# Dumb things in movies **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [February 28, 2016, 9:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dumb-things-in-movies/747433 "2016-02-28T21:21:28Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 6
**Author:** ![terentii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terentii/32/212_2.png) [@terentii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/terentii)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2016, 8:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dumb-things-in-movies/747433/101 "2016-03-02T20:18:37Z")
> [@Biffy\_the\_Elephant\_Shrew](#): > > I want to see a dinosaur movie where the hulking predatorsaurus rears back and emits a blood-curdling “Cock-a-doodle-doooo!” Even better would be an ear-shattering screech like a seagull. That would be scary as hell! :eek: I once found my cat after he’d been lost in the wilderness for three weeks by following his screeches (birdlike, not catlike; more like loud croaks, actually!) when I called his name. I felt like I was hunting a giant roc! ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2016, 8:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dumb-things-in-movies/747433/102 "2016-03-02T20:23:07Z")
> [@terentii](#): > > Even better would be an ear-shattering screech like a seagull. That would be scary as hell! :eek: > > I once found my cat after he’d been lost in the wilderness for three weeks by following his screeches (birdlike, not catlike; more like loud croaks, actually!) when I called his name. I felt like I was hunting a giant roc! Doesn’t the first _Jurassic Park_ movie give you that? In the scene where the velociraptor s are hunting the kids in the resort kitchen, the first 'raptor enters the room and emits a high-pitched screech, calling to the other. ---
**Author:** ![terentii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terentii/32/212_2.png) [@terentii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/terentii)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2016, 8:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dumb-things-in-movies/747433/103 "2016-03-02T20:24:20Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#): > > Doesn’t the first _Jurassic Park_ movie give you that? In the scene where the velociraptor s are hunting the kids in the resort kitchen, the first 'raptor enters the room and emits a high-pitched screech, calling to the other. Yep, that’s what my cat sounded like! 😃 (Damned if he didn’t just jump up on the arm of my couch as I was typing that! :eek: ) ---
**Author:** ![Patch](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/a183cd/32.png) [@Patch](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Patch)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2016, 3:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dumb-things-in-movies/747433/104 "2016-03-03T03:34:00Z")
> [@Biffy\_the\_Elephant\_Shrew](#): > > I want to see a dinosaur movie where the hulking predatorsaurus rears back and emits a blood-curdling “Cock-a-doodle-doooo!” I think [Caveman](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082146/?ref_=fn_al_tt_4) did that. ---
**Author:** ![Wallaby](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/dc4da7/32.png) [@Wallaby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wallaby)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2016, 4:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dumb-things-in-movies/747433/105 "2016-03-03T04:26:13Z")
Space guns that: a)mildly injure victims (good guy gets shot and immediately grunts ‘Aaargh! My arm!’ through gritted teeth. Of course, they are instantly fatal to bad guys, so I guess that’s good). b) fire coloured beams so slowly they can be seen and avoided in real time. Seriously, they are lesss effective than a mid 1800s pistol. Twice the size, twice as shiny - less than half as potent. ---
**Author:** ![Dale\_Sams](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/779978/32.png) [@Dale\_Sams](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dale_Sams)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2016, 5:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dumb-things-in-movies/747433/106 "2016-03-03T05:29:20Z")
> [@davida03801](#): > > The Revenant when Leo’s character was in the river during mid-winter for that length of time. Per the movie that had to be a substantial amount of time. > > Ever been in river water in mid-winter ? I have up to waist deep and I don’t think that scene is credible. Leo has some experience in defying hypothermia 🙂 I think I’d last about 15 seconds in the Atlantic or a river up to my waist. ---
**Author:** ![Dale\_Sams](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/779978/32.png) [@Dale\_Sams](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dale_Sams)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2016, 5:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dumb-things-in-movies/747433/107 "2016-03-03T05:32:37Z")
> [@RivkahChaya](#): > > Or you can bludgeon someone with it. > > Generally, you have to be registered, ie, licensed, to carry, but the gun itself doesn’t have to be. You can carry any gun you own. > > * * * > > I have a very specific bone to pick with _The Good Wife_\*. They keep wanting to do death penalty stories, so they have executions in Indiana, because the show is set in Chicago, and Illinois doesn’t have the death penalty. > > Well, sorry, but since the show has been on the air, the only executions in Indiana have been the three