Entertainment For Lively Minds
Stuff they get wrong in films
Watching TV recently, it’s struck me that here are some conventions which you almost always see in films that are basically wrong. They seem to be copied from other films and not reality, and they are found in Art films as much as Blockbusters.
For example:
- Anyone looking through binoculars sees two circular images joined together in the middle. It’s a long time since I looked through binoculars, but don’t you just see one image?
- English judges have a gavel, which they use to call order. No, that’s in American courts.
- All drivers constantly move the steering wheel from side to side while the car moves straight on.
I know these are trivial, but given the money spent on so much of the research and design of films, I don’t know why they persist.
Any others?
- More from Melville.
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People using telephones in old movies..
..would always repeatedly press the clicky bit on the old-style phones whenever anyone hung up on them in the hope it would immediately get them back on the line. Did this ever actually work in real life?
It may have worked,
some odd things were possible with the contacts under the old system. With the old pulse dialling phones you could dial a number with them, without using the dial. Just 4 clicks for 4, pause, 7 clicks for 7, 10 for 0 and so on. I saw it on a movie or TV show and actually used this once.
Ooh you old phreaker you
I used to do that de temps en temps as well. Yes, I have a beard and am a certified geek
This is similar to...
...when people changed channels with the remote and you hear this clanging click. For chrissakes, it's a HD flatscreen TV! Even my first remote control from 1978 didn't have a CLICK on it!
telephones in old movies...
I understand that this was a way of signalling to the operator in the exchange that you wanted some attention.
Anyone in a band...
...can walk into the venue well after all the audience are in, leap up on stage, do a number (without sound checking or tuning up) and be back at the bar to chat up an attractive lass without either the promoter having a go at them to do another couple of songs as it's Friday and the pubs have just turned out, or a bloke coming up and asking what pick ups they've wired into their Tele to get that great sound on the lead breaks. And noone ever shouts for Mustang Sally. Not even in The Commitments.
speaking of The Commitments
it's the ONLY music film I've seen where the band stuff rings true - whether it's actually playing, what you talk about when rehearsing, etc etc
Piano players always move their arms and bodies too much. Horn players never breathe.
Etc Etc
"Ray" was pretty good tho
Captains of ships...
... are allowed to conduct marriage services. Apparently they're not.
Police chief never allow their renegade detectives more than 48 hours to solve the crime.
It's perfectly OK to stare at your passenger for 30 seconds or more while driving. No one's going to step off the kerb until you're looking at the road again.
There's always a parking space available, usually right outside wherever it is they're going.
Snort
I saw "Basic Instinct" at a theatre in San Francisco, and when Michael Douglas pulls onto a street on Telegraph Hill straight into a parking spot outside Sharon Stone's house, the entire place erupted in laughter.
Kojaking
This is known as 'Kojaking'. Coined by the Beastie Boys to describe the follically-challenged detective's skill of being able to park exactly outside any location in New York City.
In Adventures in the Screen Trade,
William Goldman discusses how this gets cited all the time and just gently points out how deeply tedious it would be if movie characters had to park realistically.
And he's right, to a point
but in US cities (like San Francisco), every corner has a fire hydrant/no parking zone the cops can use. There might be different rules for detectives in a non-emergency situation (going off to bed the suspect), but still, walking maybe 3 houses from a corner might make for a less blatantly stupid scenario.
Doesn't help anywhere else in the world I suppose....
An anti cop/buddy movie..
..Cops long time older partner doesn't get killed the day before his retirement, cop doesn't get thrown off the case for being too close to it, doesn't throw badge on chiefs desk in disgust.
Doesn't go home to wife/GF, who doesn't then complain she never sees him and "why doesn't he marry the goddamn job?"
Doesn't solve case due to a ridiculous set of coincidences and doesn't get shot by (usually British) villain so that we think he's dead until last scene in hospital, where he isn't re-united with wife/GF and contrite police chief.
phone conversations
no one ever says goodbye or makes arrangement for next contact
Suitcases....
....are never heavy.
IT
IT - too many to mention really but the two most obvious are that any site appears to be hackable in about 30 seconds, and all text is displayed in something like 48 size font.
and nobody uses Ms Office.
Or in deed any recognizable software package. (I know why it's just odd)
Timing
And you can reprogramme the internet (!) in 30 seconds, when it takes my laptop 5 minutes to come out of hibernation.
Jack Bauer's phone
never runs out of battery.
Leading men have small organs
which means that bullets can pass through their bodies without causing damage, trauma or exit wounds. A torn piece of blouse is usually enough to heal them.
