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They Live (wikipedia.org)
114 points by doener 1 day ago | hide | past | favorite | 81 comments





The short story it is based on can be found here:

https://pvto.weebly.com/uploads/9/1/5/0/91508780/eight_o’clo...

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This movie is great overall, in my opinion, but I always chuckle when I think about it because I had no idea about Roddy Piper’s wrestling fame and there is a scene where he fights Keith David that is just silly and I had no idea why it was in there until later.

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Unsubtle but ahead-of-its-time media analysis + most absurd fight scene ever. Worth a watch with a drink and some good friends.

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What's really absurd is how hard we fight to view the world only through our own ideologies.

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I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubble gum. -- Nada

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Fun fact: Roddy Piper's line was originally intended for a match against wrestling fighter Playboy Buddy Rose (1952-2009). (Source: "In Search of Darkness" documentary.)

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Redditor /u/SanderSo47 posts a weekly analysis called "Directors at the Box Office". Last week they covered John Carpenter:

https://www.reddit.com/r/boxoffice/comments/1cepji9/director...

I was surprised to find out that most of his movies were box office failures. Didn't matter to me, though. They weren't critically acclaimed, but they were a lot of fun.

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Yeah he is a legend in the horror and sci-fi genres but neither of which are too lucrative

We get what we deserve. Nowadays if your movie is not PG-13, a franchise, or both it’s tough to get financing so these original and unique works have pretty much died out

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Is this of special significance today?

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> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Anything that "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" is on-topic on HN :)

Wikipedia happens to be a great neutral resource to share curious media/phenomena that others might not know about.

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I saw that movie when it came out, and it did not gratify my intellectual curiosity.

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Shame, it's a brilliant film.

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Maybe try again? I saw it many times as a child and rewatch it every few years.

Feels more prescient every time.

Still, options will differ.

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> Anything that "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" is on-topic on HN :)

Yeah — sure. But I’m with the parent comment to which you replied. Sometimes I’m not sure if I’m just coming across one of todays “lucky 10,000” [0] or if there’s another reason why something old has resurfaced and, if it’s the latter, it’d be nice to know the context.

[0] https://xkcd.com/1053/

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The best way to farm karma on HN is to post a random Wikipedia article every day

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Y’know, I see these random Wikipedia articles come up every day or so on the front page and wonder what is going on.

I thought they were organic at first but then I got skeptical and wondered if it was some vestige of the early days of HN where it was automatically injecting a random article to bolster content.

The other thing I thought could be happening was that there is an article on the front page in a particular topic, someone reads it finds a novel topic and then thinks to themself: “I know! I can post a Wikipedia article on that topic and farm some karma”.

Who knows.

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I've posted this and nothing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40106956

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Dumb question. What advantage is there to having hn karma?

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I learned from social media that having bigger numbers is better; it means that you are a better person.

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After 500 you're allowed to downvote

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I mean assuming the articles are well chosen that seems like a public service

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Aligned incentives.

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..and if they aren't well chosen, they should drift off the front page soon enough

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Unclear. Maybe there's a bubble gum shortage.

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Why are so many posts being upvoted that are nothing but links to Wikipedia articles?

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This movie is a lot of fun, and a great window into its moment.

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Obey Consume Go to sleep Conform

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Finally ... a use case for current state of the art AR ...

1) Tag boss and other questionable associates through They Live filter.

2) Put glasses on.

3) Chew Gum

4) End Gum

5) Run Kick Ass automation.

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Which gave birth to Cripple Fight.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cripple_Fight

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Jxm6JQDN98

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Wow I had no idea! Too good, time to rewatch both!

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This movie really shook me when I watched it as a kid.

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SPOILER

Ya, the hero died at the end. I kept expecting him to come back to the very end.

EDIT: edited due to downvotes. Come on!

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Roddy Piper has passed. Apparently, many professional wrestlers die early.

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Is that due to the prevalence of steroid usage? Do we know?

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Given the prevalence of heart failure, I'd say that is almost certainly the primary cause, but it's a pretty hard-living profession where excess is encouraged in almost every way, which can be quite hard on the body generally. Joint replacements are very common - Hulk Hogan had both hips and knees replaced in his 50's as an example.

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I think that it's a pretty grueling vocation.

John Oliver actually did a piece on it, and that was fairly revealing[0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8UQ4O7UiDs

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Watched it last year. The premise is great, but I thought that the acting was very poor.

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Roddy Piper has the best Jeans.

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John Carpenter made some good movies some great movies, some truly shit movies, and one of the greatest movies ever - one of my top 3 favorite movies of all time (The Thing).

Story and script seem to be the defining factor in making a great movie.

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That is a very, very good way of stating way of stating a fact that I 100% agree with.

Although my favorite would probably be In The Mouth of Madness, because I saw that at a better point in my life.

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Same here, The Thing is an absolute masterpiece. What are the rest of your 3?

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Alien and Star Wars of course.

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What are his shit movies?, I’m not aware of any but need to check them out.

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I hated ghost of mars and prince of darkness.

