My kids (9 yr old girl, 11 y/o girl, 13 y/o boy) said it was the best movie they have ever seen. They are not super familiar with Looney Tunes. It isn't uncommon that they would see something and immediately it becomes their favorite movie, but the discussions afterward were different.
I loved it (52 y/o dad). I've been fascinated by it since hearing a few years ago about the tax write off situation.
A bit of extra context: since seeing MacGruber, I want to see anything with Will Forte (I know that's misguided, but I can't help it).
I loved macgyver growing up (unusual I know) and I found macgruber just incredibly mean spirited, like, it wasn't a parody that loved its source material and audience, it felt like it hated it.
> MacGruber is a 2010 American action comedy film based on the Saturday Night Live sketch of the same name, which itself was a parody of action-adventure television series MacGyver.
How did you think this was some kind of independent original thing???
I want to have this debate. This might be the MOST important thing ever discussed here on HN. Let's get this SOLVED!
If you look at the name, sure. But, the ENTIRE premise of MacGyver was that Richard Dean Anderson would ALWAYS come up with some strange scientifically accurate combination to get out of a hairy situation. MacGruber is about an elite strike force guy whose wife is killed on their wedding day, and then this pain drives the entirety of the movie. The characters have no origin story in common, and no references to MacGruber can be derived from MacGyver.
From MacGyver: "Resourceful and possessing an encyclopedic knowledge of the physical sciences, he solves complex problems by making things out of ordinary objects, along with his ever-present Swiss Army knife, duct tape, and occasionally matches."
SPOILER ALERT: I suppose the carrot in the ass COULD be considered a clever approach to a problem. But, I just thought it was evidence of MacGruber doing somthing ridiculous. And, clearly he used this often in the past, and it is not an ad-hoc clever assessment of something in the moment. Maybe he could have picked weeds in one scene, stuck them in his butt, then Ryan Phillipe could have used fake flowers, or something. Otherwise, you get no points for that one.
MacGyver has none of the rage that is SO important to MacGruber. His origin story: "The show follows Angus MacGyver, played by Richard Dean Anderson, who works as a troubleshooter for the fictional Phoenix Foundation in Los Angeles and as an agent for a fictional United States government agency, the Department of External Services (DXS)." NOTHING in there to indicate he is using emotional pain to drive an episode.
The only real satire I see is this: "He favors non-violent resolutions and prefers not to handle firearms due to the accidental shooting death of one of his friends when he was 12." Clearly, MacGruber does not have any such qualms about violence, and he also hates guns. But, you can't parody one characteristic by taking the exact opposite (violence), and then parody another characteristic (guns) by making that characteristic identical to the original. It ISN'T RIGHT!
Also, let's talk about Jack Dalton. He's the womanizer, and his eye twitches. And, his get rich quick schemes. That could have been mined for gold in this "parody."
If it is a parody, then Will Forte is insanely lazy. I'm willing to accept that might be the case, but then you need to refer to it as a lazy parody.
Bring it on, wredcoll. I'm waiting like a ninja and wolverine combined.
My kid (9yo) had seen a couple of Roadrunner cartoons on Youtube, no more than that. e.g. I don't think he's ever seen a Sylvester-Tweety cartoon. It didn't matter, he enjoyed the movie a lot. Beyond the very basics of Coyote and Roadrunner, which everyone picks up very quickly- and if you don't they do a great modern version in the opening minutes to bring you up to speed- the movie doesn't need deep knowledge of the WB cartoon universe. It's not like the MCU that way.
And the fact that it reinforced a message his mom and I have been trying to teach him (about the importance of not letting failure keep you from trying again) was a bonus for us.
I took my 7- and 10-year old and they enjoyed it, especially the 10yo. We watched a couple hours of Looney Tunes compilations on YouTube the day before to introduce them to the characters.
They will be entertained. I laughed harder than my 6 year old, he enjoyed it and probably also enjoyed seeing dad splitting sides. I think for your range they’ll understand and like it more. YMMV
My five year old who has never seen a Looney tunes cartoon thought it was hilarious. (It made me think he'd probably love actual Looney tunes cartoons!)
You're right, they can't prevent that, but they can change their APIs in breaking ways enough to make librespot unreliable, to the point it's just not worth it.
I assume that for a long time, Spotify was content to ignore projects like librespot... they didn't help those projects, but didn't harm them either, and generally to keep things stable enough that a project based on librespot basically stayed working, which is why you saw so many OSS tools that used it behind the scenes. It does seem like that balance shifted over the last year, and now librespot is constantly breaking in new and mysterious ways. Some accounts work, others don't. Some tracks play, others don't. The devs did a great job fixing that stuff, but it's a game of whack-a-mole, and Spotify seems to have really upped the frequency of how often they break things. And that's for the lossy decoding, which is functionality that used to be pretty stable. Spotify reached out and (I assume) made some threats that explicitly shut down their work around lossless audio [1].
FYI -- I'm not associated with the librespot project, but I was actively working on a project that relied on it. Eventually I gave up in favor of self hosting, because I want my music to not break all the time. Shame, because I used to like Spotify a lot and now I'm actively looking to move away from it. That's one premium family plan subscription they're gonna lose! I'm sure they'll feel the sting.
I'd like to read that book too... but "how to do a certain kind of difficult new thing" in their case involved more than solid execution. It also needed an owner/investor with extremely deep pockets and technical capabilities that vastly accelerated their work, who was willing to throw huge amounts of money at the problem for years, along with favorable economic conditions (zero-percent interest rates) for long periods of time, at the right period of time. I give Waymo tons of credit for their work here, but the conditions that enabled it aren't easily repeatable IMO.
