I will nitpick this by saying that I think you are confusing the Elijah Wood thread with the Tea Leoni thread. Tea’s character, an MSNBC newscaster, doesn’t survive; she gives her seat on her station’s escape helicopter to a mother with a young child (Dr. Weaver from ER) and goes to her father’s house on the shore to die with him.
Yep. Tea Leoni just went and died. Her decision was fan-wankable, stupid as it was.
Elijah Wood, however, did skooter up onto a mountainside that nobody else had even thought of walking up, via a fairly empty section of road. Apparently nobody else thought of getting out of their cars or even using motorbikes.
(This is a film which has some good acting and just … fails.)
One thing I notice is that TV shows that are set in cities in the Central and Mountain time zones have prime time that runs from 7pm to 10pm. Yet you always here of the characters watching the 11 O’Clock news. This is wrong. It would be the 10 O’Clock news in the Central and Mtn Time zones.
Evidently no TV writer has ever come from the Central or Mtn Time zone.
Could the historic Vlad “Dracula” Tepes have actually been a vampire within the context of this book? Since he lived in the 15th century then he’d have become a vampire well before 1850. Of course, if the vampire were talking to any ordinary Englishman then this reference would have made no sense to them, but it could be fanwanked away if it was a comment to another vampire or experienced vampire hunter.
I have recently come to realise that almost all of Hollywood’s creatives were born or brought up in California, usually the LA area, and that’s how they managed to get jobs in the industry. If you live in Utah or Alabama, or worse in a different country, you’re never going to be a successful screenwriter, so give up now.
A classic (I’m surprised that nobody has mention it so far) is in the Sherlock Holmes short story “The Specked Band”. In this one a trained snake was used to murder the victim. The hooker was that the snake’s master would recall it by whistling. And of course, snakes are all stone deaf. But I still love all the Sherlock Holmes stories.
However, I’m a lot less forgiving with modern authors. I just read the first half of Michael Crichton’s last book - published posthumously - and ran into this howler. Two pirates were discussing the characteristics of a Spanish Galleon that they had just captured, and one of them complained that it could make only 8 knots as it was in such bad repair. Stated that it should be able to make 16 knots.
Good God! Those old galleons probably could sail at 5 knots on a good day. Stopped reading instantly.
Oh well, maybe if Crichton had been still alive he would have reread the book before publication and caught this. Maybe.
No, the context of the remark was “I’m not like the vampires you’ve read about.” And the historical Dracula could not have been a vampire in this setting - in the book vampires were a seperate species and were not transformed humans.
In that case you’re right, Varney or maybe Lord Ruthven would have been a lot more appropriate.
Not quite. It is true they lack an external ear structure and ear drum, and most of the vibrations they pick up are through the ground; but they can and do recieve cochlear signals from airborne vibrations too.
Joan Baez’s Diamonds and Rust unambiguously uses “light-year” as a unit of time. Pisses me off every time I hear the song.
Naturally there’s a trope for this.
Especially considering that her father is a well regarded physicist.
But that would have slowed the scene down and bumped you from background performer to principal, making you much more expensive.
Maybe she was a repeat customer and the bartender knew her preference. Or maybe it was his last day and he didn’t give a damn.
Ah, that makes sense. It still drives me batty.
I’ve been trying to remember if it was that godawful Tom Cruise bartender movie, but I can’t force myself to watch it so I can check. I had a bar manager point out to me that money only changed hands once in that entire movie…it was like all the drinks were free. 
One that was just mentioned to me by a coworker: in, he thinks, the same Mission Impossible in which Tom Cruise’s character mixes Seville’s Easter and Valencia’s Fallas, there is a scene where he is being pursued by a modern car with Madrid plates.
Only, the plates have the M, then four numbers and a single letter, making them from the 50s.
Obviously, it should be Parsec.
I liked The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I was looking forward to The Girl who Played with Fire.
I didn’t end up liking the second one as much because a) both the mystery and the resolution revolved around a ridiculous volume of coincidences and b) The murder weapon was a .45 Magum Colt revolver.
There has never been a cartridge called the .45 Magnum commercially produced anywhere in the world, and certainly not a factory-produced weapon chambered for it, but just about every time the weapon was referred to in the story, the author took pains to say Colt .45 Magnum.
Why the hell couldn’t Larsson be bothered to reference a list of available handgun cartridges and then just pick one?
Well, there is a .45 Winchester Magnum cartridge for handguns, so it seems like an understandable mixup.
“Sugarland Express,” Steven Spielberg’s first feature film. In it an escaped convict and his girlfriend, played by William Atherton and Goldie Hawn, are headed toward Sugar Land, which is supposedly on the Mexican border. In reality Sugar Land is a suburb of Houston. In fact there’s a shot at the beginning of the movie that shows the intersection of Alt-90 and U.S. 59, right where Sugar Land is located and where the couple begins their journey.
When I first saw the movie I was confused, thinking, “Why the hell are they driving all through the night to get to Sugar Land. It’s right there. They shouldn’t be driving more than a few miles.” It took me awhile to figure out that the movie got its geography reversed - the couple actually starts their journey at the real Sugar Land (at Alt-90 and 59) and ends at the fictional Sugar Land, which is about where the real life Del Rio is located.
It makes my head hurt explaining this.
Another Tom Clancy whoopsie. I can’t remember which novel it was, but at the very beginning, a super-duper analyst person discovers something of critical national security importance while working at a satellite listening station in Sunnyvale, CA (presumably meant to be the real-life Onizuka Air Station). He jumps on a plane at LAX for Washington to report the situation. However, Sunnyvale is located in the San Francisco Bay Area…the analyst should flown out of SFO, OAK, or SJC. Obviously Clancy fell into the “well it must be near LA” trap that many California set works do.