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Types Of Film You Find Unbearable

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    Originally posted by TonTon View Post
    Generally speaking, "the average" and "the mean" are one and the same thing, in these situations.
    The way we were taught, mean and average are two words for the same thing - a sum of all the numbers divided by the number of, um, numbers. Median means the one "in the middle."

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      Originally posted by Stumpy Pepys View Post
      Misery porn, torture porn … do I now need to refer to pornography as sex porn?
      Beavis: err... what's pornography?
      Butt-head: I think that's like the study of porn.
      Last edited by Wouter D; 15-11-2018, 21:08.

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        Originally posted by Hot Pepsi View Post
        The way we were taught, mean and average are two words for the same thing - a sum of all the numbers divided by the number of, um, numbers. Median means the one "in the middle."
        The way we were taught, "average" could be any kind of middle ground. Mean, median, and mode, were all specific forms of an average.

        Your Joe Average, as far as I understand it, is more of a mode than a mean or median.

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          Originally posted by elguapo4 View Post
          In other words, anything starring Sarah Lancashire, she's an excellent actress and I can understand her wanting to break away from Raquel off Corrie but she picks some grim, hard to watch stuff
          See also: John Simm, Christopher Eccleston.

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            Originally posted by blameless View Post
            Not so much films (although I share others' disdain for horros and musicals), but I find there's a certain brand of misery-porn drama that's spreading across British telly like a malignant growth.

            This invariably involves poverty, or sexual battery of some kind, or - increasingly - a murdered child/children. Distraught parents howl at distraught police officers, the distraught police officers take it out on their own family in some way (shouting, drinking, absence) and the whole thing is designed to make the viewing public feel like slitting their wrists.

            ITV are the worst offenders for this, but increasingly the Beeb and C4 are jumping on the bandwagon, to such an extend that it feels like Olivia Colman - a superb actress - is wasting her whole career looking grief-stricken on desolate hillsides. Shit, they couldn't even resist giving her character a "guilt-ridden over a dead child" backstory in The Night Manager, which is a fucking espionage drama ferchrissakes.

            Now I'm not saying drama shouldn't tackle difficult subjects - it should - but it shouldn't be the only kind of drama on UK telly, and it shouldn't be done in such a manipulative manner.

            As I've mentioned before, it seems that all British TV these days is about a veteran detective who has seen unspeakable horror and/or known unspeakable personal loss solving an implausibly complex case about an unspeakable crime in an unspeakably beautiful place.

            It does sometimes feel like every single major character in every single drama on film or TV has lost a child, spouse, or both-parents-simultaneously in some horrible unforeseen tragedy.

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              Originally posted by Wouter D View Post
              The way we were taught, "average" could be any kind of middle ground. Mean, median, and mode, were all specific forms of an average.

              Your Joe Average, as far as I understand it, is more of a mode than a mean or median.
              A quick google search confirms that, and yet I've never heard it used that way. Perhaps a UK/US difference?

              In all of the stuff I read where the distinction really matters - particularly scientific papers - they use mean, median, or mode. Never "average."

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                Well, I presume Wouter was taught that in the Netherlands, but that was also the line I was given in 1960s New York.

                Mean, median and mode were three types of “average”, each with its own analytical uses.

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                  Originally posted by ursus arctos View Post
                  Well, I presume Wouter was taught that in the Netherlands, but that was also the line I was given in 1960s New York.

                  Mean, median and mode were three types of “average”, each with its own analytical uses.
                  Well yeah, but they'd be learning UK english, I assume.

                  Maybe mean = average is an AP style thing, but I can't confirm that.

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                    Originally posted by Hot Pepsi View Post
                    Well yeah, but they'd be learning UK english, I assume.
                    Wouter will tell us I'm sure but I've noticed during my ~10 visits there (from 1981 to 2003) and through the Dutch people I've met in my life that they tend to speak more AE than BE there (or at least as much AE as BE), must be to do with the fact that everything is dubbed on TV there and they have far more US stuff on telly. Maybe that's changed, I don't know.

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                      Originally posted by Pérou Flaquettes View Post
                      Wouter will tell us I'm sure but I've noticed during my ~10 visits there (from 1981 to 2003) and through the Dutch people I've met in my life that they tend to speak more AE than BE there (or at least as much AE as BE), must be to do with the fact that everything is dubbed on TV there and they have far more US stuff on telly. Maybe that's changed, I don't know.
                      You're spot-on. Endless reruns of NCIS and CSI and the Big Bang Theory and whatnot will do that to a population.