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I believe Prince of Darkness is the one that had (incidental to everything else, not an important plot point) a possessed Alice Cooper impale a guy with a bicycle. If that’s not enough to move a film out of the doghouse…

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Me too. The worst I’ve seen from him is average/meh, never shit. I liked the much maligned “Ghosts of Mars”, a kick ass action movie with a twist on his usual anti-conformist work; now a couple of polar opposite archetypes must act together.

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What about it?

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Saw the move years ago. The acting was not great, but the very end was hard to swallow.

The 'hero' gets to the roof where he has a clear shot to destroy the transmitter (apparently sophisticated aliens with teleporting technology can't be bothered with simple redundancy so they have a single point of failure), but stops to ask his girlfriend if she is 'clear' even though she is standing way behind him. This gives her a chance to shoot him and almost stops him from destroying it before he dies.

Anyone watching has to roll their eyes at whoever wrote that scene.

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I have to roll my eyes at anyone who not only spoils the movie’s climax but gives the blow by blow in detail.

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I have to roll my eyes at someone who thinks critieking a 30 year old movie is somehow 'spoiling' it.

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"put the glasses on" is a distant ancestor to "red pilled"

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Not so distant. The films are only a decade apart and They Live was hugely influential.

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with arguably inverse political implications

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How would you argue they're inverse?

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red pill is a right-wing notion, put the glasses on is a left-wing one

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The idea of poking holes in official dogma is novel for the right, and so the reactionaries have adopted the "red pill" symbolism. This causes many to associate the two, especially those newly enamored with the concept after having seen through their first layer of the memetic prison.

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I don't think I even want to ask what the hell 'memetic prison' means.

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That's fine. Just if later in life you come to a revelation that does make the term click for you, do yourself a favor and make sure you keep going with the questioning rather than taking your newly altered model as unassailable truth and thinking you're out.

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Best fight scene ever

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They do indeed.

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When I think about how well terraforming is proceeding, I think of this film. Our planet is just another input.

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One of Carpenter's best, and one of the best 'capitalists dressed up as aliens'-movies.

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A capitalist success ($4m bugdet, $13.4m return).

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Not sure what you mean. Could you name the capitalists to whom that revenue was so important?

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Maybe Carpenter himself? Who knows, the fact is that it had a large return on capital, so it's a capitalist success.

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Are you using money and capital as synonyms? Do you consider every society with money a capitalist society?

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Is that a real category?

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The Arrival[0] (not Arrival) was like that.

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115571/

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This is an absolutely fantastic movie that I recommend all the time and people think I'm joking but I'm not.

It's a bit low budget but the story is legit and Sheen does a pretty good job with it IMO.

There is some radio astronomy techno jargon which is surprisingly accurate as well and maybe that is why I like it so much.

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Haha, it should be! If it is, "Landscape with Invisible Hand" is certainly one of the genre's best!

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No, like every other category it's made up.

Another of my favourites in this category is Save the Green Planet!, though it's not as family friendly as Carpenter's take on it.

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Great movie. Zizek's "A pervert's guide to ideology" got me hooked on it.

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Same here. _I already am eating from the trash can all the time_

https://youtu.be/oBcFLmu_tlc

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Haven't seen the film. But the concept reminds me of the Israel Palestine situation in the US.

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> In 2017, in response to neo-Nazi interpretations of the film's themes, Carpenter further clarified that the film "is about yuppies and unrestrained capitalism" and "has nothing to do with Jewish control of the world".

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Yes, Carpenter made it to be about yuppies and unrestrained capitalism in 1988, however, art from the viewer's perspective 36 years later, can mean something different for that viewer or any other. Personally, I don't see the neo-Nazi and Jewish control of the world angle, but the way the media has sold the Palestine-Israel conflict, the passing of the redundant, free-speech-limiting, Antisemitism bill recently, and with thousands of Jews in the US and Israel protesting for a cease fire, and the thousands of police unleased on US college campus protestors, it can have a different interpretation. In 1985 Columbia students occupied the same hall for 3 weeks, and it led to Columbia's divestment from South Africa's apartheid regime, but most Americans under 35 or so, don't have historical depth. They sway in the wind of the media's hot air. For me, putting the glasses on or being red pilled, today makes the film applicable to a host of viewpoints, and not the cliche yuppy / capitalist trope even if that was sincerely John Carpenter's intention as an auteur. Sure, the acting is bad, and the late 80s coloring makes it seem a dinosaur to today's high-tech, SFX, CGI-addicted, chop-editing audience. I guess I am old. I love it. I also loved watching Wood Allen's 1973 film "Sleeper" for about the 7th time last month.

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I said it reminds me personally.

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You probably need to see the film then.

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To be fair, when asked he had to say that. Many people think it's obviously about Jews, seeing as how the 'aliens' are in control mainly of banks and the media.

Had he answered any other way, his career would have been over and he might have been killed.

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My uncle knew a guy who knew a guy who converted his car to run on pure water, but after word got around the oil companies killed him and burnt down his workshop.

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