Not to mention, when someone gets stabbed in the back, they tend to fall down dead almost immediately. Have you ever seen someone get stabbed? It's *nothing* like that.Originally Posted by Rune Blackwings
Interesting sidenote: Porcupine Tree's "Shallow" is in that film. I think it was that song anyway, I only saw it once due to the points you made!
Interviewer of reprobate ne'er-do-well musicians of the long-haired rock n' roll persuasion at: www.velvetthunder.co.uk and former scribe at Classic Rock Society. Only vaguely aware of anything other than music.
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It's very rare to stab someone once and kill them. In fact, watching ID, Forensic Files and such, I have only heard of two incidents and both were men who stabbed women they subdued and had laying on their backs. Usually, the stabbee is not all that amused by the idea of being stabbed and fights the stabber. Similarly, when someone is strangled on TV or in movies, it is way easier than it really is and requires less force than it really does.
"Alienated-so alien I go!"
Not the same thing. I said "label", I didn't say "label for an actual product that you can buy".
As Jeremy Clarkson noted when he interviewed Goldblum for the Star In A Reasonably Priced Car segment, "How did you know you had the right lead?!". Yeah, because all extraterrestrial spacecraft use the same USB ports we use here on Earth, don't they?
A few that come to mind for me:
1. Gary Busey playing three different Fender guitars in The Buddy Holly Story, none of them made when Buddy was actually alive. The Bronco wasn't even introduced until the early 60's, Buddy never played a Telecaster, and the Strat is very obviously a CBS era model, with the large headstock.
2. Michael J Fox morphing, in the space of mere days, from an incompetent Eddie Van Halen wannabe to a seasoned guitarist well versed in Chuck Berry licks and capable of leading a pickup band flawlessly through a song they've heard before. I'm not even going to bring up the fact that he's playing a guitar that didn't exist in 1955, or the fact that he probably wouldn't have been able to play that guitar solo on it, either.
3. Scuba divers diving alone. First rule of scuba diving is you never dive alone. It probably happens, there's always people doing stupid stuff, but we're supposed to buy marine biologists, military men, environmentalists, and other "responsible adults" ignoring safety rules for the sake of pushing the plot of your lame TV show or movie along.
4. I don't care that the word "parsec" was misused in Star Wars. That's besides the point. I don't know, for instance, how many times on Flipper, Sandy or Bud should have gotten the bends, because they didn't take a surface interval between dives. In one episode, Sandy goes down, gets nitrogen narcosis, Flipper has to "help him back to the surface" (in fact, Sandy seems to be ascending just fine on his own, Flipper isn't doing much of anything), then almost immediately goes back down and goes even deeper than he did the first time. Then after the commercial break, he goes down a third time! Uh yeah, you better have a decompression chamber on call if you're gonna do dren like that!
Oh and let's not forget all the lapses of scientific knowledge in the movie The Black Hole (everything from playing meteorites flying through space to humans being exposed to open space and surviving).
And there's that scene at the end of Easy Come Easy Go where "Elvis" (more likely his stunt double) "pumps" air into the bad guy's wetsuit (itself a physical impossibility) thus turning said wetsuit into a balloon, sending the baddie rocketing to the surface. The guy should be dead, or at least comatose, from an embolism, but he seems to be just fine when we see him a little later.
5. All those times on Lost In Space where they kept encountering the same spaceships, the same antagonists, etc, and neither the kids, the robot, the pilot, nor the scientist or his wife remember seeing them before. There's three different episodes with Robbie The Robot in them, and in each one, Robbie is supposed to be a different baddie. Gimme a break!!!!! Speaking of Lost In Space...
6. The entire Quantum Leap series. Complete ignores every single rule of time travel established by every single science fiction writer who ever wrote a good time travel story. The law of averages suggest that if you run around time/space and keep saving children from dying, or marriages from failing or whatever, at some point, you're gonna end up saving someone who grows up to be a serial killer or a crazy general or politician who leads the country into Armageddon, or at the very least, a smooth jazz musician.
