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Jet Li rejected The Matrix as he didn’t want his kung fu moves recorded (2018)
- BiteCode_dev 5y agoImagine they if they told Keanu Reeves to records all the words of the dictionary and all his facial expressions and body postures and keep it as IP forever.
- BigBubbleButt 5y agohttps://youtu.be/ouxYTQ_UuIw https://youtu.be/ouxYTQ_UuIw
- pankajdoharey 5y agoOR NFT ?
- unishark 5y agoIn return for the 100+ million dollars he got out of it? Li's role would only have been in the sequels anyway, not the one good movie... Seriously though, for such a deal if one gets a percentage as royalties perpetually too, then it may be a good arrangement. I think Li's objections could have al been addressed as terms in the deal. Apparently what Li is saying is the terms offered were one-sided and he didn't like them.
- dmos62 5y ago> the one good movie It's the opposite for me, I liked them all, but the first one was just a good old rehash of Socrate's cave allegory. It offered hardly anything new, but was pretentious with various references to Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation, which is precisely a critique of the cave allegory. The first one was accessible, simple, fun. The sequels were no less fun, but you had to think. While the first ones referenced Christian mythology a lot, the sequels jumped into Eastern metaphysics.
- jonplackett 5y agoI appreciated the second 2 more on 2nd, maybe 3rd watch. They were much cleverer, but worse as entertainment. Also the secret to happiness is low expectations, and I never walked into a movie theatre with higher expectations than I did for Matrix 2.
- dmos62 5y agoSame, on both points.
- Razengan 5y agoMatrix 2 was a cliffhanger leading to a letdown, but I loved the many little worldbuilding elements (like The Merovingian etc.)
- jonplackett 5y agoThe thing I struggled with on first watch was knowing how important events are. If this person dies or this person is caught, how good / bad is that? In the first film every character motivation is crystal clear, every character change is obvious and massive and compelling. I still get a tingle at the exact point where Neo wraps the rope around his arm and decides he’s going to catch a helicopter to save Trinity.
- atatatat 5y agoHe didn't want his art to be cheapened by having random clowns being shown as if they had those skills.
- elefanten 5y agoAnd yet he got to see that day anyway
- forgotmypw17 5y agoSequels? ?:-^
- worker767424 5y agoDidn't they do something close to that with Hugh Weaving to make a lot of CG Agent Smiths?
- testplzignore 5y agoNo. They actually created real physical clones of him. It's no coincidence that production on the film started shortly after the creation of Dolly the sheep.
- royjacobs 5y agoTo be fair, the technology and storage available in the early 2000s would have been quite sufficient to store all of Reeves' facial expressions.
- albertopv 5y agoI saw over 14 millions of possible futures. And how many Reeves' facials expressions? Just one.
- andi999 5y agoI don't fear the person training 10,000 facial expressions. I fear the person training one expression 10,000 times.
- taneq 5y agoWhoa!
- pcmaffey 5y agoBlue steel.
- gphofficial 5y agoBruce Lee ?
- thatguy0900 5y agoIn zoolander, a model develops a facial expression so beautiful it can stop thrown weapons in midair. It's the only expression he ever does. He calls it blue steel. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=D519hT7-ytY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=D519hT7-ytY
- bonzini 5y agoWasn't that Ben Affleck?
- 0j 5y agoReminds me of this masterpiece: Neo takes the blue pill https://youtu.be/aau8qa3xgFs https://youtu.be/aau8qa3xgFs
- justinclift 5y agoThere's also the classic xkcd: https://xkcd.com/566/ https://xkcd.com/566/
- nsonha 5y agoKeanu Reeves has like 4 facial expressions and none of them is original, no one would be interested in that. This guy becoming an action/movie star seems like dumb luck.
- darkerside 5y agoYeah, must be pure luck
- paulryanrogers 5y agoThis is explored in "The Congress" quite thoroughly
- laurent92 5y agoThe Congress is my absolute nightmare movie, despite the beauty of it. I find it depresses me because we all live some part of our lives as an illusion, and it’s tempting to go even further; In fact, are we so far into an illusion that we don’t notice our life is destructed?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- lonk 5y agoIt is impossible to read the article for me because of popups, dynamically changing layout while loading something etc . I miss old working internets
- 1123581321 5y agoIt’s a lot better with an ad blocker. I share the lament, though.
