
The first one they sent me was a little bit better than Scratchy's arm, but not by much. I returned it and asked for something with the entire character in it.
They sent Daffy Duck nearly off the edge of the frame with a nasty scowl. Not fun to look at.
For the third try, I asked if I could please have something with the character smiling and in the center of the frame. And they sent a wonderful cel of Porky Pig from A Connecticut Rabbit in King Arthur's Court!
It looks very much like this one, but only Porky and not the background:
https://www.comic-mint.com/chuck-jones/a-connecticut-rabbit-...
That cel must have been from the same scene as mine, as some elements of it are identical, particularly his right hand holding the torch.
Many years later I bought the DVD of this movie, stepped through it and found the exact frame with my cel. Too cool!
The first few seasons were meant to be just a segment inside a sketch-based tv show (i.e. some of the most disposable, worst-aging, least-resyndicated material that tv studios will ever produce) and the budget was very small.
My experience in entertainment has given me the following perspective: be happy anything gets made. The entire industry is so awash in drugs, egos, and money that pushing ANYTHING out the door is an accomplishment.
I mean, storage is forever...but who wants to pay for storage forever?
The only copy that exists (as far as I know) came from a VHS recording of a TV-channel in the 1980s. But surely the film rolls still exist?
I just watched a video revealing that many multichannel masters of big artists have gone up in flames in a big warehouse fire in 2008 [0] [1], and a comment told that a film company burnt down their silent film archive to get insurance money.
So, I don't bet.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9eXk4o35UI
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/magazine/universal-fire-m...
Anyways, I went to see if there was an official DVD release of it, and there was but several of the episodes were sourced from off-air TV recordings from reruns in the 1980s because those were the only copies the distributor could find! They were originally planning to release the set without them but asked fans if they could source copies which is how they ended up with those recordings. I didn't end up purchasing it because even the episodes where they had a better quality source weren't mastered particularly well to the point where several reviews said they were borderline unwatchable due to the image getting crushed into murky darkness thanks to the noir lighting and DVD MPEG-2 compression.
Contrast that to DVD-era 5.1 soundtracks which are usually nerfed because they are afraid you'll play them on a 2 channel system or Blu Ray-era 5.1 soundtracks which are nominally 7.1 or 9.1 but are illegible on any sound system whatsoever because modern movies don't care if you can understand what the actors say. You're going to watch with the subtitles on anyway. But heck, even downmarket platforms like Tubi are crammed with subtitled Italian crime dramas and subprime anime, so every cloud has a silver lining.
The first two seasons of Monty Python’s Flying Circus were almost erased because the BBC wanted to reuse the broadcast tapes. [0]
[0] https://www.cracked.com/article_42008_monty-pythons-flying-c...
> Were studios really that reckless with their properties?
These corporations could not care less, it's just money to them. Streaming services will take your money and ship you "high definition" nonsense that's so horribly compressed it has artifacts in 90% black frames.
If you want quality, you need to find the obsessives out there who will not be satisfied unless they have the absolute best version of everything. These are the people who will track down and scan the negatives the company left lying around to rot using equipment worth tens of thousands of dollars.
https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k77/
These people really put these billion dollar corporations to shame.
I obviously can't speak for a level of acclaim something like The Simpsons, but more broadly speaking: creating something is fun but being sentimental and treating projects as precious is something that is increasingly burdensome with each day that passes.
Let's say I do the following:
1) I take a photograph of a flower
2) I remove dust spots, adjust saturation and a few other settings in post-production
3) I crop and resize it
With each step, copies of the image are made.
After that, I export to several file types.
Then consider that one photo shoot might have 15 photos of that same subject alone, with minor or small "in camera" settings changed. Then add different angles + in camera setting changes. Then add all of the other subjects I shot that day.
Should I keep everything from every change? Would anyone truly, genuinely care about seeing some...particularly unremarkable image of a flower captured by a complete "nobody"? I'm not Ansel Adams after all. Most people probably don't even care about the finished product. It feels arrogant to presume that anyone would be that into my work. The whole idea of having a fan base just feels...preposterous. I might be okay, or even good at creating some specific sort of thing, but retaining high resolution, originals is just kind of insane. Unless you've got some kind of public validation by way of taking in millions and millions of dollars, or you're a household name with a team of people assisting you, it just feels almost humiliating to think that anybody would be clamoring to see your work decades later.
Maybe other people who do creative things feel differently. I just tend to assume that even with something as time intensive as animation, in the heat of the moment, someone like Matt Groening thought that people probably wouldn't remember The Simpsons decades afterward. There's a kind of secret hope in creation, in hoping that maybe others will enjoy it, but it feels pompous to entertain the notion that you should treat it like some kind of artifact.
To put it in developer terms, suppose that someone would be interested in combing through the archives of our GitHub repos for some random side-project we worked on 20 years earlier. "Wow! Version 0.2.44! This was before he took out all of those crazy comments talking about the famous bug. It's so cool to be able to see this code in its original state!" It just doesn't happen. Maybe some other professionally-minded person glances at some iteration because they are trying to discern why or how you did some specific thing, but it's not like we expect our software to be beloved the way someone might think of a world-renowned film. It'd be amazingly gratifying, but what are the chances?
