How Not to Make a Movie About Tech (theringer.com) 58
'The Circle' (a techno-thriller movie starring Tom Hanks and Emma Watson) is a dated, far-fetched parable about an imaginary villain -- and far less scary than its television counterpart, says Alyssa Bereznak, a staff writer at The Ringer. An anonymous reader shares the article, removing the excerpts that could spoil the plot: Hollywood is keen on illustrating the awesome power of modern-day tech companies and the elite class of entrepreneurs who run them. But lately the most effective way to do that is not to focus on what's possible, but to illustrate the real-life personalities that control the near future of tech. Stylistically, a show like HBO's Silicon Valley couldn't be further from a production like The Circle, and yet it succeeds in threading together a host of issues in tech culture, including major corporations' monopoly-like power to squash competitors, manipulate the unwitting tech press, and bypass the interests of their employees and users for the sake of better stock prices. Now at the beginning of its fourth season, the show is lauded for its highly researched, accurate depictions of the Bay Area's power players -- so much so that it has spurred at least one Business Insider post dedicated to identifying each character's real-life inspiration. (The show has even featured a handful of cameos from the industry's power brokers, including Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel and Alphabet executive chairman Eric Schmidt.) Even if it does take place in a comedy created by the man who gave us Beavis and Butt-Head, the show's researched interpretation of real life is a much more compelling way to display the tech world's flaws, rather than simply relying on imagined scaremongering.
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He was only a tiny bit smarter. To make up for it, Beavis had 'frenzy' superpowers/alterego.
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You'll note that: every time he is smarter, he is still a _huge_ dumbass.
e.g. 'Stick it in her taco', 'I'm trying dumbass, but first I've got to get her to take the spanish fly' also: 'Hey Butthead they spelled Womyn wrong' 'Cool, dumb chicks are easy' or the times that Beavis is clearly smarter, again from Womyn. 'These chicks are giving it away, why aren't there other dudes here' 'Fartknocker, you're in a room full of women that give it away for free and you're worried about where the dudes are, what's
Headline is off topic (Score:5, Informative)
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Their advice also seems to center on 'Have a genius (Mike Judge) make the show, don't be a bunch of incompetent hollywood hacks.'
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It's not bad advice.... too bad it doesn't easily scale.
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Office Space. Did you get that memo?
Re:Headline is off topic (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know, he pretty accurately predicted the future.
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Beavis and Butthead...Pure 100% _Genius_.
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The same guy also made Office Space.
So, do tell, what two movies have YOU made that are more famous and have better cultural cachet?
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And 'Beavis and Butthead', never forget his master work. 'King of the Hill', and 'Goode Family' were really B&B spinoffs. Characters that got their own show.
Ignore Diarrhea. That was MTV fucking things up.
There are episodes of Beavis and Butthead that are as much genius as any '3 Stooges' short or Marx brothers movie.
Re: Headline is off topic (Score:1)
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That's the theme of the week this week.
Ultrasonic frequencies starting below 20KHz [slashdot.org]
Freedom of speech now means defending hate speech [slashdot.org]
Success of the Airpods related somehow to major vendors pulling support for Apple Watch [slashdot.org]
Re:Headline is off topic (Score:4, Insightful)
The headline is a little misleading. The headline seems to be about the movie "The Circle", but the text about the tv show "Silicon Valley".
Although the summary is mostly about the TV show "Silicon Valley", the article is a movie review panning "The Circle" and offers up the TV show as a way to a better at
The headline is the same as the movie review title.
Re: Headline is off topic (Score:1)
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The headline is a little misleading. The headline seems to be about the movie "The Circle", but the text about the tv show "Silicon Valley".
I was thoroughly confused by this as well.
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In other words, it focuses on everything I hate about this valley, and glosses over everything I don't like.
Remake.... (Score:2)
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And yet it's the very thing Zuckerberg, Natella and Larry Page are DOING.
I'm reading "Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley" [amzn.to] by Antonio Garcia Martinez, about Facebook advertising. I'm at the part where Facebook internal data connects with external data to attach personal information on to every piece of data that Facebook had collected from the web. Scary stuff.
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It's like the NSA, only full of functional people who can work for a living instead of being in a sheltered workshop for people with James Bond fantasies - of course it's scary.
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[...] a sheltered workshop for people with James Bond fantasies [...]
Wait a minute... that sound like my government IT job.
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There's a few other "special" places out there that are too big for failure to wipe them out so they sustain a state of failure indefinitely.
However when the boss demands the highest possible security clearances for all staff and then invites a Hollywood set designer to just wander in and look at everything to do a Star Trek themed "command center" it's part of an especially special kind of failure. There's a very long, very public list but that's the one that really stood out.
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However when the boss demands the highest possible security clearances for all staff and then invites a Hollywood set designer to just wander in and look at everything to do a Star Trek themed "command center" it's part of an especially special kind of failure.
Sounds like some of the NOCs (Network Operations Centers) I've visited at Fortune 500 companies. Impresses the hell out of visitors but not very functional for day-to-day network operations.
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So what are we talking about? (Score:5, Insightful)
I find nothing in this article that is so damning as it is implied I should be led to believe.
Fucking seriously? This article should have never been written. This is a thinly veiled advertisement for a TV show at the expense of a movie. I call bullshit.
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SPOILER ALERT! (Score:4, Insightful)
The linked article mostly describes the plot-line of the last episode of Silicon Valley, complete with spoilers coming at you without warning. Poor journalistic form.
NOTE: I've never heard of this website/web-zine before. I've already forgotten their name, actually (but I hit Ctrl-K to blacklist them, so don't need to remember).
Why did this "never heard of before" outlet have an article on the front-page of /.? Much less a bad article about nothing but spoiling your fun if you haven't seen the latest Silicon Valley episode?
Should have called it (Score:2)
there is a bigger difference (Score:2)
Silicon Valley is a long-form serial, which is a completely different medium than a movie. By the end of the current season, Silicon Valley will have run for a total of 19 hours over four years, while The Circle is 1h50 and has to focus on one narrative thread.
this isn't to say SV isn't remarkable, as there a lot of mediocre TV shows, but seriously it's goddam impossible to do the same thing in under two hours.
The book sucked (Score:2)
I started reading the book, which was pretty hyped a few years ago, and it sucked. It's totally unbelievable, from setting to characters. Why it got so much praise is beyond me. Probably because it was a book that literary critics could understand.
Odd. My adblocker seems to be failing. (Score:5, Interesting)
How did this ad get past it?
The Circle ... (Spoilers?) (Score:2)