7. Things where costumes change in ways they shouldn't. In Corvette Summer, there's a scene near the end where Mark Hamill saves Annie Potts from a pornographic short film shoot. He drags her out of a hotel, with her wearing a red and black wetsuit, and into his car, and they immediately speed off back to California, with the looney tunes who stole Mark's Stingray in hot pursuit. Now, I bring this up, because late into this scene, there's several shots where Annie's outfit changes. Oh, it's still red and black, but now it looks more like Uhura's uniform from Star Trek. Then it reverts back to her wearing the wetsuit. It's like they shot the scene, decided later they needed to insert some new shots, so instead of renting the wetsuit again, they just stuck Annie in a top that kinda sorta looked similar to the outfit she wore in the earlier shot.
8. One of the common things you see in a lot of movies and TV show: people climbing out of the water, and like a minute late,r they look like they've never been in the water. Hair looks perfect, maybe they're wearing what appear to be brand new wetsuits, all bone dry. And even worse, there'll be shots where, for instance, you'll see the diver unzip their wetsuit jacket, then the very next shot, it's fully zipped again, then another shot of it unzipped, and so on.
9. In a Barnaby Jones episode once, a guy in regular street clothes on a boat, somehow changes into scuba gear, including a full wetsuit with a hood, slips into the water, murders a diver, then slips back onto the boat, takes off his scuba gear, dries off completely, and slips back into the same clothes he had on before, all in a matter of minutes. Dude, have you ever put on a wetsuit?! I have. It'll take you like 20 minutes just to do that! Taking one off is almost as bad! Forget about toweling off and getting back into his regular clothes.
10. In The Blues Brothers, the orphanage should have been tax exempt, because it was run by the church. But then reportedly, at the time the movie was being made, there was talk that such exemptions might be lifted, so maybe the movie was playing off that.
11. Again in The Blues Brothers, the Nazis really should have been driving Volkswagens (well, maybe not should, but it would have been a good history joke, since the Volkswagen was founded by the Nazis).
12. As far as deus ex machinas go, coming back to Flipper, how about every episode having Flipper somehow being able to rescue whoever it was who needed rescuing. In one episode, a diver (again, diving alone) nearly dies of carbon monoxide poisoning, because he's diving with contaminated tank. So, how the frell does the damn dolphin know the diver needs saving?! In some of the other episodes, I could see that the dolphin would see a situation (say an unconscious diver, or a mini-sub trapped in more than 150 feet of water) and then go alert the kids or Porter or whomever, but how the frell does anyone figure out what Flipper wants? OK, I could buy like after the third or fourth episode, someone saying "OK, when Flipper gets like this, that means someone's in danger", but there's at least one episode where someone who has no prior knowledge of Flipper's..."ability", let's call it, manages to deduce Flipper wants him to come save a diver suffering from the bends (a diver who, once again, was diving on his own, instead of with a dive buddy).
Talking about peopel getting stabbed, how about people getting strangled. It takes several minutes for a person to pass out form a lack of oxygen. Yet on TV, in movies, whatever, someone wraps their hands around someone's neck, or a rope around their neck, or throws a bag over their head, and inside of like 90 seconds, it's terminal. Oy!
Howard The Duck wasn't shot in Cleveland, either, though it's set here.
The inside of their spaceship is plenty roomy, and so tall that they need an elevator, but on the outside it's about 8 feet tall and 25 feet wide.
Superman would stand still while taking the gunfire, but would duck when the gun was thrown at him?!
I think I'm very glad to not be a literal-minded person.
Most of the movies and shows mentioned, and the nitpicks from them are there to push the story and do not, and absolutely should not, reflect reality, reason or the laws of physics. Seriously, er...yeah, seriously, disaster movies SHOULD be the most over-the-top, unreal, bizarre and insanely unrealistic stories possible. Who wants to watch a $200 million disaster movie about a cesspool backing up because no one thought to use Rid-X? Blech. Give me escape from reality any day. Like with music.
Last edited by frinspar; 07-07-2016 at 10:58 PM.
Well you usually only see the second floor when they show exterior shots. I guess for budgetary reasons, they devised some sort of scheme where I guess we're supposed to believe that the Jupiter 2 can sort of burrow into the ground as it lands, if there's no safe place to extend the landing gear, which we only see a few times on the show (usually when the Jupiter 2 is seen landing on like some type of purpose designed landing pad, or whatever.
