Film

Our definition of "film" is a broad one, including any moving picture, of any length, animated or not.

For the standard "2 hour film" format, see feature film.

The best way to watch a television series is: wait for the thing to end. Then watch the first and last episodes of each season. The rest is fluff. And then pick up any missing interesting clips from YouTube. If a series holds you more than those episodes, it is one of the few amazing ones!

If you are going to make a television series, do make it a limited one. Plan one story, and execute it amazingly. Don't let things drag on and on.

The BBC 1979-1982 adaptations of John Le Carré's novels are the best miniseries ever made:They are the most realistic depiction of spycraft ever made.

Some honorable mentions:

Bibliography:

There is a lot of "who kills who" useless fluff, and everything to do with the wife is boring, but too much gold otherwise.

It is amazing to see how seasons got better and better until the finale. The last season was amazing, Ciro Santilli actually watched all episodes of that one! This is clearly seen on the evolution of metacritic scores.

It's just too charming, and has some deep themes.

Ciro Santilli enjoyed watching the temple flashback moments on YouTube.

Combat in the USA is of course terribly ridiculous due to guns Are Worthless.

A bit over the top, but convincing enough. A crypto-vampire show.

Ciro Santilli likes this.

He doesn't have the patience to actually watch full episodes with rare exceptions, rather just watching selected scenes from: www.youtube.com/channel/UCdeIGY2DIjpGf0A2m9GSE3g, but still, it is interesting.

What appeals to Ciro in this series is how almost nothing is solved by violence, almost everything is decided in the bridge, at the "cerebral" level of the command structure. This reminds Ciro of a courtroom of law sometimes.

Maybe there's also a bit of 90's nostalgia involved too though, as this is something that would show on some random cable channels a bored young Ciro would have browsed during weekends, never really watching full episodes.

One crime of many episodes is being completely based on some stupid new scientific concept, which any character to back it up.

Another thing that hurt is that due to their obsession with the senior members of the crew, sometimes those senior members are sent in ridiculously risky operations, which is very unrealistic.

Episodes that Ciro watched fully and didn't regret:

Semi worth it:

Not worth it:

TODO

Although this was one of the children cartoons Ciro Santilli liked to watch, watching Dragon Ball Z as an adult feels like watching paint dry, everything takes forever! Apparently padding to sync with the manga: www.quora.com/Why-does-DBZ-drag-on-for-so-long The original Dragon Ball was likely strictly better, as it was much more fun and took itself less seriously. Also in DBZ power level inflation is taken to ridiculous levels. This is why One-Punch Man is good. Out of all evil characters, Frieza is one that made a big impression on Ciro, his graphical design is so good.

This was THE craze thing in Brazil before Pokemon, it was shown from 1994 to 1997. In particular the collectible action figures! It was possibly more popular in Brazil than e.g. in the US: www.quora.com/Why-was-Saint-Seiya-so-popular-in-Brazil

The thing as quite violent, rated for 14-year olds, but no one gave a fuck, 7 yo Ciro was happily watching it. We protect children too much.

That series also had quite a religious feel to it (as obviously suggested by the series English name itself). It must also have been a great motivator to getting young kids into astronomy!

Ciro's favorite character was definitely Andromeda Shun. He was smart and thoughtful, and had the coolest most complex weapon: his chain whips. He's also a bit effeminate, with his pink clothing and a gentle way. Perhaps that is the reason for adult Ciro's mild fascination with the Andromeda Galaxy.

The English name is horrendous... the Portuguese/French name is so much better: Knights of the Zodiac! Saying this in English just reminded Ciro Santilli of the Zodiac Killer. But nevermind.

Ciro Santilli really loved his documentary called Can't get you out of my head by Adam Curtis (2021), and then proceeded to basically watch all of this films.

Ciro Santilli was touched by this, and then watched several other documentaries by Curtis.

Part of Ciro asks if it is all a big conspiracy theory. But it feels and sounds so right.

