:eek:
I do not know where people get this very mistaken belief. There was a friend of mine when we were kids that would take a can of gasoline, pour some out on the ground and throw a match at it. It would absolutely, positively go whoosh before the match came to rest.
A pool of gas? Big whoosh.
It is dangerous to be posting such a potentially harmful misnomer around.
I used to do that too, but it’s not 100% reliable and certainly not the explosion that explosion that Hollywood would have you believe it is.
The question is not whether some audience members will be annoyed by an inaccuracy. The question is whether they’ll be annoyed enough to not want to see the movie (or future movies from the same studio/director/writers etc.).
Hollywood is actually getting pretty good about this, lately, though. I can think of at least three recent movies, for instance, with characters doing general relativity. And even though the exact nature of their work wasn’t all that relevant to the plot, and they know that it’s going to go right over the heads of the vast majority of viewers, when you see the whiteboards in the background, the stuff on the boards is right. I guess they’ve realized that, even though the number of additional audience members that’ll get them is really small, physicists will happily provide that sort of material for a song, so the net cost-benefit is worth it.
I have read that jet fuel won’t burn in that way (gasoline definitely might, but jet fuel is much safer.) There was an airline executive who once dramatically stood in a puddle of jet fuel and dropped a match to prove such a point.
Don’t watch movies by directions that do things you don’t like. Tons of people won’t see a Woody Allen (due to his style, not personal life) or Quentin Tarentino
movie.
However, outright stating that you hated the ending of one movie and will most likely see the next one (not just by the same director, part of the same franchise) you’re doing just about everything in your power to tell them you want more of the same, which is exactly the opposite of what you’re trying to do.
I understand, it’s just one aspect of that movie you didn’t like, but if the way a gun functions pulls you out of a movie, don’t see a movie made by those people anymore. That’ll teach’em.
Probably not just the ones he’s knowledgeable about, but that plus just the ones he notices.
Going back to the gun thing, most people, I’d wager, don’t even notice that someone shot 15 bullets from their revolver. If you asked them, they might not know how many it actually holds, but they would probably guess less than that.
Just think about how many continuity errors go unnoticed for years.
I think at least some of that has to do with better picture quality and people just being more nitpicky, even for fun. Also, what’s on there could even be considered an easter egg. I remember hearing Vince Gilligan talking about all the papers you’d see on a desk, the diplomas one the wall, the books on shelves etc. Back in the day, they’d all be random props that may or may not have anything at all to do with the show. Papers were just filled with meaningless Latin words. But, according to him, with 1080i and DVRs that can pause, people will stop the scene and and actually read those things. He knows that if it’s gibberish, it’s not a big deal, but if it’s realistic it adds to the show.
Yes, IIRC, Jet-A is similar to kerosene. It’s needs to be safer because any type of fire on a plane has such a high chance of being catastrophic. Also, it makes me feel better since there’s several, enormous silos of Jet Fuel close enough to my house that if they were to explode, I’d be in danger (or probably at least evacuated).
Yeah, that little noise at the end?
“Tons of people” hated that (Cite? I weighed them).
I went to Hobbes & Shaw last night, partly to see the cliches that I’ve read about in a couple of threads here. Oh, they were all there, plus a few dozen more.
But they didn’t bother me, because the whole thing was so over the top that I just shrugged and said “Well, in this world, you can ______ any time you want to.” Our laws of physics just didn’t apply there, and apparently, I’d accepted that in the first five minutes, and could enjoy it.
For a revolver, specifically, I think most people know of “six-shooters”. Though some might be surprised to learn that some revolvers hold more than that, and plenty won’t notice that a particular handgun is a revolver.
For a non-revolver handgun, I think the most common clip size is ten? But it could be more or less, even for the same gun? I’m not sure. But even for a continuous scene (which is a lot rarer than most people realize; even a single “scene” will usually have a whole bunch of cuts), it’s pretty easy to assume that people are just reloading at some moment when the focus isn’t on them (one of those times when they duck behind cover, for instance).
This is a level of nitpickery I had never considered. Seriously, never once watching a movie have I thought “why aren’t they on an interstate?” I’d be shocked if a majority of a viewers gave a shit. Hell, I’ve be shocked if even 10% of viewers cared.
There’s a bi-modal distribution of pistol magazine sizes. Single stack magazines tend to be about 8 shots. Double stack magazines tend to be 13-15 or so. You can also change the capacity of many magazine fed pistols by using higher capacity magazines. In many guns, higher capacity magazines will stick further out of the gun’s bottom but otherwise not affect functioning much.
There are two groups of guns with exactly 10-round magazines, but neither figures much into Hollywood blockbusters. The first group is .22 caliber target pistols. I’m not sure why so many of them hold ten rounds but that seems to be typical. The second group are guns with magazines that are left over from the the period of the mid-1990s assault weapons ban. The assault weapons ban prohibited the manufacture and sale of new high-capacity magazines with capacities greater than ten rounds. During those years, lots of guns that could have held more than ten rounds got magazines that were limited to ten rounds. Since the expiration of the assault weapons ban, you can expect that essentially all of those guns were refitted with high capacity magazines. And because Hollywood deals in fiction, the reduced magazine capacity during the assault weapons ban had no impact on what was depicted on screen.
I’d say the vast, vast majority of pistols seen onscreen are 9 mm or thereabouts, with a an average of 15 rounds per magazine - so much so that anything else is almost always specifically emphasized. Remember, almost all shooting in movies and TV shows is done by either cops, soldiers, criminals or adjacent, who prefer standard, high-capacity weapons, and not by civilian legal gun owners, who have much more varied tastes. I remember in one of the John Wick films, they made a big deal about the hero being given a .45" pistol - he noted how unusual it was that someone like him would be using a weapon with only 8 bullets.
This is me. As long as the characters and the plot is good, I really don’t care about the details. Unlimited bullets doesn’t bother me, although I do noticed when they need to be dramatically reload.
And continuity errors only bothers me, if I don’t like what they changed.
ETA: But it can be fun to nitpick them afterwards. Which is why I enjoy reading this tread and TVtropes. But tropes are not a bad thing.
From Mythbusters (scroll down):
What ignites is not the liquid but the vapor. To have a single match create enough vapor to get to the flash point, let alone the fire point, is so highly improbable, that I’m tempted to do my own Mythbusters video where I drop a match while standing over said pool.
The Mythbusters were testing a cigarette, not a match.
That also depends on there not already being a significant amount of vapor over the liquid gasoline.
I think Hollywood is well aware of these cliches, because there is a Simpson’s gag making fun of every one mentioned so far. Also look for reference to the forgotten Schwarzenegger vehicle Last Action Hero. Spoilers not blocked, because then you won’t have to watch it if you haven’t seen it: A key plot point is that the hero has to get back to the movie world where his real life very serious and life threatening gun shot injury will turn back into a flesh wound that can be shrugged off.
I also think that the errors range from stuff such as “it was a mistake, don’t worry about it” to “the audience are idiots” encompassing “not important to the plot” and “too boring to film” in there, too. (Those have all been mentioned in this thread.) I think when the film makers are sloppy because they think the audience are idiots, it often shows in the rest of the work, and usually results in a bad product.