The reason it's interesting (IMO) is that other companies that also had owner/investors with extremely deep pockets and technical capabilities have been throwing huge amounts of money at it in the same favorable interest rate environment, but with seemingly a lot less success.
I think their (apparent) success probably does have a lot to do with some combination of having the deepest pockets and (I think?) being a few years earlier to get started than everyone else, but still, it also looks like they had a better strategy, and I'm pretty curious how that worked.
It is fascinating how Google simultaneously provides a great lesson in how to leverage their primary competency of AI, as well as how not to (losing to OpenAI in LLMs).
I can highly recommend an episode of 99% Invisible [1] about the musician's strike of 1942, which was a fight about royalties from recorded music, but was in large part actually about the the loss of livelihood from music recordings. Very little new music was recorded for over a year, and the president of the musician's union was pushing for record labels to pay into a fund that would benefit unemployed musicians in order to end the strike. I didn't make the connection when I heard this, but yeah, it does feel analogous to what we're facing now.
Actually, it was only instrumental musicians being prohibited to record. So singers weren't affected and that strike hugely contributed music shifting from primarily instrumental (earlier jazz, swing) to vocal-focused (jump blues, rock and roll and so on...)
It's interesting because it's something which is around us every day but most of us don't know about it.:)
Oh man, you're bringing the flashbacks. My siblings watched that movie constantly when I was a kid, and some of those scenes traumatized me for years (I was a sensitive kid).
Modern Disney filmmaking (Pixar, WDAS) is much closer to the Miyazaki approach you describe than you'd think. It's very, very iterative; each film goes through 5-6 screenings, during which the story structure can and does change dramatically. People are very definitely working on the final product while the story is still being worked out. One pretty common pattern: with 8-9 months left to go until release, the entire third act has to be scrapped and reworked, and often big chunks of the first and second act reworked to match. Voice actors for the main characters are involved throughout, and often come in many times to record new pages of freshly written dialog.
If all this seems chaotic, it is. It leads to untold stress as the release date looms closer and closer and the ending still isn't figured out, which compresses the schedule for each department to deliver a finished product. Very very rarely, the release date is allowed to slip (see "The Good Dinosaur" for example) but that's really the nuclear option, as it involves shuffling the release schedule and incurs a ton of cost. This is a big part of why these movies cost so much: compressing the schedule means hiring tons of people and paying them tons of overtime.
Source: I worked the better part of a decade at WDAS.
I found it fascinating how the team was still developing key plot points (let alone dialog/animation) down to the final few weeks/days before the film needed to be completed!
It's no different to how the video games industry works, either.
It completely kills your employees though: all those crunches to scrap tons of good work and replace it with new ideas; tons of stressful overtime. Ugh.
Working on the new service, everything is involving independently while product is figuring out what they want to sell in reality. This out-of-order execution seems like a feature of modern production, while consistency is left behind and only synchronize when they absolutely has to.
I have no opinion on this however, can't think of a better way myself.
I have a few friends in the industry and their whole process just seems nuts. They earn good money from overtime but I'd just be so annoyed doing so much throwaway work even though a lot of it just seems like it could be avoided with planning, time management and more honest pricing when it comes to sub contracting.
The willingness to throw away work that, no matter how well done, is in service of a less enjoyable movie, is why some movies are great while others are, well, just movies. Producing 90 minutes of animation is a heck of a lot cheaper than producing 90 minutes of animation that hundreds of millions of people will cherish for generations.
Yeah. That amazing scene in terminator 2 with Sarah Connor's actor's twin sister is a great example. Just wasn't necessary to tell the story, movie was better without it.
It is chaotic compared to conventional film production. Most movies have a complete script before principal photography even starts, or at the very least all of the major story beats and set pieces planned out. Last minute rewrites and reshoots for big budget productions are a last resort if the studio feels the product just isn't shaping up into something that will put asses in seats.
Anecdotally: I don't have any smart home stuff, but literally every other member of my family does (parents, siblings, inlaws, etc). I've had numerous conversations in which they ask me why we accept an Echo or a Nest or something as a Christmas present, but my privacy concerns are always greeted with a blank stare. They just don't see it as an issue.
To them, the (perceived?) issue is how hard everything seems to setup and maintain. I haven't tried connecting any smart stuff lately, so maybe it's really easy for all I know, but all that stuff seems really advanced to them and they seem kind of afraid of it.
Man, does that thing bring back memories. I did my PhD in computer graphics (though I no longer work in that field) -- I've written several papers and read more than I can count. That bunny is iconic and still shows up in some absurd number, although it's considered a trivially simple model now. Even so, it can find ways to bite you; there are holes in the base can cause problems with some algorithms (sure you can find watertight versions... but that's cheating ;)
Me too -- I live in Sublime Text most days. Hard to argue that VSCode wins on dev features, and most of my fellow developers use it for that reason. But I can't get past the speed; Sublime Text does everything instantly, while in VS Code, everything is just slightly laggy.
To each their own, I guess, but given how much of my day editing text, it's hard to want to use a text editor that has noticeable lag. (Cue the usual rants about latency in 2021 on multi-GHz machines)
I've also got most of the shortcuts committed to muscle memory and configured just the way I like it. Sunken cost fallacy is where I am headed. But I've always loved this editor and will continue to support it as long as they continue to support it.
Pixar was founded in 1986. They started releasing theatrical films with Toy Story in 1995. Are you really saying there hasn't been a single good Disney animated movie in the past 25 years? What's the basis for that statement?
The history of the two studios is way more involved than what you're suggesting, and talent moves around between studios quite a lot. And 25 years is a long time; there have been entire generations of talent that have risen up since then, and trust me, they're not all at Pixar.
Source: I worked at Disney Animation for nearly a decade (and closely with Pixar during that time). I'm certainly not unbiased but probably way more informed.
