Guaporense's live action thread

باكا باكا شي أومي تاتشي

Μου αρέσει να ασκώ την αστρική διαστρέβλωση και η αγάπη μου πρέπει να απορροφηθεί από ομοφυλοφιλικές ααρδάρχες.

__________________
Look, I'm not judging you - after all, I'm posting here myself, but maybe, just maybe, if you spent less time here and more time watching films, maybe, and I stress, maybe your taste would be of some value. Just a thought, ya know.

Baka baka shi omae tachi

Google translator: making language knowledge obsolete.

Not at all. Although with a lot of potential, translators will never replace people. Not for serious, important, or nontrivial matters. Sure, translators are fine, if you want to know how to say 'Hello!' in German, but fail at more complex sentences. And it's easy to see why. To not look far, look at 'homonyms'. Two words with the same spelling, but different meanings. It's easy to differentiate between them for us, people, because we easily understand the context of the sentence. However, a machine needs an algorithm, or some other way to be able to tell what some person actually meant by 'lead', 'bear', or 'can'. But this isn't that hard, as with a lot of data of already-existing translations, altgorithms and such this issue can be solved. What's really hard are the cultural subtleties of every language. Literal translations fail miserably, because in order to speak a language proficiently, one needs to understand the culture, subtext, social structures, innuendo, and other concepts of the language, and some of these don't translate between languages at all. Take Russian translation of 'you' (singular). You can say 'вы', but you can also say 'ты'. The first one is more formal and you would use it to address your boss, or a customer. The second is a more casual one, fine between friends. Now, when translating from Russian to English, a computer translator would interpret both of them as 'you', and this would make it impossible to tell which one to use when translating back from English to Russian. Mind you, this is just a simple word 'you'. And it gets way more complicated further on.

In my line of work I sometimes have to deal with immigrants who don't speak any English. I once had to help a client who only spoke Romanian. So I gave him a pen and paper, and then I opened google translate and two other Romanian translation websites. I'd type what he wrote in google and at least half of it would come out incoherent nonsense. Then I'd look up individual words and try different words that were used to translate it and see if he nodded or shook his head. It would often take three or four tries just to figure out one word. It took over an hour to help him figure out how to get to the immigration office for his appointment the next day.

Once I came to situation with a guy that cant speak any instead of their own etnic language. Even if there is hsdpa signal Google wont help at all

you as a anime fan should know how bad google translate is for Japanese

__________________

This Greek was pretty solid. That reminds me, I need to brush up since all I really understood was Μου, να, την, και η, μου, να, and από. The rest I had to google translate.

It is still highly imperfect but I think it can also help as a learning tool.

Also, Japanese is a language that has no direct "correct" translation to English or to any other major language actually. The reason is that Japanese's language family is unrelated to the language families of any European language or even Chinese and Korean languages, it is it's own language family Japonic (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japonic_languages). That is another reason why Japan is pretty much it's own civilization that I'd separate from the Chinese or Western civilizations.

Because of that translating Japanese involves a lot of "artistic liberty", in other words, when you are reading a translated Japanese novel the translator is as important author as the original. Manga, anime and film are less problematic to translate because the language is less important and the way it is written/spoken is not that critical as long as the basic meaning is carried through but that means that one will not fully understand manga unless one is fluent is Japanese. Hence why I am learning it.

Hence one can grasp the fully authentic Japanese experience without any traces of Western meddling. A page of Miyazaki's Nausicaa manga in the original version:

Dunkirk (2017)



I tried to not watch anything that is not in Japanese so I got to watch Dunkirk in the plane while traveling to see my family for holidays and they had Dunkirk there with Japanese dub! So I got to watch Nolan's film with Japanese voice acting.

Well, I didn't care for the characters in the movie but I was impressed by its technical proficiency as Nolan surely is a master if his craft of live action filmmaking. I didn't like the way the Germans were portrayed as dehumanized faceless enemies though, I recall that older Hollywood movies about WW2 tried to portray it in a more realistic fashion, with both Germans and allies being portrayed as two sides simultaneously, in this case only one side was shown and the other is just dehumanized. But it's an impressive piece of cinematography anyway.