                      My middle school English teacher insisted that we choose one and stick with it: either go for British or American English. The whole class opted for British English, for reasons not entirely clear to me. But formal teaching is easily superseded by constant exposure.

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                        Kids at school in Holland learn UK English; when they go on to higher education it's all US English. That and all the telly, which isn't dubbed but subtitled

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                          Originally posted by blameless View Post

                          ITV are the worst offenders for this, but increasingly the Beeb and C4 are jumping on the bandwagon, to such an extend that it feels like Olivia Colman - a superb actress - is wasting her whole career looking grief-stricken on desolate hillsides. Shit, they couldn't even resist giving her character a "guilt-ridden over a dead child" backstory in The Night Manager, which is a fucking espionage drama ferchrissakes.
                          What were the details of that back story, I’m trying to remember if it was in the book (though I doubt it).

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                            Checked with mrs b: it was actually dead children, and lots of them - Colman's character is determined to take down the main villain after seeing what the chemical weapons he sells has done to schoolkids.

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                              Originally posted by Wouter D View Post
                              You're spot-on. Endless reruns of NCIS and CSI and the Big Bang Theory and whatnot will do that to a population.

                              My middle school English teacher insisted that we choose one and stick with it: either go for British or American English. The whole class opted for British English, for reasons not entirely clear to me. But formal teaching is easily superseded by constant exposure.
                              Thanks for confirming what I thought.

                              Originally posted by Aitch View Post
                              Kids at school in Holland learn UK English; when they go on to higher education it's all US English. That and all the telly, which isn't dubbed but subtitled
                              Sorry, I meant to write "everything is subtitled on TV there" of course not "dubbed" as what I wrote completely jars with the rest of my explanation. My mind wasn’t firing on all cylinders about posting that pavé (long post) in the French thread that tired me out and made my mind go doolally.

                              Originally posted by Reginald Christ
                              Just going by my experience from talking to friends from non-Anglophone nations, AE seems to be far more prevalent. I've spoken to people from Italy, France and Portugal who all pronounce the word "and" as if they were from southern California (nothing wrong with that, of course). Netflix probably has something to do with this.
                              You’re probably right there for the younger generation in France and Italy (where Netflix has 4m and 1m subscribers respectively but was only launched 3-4 yrs ago there) but not the over-35s I’d say, although of course it’s more nuanced than that, eg Canal + has had subtitled Anglophone films and programmes (probably 80-90% US) since the 1980s, and you do get both BE and AE possibly equally I'd say in France, plenty people with US-ish accents (and therefore AE vocab), or people who speak a strange hybrid kind of English (by this, I don’t mean Globish, that’s a different category altogether). There are actually more registered French citizens in the US than in the UK (~170,000 vs 140,000), although the reality is different, but anyway plenty of cross-pollination of AE into the traditional BE spoken in France (for the 5 or 10% of the population who can speak English I mean, and that’s probably an optimistic figure, they really could do with far more subtitled films/programmes in the French media, that’s really the best way to progress short of living in an Anglophone country, but 95% of the material is dubbed).

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                                I would guess that the dubbing percentage for Italy is even higher than that.

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                                  Originally posted by ursus arctos View Post
                                  I would guess that the dubbing percentage for Italy is even higher than that.
                                  In 30 years, I've seen one English-language film on German television that had subtitles rather than dubbing.

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                                    Well, yes.

                                    But a city like Frankfurt, Berlin or Munich will have regular showings of subtitled films, with audiences that are not exclusively Anglophone expats.

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                                      ...which is why I used to go to the cinema exclusively on Tuesdays, as this was subtitle night in Dortmund.

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                                        Originally posted by ursus arctos View Post
                                        Well, yes.

                                        But a city like Frankfurt, Berlin or Munich will have regular showings of subtitled films, with audiences that are not exclusively Anglophone expats.
                                        You forgot Lübeck.

                                        There are three cinemas here that show subtitled films. Three.
                                        Last edited by treibeis; 16-11-2018, 18:28.

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                                          I'm surprised there's still so much dubbing. I thought it had just fallen out of favor because it usually degrades the film/show. Even anime is better with subtitles than dubbed, unless it's one of the rare films where they've really put a lot of money and effort into the English-dubbed version.

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                                            There's a deep cultural opposition to subtitles in Italy, and dubbing is so ubiquitous that voice-over artists are reasonably well known, to the point that when Anglo actors come to things like the Venice Film Festival, people in the audience often comment that they don't sound like they do in the movies . . .

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                                              That's not what I would have expected.

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