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Comment by dudeonthenet | Hacker News Reader

It's also worth making the distinction between the movie and the impressive short story that the movie is based on, which the article completely fails to mention: Ted Chiang - Story of Your Life [1]

I've read Chiang's book about two years before the movie aired and it really is top-notch speculative fiction that I highly recommend to any Sci-Fi lover.

Even though Denis Villeneuve, Eric Heisserer and Ted Chiang himself did a wonderful job with the screenplay, while managing to convey the main ideas and emotion of the book, there are quite a few details about the process of translating Heptapod A and B that didn't make it into the movie, details which would have painted a more complete picture of the situation for the interviewed professor of linguistics that was interviewed in this article.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18626849-stories-of-your...

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[spoiler] Also, the story clearly has a theme of a person being a helpless observer of their own life (prescience or not (see Gwern's post [0]). The movie has a time-travel twist that's very, to use an indian term, "masala".

[0] https://www.gwern.net/Story%20Of%20Your%20Life

I'm intrigued by this use of "masala", can you explain? Urban dictionary has a few options, not sure which of those you mean, if any.

[Spoiler] A rather technical and intricate story is generically spiced (masala) up with typical thrill-tropes to make it appealing to the masses: military attack on aliens (wise aliens only send video-conference units to the earth in Chiang's story), an international affairs angle, melodrama of General Shang, etc.

I was using it in a sense similar to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masala_film

I can try to shine a light on this idiom.

Masala is a popular indian dish here in the US... so popular in fact that it is expected at any indian restaurant. Because of this, the term can be synonomous with 'run of the mill', 'standard', or even 'safe'.

>Masala is a popular indian dish here in the US...

Huh? Masala just means the dish uses a bunch of spices (ie masala chai is just tea with cardamom, maybe pepper and cinnamon and other things depending on whose making).

I'm pretty sure regarding film its used to say a "standard movie" or even "boring", thats been "spiced" to taste better, with spices being a set of tropes that most people like.

Haha, such an appropriate comment thread in a post about linguistics!

I prefer Alien Tikka Masala myself, with a side of xenophobiNaan.

Masala is a mixture of spices, or the liquid portion of the stew a dish is cooked in.

In this context, it would mean spiced up, or exaggerated for entertainment reasons.

masala = spicy

I've seen the movie only and am probably among the rare ones that think it's quite tropey and boring. In the story itself, does the physicist do anything aside from carrying around a TV set, inexplicably making breakthrough in linguistics and making a baby?

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