Paul Walker Dies in Car Accident

[Gaidin]

I'm sure if they really wanted to they could afford it, just like every now and then any given person can buy above their means. I'm not so sure a 450,000 dollar car is targeted at them and marketed at them, and designed with them in mind.

[Thanas]

I wonder who thought you did not have to spent extra time and attention on the fastest car Porsche ever sold. Probably nobody.

Also, you can't really blame the car without it being revealed what the modifications made to it were.

[Napoleon the Clown]

From what I've read the issue wasn't with out of control acceleration, it was because they didn't slow down enough for the turn. It doesn't take 600+ hp to go off the road when you try and take a turn too damn fast. linky

So yeah, what apparently happened wasn't related to how much power the car put down so much as them not slowing down enough for the turn. Maybe he was going too fast and couldn't slow down fast enough, maybe he thought he could take the turn faster than the car could actually handle. 15mph turn at 40mph is going to send most any streetable car off the road at high speed. It may even have been a case of something being wrong with the brakes.

Car hits sideways, possibly rupturing the gas tank... And there you go, big problems. 40-45mph seems like a low speed to cause the car to catch on fire, but if they managed to hit exactly right I can see how it would happen.

[Terralthra]

$400k is roughly the annual income cut-off for the top 1% in the US.

[Thanas]

I doubt it has something with the brakes - the ceramic brakes used on the Carrera GT are the best in the business.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

How the fuck did a thread about a guy dying degenerate into a three page discussion on if celebrities deserve a bad end because of roles they've played in movies and tv? Seriously, if you honestly believe Walker deserved to die in a fire because he starred in a movie I'll just say here and now that you are a waste of fucking air and should stop goddamn posting.

Want to know what killed Walker and his friend? The answer is that Posche's entire design department is run by wild haired mad scientists.

Anyone else wonder why the URL says Scott Walker?

[Napoleon the Clown]

I doubt it has something with the brakes - the ceramic brakes used on the Carrera GT are the best in the business.

Brake line failure is possible, though. Yeah, the brakes themselves are awesome, but it's still possible mechanical failure happened somewhere. It's also possible he just didn't brake when he should have. I'm not going to just assume it was driver error, though I'm also not going to assume it wasn't. I was just offering a possible cause for taking the turn too fast.

[Sea Skimmer]

The autopsy said the impact was at as much as 90mph, that's the answer. Most people are just not competent to drive any car at that kind of speed on a non highway, non race track freaking access road in an office park.

[Thanas]

I doubt it has something with the brakes - the ceramic brakes used on the Carrera GT are the best in the business.

Brake line failure is possible, though.

On a car of this quality? Doubtful.

[InsaneTD]

I doubt it has something with the brakes - the ceramic brakes used on the Carrera GT are the best in the business.

Brake line failure is possible, though.

On a car of this quality? Doubtful.

The name lines are braided. I want to say they used Kevlar fibre, but I can't remember what they are made of. More likely that a seal in the master cylinder failed.

[Sea Skimmer]

Multiple seals have to fail in the master cylinder to remove all breaking force. A car cannot be sold in the US without two independent systems within the cylinder, only the linkage to the pedal is common. This is absurdly unlikely to happen. If meanwhile one seal did fail, depriving two wheels of breaking force, it would become vastly easier to lock the wheels on the other two wheels. This did not happen, ergo no real reason exists to assume a break failure of that sort.

Some people are claiming a power steering failure. That is at least more likely; but would still not matter if they were not going 90mph or more in the first place. Also still highly unlikely, this car had under 10,000 miles on it.

[Channel72]

There's nothing manipulative about Casino and Goodfellas. It's merely a portrayal of the mobster lifestyle. Where the glorification comes in is when you realize that all the murdering and thievery was A-ok until it was done against the interest of the mob bosses. Once that started happening is when things fell to shit. Ace sticks to the code and dodges a lot of the bullets. Karma doesn't kick Nikki in the ass because he murdered an old lady or cops or anyone else. "Karma" gets him because he tries to kill Ace after banging his wife.

The premise of both movies is that the mob would have kept things going fine (Casino even points out how much better Vegas was to the average person before the Mob was kicked out), but the protagonists broke away from the good Mafia values.

I suppose I can see where you're coming from... but ultimately whether or not a film "glorifies" something is pretty subjective (unless we're talking about some blatant propaganda piece.) I never really got the impression from Goodfellas that the director was saying: "see... the mob is awesome!". Especially during the latter scenes where Ray Liotta is constantly under surveillance from helicopters, running around like a stressed-out idiot, flushing drugs down the toilet, etc., It really seemed very depressing - quite a far fall from the glamorous restaurant scene in the beginning - which I think is precisely the point.

You can argue that Liotta's misfortunes were simply a result of selling drugs as opposed to being a criminal in general, but I think the whole point is that the mafia itself is an inherently criminal and grotesque organization, where there is no "straight" path. The drugs are just a detail, really; I certainly never got the impression that Scorcese meant the viewer to interpret Paulie's "anti-drug" policy as some kind of vindication of the mob code in general.

I think the ending is all the more poignant because Henry wasted his entire life. As a boy he idolized being a criminal, but at the end of the movie he's left with nothing after a life of crime. He has to deal with the real world with no skills or experience, and all his friends are all dead or in jail. I don't know exactly what more you think Scorcese should have done. I think having Ray Liotta get killed or thrown in jail would be far less effective than the ending scene where he's reduced to being a "nobody" in witness protection, especially since his life-long dream was to be a glamorous criminal. It's a really depressing and effective ending.

[Channel72]

Also the fact that, in real life, Henry Hill ended up in witness protection, somewhat limited Scorcese's options, I guess. A lot of the details in the movie, including the Air France robbery, the murder of Billy Batts, and Hill's drug dealing activities, are simply actual facts. So I don't know how much you should really read any of this as Scorcese trying to glorify the mob.