But you do bring up an interesting point about those sort of TARDIS esque incongruities. I remember reading somewhere that on the Brady Bunch, not only was the show not filmed in the house you see in the establishing shots of each episode, but it couldn't be that house. I remember reading on a webpage where someone pointed out that if you actually drew up a blueprint of the interior of the house, it doesn't match the exterior at all.
I remember years ago, I read an article in a magazine where they asked various professionals to comment on how their profession is portrayed on TV and movies:
Lawyers complained about sleazy and devious they're always depicted (especially criminal case defense lawyers)
Cops commented that when you're involved in a shooting you're taking off the street for awhile while it's being investigated, so you're not back out there right away trying to wrap up the investigation you were in the middle of. Likewise, if you smash up your car, again, there's paperwork and investigations that take place before they just hand you another car and let you loose on the streets again. Also, nobody "tastes" cocaine or heroin, as is frequently depicted in movies and TV shows. I also read that the one cop show that police officers actually tended to like was Barney Miller, because it was closest to depicting what being a police detective was actually like.
Also, cars don't just burst into flames when they're shot at or crash into things. I remember in one of Spider Robinson's novels, I think it's Lady Slings The Booze, the narrator points out that the worst you can do is cause a fire in the trunk. And as I understand it (judging from what they demonstrated on Mythbusters) the gas tank has to be nearly empty. Even if you crash a car over a cliff, it still won't burst into flames on impact.
Car doors will not make sufficient shields when you're being shot at (again demonstrated on Mythbusters).
If you actually got the dren kicked out of you in a street fight (as seen in any number of movies), you're not going to just get up and walk away from that. Even if you "win" the fight, you're probably going to need to visit the ER, at the very least. And if you punch someone, you're likely to do some significant damage to your hand. Someone once told me if your hand hurts after you punched someone, that means you hurt him pretty bad too.
When someone gets shot, it's very unlikely that you'll be blown out a window or door by the force (what was the name of the Burt Reynolds movie where he shoots the baddie and the force of the shot knocks the guy out of like a ninth floor window or something like that?).
Attempting to pull a pin out of a grenade with your teeth (as depicted in numerous war movies and action flicks) will not only prove unsuccessful, but you'll probably seriously damage your teeth doing it. Also, using a wall as a blast shield when using a hand grenade, you know how they show the guys running up to the doorway, they stand on one side and throw the grenade in the room? Well, that doesn't actually work, unless the wall is made of like concrete or brick. There's about a million other things you see in those movies that don't work, according to my dad (who spent 20 years in the army and served in Vietnam).
I always thought it was funny how on MacGyver, no matter where he was, he was able to find just the thing he needed to save the day. I remember there's one episode where he yanks a hockey ticket out of someone's pocket and sticks it inside a bomb to stop the relay contacts from connecting, thus stopping the bomb from detonating. Thank goodness he was hanging around a sports fan that day.
I was citing those as an example, but movies and tv shows do the same things a bit differently-covering logos of cars, using false labels, etc.
"Alienated-so alien I go!"
Let me explain myself very quickly-I am a huge riffer on movies and tv shows. One might say it is a hidden talent of mine. My mom likes Hallmark movies and TV shows. I am actually banned from the living room when she is watching certain programs. So, as a result, I feed off of these sort of things. Kind of like some nit picking fact sucking vampire bent on filling my head with the most arcane crap to spew out just as Cassie the Good Witch has another "mystical" moment where she spouts off a cryptic musing like a riddle from the Sphinx and the resulting "good luck" flies in the face of logic.
And it is one thing to see science fiction or fantasy and there is a factual inconsistency and you let it fly simply because it is a science fiction or fantasy, such as explosions in space or human being batteries. It is another to be a science fiction or fantasy and completely abuse the suspension of disbelief or be a show based in realism (crime dramas, for example) and totally ignore facts.
"Alienated-so alien I go!"