- fbnlsr 5y agoI wouldn't use the Internet without an AdBlocker nowadays. I even set up a PiHole on a Raspberry Pi at some point and it was super nice. Whenever I need to consult something on my phone though, it's a real nightmare. I hope some day publishers will understand that aggressive ads are killing the experience and drive users away. Hell, ever since they've implemented the purple screens on Twitch, I just don't go on the platform anymore.
- circularfoyers 5y agoWhy is it any worse on your phone? You can run uBlock Origin on Firefox on Android (one of the biggest reasons I don't understand why anyone would want to use Chrome).
- 2Gkashmiri 5y agoooo... people apparently put up with ads on chrome or youtube app or any other app even "system apps" like those insidious xiaomi people, because "1. ads on tv are always there, why should phones or laptops be different and 2. some poor youtuber needs to earn. whats wrong in spending 30 seconds if it earns money to someone".... urrgh. i use pi hole, ublock on firefox on desktops and android and i still find that sneaky ad creep in sometimes. makes me sick. newpipe helps a lot actually
- vorticalbox 5y agoI run tracker Control, it acts as a 'vpn' so it can block ads, not unlike a firewall. This let's you block ads on a system level or as I do on my p30 Pro not let any of the system apps connect to the Internet. https://github.com/OxfordHCC/tracker-control-android https://github.com/OxfordHCC/tracker-control-android
- pankajdoharey 5y agoGood For Matrix, Jet Li isnt much for acting. Keanu really did a good job, i cant imagine it any other way.
- unfunco 5y agoJet Li wasn't in the running for the role of Neo.
- effingwewt 5y agoYea he was up for Seraph. The actor who ended up playing him was spectacular though. I love Keanu Reeves as much as the next person byt there's a reason he's described as 'wooden' in his acting. Until John Wick I honestly would have bet money he couldn't act with real emotions. I remember there being a word for it when an actor just lools like they always do but due to music score and your own expectations you assume they are acting how you would expect. I think Keanu has mastered that =)
- Nevermark 5y agoThe word for it when “acting” that way in real life is stoic. If there is a term for a continual poker face in the theatre arts I would be interested to know it!
- imbnwa 5y ago> Until John Wick I honestly would have bet money he couldn't act with real emotions. You haven't lived until you've seen Keanu take a shot at Shakespeare in Much Ado About Nothing
- dogorman 5y agoFor me, it's Dracula.
- effingwewt 5y agoI re-watched Dracula recently on Tubi, it was wonderfully bad. I remembered it being scary when I was a kid. I've yet to see Much Ado About Nothing, will check it out though.
- RedComet 5y agoHow would have been any different than any other movie he's been in? Are they not digitally recorded indefinitely as well?
- pan69 5y agoI think they are talking about digitally recording as in motion capture. That probably doesn't happen for a lot of movies he's in.
- effingwewt 5y agoThis is mentioned in the article. They wanted essentially to own the IP to every martial arts move Li would have recorded for them, allowing them to essentially have him or even just his moves with someone else's face superimposed, so what would they need the actors for at that point? And of you are just going to digitally do the fight scenes then why not just use moves already recorded without any IP? Seems to me like he was smart to Nope TF out.
- RedComet 5y agoIt actually is not mentioned in the article, how this movie would be different with respect to other movies he was in at the time.
- dangson 5y ago“I realized the Americans wanted me to film for three months but be with the crew for nine. And for six months, they wanted to record and copy all my moves into a digital library.” The difference is they wanted to motion capture his moves in addition to the regular filing process.
- RedComet 5y agoAgain, clearly I'm not tapped in to Hollywood like some here seem to be, but it wasn't clear to me how what he says there, "they wanted to record and copy all my moves into a digital library", was any different than what happened when he was in any other movie, say The One. Motion capture wasn't mentioned in the article at all, nor is it clear that other martial arts movies didn't/don't use it.
- lbj 5y agoIn the words of Norm McDonald: What a genius, he’ll be sorely missed
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- devfromanatolia 5y ago'Li said back then, he was already worried that future technology would allow US filmmakers to digitally reproduce his moving body and superimpose the face of any actor onto it. “I was thinking: I’ve been training my entire life. And we martial artists could only grow older. Yet they could own [my moves] as an intellectual property forever. So I said I couldn’t do that,” Li said.' It is fascinating to see that at some point of any expertise, you start to respect the art itself more than any hard work you invest in it.
- agumonkey 5y agoAnd we're hitting a point where tech is making this irrelevant. I'm somehow scared about the implications.. it kills a lot of deep human emotions (desire, ambition, skill, transmission). Some people are already feeling this in music slightly.