Notably the part of the governments have lost all power to companies, and can't do anything meaningful anymore to actually represent the people, because globalization reduces the power of governments.

Beautifully argued at: Can't get you out of my head by Adam Curtis (2021).

His films Blaise Pascal (1972) and Cartesius (1974) have the greatest scenery and wardrobe ever. The eerie horror movie soundtrack is also very interesting. Ciro was weirdly reminded of Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1980).

IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt0066839/

Episodes of the life of Blaise Pascal.

IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt0161382/

This film is really good.

Ciro Santilli defines a "business film" as a film about business, enterprises or entrepreneurship. Political thrillers are closed related as well.

This is one of his favorite film genres!

Some lists:

Great reports to how 2022-Ciro Santilli views how OurBigBook.com could go. Ciro can't help to feel that he is a mixture of both of the vision, tech and people guy. Not as extreme as any of them, but more like a well rounded (and less good individually) version of each. High flying bird vs gophers.

Reviews:

It is good to watch the Out For blood in Silicon Valley (2019) documentary after this to see how the characters look like in real life. Many feel amazingly cast, very close to the original. The only great exception is the Indian dude, who is completely different. Was it that hard to find some indian dude who looked and felt a little more like the real one?

Best quote at 00:23:01: matters of small concern should be treated seriously.

www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFzCodipONmNiROhYCUWyz_U interview with Walter Murch by Web of Stories. He worked on sound design for all The Godfather films, and tells some interesting details about it. He's just super nice in general otherwise. E.g.:

This film is an abomination and disgrace to the bilogy.

One is reminded of Nick Leeson.

Ciro can relate strongly to the level of passion depicted in this film: Section "Don't be a pussy". It almost feels like a business film in that a sense, where the startup is the authors career and passions.

by The New Republic

Ah, Ciro Santilli was not expecting this. What a unique mixture of humour, technology, politics and bravery. No wonder it was a box flop, there's something good about this film.

Chanbara (チャンバラ).

Those movies are "all the same". A quasi lone superhuman samurai with a good inside but painful problems helping out random people, mostly villagers in trouble and bitches in debt.

This is a neologism by Ciro Santilli, it refers to the fact that Zatoichi was not fully blind, but extremely hard of sight, which makes him:and metaphorically refers to similar situations where a person or group of people are in the middle of two groups and not part of either of them.

A related thing that comes to mind is Aum Shinrikyo's Prophet Shoko Asahara, who was semi blind, and would bully the fully blind people of his school for blind people.

Some criticisms:

And by artificial intelligence, read of course (non-human-identical) artificial general intelligence.

Today-2022, this is placed under the science fiction film category. But maybe this might change during Ciro Santilli's own lifetime?

The basic criteria of "is a film about artificial intelligence good or not" to Ciro Santilli is: does the AI inhabit humanoid, or fully human looking, bodies? Bodies is a bad sign due to:

This is a tag for films that depict some sort of artificial general intelligence, but in which that is not the primary focus of the film.

Low budget.

Things that can be understood are boring.

Aaron Swartz agrees: www.aaronsw.com/weblog/looperexplained "Next week we'll explain Primer." He never did though :'-(

That makes Ciro Santilli most mad about this film is the fact that the dude was passionate about writing, and when he became a genius, rather than write the best novels ever written, he decided instead to play the stock market instead. This paints an accurate picture of 2020's society, where finance jobs make infinitely more money than other real engineering jobs, and end up attracting much of the talent.

Another enraging thing is how his girlfriend starts liking him again once he is a genius, and instead of telling her to fuck off, he stays with her.

The other really bad thing is the ending. He fixed the drug by himself? He scared off De Niro just like that?

Ciro Santilli just keep watching that a gazillion times whenever it showed on TV.

All action scenes are useless crap, but the premise with Ciro's precious simulation hypothesis subject, related physics and the illusion of life.

It is a shame that the key premise of using human bodies to produce energy is completely and impossibly stupid. You would obviously get more energy by directing burning the food you feed into humans.

