Super-gorgeous actresses like Uma Thurman given a line such as "Do I look pretty?" Or "I can't get a date!"

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“I shall always be convinced that a watch proves a watchmaker, and that a universe proves a God” ~Voltaire

Or piling prosthetic makeup onto attractive actresses (Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman) to make them "plain", and having them play plain characters (I guess they just coudn't find any plain-looking women in Hollywood )

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Ever seen the dismal Viking movie The 13th Warrior? An Arab (Antonio Banderas) falls in with a band of Norsemen. He doesn't speak the language of the Vikings, so he sits by the campfire for a few nights and picks it up by listening and watching the Vikings swear and curse. Now I'm sure if you hung with some foul-smelling Vikings for a few days, you'd pick up the ability to say things like "food," "grog" and "gut him." But I doubt you'd be able to enter into a complex dialogue comparing the Nordic and Arab cultures and religions. One of the more laughable ways I've seen the language barrier breached in film.

Clearly you know nothing about women.

Total immersion... the Berlitz Method. It's supposed to work.

(And the Vikings did more than just swear and curse.)

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Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance or stupidity.
Isaac Asimov

It should work more slowly, though. He would've had weeks, maybe months, of travel with them, but not years. I figure he made up for the difference with some prior experience with Latin and/or Greek (which Norse wasn't as different from back then as it beame later), plus perhaps an exceptional linguistic talent. (He was a professional poet.)

It's not so strange if the language isn't too different from what you know. Many English speakers would be able to understand Dutch after six weeks of total immersion. Of course, being a movie he went from language zero to language hero pretty much straight away which is unrealistic. But on the other hand, Julius Caesar used a vocabulary of about 1,500 words in his writing, so perhaps the character didn't have to learn an enormous amount of vocab.

Aliens that have been around humans (and English) for generations and still can't put a decent sentence together. I'm talking about that little green fellow in Star Wars. "Go you will." I guess the Force is not powerful enough.

And yes, yes, yes. He's a cute little guy and his way of talking contributes to the cuteness. I like him too.

When 900 years old you reach, speak as good you will not.

By the way....what is a year when you're talking about a galaxy wide empire? One revolution of the galaxy?

No, the movie shows otherwise. It skips through the land journey in a montage because land journeys back then took long times, but it also shows that the scenes take place on multiple different days/nights. The rain coming and going (with clothes being dry right after a rain scene) and the differences between the fires are part of that, but another is that they show guys speaking right after showing them going to sleep.

I'm no Star Wars nerd, just picked it up somewhere, but I think a standard year in the Star Wars galaxy is equal to the capital planet, Coruscant's, year. Coruscant has a 24 hour day and a 368 day year...yeah, really creative there, Star Wars.

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If we don't play god, who will?-James Watson
I never think of the future, it comes soon enough.-Albert Einstein
The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.-Tom Waits

Nah, that just makes him sound all mystically enlightened and stuff.

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If we don't play god, who will?-James Watson
I never think of the future, it comes soon enough.-Albert Einstein
The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.-Tom Waits

That's true, but I was thinking how once the film switched to all English dialogue, Antonio Banderas was the most articulate of the lot. But that's okay with me. I wouldn't want to see a movie that boasts spectacles such as - See Antonio Banderas struggle inarticulately with a new language! Thrill to protracted sequences of Viking warriors saying, "What? Come again?" See Antonio Banderas resort to pantomime to convey his intent!

People striking a match, wick lighter etc. in a dark place and they're surrounded by dozens, nay, hundreds of crates of trinitrotoluene sticks (Why'd they leave all those perfectly good explosives behind? Can't be cheap.). Then they freak out and blow out or turn off the flame. Yeah..., it's not going to blow up inside its crates just because you have a little flame on a tiny stick or on the end of a little metal box in your hand. Perhaps if you get your kicks by pouring kerosene oil on all those crates and setting them alight you could get the TNT to blow up.

Now for something that actually could happen, you strike a match or lighter in a subterranean coal mine and the suspended coal dust forms a fuel-air mixture and BLOOM!.

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If we don't play god, who will?-James Watson
I never think of the future, it comes soon enough.-Albert Einstein
The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.-Tom Waits

Or lighting said match to reveal that the character is surrounded by dozens to hundreds of monsters/predatory animals/aliens; as if they'd all been waiting until just that moment to attack. "Shh, all right, gather around him now, but don't move or make a sound until the light goes on... there it is, now quick, everybody growl in unison!"

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Thanks for the info SkepticJ. Hey, considering how most space travel films mangle time at least they based it on something.

Maybe I was a little rough on The 13th Warrior. Just remember learning German for two years in high school and then finding it almost useless when I visited there. Everybody speaks their native tongue so fast it's hard to pick out the words. Ich kann das nicht verstehen!

The first guy who died in The 13th Warrior was wearing jewelry made by my ren faire boss, who can apparently only make jewelry for movies if those movies are bad retellings of the Beowulf mythos.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Here in Utah we have a religious group of some fame. One of the thing that nearly all males do at age 19 is leave home for two years on a mission. Most go from no foreign language at all to conversationally fluent in a few months. But then, some go to other parts of the US. I actually liked the way they did the language in 13th Warrior. It showed that he was picking it up bit by bit. What I didn't like is the casting of Antonio Banderas. The bald guy and the guy with the beard from The Mummy could more easily pass for Arab. (Arnold Vosloo and Oded Fehr) Sure they are from South Africa and Israel, but putting Banderas in that role just seemed too much like a throwback to the white actors playing Native Americans in the older films. Also, I can't understand half of what he says. Like the guys from Oasis, he needs subtitles all the time. That might just be me though.

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A Nerd can figure out how long it will take the original Enterprise traveling at warp 6.5 to travel from Regulus to Antares.
A Geek with think he can use that to pick up a girl in a bar.
A Dork knows he can't pick up the girl with it, but will hang around for hours anyway, just in case she asks.
She might. You never know.

I would guess that Palomar knows something about at least one woman, since according to her profile, she's female.

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I'm curious. Does there exist in this space-time continuum a good movie retelling of the Beowulf mythos?