@newtboy

Actually , you only know that this deputy on this dashcam stayed out of the pond. Link below has the rest of the story, namely that there is additional dashcam footage, all of it released to the media. Somebody decided to put out just this clip on social media to claim the police lied about trying to save the girls. I'll post a link to the other dashcams if I come across it, but the link below came up within 5 minutes of checking the accuracy of this account.

https://m.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/4g8p71/sheriff_lays_into_media_for_misleading_reporting/

I never got sold on motion control. It just has never been precise enough to feel like anything more than a gimmick to me. Maybe just confirmation bias, but everything I tried on Wii just felt really weird, clunky, and plasticky. I'll admit that I haven't really tried much of anything since then (and Wii is really old news by now).

Anyway, all the demos here looked cool for their 3D immersion, but my old bias against motion control kind of put a bit of an unfavorable spin on everything -- at least to me. Fine, small-scale motor skills are just going to be really hard to simulate with two wand-like things, even when they have multiple degrees of freedom and seemingly pretty solid accuracy.

...But, I'll admit that the archery mini-game looked like a really fun adaptation of that that wouldn't necessarily require *extremely* accurate fine control. Moving out of gimmick territory and into "ok, that could actually be extremely entertaining".

One thing I liked about that in particular:
She looked like she was having fun, even when she wasn't so good.

I've played bass (electric, never tried an upright) for about 15 years. I only got *really* serious about it after getting Rocksmith 2014 -- went from playing once in a while to almost every day. I'm a LOT better than I was, can play a LOT of songs at least decently (say, 97%+ accuracy in Rocksmith), but still nowhere near as skilled as some.

BUT, it has been FUN every step of the way. Especially after trying Rocksmith, which presents "sheet music" in a visual, tab-like format that I can now effectively sight-read (it takes some getting used to, but works great once you figure it out). A lot of people are reluctant to try learning an instrument because they think it won't be fun, particularly in the early going. They think they will suck.

Well, in my experience that is half right. Yeah, you're going to suck (I certainly did). But it is loads of fun, in spite of that. And you get better fast -- the human brain is a pretty amazing thing. One day, you try a new song and think "damn, that is so hard I'll *never* be able to play it right". Then a month or two later you think "oh yeah, I should give that a second try" and all of a sudden it is very doable. Awesome to have those little moments of revelation when you realize that "hey, I am definitely getting better at this!"

Accuracy after 20 feet is probably in the miss-the-side-of-the-barn area...

The first time this will probably come into consideration in the real world is consciousness uploading. It's not far fetched that we will eventually have the technology to take a snapshot of all of the atoms in our bodies and simulate that arrangement on a computer of some sort.

It would be exactly like your consciousness if it's simulated with 100% accuracy. And again, who can say that we'll never get to that point? But when your biological self dies, will you really be immortal if the original consciousness is destroyed?

It's funny how he didn't hear the question that he repeated back to the interviewer with perfect accuracy, twice.

If this doesn't tell you Trump will say anything for votes, what does?

"Automatically ok"? Not necessarily. But in cases where it makes sense, at a stretch even "plot sense" for the character to be there; yeah, I think that is OK.

The Last Samurai isn't a documentary. But, the general historical justification for Tom Cruise's character being in Japan is pretty much valid. Meiji was interested in the West -- clothes, technology, weapons, and military. He actually did hire Westerners to train his army, although from what I read it sounds like they were German, French, and Italian rather than American. Still, the movie portrays the general situation/setting with at least *decent* broad-strokes historical accuracy. LOADS of movies deviate from even this degree of historical accuracy *way* more without drawing complaints; particularly if their main purpose is entertainment and not education / documentary.


Your hypothetical reverse movie makes some valid criticisms. Even though it would have been historically possible for a Westerner to be in Japan at the time -- even to be involved with training a Western-style military -- it would be unlikely for such a person to get captured, run into a Shogun that speaks English, become a badass (or at least passable) samurai warrior, and end up playing a major role in politics and significantly influencing Emperor Meiji.

My defense against those criticisms is that, for me at least, the movie is entertaining; which is kinda the point. Your "Union Samurai" movie might be equally entertaining and therefore given an equal pass on historical inaccuracies by me.

The whole characters as a "lens through which the audience can appreciate a culture/history outside their own" issue is (slightly) more weighty to me. I don't think those are often necessary, but I don't feel like my intelligence is being insulted if the movie maker feels that they are in order to sell tickets.

