One of the great things about Sneakers is that the McGuffin's core concept still holds up as reasonably credible 30+ years later.
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.
I was a CS major at the University of Washington in the mid 90s. In one of my intro courses we were touching on public key cryptography and this movie came up. The professor mentioned that Adelman was a consultant on the movie and that he was a notoriously slow replier to email. Like you would get a reply weeks or months after you sent an email to him. But, if you asked a question about this movie you'd get a reply to your email almost immediately.
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.
> 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.
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.
Agreed. I talked my way into the server room several times by different night janitors at my old high school back in 1996. I told them I was there to do maintenance and it wasn't entirely untrue but I was there for running wires and setting up new Macs as part of my class load.
I saw this movie as a kid when it came out on vhs. it blew me away! I loved the blind guy. He was amazing. That part where he listens to the sounds on the road to determine where they took Robert Redford. You're right, it made blind people cool.
When I was a kid we had a VHS recording of Sneakers, with the beginning of an episode of Letterman at the end. I remember my mom liking it. Fond memories. I need to watch it again.
*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*
> "A computer matched her with him? I don't think so."
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.
Keep in mind the script was from a top-shelf writer who worked on it for ages. It's established earlier in the film that the crew think it's completely plausible a computer dating service would set the two of them up.
"...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...
Other way around. The clothes you wear are a method of communication you're actively engaging in whether you're aware of it or not. This is a really useful thing to be aware of, since it lets you craft narratives in other people's heads.
Yes but many times, these can be quite valuable inferences.
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.
* 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?
>I also can’t imagine the film masters were trashed, or that the show was composited to video tape.
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.
This is spot on. I had a friend working on early streaming license deals, and a typical pattern was getting the streaming rights to a show and then going on a lengthy adventure to find a higher quality master, if any existed. If you see bad transfers or old SD resolution in a digital format I want you to know that someone tried but the originals were in fact lost.
In the early days of streaming, content owners only had what they had sitting on the shelves. Most of those were SD masters that were formatted for broadcast. In the US, that meant 30i sources. Most TV was shot on 24p film, transferred to 30i in a telecine, edited without any regard to that film cadence, and that was that. The opening/closing songs were typically cut from that same footage, and doing an inverse telecine on that content was a nightmare. Everyone of us that dealt with that to supply the early days of streaming content had "so much fun".
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
O/T: I've discovered that the animation studio I had a gig for has shut it's doors recently to liquidation.
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.
Just because you buy content on the auction block does not mean you own the rights to release that content. You've only purchased the physical media, not the rights. I know someone that has been down that very road after purchasing stuff from an auction after the death of a studio.
for what purpose? waiting for the copyright to expire, and then hope to cash in on it in the public domain?
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.
amusing that the studios do all this work in contracts to make sure they have rights as long as they possibly can and then they forget to take care of the physical media
I think you're confusing modern day contracts with content from pre-2000. With DVDs, people started paying attention to the quality of the content to the point that additional things were added to the contracts to have cast/crew available for behind the scenes during principle photography, after edit for commentary, etc. Before that, it was just take the released version and dub it to VHS were quality was an after thought.
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.
The X-Files went the opposite way: The streaming release was remastered from higher quality originals that had been prepared ahead of time for the eventual arrival of higher resolution TV.
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.
> The entertainment industry has a lot of people who just want to get their job done and go home, just like any other industry.
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.
I work in gaming and this is very much the same attitude, though it is starting to change: with things like Xbox Game Pass, there are now theoretically revenues to be skimmed from older releases via subscription revenues, so there is at least lip service paid to proper archiving of working files and source code. It's still tough to make the case not to phone home or rely on publisher-hosted services.
That made me think of Law and Order (since I remember reading that day players want to get on those shows for the residuals), and I saw a relatively early episode of SVU on a rerun that looked freshly shot.
We knew HD TV was coming since the days of the first analog demos (1125i, IIRC). It’s also a matter of budget to shoot in high quality film, shoot widescreen, and get any SFX/VFX at least recomposed. Entire series of Dr Who were lost to originals being reused.
