Hacker Cinema
Outlander
2014 · TV series · 8 seasons
Created by Ronald D. Moore
The story of Claire Randall, a married combat nurse from 1945 who is mysteriously swept back in time to 1743, where she is immediately thrown into an unknown world where her life is threatened. When she is forced to marry Jamie, a chivalrous and romantic young Scottish warrior, a passionate affair is ignited that tears Claire's heart between two vastly different men in two irreconcilable lives.
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8 comments on Hacker News
A film made in Scotland, using mostly Scottish actors, with barely a trace of tartan shortbread tin.
We need more like this please, and less of the Outlander shite.
Any unfamiliar accent is difficult. The only question is the amount of effort we’re willing to put in to familiarise ourselves.
For example, I thought I had a decent handle on Scottish accents. Turns out I don’t, just that all the Scottish people I worked with were anglicising their accents. I only heard their natural accents after we had a few pints. Now I’m working with several Scottish people who don’t change their accent and it is hard. I’m thinking I probably have to watch a few seasons of Outlander to get used to it.
There’s nothing “natural” about any accent. How difficult was the Boston accent the first time you heard it? I needed subtitles for sure. Then I watched several movies set in Boston (Good Will Hunting, The Departed, The Town) and it’s understandable now.
All this to say - you need familiarity to understand and you need to put in effort to gain familiarity. That’s fairly uncontroversial.
Here’s the controversial part - people will put in the effort to understand the accents and dialects of people from Scotland, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, America. But if it’s an accent/dialect from India, they say some racist shit about the brown people being unable to speak English.
So yes “Strong Indian accents are very difficult” for you. And now you know why.
> The GP has some odd ideas about manual labour killing people
It's not odd at all. The bone evidence from colonial Americans shows that they were severely overworked. I think modern Americans have some romantic notion of what it was like, probably from watching Daniel Boone episodes on TV or Outlander.
While I agree with Spielberg's realization that modifying his prior work was a mistake, there's something I would like to be able to do with movies as a consumer that I wish streaming services offered.
Hollywood seems obsessed with three things: Guns, sex and objectifying women.
While not every movie has guns, the sex and objectification is pretty much everywhere. Perfectly good movies have utterly unnecessary sex scenes that make them impossible to watch with kids. In some cases this is also uncomfortable in family gathering settings.
Two examples that come to mind (there are thousands):
Die Hard. He opens an office door, only to expose a couple having sex. Of course, the woman is fully exposed, while the guy is not.
Lucky Number Slevin. The main character walks into his apartment only to find his girlfriends on all fours on the bed having sex with a guy. Again, full sexual exploitation of the woman, of course.
The Last Kingdom (series): Once again, sex everywhere. No value whatsoever to the story. It's a great series. Unwatchable with kids and in other settings.
Battlestar Galactica (the one with James Olmos): Excellent series. Sex everywhere. No nudity that I can remember, yet scenes of oral sex and other forms of sex without showing full body nudes. Fucking unbelievably unnecessary.
Outlander (series): Might as well be labelled porn. It's a sex-fest. Humping in any way possible at any possible time and even male-to-male rape. Nothing whatsoever to add to the story, which would have been amazing without all that shit in there.
The Queens Gambit (series). Fantastic series about chess. My kids are really into chess. Fuck if we are going to watch it with them. No nudity, yet drugs and sex are featured. The character is fictitious, which means there was no need for any of it. The producers just wanted to include sex and drugs. This one can't be fixed. I am not going to watch a show with my kids that implies taking drugs can make you smarter in any way.
There are tons of movies and shows with similar problems. Movies that are excellent and yet the producers feel it is necessary to insert a stupid sex scene that adds absolutely nothing to the story and is of no value whatsoever other than to show boobs bouncing and feature women as sexual objects.
Notice I did not say anything about movies like Fifty Shades or Gray, Wall Street or Eyes Wide Shut. Those are movies where the story justifies some of what they feature. There could be an argument related to female objectification, that's about it.
I am not a puritan, by any means. I just think this is stupid, wrong, unnecessary, detrimental and destructive to women. Having a daughter changes your perspective on what's out there in popular culture. Great movies and series are being ruined all the time by inserting sex where it is unnecessary, and it is usually at the expense of women.
Getting back to the first paragraph. I wish there was a setting on streaming services to be able to watch these movies with those scenes cut out or replaced by alternative scenes shot and chosen by the creators.
In the case of Die Hard, the couple could be kissing, taking a nap, playing chess...anything. The point is they were distracted and did not react to the emergency. In the case of Slevin, the sex scene could either be completely cut out or replaced with something different.
That, to me, would be a feature very much worth having. Hollywood's obsession with sex and the objectification of women is a problem that does not seem to receive the attention it should.
Yeah, absolutely hated the Ozark (TV Series) look. Heavily desaturated, brightness turned down and shifted heavily into blue. Ruined what looks like pretty scenery in the background on photos.
Compare that to Outlander, a cheesy romance show I mostly just kept watching because of the beautiful (saturated) landscape shots.
> High-quality, daring, more than superficially controversial, world-changing movies are another casualty of the rise of streaming.
Yes, but what has maybe replaced the movie is the high-quality, daring, world-changing series. Squid Game, Outlander, etc. Directors and consumers are now no longer limited to a 3 hour time in the theater, as far as the art of the motion picture is concerned.
I wish the title had not been edited from its original: "Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny." It captures so much better the essence of this rambling incomprehensible thesis that action movies have many beautiful people not having any sex. Alternate title: "Everyone drives cars in cities and no one is seen parking." To use his example, Starship Trooper is an action movie with satirical subtext, it is not served by having more horny people bang. Every narrative has to be edited to GET TO THE POINT. And then he leans on this faulty premise to criticize a bunch of weirdly unrelated stuff, movies made after the 90s, the cluttered interiors, McMansions, swoles, BMIs and 9/11. What?
There's plenty of beautiful naked people having sex on screen, uncomfortably many. Where has this writer been? The Tudors, anachronistic boobs and asses and fornicating beautiful people since 2007. This formula was so successful it's repeated in Games of Thrones, the trope so commonly employed it earned the moniker of "sexposition", naked people banging + dialogue = sex + exposition. It's also repeated in Versailles, Outlander, and from what I've seen of ep.1 Bridgerton. There's also plenty of beautiful people having sex, or at least demonstrating their horny-ness in RomComs, Sleeping With Other People comes to mind. Somehow I don't think the author was the audience for any of the above. He's complaining that there's not enough horny people in the movies he is watching.
Starz has been around since the mid-90s. It has some pretty good programming but it just doesn't get the attention that maybe HBO or Showtime does.
They had a really good short lived comedy series called "Party Down" that I loved. Had a great cast! https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1073507/
I think Outlander might be one of its more popular series now. Based on a book series and brought to TV by Ronald D Moore who did Battlestar Galactica (which personally I am cautious about because the last season or 2 of BSG was not my favorite)