fictional ones on _The Good Wife_. Since the moratorium was lifted in the 70s, there have only been a few more than a dozen executions here, IIRC, and one of those was Timothy McVeigh, which was a federal execution in Terre Haute. > > Also, death row in Indiana is in Indianapolis (Terre Haute is even further away), which is about 5 1/2 hours from downtown Chicago. But the characters zip back and forth as though all they have to do is hop the border, which granted is about 75 minutes from Chicago. > > This is not to mention that no one facing the death penalty would hire some general purpose out-of-state lawyer. He’d want a DP specialist, and a lawyer like that would not practice in a non-DP state. > > Been wantin’ to say that for a while. > \*Yes it’s a TV show, not a movie, but this has been bugging me. That reminds me…“That’s treason!!” I even tried to create its own trope page. Treason is incredibly difficult to prosecute. And yet TV shows…and real people on FB…cannot stop saying it. ---
**Author:** ![DrCube](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/a3d4f5/32.png) [@DrCube](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrCube)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2016, 1:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dumb-things-in-movies/747433/108 "2016-03-03T13:36:09Z")
> [@Wallaby](#): > > Space guns that: > > a)mildly injure victims (good guy gets shot and immediately grunts ‘Aaargh! My arm!’ through gritted teeth. Of course, they are instantly fatal to bad guys, so I guess that’s good). > b) fire coloured beams so slowly they can be seen and avoided in real time. > > Seriously, they are lesss effective than a mid 1800s pistol. Twice the size, twice as shiny - less than half as potent. Maybe that’s the point? You really don’t want to be shooting high powered artillery inside a sealed spaceship in the hard vacuum of deep space. Something that will bounce off walls harmlessly, supposing you can still wound people or hurt them enough to make them stop, would be a decent defense weapon in that kind of environment. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2016, 4:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dumb-things-in-movies/747433/109 "2016-03-03T16:32:47Z")
> [@Chefguy](#): > > Bad guy gets kicked square in the cajones, but is able to get up and chase the good guy within 30 seconds. Ain’t happening, people. Why would being hit in the furniture hurt? ---
**Author:** ![Casey1505](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/dc4da7/32.png) [@Casey1505](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Casey1505)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2016, 4:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dumb-things-in-movies/747433/110 "2016-03-03T16:52:19Z")
> [@BobLibDem](#): > > Forgot to mention the routine where the cop dips his pinky fingernail into the white powder, touches it to his tongue…“Yep, cocaine!” Why wait for the crime lab to safely test the product with something more admissible in court than your tongue? Why no, just put whatever unknown substance it might me onto your tongue- what could possibly go wrong with that? Exactly. I’m no cop, but even I know that you can’t tell it’s cocaine just by tasting. You have to smell it, too. ---
**Author:** ![Boyo\_Jim](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/87869e/32.png) [@Boyo\_Jim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Boyo_Jim)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2016, 4:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dumb-things-in-movies/747433/111 "2016-03-03T16:56:10Z")
Deeply! You gotta snort it way down. ---
**Author:** ![carnivorousplant](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnivorousplant/32/3563_2.png) [@carnivorousplant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carnivorousplant)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2016, 5:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dumb-things-in-movies/747433/112 "2016-03-03T17:03:12Z")
> [@Nava](#): > > Why would being hit in the furniture hurt? I have no idea, but I assure you that it does. ---
**Author:** ![drewder](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/57b2e6/32.png) [@drewder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/drewder)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2016, 5:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dumb-things-in-movies/747433/113 "2016-03-03T17:11:28Z")
When you’ve got your gun pointed at Bruce Lee and you stand their just looking at him to give him time to disarm you and kick you in the face. ---
**Author:** ![drewder](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/57b2e6/32.png) [@drewder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/drewder)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2016, 5:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dumb-things-in-movies/747433/114 "2016-03-03T17:23:54Z")
> [@Hilarity\_N.Suze](#): > > Let’s make some androids that look just like humans and fill them with blood! WTF > > Dinosaurs sound like lions/tigers because of course they do. I mean, they’re reptiles. Why don’t they hiss? Why don’t they sound like giant chickens? > > Someone hangs up on you in a movie, you get dial tone. Huh? I always get that voice. “If you’d like to make a call…” No dial tone for minutes. > > All right, not a lot of people have seen androids and live dinosaurs, but who hasn’t been hung up on? I’ll never understand giving androids free will. ---