And no self-respecting villain leaves home without a clip of shoulder-seeking bullets.
and all the bullets that miss someone
hit the ground in front of them or just to the side.
and they throw the gun away
and they throw the gun away when they run out of bullets - why not put it back in your pocket. No wonder gum crime is bad in the US - you keep finding guns abandoned in the street.
Also locking of cars - do they still not do that even with blippy things ?
Finally - seatbelts - why aren't they worn in movies ?
the best one of these recently was
Bruce Willis in Die Hard 3 where he shoots a baddy through his own shoulder!
The notion that a bullet in the shoulder is harmless.
A bullet in either shoulder will puncture a lung. It will probably tear a major artery or two as well and also wreck the nerve-supply to the appropriate arm.
On the other hand...
...all arrows strike exactly in the middle of their victims' front or back.
Alien planets
are generally populated by one tribe / culture, who speak the same language. Sometimes they speak English. With an American accent.
and always look human with
and always look human with rubbery bits added!
WARNING!
If you like the above, this site will eat your weekend...
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HomePage
There is always
a cave through a waterfall.
Virtually everything
movie-related they ever investigate on Mythbusters.
All computers bleep endlessly:
They bleep when the operator hits a key, they chirp and squeak and trill with each drawing of a graphic, and an alarm helpfully goes off when the machine gets a virus. And of course the word "VIRUS" appears large and in red on-screen, and flashes too if it's a really big-budget movie.
Plus, when bank transactions are occurring you can see the money draining out of the account in a download window over a period of a few seconds, with a little progress bar and some "percentage complete" info. First Direct never does that with me!
Can I just save time
and just add the entire "Pirates of the caribbean" franchise
Female research scientists....
... are hot.
I think I've seen that film
...
They are!
I have to say that - loads of my friends were female research scientists, including my wife.
Male research scientists are all scruffy gits though, apart from Prof Brian Cox who gives physicists a better image than we deserve.
when gooving to a significant tune on a car radio
the local traffic reports don't randomly cut in and the hero has to fruitlessly battle with the radio and fails to turn it back.
the other day I just had to brush past
a bike in our hall way and my headphones cables got so tangled I almost had to dismatle the bike to free them. And yet it takes at least three goes to get a grappling hook to lodge firmly on a castle rampart.
They should use...
...grappling headphones instead...
State of Play
I saw this on DVD at the weekend. Russell Crowe, Ben Affleck and the ever-lovely Helen Mirren.
It's a Blackpool rock of cliche's. They're fused into it all the way down.
Maverick, scruffy journalist (Crowe) uncovers intrigues around the national defence dealings of congressman (Affleck) - who also happens to be his ex-roomy. Who'd have thought? Helen Mirren is the newspaper editor who has to say 'bloody', 'geezer' and 'arse' a lot to show she's British. And she's tough. 'You bring me bloody this story or your arse is toast. Apples and Pears, strike a light...'
In short it's a load of cobblers awls.
Couples always wake up happy in each others arms...
instead of the woman waking up in a right strop because her bloke has left her with about 1 square inch of the duvet and has taken up so much of the bed that she's practically fallen out of it.
...and they have never
shut the curtains, have they?
And the woman is still perfectly made-up
and doesn't have crusty gobbets of sleep-dust in her eyes.
Yes, and the only time
I have ever seen anyone (TV or movies) refer to morning breath was in an ancient episode of 'Soap'.
And why don't people wake up...
with hair so messed up that one would think they had been sleeping under a hedge?
Every morning is a bad hair morning for me...
A while back
I did a Gun safety course and they dispelled a few myths.
No-one can fire two hands guns at the same time nevermind two sub machine guns.
If you fire a bullet at a car it won't explode.
Guns are heavy and shooting and hitting a target takes a while to learn.
If you get shot ,the effect on your body makes you evacuate your bowels.
Did they teach you
how to shoot the gun held sideways, gangsta-style?
It's obviously more accurate than holding the gun with the handle vertical...
Guns don't kill people, actors do...
A mate of mine was in a Channel 4 thing on Waco and did the gun training thing. You can't hold pistols Gangsta style as the exhaust fumes would burn you on the forearm (or words to that effect). That he now knows how to fire an AK47 has thoroughly endeared him to his godsons, by the way.
Guns never seem to need reloading, either.
Or if they do, it's at a convenient point in the action.
One of the other things they
get wrong in films is to put people like Andie MacDowell and Paul Walker in them and to allow people with names like McG to direct them.
