This is one of my favorite movies, yet it won 0 Oscars (nominated for 7) and was a box office flop (cost $25M to make and box office proceeds were $28M). It only gained popularity after the theatres from the VHS rental market.
I firmly believe part of the initial commercial failure was because of the title. With something more descriptive like, "Escape from Shawshank" or just "Prison Break" people would have been more interested to see it.
For the academy awards, to its defense, it was competing against Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, Four Weddings and a Funeral, or the Madness of King George. I can barely name one good movie a year these days, and certainly none that makes it to the oscars. The contrast with the 90s is brutal.
> can barely name one good movie a year these days
Not really.
Of the recent movies, Everything Everywhere All at Once is a storytelling masterpiece. Since you mentioned it, I personally rate it alongside Tarantino's Pulp Fiction.
Everything Everywhere All at Once was the last time I sat in a theater where, for the first half at least, I thought I was watching an instant classic.
But that movie just dragged on, and now I look back and see it as a bungled opportunity. It could've been so much tighter in the edit. They could've cut a third of the movie and made the whole thing so much better.
This has generally been my experience with most highly acclaimed movies over the past 10 years. Most recently had this w/ Marty Supreme... last year had this w/ The Brutalist and The Substance.
The first half has me thinking instant classic, my hope is sky high. But then toward the end I find myself looking at my watch and realize it's simply not going to the stick the landing.
OTOH, many acclaimed streaming series have generally done this well. My take is that as long-form storytelling has evolved, movies have transitioned into this post-modernist phase as directors/writers don't feel they have the runway to tell something truly cohesive that doesn't end up being trite. It's much more about saying 'something' or imbuing a feeling than telling a fully fleshed 3 act story.
This was a good movie, but what was it up against. Were there 4 or 5 other movies of comparable goodness that any of could have won the oscar? So 'can barely name one good movie' is apt here. There are some, but way fewer and farther between.
Everything Everywhere... is a much better movie than the incredible Pulp Fiction. Some of the visual effects are actually psychedelic (I've "seent" them), and the storytelling is exceptional.
The scene where the antagonist is walking down a hallway while the background keeps changing — is among the best fight scenes / visuals in any film, ever.
I think you're going to see more and more people saying things like that as the audience gets younger and more people see the antecedents of Pulp Fiction before they see Pulp Fiction itself. There wouldn't be an EEAaO without Pulp Fiction.
Even setting its influence aside, Pulp Fiction is the better movie.
I wouldn't even rate pulp fiction highly on Tarantino's filmography. I tried watching it recently and found it to be incredibly pretentious and overwritten.
It's quintessential-Tarantino, but I don't ever recommend it anymore (start with Django or Reservoir Dogs). Decades ago I shared this movie with college friends — mostly because we enjoyed decadence.
If you've not seen Pulp Fiction by 2026 [0], how can I safely recommend you submit yourself to hours of semi-disconnected robberies, rapes, and deceit? It's a great movie, EEAaO is just better storytelling.
[0] similarly, how does one recommend the acclaimed Deliverance without blushing?
Django has low re-watchability (unlike most of Tarantino's work) but incredible acting/twists/cinematography.
Once Upon a Time is too much for me (bottom-tier Tarantino IMHO), but it does have many great actors/scenes (the overall storyline/premise is what I didn't care for).
Haven't seen Deathproof, but Basterds is wonderful storytelling.
Yeah I think Basterds is probably the most undeniably great, even if it's not my favourite. He even calls his shot with the last spoken line being “i think this might be my masterpiece”.
Probably my favourite thing about cinema is how slippery the subjective experience is.
For example I can appreciate a movie I don't really enjoy in a way I can't with music. Also on a rewatch a movie can go from hated to loved, or vice versa, in a way that feels unique to the medium.
>Yeah I think Basterds is probably the most undeniably great [Tarantino film], even if it's not my favourite.
Well-said.
>...on a rewatch [it] can go from hated to loved
I typically don't rewatch movies for at least five years — this is enough time for life experiences to change media interpretations. Yet I listen to the same tracklist of catchy MP3 earworms, on repeat.
Songs are motivational background energy (for me), and skipping a track isn't nearly as hard as bailing out of two hours invested in a cozy full-length film.
I thought it did an extremely good job of conjuring a particular place/time, and I find the Nosferatu backstory of being Temu Dracula sort of inherently entertaining.