I know most productions now run so tight they rent their stuff, so once the edit is done and shipped most of the raw footage is all purged. No outtakes or extra footage exist. Actors prefer this for their image, studios will not pay to store any of it, but what a loss.
> I also can’t imagine the film masters were trashed, or that the show was composited to video tape.
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."
I believe Technology Connections on YouTube did a video on film vs video where he touched on this. Film was much more expensive, and people weren’t always thinking about remasters 30 years later. If something was being shot just to air on TV, sometimes VHS was all they did.
Over the years I’ve met several people that worked in the cartoon industry because where I live (Toronto) used to be an outsourcing market for many 1980s/1990s cartoons.
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.
Because children watched them on 13"-25" tube TV's that were designed to make those imperfections look acceptable (for the time), that a modern display blows up to proportions never seen during production even with the best studio displays of the era.
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.
> Were studios really that reckless with their properties?
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.
It doesn't even take destruction of the property to keep media locked up forever, sometimes even just IP rights. For example original Brave Little Toaster film has never seen an official release in HD because it was produced as a joint venture and nobody has (apparently) been willing or able to hammer out a deal between the various rights holders for a new home video or streaming release.
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!
There are several Star Wars film projects that are collecting old film print, negatives, laser disc, etc and using that to remake the original releases. Gemini is very good at listing off all these projects, if you're interested.
They're solidly pre-digital. Somewhere, the individual frames were drawn/painted on cel, were they not? In principle, remastering should still be possible.
It would take a ton of work, especially for a show as long-running as The Simpsons. The original materials probably aren't even available anymore.
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.
I shouldn't have said never had a film negative. They likely scanned hand-drawn cells to film, then transferred that to tape. At the time they likely saw the NTSC tape as the master.
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).
Guilty as charged! This brings back a memory from around 1980.
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:
> can’t imagine the film masters were trashed, or that the show was composited to video tape
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.
Nothing that anyone’s watching on Disney+ was from The Tracy Ullman Show. And by the second or third season of the show proper it was already a bona fide cultural phenomenon, so one would hope (hah) Fox might’ve been a bit forward thinking by then. Alas.
What you're referring to came before "the first few seasons". Season 1 and onward are the standalone TV show, spun off from the Tracey Ullman Show shorts.
Tell me you haven’t worked in entertainment without actually…
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.
Speaking of, I am desperately trying to get hold of Then Came Bronson that is of reasonable quality. Great and well known TV-series that came out in 1969. It's simply impossible to get a good rip though.
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.
A while ago I found a few episodes of a 1950s crime drama/noir series called M Squad (the M is for "murder") on Youtube. I don't recall exactly how but probably because someone mentioned it was a direct inspiration for short-lived Police Squad series and later the Naked Gun films.
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.
Funny some of the best "home theater" experiences I have lately are VHS tapes which, when decoded by something Dolby Pro Logic compatible, have a great 5.1 soundtrack.
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.
> unacceptable for a digital format that you pay for
> 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.
> I also can’t imagine the film masters were trashed, or that the show was composited to video tape.
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?
They're at their best when they're reckless... it gets so much worse. There was a 4th tv network in the 1950s that died quite soon, and they had a Jackie Gleason show of their own that is now lost to time. At some point in the early 1960s, they had a board meeting to discuss what to do with the accumulation of taped archives (quadruplex I guess?), and the lawyer spoke up "I'll take care of it". He loaded them up into his car that weekend and dumped them in the river.
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.
I was shocked when I rewatched this recently just how good the cryptography technobabble is in this movie. Specifically the scene where the professor is presenting on breaking public key cryptography. The very first thing he mentions is a number field sieve. Nice work hiring whatever cryptography consultant that got for this scene.
I think the only part that really pulled me out of the movie was when they were testing the device and it was decrypting a dial-up feed random character by random character on the screen. It wasn't "Hackers" bad but it was still pretty unbelievable.
Oh yeah. It snapped me out of immersion the first time too.
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.