Mobile phone coverage in America
It can't possibly be as bad as the movies would suggest, can it?
Movie truism: If a situation could be easily resolved by a simple phone call, there will be no signal available to allow that call to be made.
Yes, it can. Pray there is
Yes, it can.
Pray there is never a national security issue along I-66, because cell phone coverage there sucks.
It's the major interstate between Washington D.C. and the west of Virginia. It runs through Fairfax - major conurbation, coverage OK - and Winchester - smaller, but still not insignificant town, coverage crap - and is about 70 ish miles long.
I still can't believe how bad the coverage is as I drive it. An hour and a bit out of the capital, and coverage can't be guaranteed. Unless it's my two carriers that are the problem.
Can I add anyone involved with the...
... Transformers franchise to your list? Michael Bay, Shia Lebouf and Megan Fox are pretty damn satanic as well.
The school bell..
always goes off just when things are getting interesting, then everyone dashes out of the room.
No one coughs in a film...
... unless they've got a life-threatening illness.
and they very rarely, if ever
go to the loo. Unless it's a mafiosi peeing on someone's shoes, or a gun fight.
Or a Chinaman peeing on a rug
Sorry. The preferred nomenclature is Asian-American. But the rug really tied the room together.
The chinaman
is not the issue here.
Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics
is a wonderful book and looks in detail at how, for example, film explosions are never right; why people DON'T really dive forward when an explosion goes off behind them, why being hit by a bullet doesn't throw you through a glass window, etc
I can heartily recommend it!
http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/
Windows
Movie windows are incredibly flimsy - it's amazing how many heroes can leap through them, whereupon they shatter into a thousand pieces, rather than said hero either bouncing off or lacerating himself.
That rankled in the Bourne Ultimatum - that roof-top chase in Marrakesh (or wherever it was): in the trailer, Bourne jumps from a roof, across an alley and through an open window. That looked pretty cool and looked like a proper stunt. In the film some post-production geek had added CGI glass to the window to make it "more" spectacular, but served to detract from the "realism" somewhat.
You're right, it's all the more striking
when it is done properly, like in 'The Man Who Fell To Earth' when the baddies are trying to throw Bowie's offsider through a very high hotel/apartment window and it takes 3 or 4 attempts because the glass is 'real'.
'Die Hard' did it too, when Brooce is dangling from a fire hose trying to get back in to the building and had to shoot the glass when he couldn't kick through it.
Good book, Stimpy..
It appeals to both the pedant and the scientist in me. I will be greatly cheered. I'm off to Amazon..
Pregnant women
all give birth on their backs despite it being the single worst position to give birth in.
It was one of the first things we learnt at ante-natal classes, and virtually all the women were as surprised as us men to learn that 'on your back birth' wasn't the default way of doing it.
Would that be NCT classes?
Who teach lots of things they hold dear, very few of which are backed up with anything resembling evidence?
Midwives and obstetricians deliver babies, not the NCT witches. I listened to the advice of the former. But we did meet some nice people at NCT.
Memories
Did you get the breast-feeding fascists who claimed using the bottle causes cancer ? We were the wrong audience (wife being in oncology.... an entertaining row ensued over 'evidence' and 'complete bollox').
Ah.. no..
We had the pain-control one. Discuss the relative worths of each method without asking the most important question: Does It Work? And make lots of sweeping statements about how terrible pharmacalogical pain-control is without having any evidence to back up your arguments.
I wasn't popular at NCT, least of all with the crystal-waving Earth Mother in our group who was, I am sure, Cressida out of Modern Parents.
In the end, wife wouldn't let me go any more.
Both NHS and NCT
ante natal classes said the same thing, and while I agree that there's a lot of bollocks in the NCT, it's pretty uncontrovertial (reams of credible research) that the "lithotomy" position isn't the best one for giving birth.
It is, however, convenient for doctors.
Lights, stirrups, action!
It seems that the on-the-back position is the default method in the States. I base this on watching grisly american real-life maternity ward shows that are on at 3am. Ironically, we would watch these while feeding our newborn twins a year or so ago.
Old cars honking
I once read in a blog somewhere - might have been here - that in any street scene in any movie set in the 1920s there will always be an old car driving past and that car will always sound its little horn.
This happens so often that it can ruin a movie, as you start concentrating on whether or not you're going to hear the horn honking and not on the dialogue.
Laser beams
Are always visible and are usually red.
When at home...
...the victim (or potential victim) of any violent crime will not have net curtains up. Ever.
