Watching Bones, and Pilant seems to be spying on Booth and Brennen using the radio or whatever it is in their kitchen. Now I am not really up on technology, but I know that there are tools that you can use to scan a room for unauthorized transmitting devices, yet it never seems to occur to Booth to get one and scan his own home for bugs … and he knows Pilant is bugging him somehow.
It really does bother me that Booth can’t seem to figure out how to pass a message to Brennen to let her know why he can’t marry her [the threat from Pilant] I mean, hells bells, write a freaking note and have Sweets pass it to her, or something.
There was an episode that made me give up on Rizzoli & Isles. Some sort of terrorist plot has shut down Boston and the police/detectives are all running around trying to thwart it.
It seems that on that particular day, EVERYONE IN BOSTON forgot their cell phones at home, which would have resolved the crisis quite handily.
The Eiger Sanction. Really? You didn’t know it was George Kennedy? Walked with a limp, part of a fucking elite mountaineering crew? But you couldn’t eliminate the others with… something?
Fuck, that movie sucked. The Goddamn Archer parody made more sense.
White House Down is the world’s most annoying movie to watch due to how many plot holes it has.
Such as the terrorists literally consist of 8 or so guys with light weapons and maybe one or two rocket launchers, and yet they’re able to keep the entire Army at bay (who also have tanks that get destroyed with a single RPG to the front) despite the fact there’s really no reason for the Army to not just go in and destroy these guys once it was clear the President had been secured. It gets even dumber when the terrorists are all on the roof of the White House fighting off literally multiple Army helicopters with only a single air-to-air missile launcher. You’d think 8 guys on a roof-top would be pretty easily swept aside by either a single attack helicopter or multiple snipers but yeah these guys are somehow the greatest terrorists of all time with their one Stinger missile knocking out multiple helicopters taking no casualties in return.
Also the terrorists somehow shoot down Air Force One with an ICBM. Not in terms of “having the nuclear rocket explode near it and knock it out with an EMP”, they somehow literally get the ICBM to physically hit it, somehow.
I was particularly irritated that every member of the secret service in effect left cover, and presented their chest to be shot. Not a single one practiced basically any ability in the slightest. I’d expect young children to at least not walk out in the bullets. Yet they all did.
This is a minor one, but it annoys me. In the final boss battle in License to Kill, James Bond (Timothy Dalton) fights with Franz Sanchez (Robert Davi) over, under and around the back of a tanker truck Sanchez has been using to smuggle drugs. At one point Sanchez swings a machete at Bond, unintentionally severing the truck’s brake lines which causes it to slowly roll downhill and eventually over an embankment to crash.
Thing is, these are clearly air brakes (as is standard for large trucks) and we get treated to multiple shots of the severed lines futilely hissing away and the driver’s attempts to stop the truck before he bails out. Air brake systems are deliberately designed so a breach causes the brakes to clamp down, not fail. In fact, pressure in the lines is needed to make the brakes release so the truck can be driven in the first place.
On an unrelated personal note, I thank the anonymous donor that paid for my charter membership.
In the 1998 remake of Rear Window, Jason Thorpe claims he has an eidetic memory and he read all the papers on the office building’s renovations while recovering from the accident that left him paralyzed. Yet he didn’t know that Julian Kemp designed the statue for outside of the building?
You could drive a motorized wheelchair through that plot hole.
A discussion in another thread reminded me of a massive plot hole in The Living Daylights. At the beginning, Bond is assigned to secure Georgi Koskov’s defection. A sniper will be trying to kill Koskov, and Bond’s job is to kill the sniper. At the last moment, Bond recognizes that she’s not a professional and only shoots the rifle out of her hands. He spends much of the rest of the movie trying to figure out why. He even befriends her and finds out that she’s Koskov’s girlfriend. He wants her to lead him to Koskov, but she has no idea what his plans are.
How is this supposed to have happened? She’s not a sniper, she’s a cellist. I want to hear the conversation that must have taken place just before the events in the movie.
*“Hey, sweetie, would you do me a favor? During the intermission of your concert, could you go up to the third floor and point this rifle out the window?”
That’s the kind of thing that happens when the movies try to mine random elements from Ian Fleming’s writings (For Your Eyes Only is arguably the worst in this regard, grabbing bits from at least three different Fleming stories and trying to jam them together like ill-fitting puzzle pieces). The short story “The Living Daylights” is a taut (albeit highly contrived) cold-war thriller in which Bond sets up a sniper post in West Berlin, overlooking the Berlin Wall (or at least a gap in the still-under-construction wall), waiting for a deep cover agent to make his escape from the East, which could come any time in the next three days. Bond observes a women’s orchestra enter a building on the East side, including a tall attractive blonde carrying a cello case. Bond can hear the music each night and sees shooters at the windows, waiting to take the agent out as soon as he appears. The primary threat is “Trigger”, the code name for a expert Soviet sniper about whom little is known. He figures the orchestra is there to make noise to cover the sound of shooting when the agent starts his run. Bond’s mission is to take out “Trigger”, but he’ll only get a shot when Trigger leans forward to snipe the agent. Bond can only see the barrel of Trigger’s rifle and everybody waits silent and tense. Bond meantime has been mildly fantasizing about the blonde cellist.
When the agent finally appears, Trigger leans forward for the shot and Bond recognizes her as the cellist (who likely carried her rifle and gear in her cello case). Instead of just killing her, he adjusts his shot to hit her rifle instead, possibly shooting her in the left hand but sparing her life (scaring “the living daylights” out of her). The agent gets across and the other shooters open up at Bond and it’s a big mess for a couple of seconds.
Bond’s spotter is annoyed that Bond didn’t kill Trigger and says he’ll write a report to that effect. After three days of tension, Bond doesn’t really give a damn.
White House Down’s biggest plot hole is the President is not more important than the country. No one is going to change international policy to save the President. God, that movie annoyed me! Everyone is so stupid.
Yeah, 30 minutes into the movie there’s the first escape attempt by the secret service and the President where they jump into the Presidential Limo and try to get escape via crashing it through the gate where basically the entire US Army is waiting to rescue them. But when they’re about to reach the Army the terrorists take two Secret Service SUV’s with mounted machine guns and chased after the limo and start opening fire on it with the guns in full view of the entire US Army at less than 50 yards away. Why none of the Army guys open fire on the clearly terrorist driven SUVs to rescue the President is never explained, instead the Limo goes on an overly-long car chase around the White House grounds and then it’s back to square one. The movie could have literally been over at that point if ANYBODY took a shot at the terrorists driving the SUV’s even just a non-lethal tire shot if they were still concerned about hostages in the vehicles. But nope, everyone just stands there and lets the terrorists do whatever the hell they want.
I don’t know that that’s necessarily the cause. A lot of the movies fall apart if you think of the characters as people, rather than as chess pieces in the villain’s Evil Plan[sup]TM[/sup]. Imagine the conversation that could have taken place during Moonraker:
I think I’ve read The Living Daylights, but it was ages ago.