Goodness no. It was such a drag! That movie became famous from the hype. I couldn’t finish it. I am really wary of famous + acclaimed films now. These days this combo almost always disappoints. Like Nolan films. I know he has a massive “fan base” now and anything he churns out will become crazy famous and an instant classic. Anything!
YMMV. I found Anora quite tiresome - all of the people depicted were awful and stupid, and the point that it made was so basic that it could have been made in 10 minutes flat. I'd call it "preachy" but that's overselling it.
Fair enough, not everyone needs to like the same things. In fact, I had a rather negative view on Shawshank Redemption, but it's been too long since I saw it that I barely remember why.
YMMV. I found EEAAO to be engaging but shambolic. It was an experiment that kinda worked, kinda not. The chaos of it can't be cleaned up, it's intrinsic to the concept.
It's not going to a template for lots of similar films. It's more of a one-off.
But anyway, that was several years ago, it stretches the meaning of "recent".
The translations of the title (Finnish, Greek, others?) referencing Rita Hayworth make more sense if you know the title of Stephen King's novella the movie was based on (Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption).
Reminds me of the Luc Besson film "Leon", which also went by the names "The Professional" and also "Leon: The Professional". A great film but there was definitely something going on in regards to getting crowds interested purely by messing with the title of the film.
Confound: I think one of that film's themes made people deeply uncomfortable, and it was not hidden from the marketing as far as I know. I was a bit put off by its execution myself, even though there's really nothing untoward about it on a factual level.
In Greece it was released as "Τελευταία έξοδος: Ρίτα Χέιγουορθ" literally "Last Exit: Rita Hayworth". People were saying, jokingly, that the title was a spoiler.
the italian dubbing was named "le ali della libertà" (the wings of freedom), which is one of the rare cases where I agree with using a different name than the original, since nobody would have clue what "Shawshank" means.
In the US, my experience correlates with the rise of TNT and cable television - Ted Turner bought the rights to show certain films on his new cable channels and “Shawshank” got heavy rotation. It was akin to “background noise” sometimes. Others can probably recall the frequency.
Based on a Stephen King short story, I’m a fan. Never did catch “The Majestic” and no interest. Ebert was a national treasure, great share.
As with most self-congratulatory inter-industry awards, the Oscars are mostly a joke. Obviously, lots of good films get recognition from The Academy but you can glance at the number of titles in any given year winning piles of Oscars and then disappearing into the mists of time because they were trash that hit all the buttons and played the game.
The most notorious of recent memory is Crash, a film you probably haven't heard of if you're just casually into film (or a sicko like me lol)
> With something more descriptive like, "Escape from Shawshank" or just "Prison Break" people would have been more interested to see it.
But maybe that would have killed the real market for people who wanted a deep subtle movie.
Despite its disappointing box-office returns ...
...It went on to become the top rented film of that year.
also
While finances for licensing the film for television are unknown, in 2014, current and former Warner Bros. executives confirmed that it was one of the highest-valued assets in the studio's $1.5 billion library.
Everyone would have expected an action movie and been even more disappointed. I loved the movie as a teenager, but as an adult, it's feels like a kids movie. I remember liking it, that's pretty much all that's interesting about it. Nothing else holds up.
Tom Kelley and David Kelley, founders of Stanford's Design School and IDEO (the industrial design firm that made things like Apple's first mouse and the standup toothpaste tube) have a great book, Creative Confidence.
Start selling in the US early. To be the global leader, and not just the regional leader, sell across global markets early to establish the position of best product globally.
“They do not reliably capture what a user was shown or told.”
This adds to the case for middleware providers like Vapi, LiveKit, and Layercode. If you’re building a voice AI application using one of these SST -> LLM -> TTS providers there will be definitive logs to capture what a user was told.
Would you say MCP is a protocol (or standard) similar to how REST is a protocol in that they both define how two parties communicate with each other? Or, in other words, REST is a protocol for web APIs and MCP is a protocol for AI capabilities?
also REST is less about communicating, more about the high level user interface and the underlying implementations to arrive at that (although one could argue that’s a form of communicating).
the style does detail a series of constraints. but it’s not really a formal standard, which can get pretty low level.