Total Recall
They colonise Mars successfully but do not seem to have the sense to use bullet-proof glass to enclose the colony. It's vital to maintain the life-preserving atmosphere, but a single shot can break the glass and allow hundreds to die through lack of oxygen - poor planning indeed!
Well, presumably there
will never be any meteorites coming the other way either.
Microphones
Every time someone in public goes to speak into a Tannoy (sorry, public address) microphone for the first time it feeds back, they wince, touch said microphone and everything is subsequently okay. Feedback as a pathetic fallacy for being uncomfortable...
Cats
always meeow (or some other cat noise), as if the sound editor has to let us know that we're looking at a cat. This applies especially if the cat has been disturbed or "Shooed" by a human presence*
*Similarly applies to dogs.
Car central-locking
Have you ever heard ANY car make that two-tone noise they use in movies?
yes
They all do in America.
Thanks, M
That's me told!
My friends Alfa 159 does
(and it's not in the US)
Depends
on whether or not you're locking or unlocking......locking is a single tone.
Depends
on whether or not you're locking or unlocking......locking is a single tone.
Precautions
Are never taken.
Stretches credulity
Patrick Swayze as a Bouncer,yeah,right oh!
The whole of Robin Hood Prince of Thieves!
Elvis as an actor!
Swayze
Dalton was the best cooler in the business. No mere bouncer, he.
More inaccurate gun stuff..
A scene we've seen a 100 times before - the hero encounters a locked door, so produces his gun and blows the lock off.
Apparently it's virtually impossible to do. You're more likely to end up with a bullet ricocheting into your fleshy bits than to ever successfully shoot the lock open in just one shot.
.
Good point, that.
For blowing doors open, people with an inclination to such things use a shotgun which fires a big, solid slug. And they aim at the hinges, not the lock.
in swashbuckling days...
... sailing ships heading into the wind with their sails full; used to rankle my dad something rotten that did ...
Nobody says..
"er.." "y'know" "sort of thing" or stumbles on their words.
not even in ken loach films!
TV doctors are not good medical role models
In case you need to be told:
http://www.theage.com.au/lifestyle/wellbeing/tv-medical-malpractice-2010...
I'm sure you can't reduce complex medical or scientific processes to a point where all will be resolved by the last ad break. If I went on TV, do you think my dodgy back might be permanently cured by 9.25?
Oh, every hospital in a movie or TV show has perfectly functioning, up-to-date equipment and no-one ever has to worry about the medical bills. Doctors do it for the love of the job and humanity in general.
Except in ER
Where questions of insurance used to arise quite often and I'm sure they had a few instances of equipment malfunction over the years.
The Macguffin...
...is protected with
a) A laserbeam which will show up when sprinkled with talc/cocaine/dandruff
b) An intricate mesh of lasers which can be avoided by a sexy female gymnast.
Why not use a 9.99 motion detector from Homebase? Ever tried catching one of those out?
When a bloke goes back to lasses place..
..for a romantic interlude, "proceedings" are never interrupted by the lady's pet dog peering at the bloke from the bottom of the bed.
and growling in a faintly threatening manner
(the dog, I mean)
Nor Is there EVER
a blind cat knocking all sorts of ornaments,bottles,potions etc off the dressing table, scaring the bejazzus out of me, or indeed, the actor, thinking it was the ladies husband, or somesuch.
drawing a sword from a scabbard
produces a lovely metallic shhhiiiing sound. Which would make sense if scabbards were made of metal
Face-to-face meetings.
No quick phone calls to resolve things in films. Even the smallest matter must be discussed face-to-face.
After a couple have had sex..
...the girl will lay in bed with the covers up high to coyly conceal her breasts (or suddenly sport a vest) despite the fact shes recently exposed every inch of her flesh to the guy she's in bed with. Sarah Jessica Parker did this in every bedroom scene in Sex In The City, leaving all the nude stuff to Kim Catrall.
Invariably...
...either man or woman would dash off to the bathroom to wash their bits. It's true. I looked it up.
Frogs always say
'ribbit', the sound of Pacific treefrogs common in southern California. Whereas frogs around the world make umpteen other sounds, this is all you ever hear from film frogs.
rewinding or fast forwarding videotape
involves sound. No it doesn't.
sound on FF/REW video
Er, it can do. Domestic stuff doesn't but broadcast formats (Beta SP, Digi Beta, DV Cam etc) will make a hell of a racket when using the shuttle
Girls...