- fighterpilot 5y agoThat's the reason the Go champion Lee Sedol gave for quitting
- agumonkey 5y agoskynet won't even need a war, it will defeat our mindpower beforehand.
- plebianRube 5y agoNot with a bang, but with a whimper, huh? Rage against the dying of the light, my friend.
- drclau 5y agoUnless... we were already defeated and live in a simulation. There was a movie about it not so long ago... :)
- 5y ago
- trashface 5y agoCan't blame him, seems like a totally valid concern. He should have said, "That sounds like a really good deal. But I've got a better one. How about I give you the finger?"
- devfromanatolia 5y ago'"Motion capture this!" said Li, artistically'
- dnautics 5y agowith future ML pose engines, joke's on him!
- peakaboo 5y agoFrom one of the best movies ever made.
- HWR_14 5y agoOr, alternatively, he could have forced the situation so he owned the mocap files and gave the Matrix producers perpetual rights (maybe fore the entire trilogy). Then, when he's old and cannot move his virtual moves can be earning for him.
- Apocryphon 5y agoJet Li rejected The Matrix Reloaded to star in DMX vehicle Cradle 2 the Grave.
- gherkinnn 5y agoThat’s ok. Those two are forgotten, while the other is actively despised.
- enkid 5y agoThe Matrix Reloaded was ok. It's Revolutions that was actively awful.
- baby 5y agoThey have great fight scenes though, and I would still enjoy a re-watch. I just think about them as fan fictions and not the real sequels of Matrix.
- Apocryphon 5y agoThey were ambitious attempts to build a mythic world but fell short- but they also work as nice early 2000s time capsules the same way the original film is a time capsule of the year 1999.
- agency 5y agoThe article also says he was making Hero, which is a masterpiece IMO.
- zentr1c 5y agotrue Hero is such a beautiful piece of artwork in so many dimensions. its the movie I watched the most often. 》5 times
- amelius 5y agoAt least he was asked to opt in. With Co-pilot, programmers don't even have a way to opt out.
- lordnacho 5y agoIsn't this going to happen anyway? Someone will train a ML model with martial arts movies to generate new sequences, just like they do with all sorts of other media. It's fair use to train it on existing movies, isn't it?
- amelius 5y ago> It's fair use to train it on existing movies, isn't it? I don't think so, if the intent is to build a system that competes with the original actors.
- HWR_14 5y ago> With Co-pilot, programmers don't even have a way to opt out. I find not using GitHub lets me opt out. Am I wrong?
- phaemon 5y agoI'm afraid you are. If your project is open source, it's quite likely someone will put a copy up on GitHub while they're working on it.
- HWR_14 5y agoI could include an anti-GitHub clause in my open source project if I really wanted. But at any rate, if my project is open source, then haven't I said that using it a ML corpus is fine?
- flybrand 5y agoThis sounds a little bit like the people who didn’t fight in the UFC because they wanted to keep their art ‘secret’.
- notoriousjpg 5y agoMakes no sense. Jet Li has legitimate kung fu pedigree and has won multiple martial arts tournaments.
- Delk 5y agoI don't think it sounds like that at all, from what the article says. Rather it sounds like he didn't want the skills he had spent years practising and learning to be potentially subject to cheap replication by technology. That would turn something that used to be a skill learned through effort into a commodity, at least as far as film goes. I can easily see how that would seem like a bad deal for the actor. It could also feel like it devalues the skills themselves. That's orthogonal to the applicability of those skills in the UFC or whatever.
- sadfasf122 5y agowat
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- aaron695 5y agoIt's unlikely the Wachowskis would have asked for this, it's unethical and they are not bad people. They understand the value of art, both movies and martial arts. It's still not possible to this day taking it at face value. We still use motion capture on people just walking.
- kevingadd 5y agoI'm not sure why you think this. The films literally repurposed motion capture this way, by digitally replacing the faces of actors or rendering them in full CGI for stunts. Doing this would naturally require the studio to have the legal rights to reuse their captures in this way. The Matrix actors' mocap was also repurposed for use in an official tie-in video game.
- aaron695 5y ago> The Matrix actors' mocap was also repurposed for use in an official tie-in video game. The motion capture was done specifically for the game. "“The Wachowskis wrote an hour of new story and filmed it so we could have the video game really be a part of the Matrix story " https://wireframe.raspberrypi.org/articles/the-unique-story-of-enter-the-matrix https://wireframe.raspberrypi.org/articles/the-unique-story-... You can see Keanu Reeves in Cyberpunk 2077, he can't even scratch his head without looking stupid. https://www.cinemablend.com/news/2559005/keanu-reeves-shares-the-difference-matrixs-motion-capture-and-doing-it-for-cyberpunk-2077 https://www.cinemablend.com/news/2559005/keanu-reeves-shares...