My wife and I -and my brother when he visits-tend to scoff and/or snicker at these sorts of things so frequently that my parrot has picked it up, and when something relatively loud happens on the TV she'll often laugh or snicker in response.
Let's start with 8-ever see Top Secret with Val Kilmer? They do a spoof on the wet hair/dry hair thing-you see Kilmer in a fist fight underwater with the foe. He walks out totally wet, they cut to the leading lady and then back to him and he's completely dry and his hair is styled.
9. Barnaby Jones defies science and logic in 800 ways, primarily by having a senior citizen in Ebsen's shape being able to fight and outrun people obviously a third his age.
5. One could say the same of Nero Wolfe, but I usually let fly this sort of thing. In NW, it was because the concept was based in radio shows of the 1930's-1950's where the same cast would play different roles each episode save the main characters. In Lost in Space, I would assume it was because of budgetary considerations. What drives me more insane is inconsistencies in regular or recurring characters-big offender: Monk. For example, in one episode, Monk is trying to clear Willie Nelson from a murder charge. The only witness is a blind woman, who fingers Nelson based on recognizing his voice (we won't get into how easy that would be to beat in a court of law). A streaker who has been vexing the police is arrested and Monk has an idea-arrange a meeting with the witness alone and have the streaker run past her. Monk watches the streaker in the sting with no issues about the fact the guy is nude. A couple of seasons later-Monk is involved with a billionaire battling against a nudist beach. Monk is borderline homicidal, acting like some Nazi on a mission.
6. You mean Kenny G is the result of too many people time travelling???
Jeff Goldblum-I did not make it past the tunnel fireball scene. At that point, I left with hopes the aliens would win...
"Alienated-so alien I go!"
If you ever have to get rid of him, I will gladly adopt him! A parrot who can join me on ragging on movies! Genius!
Hallmark, btw, is the land of deus ex machine, especially at Christmas time, where capital felonies get forgiven in the name of the holiday.
"Alienated-so alien I go!"
Hey, at least they actually ran out of bullets...
Cobra handling and cocaine use are a bad mix.
Regarding Point #8, I think this is perfectly parodied in a Sean Connery James Bond film. (I forget which one...) Bond comes out of the water in a wet suit at the beginning of the movie, breaks into some place and sabotages it, then takes off the wet suit and is in a perfectly pressed tux.
Cobra handling and cocaine use are a bad mix.
Yeah, but he drank from the holy grail so he was practically immortal anyway.
that was actually based on a real event during WW2.
"Alienated-so alien I go!"
Here's one great story on unrealistic stabbings. During the filming of Saruman's death scene in the Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson called out the Christopher Lee should make some sort of noise and gave an example. Lee just raised an eyebrow and said in that great voice of his, "that is not the noise that a man makes after being stabbed in the back." Lee served in Winston Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare in WWII. His missions are still classified by the British gov't. It was then agreed that they would let Christopher do it his way.
I don't like country music, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means 'put down.'- Bob Newhart
When Christopher Lee said that's not how a person dies, you didn't ask for clarification...
"Alienated-so alien I go!"
One of my wife's favorite film ad TV pet peeves: actresses waking up in the morning with perfect hair and makeup.
I don't like country music, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means 'put down.'- Bob Newhart
Supposedly, Irwin Allen was upset that NBC made him cover up the Voit logos on the diving gear used on Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea, as he had made a product placement arrangement, which apparently contravened the network's policy regarding such things. Voit were at least identified in the closing credits as having furnished the diving gear for the series, but who the frell reads closing credits? I mean, besides me, of course.
And you see it on a lot of other shows, too. On some of the Flipper episodes, for instance, you'll see a diver wearing a wetsuit with the logo covered up with electrical tape. Another maneuver was to have the diver wearing a tank that's facing the wrong away around, to hide the logo on the tank. That's why on some of those shows, the regulator hose appears to be coming out at an awkward angle, because the entire tank, including the regulator assembly is reversed.
On variety and talk show type programs, they'll often times cover up things like logos on the back of keyboards. Someone's playing a Yamaha or Roland or whatever synthesizer, but there's a big strip of tape on the rear panel covering up the company logo. Interestingly, they don't usually do that with guitars.
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