**Author:** ![carnivorousplant](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnivorousplant/32/3563_2.png) [@carnivorousplant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carnivorousplant)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2016, 5:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dumb-things-in-movies/747433/115 "2016-03-03T17:50:21Z")
> [@drewder](#): > > When you’ve got your gun pointed at Bruce Lee and you stand their just looking at him to give him time to disarm you and kick you in the face. [Marlowe](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tX2H6LI_wm0) got him. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2016, 5:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dumb-things-in-movies/747433/116 "2016-03-03T17:55:40Z")
> [@Hilarity\_N.Suze](#): > > Let’s make some androids that look just like humans and fill them with blood! WTF I’m not sure which movie you’re discussing here, but I’d like to bring up a distinction I have mentioned many times on this Board – from the 1930s until about the 1970s “android” was widely used in science fiction to mean artificial biological constructs, not living, but using non-metal parts (as opposed to Robots, which were basically mechanical people, largely built out of metal). Edmond Hamilton seems to be the writer who made the distinction, and propagated it through both his science fiction writing (such as the _Captain Future_ series) and comic books (he write for _Superman_ and other DC titles). The authoritative _Encyclopedia of Science Fiction_ followed his lead, and the online version still supports this definition. \* Therefore you’d _expect_ to have an android having arteries and veins filled with, if not blood, then some other fluid serving the same purpose. It’s the Robots that you wouldn’t expect to have fluid-filled conduits. But in the late seventies things changed. I suspect it was due to two factors in 1977 – the death of Hamilton and the release of _Star Wars_, in which R2D2 and C3P0 are called “Droids”, which I suspect is a shortened form of “Androids”, influenced by the term “Drones” used for short robots in the film _Silent Running_ (R2D2 and CeP0 actually ARE called Robots in one scene of the original _Star Wars_, and then never again in any of the Star Wars films, books, etc. , as far as I know). Ever since, “Android” has been creeping back to meaning "Man-Shaped automata, whatever it’s made of. In the film _Alien_, which you might be referencing, (Spoilers!) Ash is ultimately revealed to be a “Robot”, but it’s a Robot with lots of non-metallic parts and filled with white fluid, so it’s not clear if he’s a classic Robot or a classic Android or some mix of the two. In the sequel _Aliens_ (which you might also be referring to), Bishop is also revealed to be an android, also with gooshy parts and filled with white fluid. So it’s not unreasonable to have an android/robot/whatever to be filled with fluid, although not human blood (although even that, I think, has been done). - The term “Android” for human-shaped automata actually predates “Robot”. It was used in the 19th century, whereas “Robot” dates from Kael Capek’s play **R.U.R.** (1920), and is a shortened version of the Czeck word for “worker”. To make things more confusing, Capek’s “robots” are what Hamilton would have called “androids”, since they’re made of organic matter, and were portrayed onstage by human actors that weren’t trying to look like metal. ---
**Author:** ![Kamino\_Neko](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kamino_neko/32/34_2.png) [@Kamino\_Neko](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kamino_Neko)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2016, 6:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dumb-things-in-movies/747433/117 "2016-03-03T18:43:48Z")
> [@RickJay](#): > > But dinosaurs were not reptiles. Dinosaurs are reptiles. There are two living groups representing the Archosaur clade - birds and crocodilians. Saying that dinosaurs (including birds) aren’t reptiles, but crocs and the more distantly related snakes and lizards and turtles are, is rather silly. ---
**Author:** ![AncientHumanoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ancienthumanoid/32/278_2.png) [@AncientHumanoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AncientHumanoid)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2016, 9:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dumb-things-in-movies/747433/118 "2016-03-03T21:53:55Z")
They were, however, terrible lizards. ---
**Author:** ![Kamino\_Neko](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kamino_neko/32/34_2.png) [@Kamino\_Neko](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kamino_Neko)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2016, 9:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dumb-things-in-movies/747433/119 "2016-03-03T21:55:37Z")
I know, right…it’s like they weren’t even trying to be Squamates. ---
**Author:** ![AncientHumanoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ancienthumanoid/32/278_2.png) [@AncientHumanoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AncientHumanoid)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2016, 10:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dumb-things-in-movies/747433/120 "2016-03-03T22:05:24Z")
About every 10 years or so, I get an opportunity to make that joke. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dumb-things-in-movies/747433.md?page=5) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dumb-things-in-movies/747433.md?page=7)