And the Oscar goes to a movie you have never seen

It looks like Clint Eastwood has proven once again that on rare occasions you can make a movie that appeals to adults and make big money. Unusually strong 3rd and 4th weekends for American Sniper means that the movie will probably end up the highest grossing film first released in 2014.

The Passion of the Christ and American sniper are only two examples of adult oriented movies that do well in the fourth week. Usually only movies aimed at small children make money in later weeks as parents finally drag their kids to the films. The primary teen or young adult driven movie makes most of the money in the first two weeks.

American Sniper (wide release only)
Weekend #1 $89 million ($107 million including Martin Luther King Day)
Weekend #2 $65 million
Weekend #3 $31 million
Weekend #4 $24 million

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1
Weekend #1 $122 million
Weekend #2 $57 million
Weekend #3 $22 million
Weekend #4 $13 million

Guardians of the Galaxy
Weekend #1 $94 million
Weekend #2 $42 million
Weekend #3 $25 million
Weekend #4 $17 million

Quote: Wizard

I just saw The Imitation Game. As a math nerd who likes the topic of code-breaking, I couldn't help but see it. However, the movie is much more about the primary code breaker Alan Turing than the German Enigma machine itself and the effort to crack it. I'm sure Hollywood thought, probably correctly, a movie centered on the actual Engima machine and trying to crack the code would only appeal to math geeks like me.
So, in short, I liked it but didn't love it.

I finally saw this movie, and I found it very moving. From what I read however, it is chock full of fantasies to improve the story.

Joan Clarke's life was vastly improved to make it a good part for Keira Knightley.

It was sort of like leaving out Mozart's two sons in Amadeus to make him more pathetic and lonely.

I wonder how accurate the portrayal of the computing machine in "The Imitation Game" was. Did it actually look and perform as depicted in the movie?

I'm probably going to have to break down and stream this movie, because I've been waiting over a year for it to reach HBO or somebody I'm already paying for.

Re: the Enigma machine; I think they were extremely careful to be accurate (but since I haven't seen it, speculation on my part).

If you have Netflix, there's a British series called "The Bletchley Circle" about a group of Enigma Code women just after the war, with a lot of flashback to the war years and how they did it, with the equipment they used shown. (The series is a solid British drama and worth watching on its own, btw.) The opening of Season 2, Episode 1, is an extended flashback using the machines.

Also, someone brought one in on Pawn Stars and they talked in some detail about how it worked. Clip might be on YouTube, I don't know.

I'm referring to the "computer" they built to break the Enigma's code. In the film, it is quite large, with mechanical "wheels" that turn. There is no explanation of how it works, outside of it is designed to be a faster way run through every possible sequence of outcomes.

Quote: Ayecarumba

I'm referring to the "computer" they built to break the Enigma's code. In the film, it is quite large, with mechanical "wheels" that turn. There is no explanation of how it works, outside of it is designed to be a faster way run through every possible sequence of outcomes.

The Enigma machines used rotors to generate the code, like mechanical computers. There were some very rudimentary electronic and electromechanical computers at the time. So it's possible some kind of programmable calculating machine was used, and it may have had wheels.

Do you recall 50s and 60s, and even 70s, TV shows and movies which showed computers with large, open-reel tape machines? invariably the tape reels would move when the computer was operating (and lights would flash on and off, too). That's not entirely inaccurate. If the tapes contained data, the computer would spin them in order to be able to read it.

Quote: Ayecarumba

I'm referring to the "computer" they built to break the Enigma's code. In the film, it is quite large, with mechanical "wheels" that turn. There is no explanation of how it works, outside of it is designed to be a faster way run through every possible sequence of outcomes.

The Bombe wasn't a Turing-complete computer as I understand it, but an electro-mechincal way of churning through hundreds of possible cyphers to find candidates for the encryption settings of the day. Later on they sent work out to the faster Bombes in the US.

There was still plenty of manual work to do after creating a set of possible encryptions, but the reflection that the Enigma used (such that A -> A encryption could never happen) meant it was breakable in relatively short space of time, even given the tools they had. Course, actually having a Enigma machine in their possession really helped.

One was captured in 1941 from a UBoat (by the British Navy, not the US despite the film U571). The German Navy used a more complex version of the Enigma machine... which had been in production for years before the war, as a commercial system. The Polich had been able to break earlier Enigma's since about 1932, and their work was used at Bletchley as starting point for Turing's work.

This might all be in the film, of course. Not seen it.

Quote: Ayecarumba

I'm referring to the "computer" they built to break the Enigma's code. In the film, it is quite large, with mechanical "wheels" that turn. There is no explanation of how it works, outside of it is designed to be a faster way run through every possible sequence of outcomes.

As the Bombe machine is a well known from the museum, the look in the movie is very accurate. The contribution from mathematician Gordon Welchman was attributed to Hugh Alexander in the film. More than 200 British Bombes were built under the supervision of Harold Keen of the British Tabulating Machine Company.

The epiphany that broke the code, that they all received at a bar was pure movie fantasy, as such techniques are universal to all code breaking.

Thank you. This is what I was referring to.

Is it unusual that I am more interested in this machine and how it works than in the story of the person who designed it?

https://youtu.be/b3LGAgM32_E

Ice Cube gives a sensible response to the Oscar controversy.