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Comment by bryanrasmussen | Hacker News Reader

>If you have a bad writer, no amount of good other stuff can salvage your movie.

no, if you have good actors they can make your bad writing in some ways standable.

There is the whole "so bad it's good movie" which is generally because the actors manage to make the badness bearable.

Con Air and The Rock were not written by a writer as good as the ones you mentioned but they did have the right actors to make those movies really enjoyable for a lot of people. I would submit the actors salvaged those movies.

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> Con Air and The Rock were not written by a writer as good as the ones you mentioned but they did have the right actors to make those movies really enjoyable for a lot of people. I would submit the actors salvaged those movies.

I mean we can expand the scope of the conversation and lower the bar, but the article writer's scope seemed to be one of being "on a quest for the one-in-a-hundred experience" to which I was responding to the dearth of such.

Are Jerry Bruckehimer movies really one-in-a-hundred experiences?

I mean I get where you're coming from: I loved and still love Starship Troopers but I'm not gonna assert its high-value cinema or on the level the article writer is seeking.

Friends is some of the most mindless television I've ever seen but its basically the most popular and successful TV show ever, so what do we want to measure?

I’m still not sure what Starship Troopers even was. Was it a comedy, satire or just a flat, wide-eyed warning about war and nationalism in the vein of WW1? It’s a movie that starts in a regular high school, dating, and (spoilers ahead, NFSW ahead) continue with most of the crew being eaten alive, slowly, in full view of the camera, while begging to be killed. The seriousness of the nationalism in the movie and the following / preceding carnage, the apparent lack of irony and the characters basically having the acting skills of cardboard cutouts sort of make it into … something I’m not even sure what.

It’s like an army recruitment movie for a losing war except this one continues to film after the cadet signs the papers, and then and follows him on camera to his horrible, painful, slow death. Then unironically waves the flag at the end and with a number to call for more info.

It’s either so good that the entire movie is a hilarious deadpan parody about horrors of war, or it’s so bad it’s inadvertently become that. In either case, it’s definitely something. It reminds me of the Wilfred Owen poem: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46560/dulce-et-decoru...

I think all of your criticisms of the movie were aimed at the book too. The movie followed the book pretty closely except for the mecha-suits.

>The movie followed the book pretty closely except for the mecha-suits.

There's a surface similarity but the tone is completely different. To me, the film is pretty obviously a largely satirical retelling of the book's story.

I heard the movie was basically ready to go when someone noticed how similar the story was to Starship Troopers. They had to get the rights just to avoid a lawsuit. I'm not really sure I agree on how similar they are.

There was an interview with the scriptwriter (can’t find it though) who said they wanted to make a film about nazi germany and the young people who bought into the cause. If you look at the costumes I think it is not so far fetched that was one aspect of it.

The director, Paul Verhoeven, has been very interested in World War 2 and has in fact made multiple movies set in WW2. The satiric elements in Starship Troopers and its parallels to Nazi Germany (and especially the propaganda elements) were definitely intentional.

>and the characters basically having the acting skills of cardboard cutouts

Neil Patrick Harris!

>It’s like an army recruitment movie for a losing war except this one continues to film after the cadet signs the papers, and then and follows him on camera to his horrible, painful, slow death. Then unironically waves the flag at the end and with a number to call for more info.

This is quite likely the intent. The same style that makes Robocop to be understood as a classic action movie even if the intention was to subvert.

The director said they used cardboard actors so you wouldn't feel bad when they died.

The same director made Robocop which had similar satire and themes.

yeah, 1 in a 100 movies I don't know - not sure I put Sorkin at 1 in a 100 as a writer. Also one person's 1 in a 100 is another person's pretentious piece of whatever.

I think for a lot of people Star Wars is a 1 in a 100 - if so, to quote Harrison Ford: "George, you can type this shit, but you can't say it!"

on edit: I had missed that he was looking for a 1 in a 100 movie originally so I went back and reread, he says "Perhaps worst of all is the realization that the movies you like are very rare, and as you dive deep into film, you’re on a quest for the one-in-a-hundred experience." so it is not that he is looking for an objective 1 in 100 movie, but rather the 1 in a 100 he likes, thus Con Air and The Rock could stand for someone as those 1 in a 100 - for example I like both those movies but I hate everything else Michael Bay has ever done (don't know who directed Con Air - hmm Simon West quick google, yeah looks like I hate all those too)

Hilariously, both Aaron Sorkin and Tarantino worked on The Rock, although they are not credited.

There is an old US crime show, which nobody in the US liked, but was a hit in Germany - the people tasked with translating and dubbing realized how bad the original was and decided to rewrite it into a comedy.

I can't remember the name of the show, but I read about it in a reputable newspaper, so I hope I'm not spreading an urban legend.

Nope, confirmed. Dubs were done by ZDF and they did that with Bud Spencer and Terrence Hill movies. Also the Persuaders (die Zwei).

Now I finally understand why they are always raving about those crappy old westerns on a German image board I often visit.

Where the Spencer and Hill movies originally in English or Italian?

I have stopped watching German dubs long ago, but I watched a lot of the German dub of Scrubs during its original run, and much later came across the original English version. It's incredibly striking how the dubbing changed the character of Dr Cox: In the German dub, he's portrayed in a high-pitched voice, rendering him a maniacal goofball, whereas McGinley's original performance uses a deeper flatter voice that made him appear much more psychopathic (though admittedly I only saw one episode in English, so that may be cherry-picking).

You're 100% correct.

> old US crime show, which nobody in the US liked, but was a hit in Germany

LOL, by some reason this phrase causes search engines to reduce ad hitlerum

A movie doesn’t have to be cerebral to be good. The Rock is a good movie for the type of movie it is. There are bad movies in the same basic genre as The Rock or Con Air, many of which also starred Nicolas Cage.

Yeah, good point. I don't disagree with that. On the flipside, bad acting will ruin any movie too, no matter how good everything else is.

That goes for every role. Bad lighting will kill thr movie, bad audio mixes will kill it and on and on.

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