Agreed, just saw the remaster in a theater and it holds up surprisingly well. What seemed like glaring inaccuracies in 1995 now seem like whimsical visualizations and over the top silliness. Except of course "It's got a 28.8 bps modem".
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.
Little known fact: in the late '00s, PGP Corp had developed a free standalone "Viewer" to decrypt email if you didn't have the full PGP email product installed (the onboarding process walked you through initial key generation and publication on a keyserver).
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.
Also "Live At Pompeii"[0] (although to my disappointment, it's the cinema version with the DSOTM studio clips - my original experience was the Laserdisc and VHS versions which omitted those because IMO they're not interesting and just get in the way. I'd probably watch "Pink Floyd: DSOTM: BTS" as a standalone thing but it has no place, for me, in "Live At Pompeii".)
Heard a Verizon tech on a phone call to tech-tech (tech^2?) support and the automated attendant stated "Repeat after me, my voice is my password" and the tech responded "my voice is my password" then had to wait on hold. Felt a little dystopian.
Just before I left the UK in 2018 there was starting to become this trend for voice verification on some services, in one particular one I had to go through the setup of (perhaps it was Virgin Media? I forget), they had me say "My voice is my passport" to train it on how I sound. I smiled to myself.
Sneakers and Setec Astronomy became my go to for example encryption code for years. If you're not familiar with Setec Astronomy, you're in for a treat. <3
The design of Blu-ray.com makes me nostalgic for a web where 12px Verdana was the obvious ideal body font, margins were an optional luxury, and Mac OS X Aqua-style shiny blue-gray gradients behind a menu bar were the height of sophistication. (You want just a little bit of blue glow at the bottom of the gradient for that translucent 3D effect that Steve Jobs called "lickable".)
All I remember from seeing this as a kid is that, in the final scene, River Phoenix asks the hot government agent for her phone number. The number she gives is a real non-555 number--pretty sure it was 818 area code?. You could call that number and hear a message from the character for many years.
You're gonna love the answer to that. Disney's 1994 family holiday treat, The Santa Clause, starred Tim Allen as a guy who (I'm remembering this as I'm typing it and holy cow) sort of kills Santa Claus by startling him into falling off the roof. He then puts on the Santa suit and becomes the archetype himself. But in that movie, there's an off-hand reference to a phone number: 1-800-SPANK-ME, meant entirely sarcastically. Turns out, either that was already a real number or some enterprising pornographer recognized that there's no such thing as bad publicity, and precocious youngsters who called the line after watching the movie were invited to pay $5/minute for "the hottest phone line in America".
Tossing a few ARG links here, since the heyday of larger games (and especially ones with PTSN connectivity) is old enough some HNs might not have experienced them.
I really enjoyed the original Valve's Portal BBS you could dial into Aperture Science and read on the history. The writers at Valve really wrote some great silly backstory about a shower curtain company developing quantum portals, as some sort of tool to get in and out of showers. I'm not sure that's cannon anymore though.
I think that still is (per Portal 2), but some of the original details aren't – like how Cave Johnson poisons himself, and how much his excellent decision-making was influenced by said poisoning.
"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.
A great example of this is Hard Boiled 1992, the Hospital Shootout.
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.
Michael Bay are basically not worth watching for me. Things move around the screen too fast to know what's going on. The Transformers movies are especially bad due to it because it can be hard to tell which robots are on which side; and , if you're bouncing all over the screen so you never get a chance to focus on one, it becomes impossible.
> Some of the recent Michael Bay movies are so aggressive when it comes to cuts
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.
Modern live music edits are like this as well. When the guitarist is rocking a solo, I don't want to see the back up singers or the lead singer in rapid fire edits. I want to see the guitarist.
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.
I once sat in on a TV production class, early in the schoolyear before my schedule got sorted out and it turned out I couldn't take it. So I was in it for one day.
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.
I am a fan of baseball, and in 2021, there was a real MLB game played at the original filming location. It started with Kevin Costner leading the players out of the cornfield.