If the film had been made later, maybe the much more plausible concept of AI alignment would would have been used instead. What a shame.

The premise that "we can't make AGI, but we know enough about the human brain to upload on to a computer" is flawed. Edit: after reading Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom (2014), Ciro Santilli was convinced otherwise. What is flawed is of course just the "extracting connectome with macroscopic probes part". A post mortem connectome extraction with microtome is much more believable. But of course they weren't going to show fake slices of Jonny Depp's brain, are they? Famous actor bodies are sacred! What a huge lost opportunity. On the other hand however, the scale of the first connectome extraction would be arguably too huge to be undertaken by a random pair of rogue researchers. The same would also likely apply to any first time human brain connectome. It would much more likely be a huge public effort, much like the Human Genome Project.

But this film does have the merit of exploring how an AGI might act to take over the AGI might act to take over the world once created, notably by creating its own physical research laboratory. Though it doesn't feel likely that it could go under the radar for 2 years given the energetic requirements of the research. Even the terrorists find it before the FBI!

I also wish they had shown the dildo (or more likely, direct stimulation!) computerized Jonny Depp used to use with his wife before he managed to re-synthesized his body. But you know, 18+ would cut too much profits. Ah, what a shame.

The film starts off with more interesting "near the revelation" stuff. But then it degrades into religious wars. Ciro was reminded notably of Romance of the Three Kingdoms (1994 TV series)s.

Our definition is: about which culture a film is. Not who paid for it.

Ciro Santilli has already watched all the best films in history, and as a result any of those new movies that is full of clichés and has no innovative aspect at all (99.99999% of all modern movies) makes Ciro want to puke and to start Googling TV Tropes to classify as many clichés as possible.

Good movies are those that teach you mechanisms of the real world. Willing suspension of disbelief must be maintained at all costs.

Or of what could happen a world where a single sci-fi element is added and explored to its limits.

Love is not an interesting aspect of the world. You solve your love life at university, Tinder or Tango.

The actually interesting aspects of the world are:

Movies with a lot of action scenes, with exception of some war movies, are shit.

The Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism must be close to Cynicism max at all times. Movies with pure good and pure bad are shit.

Knowing spoilers has no effect in the film's enjoyment. The interest of storyline concepts is all that matters, visuals and acting are useless.

In a multi-language film, when two foreign characters speak English to each other when they obviously would have spoken their native language, that is a crime. Original language + subtitles is a must!

Movies that are very expensive to make tend to be bad, because they have to make returns and thus appeal to a large amorphous population without any specialization, i.e. the lowest common denominator but in TV Tropes terminology rather than mathematics: tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LowestCommonDenominator.

See e.g.:

Looking down the largest flops of all time list didn't help much, only Heaven's gate appears reasonable from the top 20.

On TV Tropes: it's Popular Now It Sucks.

One of the most nerve wrecking movies ever made. Until they decide to rescue their colleague from jail, then it just becomes too surreal.

Low budget.

Good theory of Jesus.

List of similar feeling films: www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwYwFoanrNg 11 Underrated Hard Sci-fi Movies by Marvelous Videos (2021)

There is only a very fine difference between a very good film, and the best films of all time. Perhaps it is something to do on how epic the subject matter is? It is often very hard to tell, and switches between the categories are also possible.

Has the best opening scene of all time.

Top quotes:

There's nothing like seeing the hypocrisy of the "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité" people destroyed.

Interesting how Algeria now supports China's Xinjiang policy in 2019. But of course, dictatorships tend to work together

Ciro Santilli's father, an avid history reader, and in particular interested in the military dictatorship in Brazil through which he lived, once told Ciro how the French torture doctrine was directly adopted by Brazillian military, e.g. then even invited general Paul Aussaresses who had served in Algeria, to help them out with intelligence operations and give courses. Bro, fuck that.

But of course, the Americans weren't too far behind in Guantanamo.

Respect, big respect to those people.

Many bad films have good aspects. They just didn't cross the elusive threshold of a good film.

The organic Usenet origins are quite hardcore!