I was wondering if anyone picked up on a movie flaw because they had expertise on something and that most people would not notice.
The reason I ask is because this happened to me last night while watching Transporter 2. I’m about to spoil the end of the movie, but it’s not like it had a dramatic twist, so I’m not going to box it.
Anyway, at the end of the movie, the transporter jumps onto the nosewheel of a plane and then magically appears inside the plane. The reason I say magically, is because I work as a structural engineer for that type of plane. There is no way to get from the wheel well to the cabin short of using a blow torch.
What really cracked me up is when he just showed up in the crew rest ( a small room where one of the pilots can sleep on long flights). If he had blow torched his way into the plane, he would have come up under the cockpit.
I realized that this is a minor nitpick compared to the other things that happen in the movie, but it annoyed me because it was blatantly impossible. I’m not even going to get into the plane surviving the crash into the ocean.
So, how about it? Any movie flaws you’ve picked out just because you are an expert on the subject?
Not me, but someone else on the SDMB pointed out that in Flightplan, when Jodi is running around in the bowels of the plane…well there just isn’t that much space to run around in. They said that all of the areas around the passenger area are completly filled with duct work and wiring. If there was enough space for a person to get through, they would have used it for more ductwork or more wires.
My friend Ted and I were watching Howard Stern’s autobiographical movie Private Parts. At or towards the end of the film, there’s a big outdoor party/concert in Stern’s honor, with AC/DC playing. Ted and I looked at each other at the same time and say, “Hey, that drum kit wasn’t even produced until 1996!” (The concert depicted in the film was supposed to be 1989 or 1990, IIRC.)
There’s an Arnold Schwarzenegger film (probably Eraser) where he’s on an airliner about to depart for an 11-hour flight, but doesn’t want to be. He knocks out the guy who’s minding him, makes his way to the galley, down the elevator, through the cargo hold to the front wheel well. He climbs through a hatch and is on the front gear leg as the plane takes off. He lets go and falls into a swamp beyond the end of the runway. Then gets up and walks away.
I did not need any special knowlege to know that it was complete and utter crap.
It used to be pretty standard on TV shows that whenever anybody was flying anywhere, we’d see an establishing shot of the plane taking off, and then a shot from the belly of the plane of the landing gear going up. My dad was a pilot, and he used to always catch them when the two planes didn’t match. Now I do it.
Don’t get me started on the aviation flaws in Die Hard 2.
Computers are my other specialty, but it would be shorter to list the movies that have ever gotten anything right about computers.
I’m not really an expert on South American livestock or anything, but the llama in Troy never ceases to piss me off. A freaking llama . . . in ancient Greece. Honestly, who says, “We need livestock in this market scene . . . How 'bout a llama? Eminently Greek animal, the llama.” No, it’s not.
Knitting in movies is invariably messed up, though. The actresses (usually) who are doing it are just holding it in their hands and restlessly moving the needles against each other. Knitting isn’t even that hard–you can learn both the knit and purl stitch in an hour, and after an afternoon of knitting, be thoroughly prepared to bluff your way through a movie.
In the Prince & Me, there’s a scene that takes place in a standard stanchion barn that is way too clean. Not a spot of manure in sight. You just don’t gather together 60+ cows and not expect one of them to poop while they’re in the barn. That’s ridiculous–they’re cows. They eat and poop and give milk and have babies. I imagine the person whose job it was to run around scooping up all the cow pies and washing down the area had a hell of a fun time with that.
Well living in Southern California I found it quite humorous in Charlie’s Angeles that a high speed race car car chase started at the California Speedway in Fontana and ended on the Vincent Thomas Bridge in San Pedro, 70 miles and several Freeways interchanges away.
I was wondering if anyone picked up on a movie flaw because they had expertise on something and that most people would not notice.
The reason I ask is because this happened to me last night while watching Transporter 2. I’m about to spoil the end of the movie, but it’s not like it had a dramatic twist, so I’m not going to box it.
Anyway, at the end of the movie, the transporter jumps onto the nosewheel of a plane and then magically appears inside the plane. The reason I say magically, is because I work as a structural engineer for that type of plane. There is no way to get from the wheel well to the cabin short of using a blow torch.
What really cracked me up is when he just showed up in the crew rest ( a small room where one of the pilots can sleep on long flights). If he had blow torched his way into the plane, he would have come up under the cockpit.
I realized that this is a minor nitpick compared to the other things that happen in the movie, but it annoyed me because it was blatantly impossible. I’m not even going to get into the plane surviving the crash into the ocean.
So, how about it? Any movie flaws you’ve picked out just because you are an expert on the subject?
Erm… That didn’t sound quite right. I wasn’t criticizing your comment, simply saying that in this particular case I think the producers knew that what they were doing was completely ridiculous and were trying to see how many outrageous situations they could put into the movie.