I love the Chinese historical novel "Three Kingdoms". A few years ago, John Wu made the movie "Red Cliff", mostly about one particular battle in the historical period portrayed in that book. For the Chinese audience, Wu made the movie in two parts, summed up about four and a half hours long. For the US / West, he made a version trimmed to just over two hours. Why? Because he (and a team of market researchers, I'm sure) knew that very few Westerners would go to see a 4+ hour long movie, entirely in Mandarin Chinese (with subtitles), about a piece of Chinese history from ~1800 years ago that very few in the West have ever heard of or know anything about.

I think the full 4+ hour long movie is great. In my personal top 10 favorite movies of all time, ahead of most Hollywood stuff. But I also understand that there's no way that movie would appeal to all but a tiny, tiny fraction of Western viewers in that full-on 4+ hour format. But, even though I personally think the cut-down 2 hour "US" version is drastically inferior to the full cut, I am glad that he made it because it gives a suitably accurate introduction to the subject matter to more people in the West (just like the "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" and "Dynasty Warriors" videogames do), and makes that tiny, tiny fraction of Western people that know anything about it a little less tiny. While being entertaining along the way.

For other movies, sometimes the best way that a filmmaker can sell a movie to an audience that otherwise might not accept it (at least in large enough numbers to justify the production costs) may be to insert one of these "lens" characters for the audience to identify with. I don't think there is inherently anything wrong with that. It might not work for movies that are taking a more hardline approach to historical / contextual accuracy (ie., if Tom Cruise showed up in "Red Cliff" in circa 200AD China), but outside of those situations, if that is what the studio thinks it will take to sell tickets... Cool.

The Last Samurai is, like @ChaosEngine said, a movie primarily about an outsider learning a new culture (and accepting his own past). He serves as that lens character, but actually the hows and whys of his character arc are the main points of interest in the movie, at least to me.

I'm sure that an awesome, historically accurate movie could be made dealing with young Emperor Meiji, Takamori (who Katsumoto seems to be based on in The Last Samurai), and the influence of modernization on Japanese culture at the time. It could be made with no Western "lens" character, no overt influence by any particular individual Westerner, and be entirely in Japanese. But that movie wouldn't be The Last Samurai, wouldn't be attempting to serve the same purpose as The Last Samurai, and very likely wouldn't sell as many tickets (in the US) as The Last Samurai (starring Tom Cruise!) did. That wouldn't make it a worse movie, just an apple instead of an orange.

*backup and replaced ded video with version 2.0. Changes include more factual accuracy, more exterior shots, and more non-trademark-holding airlines. -yt

Stereotypes go best with a grain of salt.
Jokes require a lack of seriousness.

And feeling a necessity to apologise after being referenced as "polite" is Canadian.

PS: this Aussie liked the concept presented as humor, regardless of accuracy and northern comforts

I'm presuming the cheesiness of the humor is for source material accuracy?

This looks like it would be amazing, but the humor just makes me roll my eyes! I'm actually envious of the people who like it. I would love to see a wise-cracking, brutal superhero film. I want to love this movie so bad.

Lulz at the end.

Bad choice though, Leia proved it's the Trooper, not the blaster, at fault for accuracy.

I like controllers and shooters so I am kind of hoping this will give me a more mouse like accuracy while being as comfortable as a controller. That doesn't seem to be the case according to this review but I want to see what people say once they get used to them.
I think I'll end up getting one eventually though because I'm kind of interested in it. But I'm in no hurry.

Ok, I'll explain it.

It's a comedic piece, not a lecture on reproductive health.

It doesn't matter if condoms are 97, 80 or 50% effective. They are being used as a stand-in for something that HAS a 97% consensus on its accuracy.

Granted, it's not a completely perfect analogy (they are comparing efficacy to consensus), but it's poetic licence. In other words.....

it's a fucking joke.

As for writing people off, everyone is entitled to make mistakes, but really at this point climate deniers are up there with creationists, homeopaths, and flat earthers. There's only so much slack we can cut them, before we move the fuck on and say "If you believe that shit, you're an idiot"

Like JMD says, it's basically a composite picture taken from several frames of video.

I don't think it's faked (multiple shots of the same cars), just quickly done. Well, maybe not quickly, but at least was going for dramatic effect not pixel-for-pixel accuracy.

Okay, I'll be that guy.

(assumes Comic-book guy from Simpsons voice)

Actually, by the time of Episodes 4, 5, & 6 the technology of cloning from Jango Fett's DNA had been lost. Most of the stormtroopers at the time of Episode 4 consisted of human recruits (as evidenced by their various heights, weights, and voices in the movies). Hence, the stormtroopers' lack of blaster accuracy cannot be attributed to cloning degradation.

Source: Wookieepedia