The one I hate is when a peripheral character in a movie manifests a homophobic sentiment. Once that happens, you know he will be trying to kiss or seduce the main character of the same sex. It’s a guarantee!
I think that Austin Powers put an end to the drawn out “villain tries to kill hero but yaps too much” scenarios with its mockery of it. “Begin the painfully slow dipping mechanism!”
Minor nitpick: most mid-range or higher quality handguns are fairly accurate, even out to 300 feet.
The short sight distance between front-and-rear sights is what makes handguns more difficult to aim accurately at distance than a rifle. But this is from the perspective of the shooter.
The greatest limitation is mostly the shooter, not the machine.
Wait a minute, there’s a rest of the world outside the USA? Anyway, this is something that happened in 28 Days Later which started out with some plucky zombie survivors in London, England.
Yes, that’s what I meant. People like to believe that police officers are highly trained shooters, but most aren’t. And even shouldn’t be trained at that range as the majority of shooting they’d get into are close range.
Although pistol calibers really do have lower velocity and energy than rifle calibers, so the potential range is longer.
They were saved at the end by IIRC a functional Finnish Air Force. And I think the second one (didn’t see it) had some other countries survive. But really, Britain is bad for a zombie outbreak due to size. The worst country in Europe would probably be Malta (8th most dense), or England discounting the rest of Britain (8th on a different list). Well those and the Vatican (6th) and Bermuda (9th), but those are either surrounded by another country or remote.
Malta’s an island, isn’t it? That would both be a problem to the people in Malta and a huge benefit to those not in Malta in the event of a Maltese zombie outbreak.
I decided just now, while typing this sentence, that Independence Day is my favorite bad movie, so I must defend it. Or at least ask what the bleep you’re talking about. When in ID does the Will Smith or the Jeff Goldblum character violate specific orders or common sense in the way you suggest? The only character I can recall doing that is the Harry Connick Jr. character, who disregarded instructions to put on his oxygen mask while flying a jet and rightly died for it.
My dad is a retired Washington State Patrolman, but spent his entire 36-year career in the Commercial Vehicle Enforcement division (those are the guys who man the weigh stations for trucks). For the greater portion of his career, his division was unarmed because it wasn’t thought they needed to be armed. Though eventually, the powers-that-be realized that simply wearing a uniform makes people a target for whackos and decided to arm them.
Anyway, despite being unarmed on the job for years, my dad has always been a shooting enthusiast and practices regularly at public shooting ranges. From time to time he used to show up at the State Patrol’s shooting ranges, to informally compete with the troopers (who, of course, are armed on the job), and according to him he routinely outshot them all.
I hate, hate , HATE the trope where , in a sequel, the relatives of bad guys who got killed try to avenge their deaths. As if the good guy had no right at all to defend himself.
If you follow a someone long enough they’ll eventually realize they love you and you’ll live happily ever after. Because you want them you deserve to have them. That’s how life works.
Or, IRL, you get hit w/ restraining order after restraining order until you wind up medicated into a stupor and committed because you’re dangerously attached to someone who doesn’t and never will love you, and it’s unsafe to let you walk the streets.
This, at least, is a comprehensible motive with roots going back to the oldest stories humans tell, not to mention real life clear back to the Neolithic and probably earlier.
As for why women in ads are smarter than men: Women do most of the shopping, or at least so advertisers think, and sucking up to them is good business. In sitcoms, it’s down more to old-fashioned sexism (poking fun at the dominant one is good fun, poking fun at the powerless is in bad taste) and the fact the median age of TV viewership is old enough to just be that sexist unconsciously. (No, that’s not an excuse; it is an explanation.)
I hate all the tropes that promote anti-intellectualism, the idea that learning things is inherently bad or limiting, or that superstition is somehow ‘just as valid’. What’s worse is when this gets married to sexism: Women are supposed to be intuitive and men are logical, as if there’s a divide between intuition and logic in the first place.
What’s even worse, most writers have no idea how logic works. The logical characters aren’t even robots; they’re idiotic robots who can’t accept that the world is round because they personally haven’t walked around it. Real logic is all about finding ways to sort through provisional hypotheses and accept ones that best fit the facts currently in evidence.
Intuition hardly comes off much better. Intuition isn’t about jumping randomly from idiotic premise to unsupported conclusion; it’s about finding connections between facts already known through the brain’s native pattern matching skills. You use it to guide future logical thought, not as a replacement for it.
Logic without intuition has no goal. Intuition without logic has no support.
Usually the main character will end up with the arrogant slacker womanizer.
Much like rom-coms where the heroine ends up with the womanizing jerk (uh…isn’t that what womanizing jerks do? Make you feel special by being with them?) the hero is more often than not:
-unemployed or marginally employed (when he isn’t inexplicably wealthy)
-frequest drug or alchohol user
-womanizer, or at least sexist and misogynistic
-poor impulse control
-manipulative
-anti-authority
-anti intellectual (if not outright stupid)
-emotionally stunted
The antagonist is more often than not:
-Highly educated
-Ambitious
-Employed, usually in a position of authority
Even when the protagonist is a smart, highly ambitious person, the “lesson learned” is often to “loosen up” and “not be so serious”.
Ironic you should say this, because when the movie came out, several prominent critics said they *liked *how it *dispensed *with the usual mass-hysteria clichés, in favor of a more realistically nuanced and generally less over-the-top scenario.
See, that’s the part many people in Parts Abroad don’t get. Here, pets aren’t family, they’re animals. While some of your relatives may be closer to counting as “general fauna” than “humanity”, a dog is a dog is a dog.
In my aunt’s words re. expensive medical treatment for her dying dog, “I would have spent that money on my second husband. While we were still together, I would have spent it on my first husband. I definitely would have spent that and more on my children. But on a dog? It’s a fucking DOG! It’s not a person! You don’t spend that kind of money on a DOG!”
Lets cause a distraction by making ALL the sprinkler heads in a building go off by:
A: Lighting paper on fire and waving it below a smoke head /sprinkler head.
B: Holding a match under a smoke head/sprinkler head.
I HATE this because it would never happen that way! Movie producers…do some research please.
It would cause the building fire system to go into alarm…MAYBE (Depending on the system) OR cause water to discharge from ONE sprinkler head… NEVER all of them!