I know, that’s why I’m always impressed when I see the knitter onscreen is a real knitter. I’ve only seen Judging Amy a few times, but it’s pretty clear that Tyne Daly is a serious knitter: she’s doing real work when she’s knitting onscreen. And watching Bette Davis in The Letter–she’s crocheting lace, not knitting–it’s clear that Miss Davis was a lifelong, hardcore crocheter of lace. (Although it’s annoying, in that movie, that the shawl she wears, which she’s supposed to have crocheted, is actually bobbin lace and not crochet.)
In Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte, one of the characters says something about contacting the county sheriff. The move is based in Louisiana, which doesn’t have counties. Their equivalent is parishes.
Although, after the coverage of Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana’s geography might not be so esoteric any more.
(And who the heck ever says county sheriff, anyway, instead of just “sheriff?”)
It is rarely possible to get all of the sprinkler heads in a building pouring out water by setting off the fire alarm system. This would require the system to be set up with open heads. This type of sprinkler system is called a deluge system and is not very common at all in office buildings, schools and the like. The deluge systems I have worked on have all been in industrial settings.
That’s a good one, lissener. I have rarely seen anyone knit properly on any size of screen. They usually stick needles in wool and just jerk them around a little bit. It’s even funnier when the piece that they supposedly have already knitted is some kind of fancy-schmancy cable knit or pattern that an experienced knitter would approach with trepidation.
The computer stuff is pretty standard for them not even trying to get right. We were watching something the other day (I think it was “Stand/Off”), and the lady who was supposed to be typing didn’t even have her fingers touching the keys.
Things I often notice is medical stuff (as I’ve posted here recently.) A show that gets medical stuff right gets my attention, they’re usually so sloppy about it. My husband must be getting tired of hearing me rant at the tv - “Oh, come on - that isn’t right at all!” etc, etc.
Just about any movie that involves weapons has so many mistakes it’s jarring to someone with any amount of training at all.
Don’t get me started on movies filmed in LA that jump to locations miles away by turning a corner. New Yorkers can spot the same things, as can the residents of Vancouver, these days.
I knew what you meant. (And thanks for getting my back, OneCent.) I’ve never seen the whole movie. (Obviously, since I didn’t even know what movie it was), but I’ve caught that scene twice while channel surfing and it’s just so egregiously preposterous that I laugh my ass off, and then keep surfing.
My ex and I were watching House on DVD last night. She’s a Med Tech by profession. As House’s crack team of doctors slaved away over microscopes and culture dishes, she quipped, “Nice that they do their own lab work. Nice that they even know how to.”
It used to bug me in movies where they would use comic books. Often a character will describe what is happening in the comic. And 9 times out of 10 nothing even close to that happens in that comic.
Worst offender is “True Romance”, where Slater’s character is describing a world war 2 comic with a gritty hero fighting a nazi and it is matched with shots showing an issue of Sleepwalker a mid-90s comic about a monster hero who comes out while his host is asleep. Nothing matches at all. I don’t understand why we had to be shown the comic if it wasn’t going to make any sense.
I think “The Ice Storm” even got the right issue of Fantastic Four as is described in the movie. If not the right issue it was the right era of the comic.
More egregious than that is Mr. & Mrs. Smith (the Pitt/Jolie film, not the film staring Carole Lombard and Robert Montgomery). One minute they’re on the run from their suburban Washington D.C. (or maybe New York City) home, the next they’re racing down the 710 into Long Beach. There’s even an aside about picking up a boat in (Playa) Del Ray, so it’s not like it was an unintentional slip. Either they blew across the country in a minivan in record time, or the Smiths live in a fictional Los Angeles–one with leafy-treed new home developments and a large downtown area with many tall buildings.
I notice firearm errors with a regularity disturbing to fellow viewers. Technical and computer errors–mostly only discernable by a small subset of people–are rife, as well. One particulary bothersome set of errors is lockpicking; I can’t begin to estimate the number of times I’ve seen someone stick a knife blade or nail file into a lock and popped it open in seconds. Even with a snapper or a rake pick, you still have to have a tension wrench to keep the pins bound while snapping or raking the lock. There are pick guns that don’t require a seperate wrench, but not usually the ones used, and they almost never work with a single movement as shown on t.v., either. Is it really that hard to have a locksmith show the actor how to do it right?
Not a goof, but since I work in broadcasting, the sight of the Storm Trooper using a Grass Valley switcher to fire the Death Star in Star Wars was enough to jerk me out of the movie mindset.
Regarding knitting, I understand the actress who plays Rosario on Will and Grace knows how to knit, and they often showed her knitting in scenes.