—
standards often include things like MUST, SHOULD, CAN points to indicate what is optional; or they can be listed as a table of entries as in ASCII
> standard (noun): An acknowledged measure of comparison for quantitative or qualitative value; a criterion
note that a synonym is ideal — fully implementing a standard is not necessary. the OAuth standard isn’t usually fully covered by most OAuth providers, as an example.
—
> The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard and open-source framework
MCP, the technology/framework, is like Django REST framework. it’s an implementation of what the authors think is a good way to get to RESTful webpages.
MCP, the standard, is closer to REST, but it’s more like someone sat down with a pen and paper and wrote a standards document for REST.
They aren’t the same, but the have some similarities in their goals albeit focussed on separate domains, i.e. designing an interface for interoperability and navigation/usage… which is probably what you were really asking (but using the word protocol waaaaaaay too many times).
Thanks, and call me wrong, I think "Protocol" in MCP is somehow misused. Sure it is somehow a protocol, because it commits on something, but not in the technical sense. MCI (Model Context Interface) would probably the better name?
I agree that interface would be a better name than protocol, but Model Context Integration/Integrator would be even better as that is it's core intent: To integrate context into the model. Alternatively, Universal Model Context Interface (or integrator) would be an even better name imo, as that actually explains what it intends to do/be used for, whereas MCP is rather ambiguous/nebulous/inaccurate on the face of it as previously established further up-thread.
That said, I think as the above user points out, part of the friction with the name is that MCP is two parts, a framework and a standard. So with that in mind, I'd assert that it should be redefined as Model Context Interface Standard, and Model Context Interface Framework (or Integration or whatever other word the community best feels suits it in place of Protocol).
Ultimately though, I think that ship has sailed thanks to momentum and mindshare, unless such a "rebranding" would coincide with a 2.0 update to MCP (or whatever we're calling it) or some such functional change in that vein to coincide with it. Rebranding it for "clarity's sake" when the industry is already quite familiar with what it is likely wouldn't gain much traction.
Wow, this is great. Calling it UMCI would have saved me a lot of confusion in the first place. But yeah I think the ship has sailed and it shows that a lot of things there were cobbled together in a hurry maybe.
The potential benefits of alcohol are hard to decipher because of the population data:
“A lot of people who don’t currently drink are people who used to drink heavily, or who have health problems that led them to quit...” said Keith Humphreys, PhD, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and the Esther Ting Memorial Professor. “That skews the data, making moderate drinkers look healthier by comparison.”
I wouldn't drink alcohol for health benefits. I'm just saying a glass of wine per day with dinner won't have adverse health effects for most people. If you don't currently drink, then there's no reason to start. If you're having more than one drink per day, then you should cut back to just one. If you do drink, then do so several hours before bedtime because alcohol does affect quality of sleep.
It would be dishonest (the intentional omission of relevant truthful fact) to not to disclose the source. If people already don't want the most important truth of all, the very one all of the others depend on always being true to then be true themselves, then they are already choosing to not adopt the truth into their lives and that is their choice. What they choose is not going to help me adopt it any more.
I understand your point, I hear all sorts of religious nonsense, but this is actually the real thing. Why blame the Lord: Truth and Life, for a bunch of people abusing his teachings to control and manipulate others? e.g. don't punish the innocent for the bad deeds and lies of many.
I wrote the paper. So, if I say that is my source, then anyone claiming otherwise must prove different.
I'm not sure I agree with the transition to full automation, but Piketty's premise that returns on assets will outperform returns on labor is still at the root of growing income inequality.
If you have a bankroll, investments will yield higher returns than returns on labor (just working your butt off). Without wealth shocks or redistribution the income inequality gap will continue to widen.
When the CCPA launched in 2018 companies had to comply when a consumer requested a Data Subject Access Request (DSAR). Because the consumer had to request a DSAR not all companies felt this compliance pain acutely (e.g. it was mostly big companies with A LOT of users that got more DSARs, so they adopted workflows and tools to alleviate the pain).
The Delete Act has more teeth. Independent compliance audits begin in 2028 with penalties of $200 per day for failing to register or for each consumer deletion request that is not honored. GDPR spurred organizations to compliance, partly because of the steep penalty (up to €20 million or 4% of revenue, whichever is higher), maybe The Delete Act (and its much smaller penalty) will also spark organizations to comply.
I firmly believe part of the initial commercial failure was because of the title. With something more descriptive like, "Escape from Shawshank" or just "Prison Break" people would have been more interested to see it.