If they were only careless, one might be relieved that there was no intention of being so destructive. Often though, they're criminally negligent or malevolent. And that was back when things were easy... now days they have to contend with digital materials that need a petabyte array.
But upon reflection, I find it forgivable, because if you think about what it would've taken to make it accurate, and then enough narrative to explain it to the fraction of the audience not up on the technical details, you've got a recipe for 15 minutes of yawns.
The story is no more or less valid for that directorial shorthand, and it could easily be replaced with an authentic scene if you really wanted to. It would break the pacing but not the plot.
The other thing I noticed was that it is chock-full of gender non-conformity. Not in the plot, but visually - almost every hacker character wears androgynous clothing or makeup or something along those lines. The over-representation of trans people in computer security is a common trope now and I wonder if Hackers was the first time that was depicted in media.
The decryption process showed the encrypted PGP Message block and used a similar Sneakers-inspired animation to transform it into your plaintext email. It was incredibly cool and I remain sad that the product never saw the light of day.
https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Uncle-Buck-4K-Blu-ray/342214/...
[0] https://superdeluxeedition.com/news/pink-floyd-at-pompeii-mc...
Those deep bass parts of Echoes are magic, when the camera is panning past the speaker stacks.
Monzo also have you recite something but it's something far less exciting like "My name is X and I bank with Monzo".
COOTYS RAT SEMEN
"No, I don't."
"No. No."
Was this the only movie ever to do this?
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/santa-clause-deleted-scene...
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0119174/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_alternate_reality_ga...
It's a shame too, as they were unique. Would love to see a nationally-accessible Meow Wolf tie-in.
PS: ilovebees
https://www.moddb.com/games/portal/features/aperture-science... is a transcript of https://combineoverwiki.net/wiki/File:ApertureScience.com_ba....
https://slate.com/culture/2012/09/searching-for-playtronics....
The ensuing despair over how to proceed is interrupted by the voice of Whistler (David Strathairn, Bay Area native), the team’s blind technician. “What did the road sound like?” he asks. “Did you go over any speed bumps? Gravel? How about a bridge?”
I nearly stood up in the theater from excitement. I’d never seen anything like it: the geography of San Francisco turned into a puzzle to be solved.
"Let's make things difficult to see and hear. That makes for better cinema!"
Jackie Chan once discussed action scenes in US movies versus his movies. Western films: cut before the punch lands, maybe cut a few more times. Hong Kong moves: just show the action in one scene.
I think audiences are beginning to appreciate continuous scenes and are becoming more frequent in western films. The most recent one I can think of is John Wick 4, when it goes top down.
Some of the recent Michael Bay movies are so aggressive when it comes to cuts, the average shot length must be 2 or 3 seconds.
The top down John Wick scene had me flabbergasted in the theater. The choreography, the camera tracking, the flame thrower like shells from the shotgun all just made for one incredible scene that as you say definitely goes against modern editorial styles.
An excellent episode of Every Frame A Painting is "Michael Bay --- What is Bayhem?" It explains in detail in what way those particular movies are poorly made.
Every Frame a Painting is a great channel.
But the teacher had the incoming students do a very simple exercise: He turned on some broadcast TV, and told us all to bang our fists on our desks every time there was a scene cut.
Then he changed the channel a few times. Soap opera. Newscast. PBS. Cartoons. Movie. Commercial break.
Our hands were sore by the end of it, but it stuck with me -- every time I watch older or foreign cinema, I am cognizant of how much longer the shots are.
2. hey man you can still be clever, you just... also have birds-of-your-feather out there. :D
The comment about the shoes, stick with you ;)
Sneakers – The Team's Demands [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41493927 - Sept 2024 (2 comments)
Sneakers Film Promotional Floppy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38585213 - Dec 2023 (54 comments)
No-more-secrets: recreate the decryption effect seen in the 1992 movie Sneakers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36799776 - July 2023 (257 comments)
Happy 30th anniversary to ‘Sneakers,’ a cult classic that was ahead of its time - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32788136 - Sept 2022 (47 comments)
Cracking the Code: Sneakers at 30 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31378418 - May 2022 (76 comments)
Memories of the “Sneakers” Shoot (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29840802 - Jan 2022 (198 comments)
Sneakers: Robert Redford, River Phoenix nerd out in 1992’s prescient caper - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29620095 - Dec 2021 (7 comments)
Sneakers (1992), the Film - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26111977 - Feb 2021 (2 comments)
Tool Recreating the “Decrypting Text” Effect Seen in the Movie “Sneakers” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11643270 - May 2016 (54 comments)
Sneakers - movie about pen testing, crypto/nsa, espionage, and deception (1992) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6196379 - Aug 2013 (5 comments)
What it was like shooting the movie Sneakers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4498985 - Sept 2012 (46 comments)
Sneakers (Film, 1992) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1499298 - July 2010 (1 comment)
Joybubbles: the blind phreaker whom Whistler was based off of in Sneakers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1443241 - June 2010 (1 comment)
This question comes up a lot - here's an answer that goes over it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40564558
This would be helpful especially for those cases where the same story gets covered on multiple places on the internet and so URL matching doesn't help.
