Hacker Cinema
The Town
2010 · Film · 125 min
Directed by Ben Affleck
A proficient group of thieves rob a bank and hold the manager hostage. Things begin to get complicated when one of the crew members falls in love with her.
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5 comments on Hacker News
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.
Best bank heist scene in any movie.
Other favorites include The Dark Knight’s opening, and as far as escaping a bank robbery goes, Baby Driver’s opening chase was 10/10 (even though a Subaru couldn’t do what he was doing but I’m willing to let that go).
The Town and the original Point Break have great ones as well.
See the film, The Town (2010), where Ben Affleck runs by the local barbershop to collect hair to toss around at the crime scene. Though presumably the idea there was that all the local men, including the bank robbers, get their hair cut at that barbershop.
I have one nit to pick.
The Town was not a good film. It was disjointed, overacted and carried about 10-20 minutes of fat. It was, in short, only greenlit because Ben Affleck was attached.
"One of the things I've noticed in both school and the workplace is that a lot of people expend more energy trying to avoid work then it would take just to do the work in the first place."
Criminals are a perfect example of this. I see a movie like "The Town" by Ben Affleck and I think to myself, "man, all that stress and hard work and almost certainty of death and/or federal prison goes into this, and most of the time they'll walk out with less than 6 figures when it's all divided up".
I think the problem is alot of people never learned how to think in small bits at a time. Our mind is cluttered like one of those hoarder/packrat types they exploit on reality TV. We're thinking about how complex the overall problem has to (or is going to) be, instead of just chunking it out into separate problem domains and tackling them one at at time. The myriad things we have in our head induces paralysis. Distractions like HN and reddit don't exactly help alleviate that, btw :D
For example: Programming a game that has a main character jumping around throwing ninja stars while avoiding spike pits, sword-wielding baddies, and evil wizards shooting fireballs sounds like a daunting task, but starting with "let's move the character thingy around the screen" might be less mind-meltingly hard. But, people just think about the end-goal and just shrug off how others can accomplish it as "magic".
Maybe that's why people choose to be employees rather than entrepreneurs: Complexity kills motivation. Entrepreneurs are just better equipped to tackle complexity one problem at a time.