In Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion, the titular duo was driving from LA to Tucson for the titular event, and shown to be doing so on a two lane desert road. In real life, you get on I-10 in LA and get off I-10 in Tucson. I’m pretty sure it is not possible to find a two lane route connecting the two. It’s desert. The old two-lane roads are now incorporated into I-10.
But, they did manage to pull over and have a meaningful conversation, so there is that.
A good director could just have them talk in the car, or at a wayside, or a gas station, or maybe the Picacho Peak Dairy Queen! Anywhere but a deserted two lane highway.
The Cabazon dinosaurs*, the Palm Springs area wind farm, Hadley’s, the George S Patton museum, the Desert Center palm tree farm, Quartzite, or the Mirana air park are all photogenic and/or quirky places to film a meaningful conversation that are easy and believable stops along I-10. Style doesn’t have to override believability.
But real cemeteries hire the same iron shops to make real cemetery gates. And sometimes, the iron shop makes mistakes on those, too. So sometimes real cemeteries have misspelled signs. If movie cemeteries, then, also sometimes have misspelled signs, that’s just realism.
Likewise, a lot of mistakes purportedly made by directors could just as well be faithful depictions of mistakes made by characters. Like, in Firefly, when Jayne needs to fire at a target in vacuum, but it’s complicated because he needs to keep his gun in an atmosphere. Sure, I know that Vera wouldn’t actually need oxygen… but does Jayne know that? His character definitely isn’t the sharpest log in the woodpile; it’s quite plausible that he doesn’t know, or thinks he knows things that are wrong.
When it was first brought up, I thought -ARY was probably more accurate. I was picturing an Authentic Olde West cemetery, where a misspelling probably happened all the time, and nobody who bothers walking out to the ol’ buryin’ ground is quite sure how to spell it…
Sort of plausible, but I gotta disagree. It’s one thing for some six-grave family cemetery to have a sign misspelled, but we’re talking about a big, been-around-long-enough-for-someone-to-point-out-the-error cemetery. If you’re in the cemetery business, you know how to spell it and you’re going to have the sign made right or corrected (at the manufacturer’s expense).
Same with major misspellings in the fake newspapers, especially with older, major city papers. Misspellings and typos were usually caught. Not always, but usually. When I see one, I think “that’s a production assistant/prop guy who didn’t do well in school and created this the night before without showing it to anyone.” Takes me right out of the movie and gets me wondering why that person didn’t use spell-check.
And you’re running the I-10 frontage road from Casa Grande the last 40 miles.
No, but they leave all the time saying “why’d they do something so stupid, when a little effort could have cleaned it up?” And “if they’d just ask us, they’d get it right for free.” And “that was a good movie, but it could be better if they’d only have fixed X”. “But they can’t because RealityChuck only believes in absolutes. In his world, a movie can either be accurate or boring.”
Do they though? Are there that many people going “I would like Hobbs & Shaw if they reloaded more.” I’d wager that the vast majority of movie goers aren’t that nitpicky.
Person A is holding a gun to Person B’s head as coercion
Person B does not react
Person A cycles the action to emphasize “he really means it”
Bonus eye roll if person A cycles it again
Everyone who has ever handled a semi-automatic is going “so, you didn’t mean it the first time? or you had a round in the chamber that you just ejected?”
Not to mention the eye strain from watching a movie with silenced weapons that go “ffft”.
One of the recent Elementary episodes had a scene where a guy is pretending to be a terrorist, and buys a rifle and a large propane tank. The propane tank salesman tells the buyer to be careful shooting around the tank, as it could go BOOM.
Of course, it won’t, and a person that sells propane and propane accessories should know that. You shoot a propane tank with a standard rifle round and all it does it put a hole in the tank. A 9mm might not even dent the bottle.
And Hollywood et al use that one all the damn time. Even in my favorite Bond film.
If they treated firearms realistically in movies, you’d just need a new hobby, since the hobby of complaining about unrealistic firearms in movies will have gone away.
In all seriousness…there are, undoubtedly, many people, like yourself, who know enough enough firearms to know that they’re used unrealistically in movies. Of those people, some, like yourself, are bothered enough about it that it takes you out of the moment; the rest probably notice it, but shrug, and don’t let it distract them from the film.