- psychlops 5y agoHe could have simply done his non-super-secret moves for the movie. You know....acting.
- ericls 5y agoPeople believe that?
- neonate 5y agohttps://archive.md/wVHwK https://archive.md/wVHwK
- oblak 5y agoBack then the story was he demanded 60 million for the role. Obscene, no doubt. But they did spent 10 million on a single rain drop that Smith or Neo punched. God, that movie sucked
- tyingq 5y agoThe people making a movie about a dystopia where any value humans have is sucked out to power a digital replacement, did exactly that. Heh.
- bitexploder 5y agoI have been doing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu for several years now. It is achingly hard as a sport earlier on. But for the most serious practitioners it becomes an expression of art. The movement of the human body in a lethal dance. The full expression of that art is something I aim for in the back of my head. Early on it was about the sport, exercise, etc. you realize the hard work is just the means required to expressing the art and that becomes primary for me. Not everyone views BJJ in this way, of course, but I do.
- CodeAndCuffs 5y agoI've trained on and off for the years. Probably only 100ish hours of mat time. I'd rolled with mainly white and blue belts, the occasional purple, and maybe 1 brown. Even with that, I understood that there are some serious levels to this. Then last year I rolled with a black belt. It was like a different game. I'm a big dude, but I could not move this guy. It was like trying to move a car, it just rocked a little as he looked at me with amusement and pity. He did the same stuff I know, just better. And he knew what I was thinking before I knew it. He's got top half guard, and Im fighting for an underhook. As I think, "Ok, he cant choke me with 1 hand, he won't go for the brabo", he goes, "You know I can still sink this with 1 hand, right?". He did, and he looked bored doing it.
- bitexploder 5y agoHeh, I often put white belts and blue belts in unfamiliar dilemmas. There is a lot that goes into weight distribution. They say each belt adds 10 lbs. I am of course not very good relative to most black belts, but I’m starting to challenge them in some spots. I am also relatively large so I follow a catch and release philosophy. I don’t too pressure smaller guys and I often concede positions etc. it’s like, I know I can hit escapes at the right places, why not let everyone work and have fun instead of just smash. That’s a good lesson about strong guys though. I train with some MMA guys that are huge and you learn who you have to move around. Some guys you just can’t move. I don’t care about winning or losing anymore. Some times I give away too much and get tapped. And that’s fine :)
- mrjivraj 5y agoIt's a similar paradox that today's DTC brands face, especially those selling digital products or consulting services. They usually have to give away a lot of IP upfront...for free.
- literallyaduck 5y agoI want him as juror on the M$ copilot trials.
- naasking 5y agoIt's interesting, because I always thought Neo's fight scene with Agent Smith in the underground had some parallels/callbacks to Jet Li's Fist of Legend.
- 5cott0 5y agothe matrix and fist of legend were both choreographed by the legendary Yuen Wo Ping. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuen_Woo-ping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuen_Woo-ping
- 5cott0 5y agoLi also turned down the role of Li Mu Bai in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon which is arguably more of a loss to cinema but that was to support his wife during pregnancy.
- imbnwa 5y agoTBF Chow Yun-Fat is 10x the actor that Jet Li is (and Li, 10x the martial artist especially alongside Michelle Yeoh) and that role required extreme subtlety to depict his unavowed, unrequited love for Yu Shu-Lien which is a big part of the movie. If I'm Ang Lee I'm OK taking the acting over the athletic prowess.
- baby 5y agoYeah I can't imagine Jet Li in that role, he's not the best actor.
- Razengan 5y agoMan, loved that movie, and the nostalgia of the era that its memory invokes. :) Shame the sequel kills him offscreen.
- lai 5y agoI'm glad I'm not the only one that thinks that Keanu's fighting choreography performance needs work. He's stiff af. (I'm referring to the commentary on the Seraph fight gif in the article)
- rramadass 5y agoPerfectly justified reason; “I realized the Americans wanted me to film for three months but be with the crew for nine. And for six months, they wanted to record and copy all my moves into a digital library.” He added, “By the end of the recording, the right to these moves would go to them.”
- bradgranath 5y agoJet Li has the weirdest publicist.