Well, he’s not wrong about The Revenant - DiCaprio’s playing an underwritten, blank character. (Hardy’s pretty good though.)
“Think they’ll go back to the parking garage after this?”
“Fifty percent.”
…
“Fifty percent doesn’t buy you anything in a yes or no question.”
Good math or bad math?
Good math AND good writing!
Actually, I was kind of annoyed at the Mel Gibson math gags at first. They grew on me, though. And I guess that line you’re quoting finally brought me on board.
-Tom
I’m actually changing my mind on this one. Thanks to Tom’s podcasts I was primed to think of it as bad math, e.g. that they were assuming that for any situation with 2 choices there is a 50% chance of each choice occurring, and therefore in a 2 choice situation it doesn’t tell you anything new to say that a choice has a 50% chance of occurring. So I was just assuming that they were seriously talking about Tom’s joke maths.
But! Now that I think a little bit more, it seems that they were saying that if there are 2 choices, and after doing the calculations each choice is equally likely to work, then it doesn’t help to have done the calculations since you have to flip a coin in the end anyway. Which is a surprisingly deep point to make for a beat cop. So yes, Tom is right, that was some good math.
-Tom
I just finished watching this. It was an enjoyable enough nasty bit of madhousesploitation. There were a handful of Zahler-y bits of flavor, like the girlfriend grading papers, the “thank you / you’re welcome” chow hall scene, and the guard casually reading “White Man Beware”. A lot of it was way too dark (yeah, yeah… “blackout”) to make heads or tails of and I’m not even going to pretend that anything after naked Rupert Evans made any sense to me.
FYI, it’s available to stream on the Google Play store for a few bucks.