Blade Runner 2049 (2017)



Now this is perhaps one of the best movies Hollywood made in quite some time. It features amazing visuals and a rather minimalistic plot. It's very similar to the original one and that is it's only flaw: it is not aesthetically innovative to a substantial degree since it is highly derivative but it's a near flawless execution of a style already used although it feels quite fresh to experience the Blade Runner style with modern CGI and high quality digital production.

It is also better than the animated short film made by Shinichiro Watanabe.

Shame (2011)



Now this is a powerful movie. It is also deeply personal since it features as a main character a man who is a sex addict but because of his deep obsession with sexual pleasure makes him unable to create meaningful relationships with other people. I interpret this film as a criticism of our sex obsessed society which actually has made people treat each other as sexual objects rather than people.

Wolf Warrior (2015)



In 2017 the world's highest grossing film if measured in terms of purchasing power parity rates was the Chinese action movie, Wolf Warrior 2, being curious why it's so popular I want to watch so in order to watch the sequel I had to watch the original first.

Lot's of explosions and cool action scenes. It's Chinese Rambo alright. A mediocre movie but decent entertainment. Most interesting thing is that is shows the world from a Chinese perspective and it is also a propaganda piece for the Chinese army.

Wolf Warrior 2 (2017)



Vastly superior movie compared to the first. It is easy to understand why it became the biggest grossing movie in Chinese history (selling like 150 million tickets). It's a well made slick action flick reminiscent of Rambo and Arnie's movies from the 1980's but instead it's Chinese. It's very stupid yes (with supremely one-dimensional good guy, bad guy type characters) but very well executed. It's also a portrait of Chinese mentality as the country sees itself as a rising superpower, dealing more and more with international issues.

Speed Racer (2008)



A very well crafted hollywood blockbuster movie. Prepare your popcorn for something very enjoyable and besides being quite enjoyable it is also a very unique movie because of it's incredibly aggressive visual style with colors so bright that they hurt your eyes. Basically, it's the live action version of a Nanoha movie in terms of bright colors. Overall, vastly superior to the typical bland stuff that Hollywood has been putting out in the last decade.

Fitzcarraldo (1982)



Finally I watched this classic by Herzog. Indeed a masterpiece of cinema and I was very impressed by it, being very well paced and quite fun to watch but it does so without insulting the intelligence of their audience, something you rarely see in a current blockbuster movie.

It is perhaps one element of the genre of movies about "Europeans trying to conquer the world", which also includes Aguirre (1972) by the same director and featuring the same actor as a protagonist. Although this time the movie has a bigger budget and runs for nearly twice as long as Aguirre (1972) it is pretty much a second version of it, "bigger and better" but this time more optimistic on the theme of the individual visionary and his struggle, in the first case it ends with absolute failure and complete tragedy in this case the ending is not as tragic and it was a half success instead. Putting perhaps a slightly less critical lens on the concept of the individual trying to achieve his heterodox dreams.

I am Not an Easy Man (2018)



This movie is one of those movies whose intellectual assertions are more interesting than the artistic qualities of the movie itself. It is a rom-com movie where genders roles are reversed.

Think of modern deconstructionist philosophy applied to gender roles. This movie implicitly claims essentially that all differences between men and women are due to cultural factors: that maybe we could get the inverse kind of society. While the movie is a criticism of sexism I also think it would be interesting if my gender were to be regarded as the weak and helpless gender.

I really became a fan of Herzog and that is probably my favorite.

Black Panther (2018)




This was not bad but it was not very good either. It's a standard cliche superhero movie that does everything by the numbers and doesn't represent an authentic example of artistic expression instead being a highly refined entertainment product. In fact, I enjoyed more Batman Vs Superman than this movie since at least the other movie had more interesting conflict (I mean Batman looked quite crazy to attack Superman so I wanted to see how it would play out but in this case all the characters feel flat and the only interesting element of the movie was. Wakanda itself, which I found quite interesting it not somewhat underwhelming in its scale.