This is kinda way off-topic, but that feeling of the "bringing back" something that had been lost to time that Field of Dreams provides, I get the same thing from the movie Midnight in Paris. Like a literally palpable warm, comforting, everything-is-alright feeling (mostly from the Salvador Dali encounter).
I really love “Sneakers.” It’s one of the best classic “hacker” films. This essay also does a nice job of breaking down a scene you might not have otherwise noticed, which has some lovely filmmaking technique and subtle sound design at play:
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.
If you have a high-quality digital version of a movie, you can use one of the CRT shaders from modern emulators to make it look like any old TV you want.
I was kinda hoping it was manual (sorry). I was fired up at the opportunity to build something tiny that solves a pain, but...man you have a solid setup there :D
StackOverflow has this feature that when you write a new question, it tries to fuzzy-match that up against existing questions. I wonder if an approach similar to yours, using search, could be employed on HN as well to reduce the number of dupes?!
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.
I'd have to do brain surgery on it first, to disentangle all the moderation-only code from code that would be generally useful, but yes I'd love to do this someday. It makes reading HN (and posting) so much easier from a desktop browser (if you like keyboard shortcuts, that is).
There are some great stills from that movie. In particular the close up of a person's face with reflections of computer text in glasses often sticks with me.
I know Timecop also has a similar scene just after the time jump. I think it looks really cool.
I always liked how they framed the gun being jammed into Gregor's back at the opera, the entire scene carries a certain tension that modern films often fail to sustain or rely on things like explosions or handcannons rather than a .38 and a well acted angry whisper that you will be quietly exiting this theater or your brains will be exiting your fucking skull that is a much more accurate depiction of what it's like to operate under non-official cover.
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 :-)
> 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
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?
>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?
Anyone noticed that streaming services start to compromise on quality? With Netflix it's been like that for a while. Apple TV+ seems to be the best. I really want to get into Blu-ray now, looking for a decent player.
Question: what's the streaming budget for the big platforms? Can they offer 50-100 mbps? For example, a 70 gb video for a 2.5 hour movie would need 67 mbps to stream. Having access to a rip like that for a popular movie (meaning new or classic) is normal "on the high seas" and it has a detectable difference on my budget-tier setup compared to a ~20 gb rip. I'm wondering if streaming platforms can afford to offer something like that.
Sure, they could. But given that the average consumer really doesn’t care that much about picture quality (DVD _still_ outsells Blu-ray for example), why would they bother? Increased storage and bandwidth costs, for what exactly? To cater to the small group of consumers that have good enough hardware (and eyes) to distinguish/care about 20Mb versus 100Mb? Those people are probably buying physical media anyway.
We're misunderstanding each other. I take what you say to mean that Netflix could offer me unlimited bandwidth for 5 euros a month or whatever they're charging.
Yeah. I see overcompression on a lot of shows. Dark scenes and star fields tend to make it obvious. Three Body Problem was the worst -- I imagine it would have been consistently visually spectacular if they hadn't compressed it to shit. I've seen it on Apple TV too though-- e.g. really visible on Silo title screens. Love, Death and Robots on Netflix quality was great.
Disney's Coco did it for me. There were so many scenes with so much visual detail, streaming compression absolutely wrecked it. I've seen it on Blu-ray since and it's an entirely different experience.
How they allowed the release to streaming without manually adjusting the compression for those scenes, I don't understand, but someone was slacking.
We actually had the opposite idea, where we'd steal a few kbps from the video to increase the audio. If you hear poorly compressed audio, the video feels bad too. Hearing clean audio made the video feel better. However, this was way back in the early days where 700kbps total bitrate were on the high end pre-AAC
Netflix is "4K Ultra HD: Up to 7 GB per hour".
Blu ray is 25GB per side, so max 50GB for 2 layers. Typical movies are 35-50GB.
So, BR, and think even DVD still looks much better than any streaming service!
Interesting. I was looking back at my BluRay collection (physical) the other day, looking for a UHD movie to test with, and in my memory, all BDs with UHD, but to my surprise, very few of them were actually UHD, with most just being HD (1080p). I doubt there's in in my collection that are BD100; could I even play them? Currently using a PS5 as my BD player, and PS4 and PS3 before that.