My brain is weird.
Sadly, the movie really shows it's age when the "cultural attaché" starts lecturing Robert Redford's character that "our countries are friends now". It's hard to suspend disbelief watching it nowadays.
To swing the discussion back to cinematography:
I'm going to avoid spoilers despite it being an older movie since a disturbing amount of folks in the hacker scene have not seen it but the later scene in the tunnel, arm extended was another great cinematic... shot :-)
But it's set in the past, when relations between the countries were much friendlier. Do you have trouble suspending disbelief during fictional movies set in WWII, because the U.S. and Germany are now allies?
Were they?
"Practice, Practice, Practice" "You...won't know...who to trust" "No more secrets"
The soundtrack is great too.
Got the dvd still and did recently just watch it again.
LE: weird, my local private torrent has a 4k version from 18 April while the site had it on 22 April
I know the first Die Hard is 4k, but the others are not.
It needs to make extra money or lose money in order to affect change.
How they allowed the release to streaming without manually adjusting the compression for those scenes, I don't understand, but someone was slacking.
We’re going to have to disagree about DVDs though. They look awful on modern (big) televisions.
Are pressed Blu-Rays limited compared to writeable ones?
I have 100GB BDXL blanks (single-sided) I use as one of the archives for my family photos/videos.
Couldn't a film BluRay also be 100GB on a single side?
Very out of date list: https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread.php?t=294596
On a site that I am a member of there are nearly 1300 BD100 rips available.
UHD discs are fairly noticeable at a distance as they usually use black disc cases instead of blue. They’re somewhat niche (if Blu-ray wasn’t already niche) and often sell at a premium, so I suspect unless you’ve been seeking them out you won’t have them barring the odd multi format bundle.
... particularly sadly, at Earl Jones' passing.-
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41493927
Greatest movie :)
PS. The quote on "goowill not being something the government does" reads so poignant now ...
(There's a whole James Earl Jones "pluriverse" out there, ain't it? ...)
Maybe what the mathematician did was crack a gigantic outstanding problem in scaling quantum computers that allowed e.g. extraordinarily effective quantum noise reduction at scale.
It also doesn't really work in the Alien universe at all. It would have been much better had it been set in an entirely different 'verse, maybe even its own things.
IMHO the Alien canon should be: Alien, Alien Romulus, and Aliens, in that order (since Romulus is in fact supposed to occur between those other two in-world). Maybe the sequel to Romulus (and Aliens) could be an updated adaptation of the William Gibson script that begins when Rain reaches the "non-Weyland colony" (which would kinda fit with Gibson's script).
My opinion on Interstellar is similar. It had brilliant moments (and visuals!) but overall I didn't like it. I couldn't get past things like: okay, so we are in a kind of semi post-collapse world apparently run by milquetoast descendants of the Heritage Foundation. Where exactly did they get a starship? Did they just have, like, a warp drive sitting around up on concrete blocks in someone's lawn? What? Also they had to lift off from Earth with chemical rockets, but somehow they're able to lift off from much larger planets later without thinking about delta-V budget at all. Sorry but if you're gonna say it's hard sci-fi it's gotta at least try to know something about physics and have coherent world building.
Yes I'm a sci-fi geek.
Likewise, the Weird running away from the rolling circle by running forwards into the future path of the circle.
Both of these things are frequently fixed by fan edits.
My head-canon explanation for this is that a good portion of the crew specifically were not astronauts -- they were experts in their field (geology, anthropology, etc.). And true-to-form, they were dismissive of other experts telling them NO, NO DO NOT REMOVE YOUR HELMET. And once the first few were exposed the others decided well, if there's a problem with it we're already screwed anyway.
It beautifully captures the golden age.
https://trademarks.ipo.gov.uk/ipo-tmcase/page/Results/1/UK00...
If you haven't seen it I think it is worth a try. Great cast, from that exciting age of computers when everything felt like it was just on the edge of possible.
Even for folks not of that time, the cast and script are so good it's worth a watch.
I think that's the reason I don't have the affinity for this movie that many do - it created incorrect stereotypes which still persist today.
Tron is literally about a hacker.
Sneakers is about spooks wanting to be hackers and hackers wanting to be spooks.
Sneakers is the point where the militarization of hackers became mainstream.
Stereotyping isn't inherently bad, it's just lazy. That having been said, I think Sneakers gets them all correct.
It feels like it's accidentally great.
But then again, maybe it just tickles to the surface the sense of wonder I had way back then.
But at the time, that was not at all clear. And I'm still not actually convinced. It certainly wasn't marketed as a comedy; it seemed to be drinking the same drama-aid as The Net and other breathless wankery at the time. In which case it's a terrible movie that only becomes watchable as an exhibit of wankery.
This feels like a special case of "suspension of disbelief".
I still say things like "We're in" every time I login to a system with people looking over my shoulder.
Certainly far better than The Net, as low of a bar as that is.