They invariably trip and fall down, spraining their ankle at the crucial moment.
Car keys - the person operating the car suddenly loses the ability to calmly take out the car key, put it in the ingnition, start the car and drive away, just because they are being pursued by a mad axeman, zombies etc.
Vampires - why do our intrepid vampire killers wait until just before dusk before going into the crypt to drive a stake into the bloodsucker's evil heart? Our vampire invariably wakes up just before the first hammer blow is struck. Surely better to seek out the vampire first thing in the morning when the sun has just come up and he/she is lying there knackered after a long night's feasting.
Football
always looks like its being played at snails pace with their feet tied together, so that our hero can weave his way through a static defence before unleashing a shot which always bulges the net, aided by a slow motion keeper diving out of the way.
And car chases....on the motorway/freeway are always clearly filmed at a ludicrous 15 mph or somesuch.
And car crashes....there's always a nice ramp so that a crashing car will do a midair rollover before crashing back to earth, despite said car only driving at 15 mph (see above).
I've just been reading the book about
the making of the Steve McQueen film 'Le Mans' and all the staged racing scenes were filmed at racing speeds - although they wisely employed professional drivers to do them.
Bullitt was pretty convincing too
But then Steve McQueen was apparently quite a useful driver. Too good in fact, and so clean round the corners they had to use a stunt driver to do the sliding-round-corners tyre-shredding stuff for the spectacle.
Steve McQueen was good at everything.
Because he was Steve McQueen.
He had a short but successful racing career in the US
with his Porsche 908
Tabloids
Tabloid papers in the movies never look right.
Journalists
are only ever working on one story, which they have all the time in the world to pursue. There's no news editor telling them to file a run of nibs and three picture stories before they even think about leaving the office. And loads of papers are still printed in black and white, for some reason.
In car chases
cars are allowed to drive at speed along pavements. Amazingly nobody dies or even gets hit. They simply jump out of the way. A fruit shop however will lose some of its stock it is displaying outside.
American houses
All Americans live in either apartments or colossal detatched houses in smart middle-class suburbs. No-one lives in a semi-detached ("dooplex") or a terraced house.
In my (limited) experience
a US duplex is a two-storey flat; what would be called a maisonette in the UK
I thought a duplex in
I thought a duplex in America was a semi-detached because of Annette Bening's line in American Beauty ("When I was growing up we lived in a duplex; we didn't even own our whole house").
I know what you mean about flats though, you see duplexes advertised in estate agents over here.
Allow me to interject...
"duplex" is a two unit dwelling split horizontally (ie a separate unit on each floor), and a "semi" is split vertically, ie semi-detached. A "ranch" is the equivalent of a bungalow. It's true to say that nobody in films appear to live in the ubiquitous "apartment complex" which is usually a sprawl of identical semis and duplexes bracketing a pool and sharing laundry facilities, with an on-site manager.
Cameron Crowe's grunge-era 'Singles'
was set in a just such a small apartment complex (albeit around a fountain rather than pool)
I've now noticed the cat thing
that someone said. Everytime a cat is on screen there is always a miow sound effect.
Cat's don't really miaow do they?....
..ours goes "aaaaaaachhhhhh" at best
Personally speaking...
- I do not always buy celery when I go shopping. And when I do it doesn't always stick out of the bag.
- When I switch the bedside light off the room does not get brighter.
- If I want to buy a bottle of wine I do not buy it in the local pub.
- Not all my fat friends are funny.
Something unusual happens
And an extra nearby who has had too much to drink - maybe an alcoholic sprawled on the pavement or just a slightly sozzled man sitting at a dinner table - does a double take, looks at the wine/spirits bottle they are drinking and throws the bottle away. Or something like that. The extra who has had too much to drink is never female.
And in at least 50% of car chases
A car smashes into a large stack of empty cardboard boxes or a fruit stand
Apropos of nothing
My mum was from Fazackerly; Scarisbrick Road in fact
Nobody ever stare at a computer screen going..
"..No..no!.." while vainly pressing "escape" and "control/alt/delete".
Nobody ever stares at a computer screen going..
"..No..no!.." while vainly pressing "escape" and "control/alt/delete".
Or hits the "post comment" button..
..twice.
Nightime scenes
The sound of crickets/cicadas at night is more common in films than it is in real life. Where I live, they only come out for a few weeks in late summer.
Sound in space.
It just isn't possible. Even lasers and explosions. IT. CAN'T. HAPPEN.
Couldn't...
...the sound travel through all that dark matter that we don't know about?