A PS5 can play UHD Blu-Ray, PS3 and PS4 (even the Pro) can’t.
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.
And Netflix HD (1080) is hardly what one would expect. It may be technically 1080p but the bit rate is often quite low. Most people don't notice or care.
I mostly see a lot of stuttering. Either during high action scenes or when there's little happening at all. It's especially noticable on HBO / MAX at 4k DV. I assumed it was due to aggressive encoding.
One of my favorite fun facts about Sneakers is that their headquarters was the upper level at the Fox Theatre in Oakland! I think about that every time I go to a show there now.
Part of my headcanon for Sneakers is that Agent Abbot (Jones) is actually Admiral Greer (Jones' character from The Hunt for Red October/Patriot Games/Clear and Present Danger), set a bit earlier in his career, and going under a codename while working CyberOps for NSA ;-)
I wouldn't fully remake it. It's a classic. Just watch it with that explanation in mind. It makes it more plausible.
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.
I do the same thing with Prometheus - I watch the Weyland TED Talk before the film and view the film as a man that considers himself a god trying to meet god.
That movie was so weird. It had flashes of brilliance but also a really dumb "idiot ball" plot in a lot of ways. Astronauts would never be as stupid as they're depicted in that film, things like "oh gee I think I'll take my helmet off around all this potential biohazard."
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.
> Astronauts would never be as stupid as they're depicted in that film, things like "oh gee I think I'll take my helmet off around all this potential biohazard."
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.
I was surprised to read they're not affiliated with Blu-ray RTM (registered trade mark) - I guess Blu-ray RTM are unusually choosing not to bite the hand that feeds them.
Sneakers is a popular show with folks interested in tech.
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 never understood the love for this movie, it just seems lame to see all of these caricatures being created that reinforce hacker stereotypes - and not even in a good way.
The movies you mentioned were far from any type of hacker culture. They were much more about the power of computers, then a mysterious machine people knew little about.
Do you love the movie Hackers? I submit there are two camps of moviegoing nerds: those who love Sneakers and those who love Hackers. I will admit though, many many years later I softened to the sheer goofness of Hackers (which offput me much initially).
I love both, for similar but different reasons. Hackers captures the naive idea of the scene really quite well. It's goofiness allows the naivety to remain, past the overwrought characters and Hollywood's downright misunderstanding.
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.
Accidentally great, yeah. If I allow myself to believe that the producers of Hackers knew they were making a spoof of Hollywood hackers in general, I can sit back and enjoy it as a masterpiece.
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 really disliked hackers when it came out, except for the sound track. Never saw it again until some twentieth anniversary watch party, and from that distance saw it for what it was and found it amusing. ... I still wouldn't call it a great movie, but enjoyable enough or at least I now get why people like it.
Certainly far better than The Net, as low of a bar as that is.
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.
Don’t look, listen.
Then he taps two tuning forks together.
A couple of scenes:
And another: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.
* 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 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
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.
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!
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Universal_Studios_fire
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://github.com/bartobri/no-more-secrets
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".
https://www.schwab.com/voice-id
COOTYS RAT SEMEN
"No, I don't."
"No. No."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GutJf9umD9c
"Too many secrets"
The password is the missile launch code from War Games.
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://youtu.be/coDtzN6bXAM
"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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2THVvshvq0Q
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Horner
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.
The comment about the shoes, stick with you ;)
2. hey man you can still be clever, you just... also have birds-of-your-feather out there. :D
amnesty scooter
coyote smartens
economy tasters
necessary motto
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.
LE: weird, my local private torrent has a 4k version from 18 April while the site had it on 22 April
Got the dvd still and did recently just watch it again.
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".
Edit to add: Now consider the age and tech-savvy of most lawmakers.
Certainly far better than The Net, as low of a bar as that is.
(This is a compliment by the way. I agree, but with at least 10x more force than I feel from your comment ;)).