It’s pretty clear to me that a lot of that unrealistic usage either (a) has become tropes in action movies, and/or (b) is done because realistic usage may distract from the scene (such as reloading).
It’s also pretty clear to me that while some people, like yourself, are bothered by it, not enough people are bothered by it to get the industry to change how they do it. Action movies with lots of unrealistic usage of firearms can do really, really well at the box office.
Long ago, I realized that there’s a rule of thumb about TV shows and movies: if you know a lot about a topic (and especially if you’re passionate about a topic), you’re likely to be disappointed by shows and movies that feature that topic, because, unless they’re intentionally striving to be highly accurate, the odds are very high that you’re going to be distracted by the inaccuracies (which come in because the writer and director are trying to tell a story, not make a documentary). I can’t watch shows about ad agencies, for example, because I work in the industry, and I find myself getting hung up on the details they get wrong. Queen is one of my all-time favorite rock bands, and when I went to see Bohemian Rhapsody, I had to intentionally shut down that part of my brain, because they did take liberties on things like the timing of events, to tell a compelling story.
When a movie is bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars, I guessing the director isn’t going to be worried that ‘thousands’ of people noticed the gun being racked twice.
Also, all those people that noticed, paid to see it.
Well, that’s the problem isn’t it. It doesn’t matter to Hollywood if they make a good product or not, because the system is set up that we don’t know if the product is good until we have already paid for it. You buy a bad burger, you don’t go back to that chain again. It can make a difference. You see a bad movie, what can you do? Just not see it again. Which is what most people already do, even if they liked it. Makes no difference to Hollywood.
It could be millions. Billions, who care. No one can say, because once we paid our 12 bucks the filmmakers are done with us.
Just because Endgame made a gazillion bucks doesn’t mean there weren’t tons of people unhappy with the ending. And just because I hated the ending of Endgame doesn’t mean I won’t watch the next one, because it will probably be enjoyable. But it could be better. How are we as individuals supposed to tell the directors that it makes a difference? We’re just suppose to keep eating their crap because the system can’t be changed?
In fact, the studios actually do an awful lot of market research, particularly on bigger releases. They do test screenings, among other things, to make sure that what they put into the theaters isn’t going to disappoint or tick off audiences. The studios can, and regularly do, re-edit, and even re-shoot, scenes that prove to be problematic.
If unrealistic use of firearms was enough of an annoyance for enough moviegoers – and, conversely, if rigorously realistic use of firearms would result in even stronger ticket sales – I am pretty damned certain that the studios would have figured this out by now, and reacted accordingly.
OK, I feel like we got bogged down too much in the “errors” or “unlimited ammo” thing. About cliches in general:
One of the biggest reasons Game of Thrones was such a success at first was because of its willingness to kill off characters whom audiences would normally expect most TV shows to preserve (the death of Eddard Stark, for instance.) That willingness to defy the “hero always gets rescued from the chopping block at the last moment” cliche was one reason for its popularity.
But with other cliches, it seems that directors persist in them simply because of habit and inertia.
Many, many times, clichés are there because reality just doesn’t sound/look “right.”
e.g.
[ul]
[li]Drop a lit match in a pool of gas and it’ll extinguish the match, not catch fire[/li][li]Cars don’t explode when running off a cliff[/li][li]Cars don’t explode when you shoot a gas tank[/li][li]Gun shots certainly don’t sound the way they do in movies[/li][li]Lasers don’t make sound. Many times they aren’t even seen, except on the target. No pew-pew-pew[/li][li]All planets don’t have 1g surface gravity[/li][li]Lights inside a space helmet will totally ruin night vision. Great for illuminating characters faces, though[/li][li]Heroes never ever have to stand and wait three minutes for a subway train. Unless suspense can be added from cross cutting with villains approaching the platform[/li][li]Being hit with a fire extinguisher in the head will only lead to our hero shaking his head briefly and resume to beat up the bad guy[/li][li]Anyone who’s had abdominal surgery, done by medical pros, knows that the pain and discomfort leaves on bedridden for a couple of days. Stab wounds in movies are fixed with duct tape and a shot of booze[/li][/ul]
ASF.
Just Asking Questions wants more realism in movies. I’m wondering if that extends to all aspects, or just the ones he is knowledgeable about.
