John,
Thank you. That was exactly what I was talking about. I just didn’t take the time to express it with the clarity that you did.
MaxTorque: The Official Bullshit ST reason is that the Inertial Dampening field works just fine for expected maneuvers, like accelrating with the impulse engines from 0 to half light speed.
However, when the unexpected occurs (“Plot complication on the starbord bow, captain!”), the computer needs a split second to adjust the field, and so inertia hits for just a second.
Well, at least the tried to make it plausible!
You say “cheesy” like that’s a BAD thing.
Damn you, WIU Wozman. I just found in my favorites folder the link to that website that you posted and was about to post it myself. I never get any credit for anything! Why do I always feel like I’m an hour late to everything in life?
OK, there’s still a reason to pick on Jurassic Park. Remember the opening scene, where they manage to get a beautiful electronic image of the dinosaur bones? They say they’re using ground penetrating radar (GPR) to image the bones. BUT:
-
GPR works by transmitting an electromagnetic signal into the ground, and it makes NO NOISE. There’s no need to transmit an acoustic wave by firing a shotgun into the ground; acoustic signals are for collecting shallow seismic data.
-
Raw GPR data have to be collected over numerous points on a transect, and then processed before being interpreted. Multiple transects are needed if you want to see a horizontal feature in the subsurface (because each transect yields a vertical 2-D cross-section). No way you get an instantaneous image of what’s underground.
-
There’s no environmental geophysics tool in existence (GPR, seismic, etc.) that can produce an image with the clarity you see on the laptop on screen.
Don’t even get me STARTED on Armageddon, Volcano, and an unbelievably crappy NBC movie called Tidal Wave starring Corbin Bernsen…
Breakfast Club: As we all know (probably), this movie is supposed to take place on a Saturday, beginning in the morning, and ending in the afternoon. However, when they are wandering the halls at school, you can see through the windows, and it’s most definitely nighttime.
~Harborina
“This is my sandbox. I’m not allowed to go in the deep end. That’s where I saw the leprechauns.”
A friend of mine pointed out that in “Titanic”, when Rose pays Jack for her portrait, she hands him a Roosevelt dime.
“Cliiiiiiffffff!!!”
Since this is my first post ever I would like to say thank you for having me, and try not to be to hard on me.
As for the topic at hand, I would just like to point out an obvious mistake in “Mallrats” where T.S. pulls into Brandi’s driveway in the beginning of the movie in a Ford. After that scene he’s all of a sudden driving a Mercury. How can filmmakers make such obvious mistakes?
Steak is like women and midgets. -Josh Putz
Amen, Bricker! You’d think with such a major place as DC, they’d get the places right.
My personal favorite movie blunder is from Patriot Games. About halfway through, Harrison Ford is leaving Annapolis to go home to find his wife. (First nitpick, and this is from the book too…if she was coming from up near Baltimore, and heading for the eastern shore, where they supposedly live, she wouldn’t be on the same bridge as him.) Anyway, they show his character driving out of Annapolis, then show him on a freeway in the next shot, which is supposed to be Route 50. One problem - you can see palm trees in the background. Must have been a section of Annapolis I never visited in 20 years. 
“You are sweet, kind, and considerate… Like a grown up boy scout with tits!”
- Brian, aka SDMB’s one and only Satan.
Heres one pointed out to me recently by a StarWars addict friend of mine :
In “Jedi” at the end when Luke pulls off Vader’s helment, the old Anakin speaks with a British accent.
In “Episode 1” little Anakin speaks with an American accent . . . so at what point did Anakin pickup a British accent ??
Don’t even get me started on those freakin “midi-chloridians”. So now you can take a blood test to determine if you are a Jedi ?? Why was this not mentioned once in the original trilogy ?
All rights reserved, all wrongs revenged.
<Die Hard 2 had so many mistakes that I couldn’t enjoy the film.>
Same here. All through the movie, I kept asking myself why the people at the airport didn’t just drive their cars out onto the sides of the runways and light the runways with their headlights. It certainly would have given more light than the trail of gasoline it was eventually lit with (And how did all of those planes come down onto a single runway that quickly without crashing into one another?). And I also didn’t get how a plane could crash half-way through the movie and hardly anyone at the airport noticed.
Die Hard (the original) is one of my all-time favorite movies, and I really liked Die Hard 3, too. But Die Hard 2 sucked big time.
My favorite one, which they do all the time, is allowing people to SEE under water. Yeah, right.
Planes, Trains and Automobiles: Bus traveling from Witchita to St. Louis (west to east) crosses the Mississippi River and drives past the Arch (on the east side of St. Louis) when pulling into town.
An Officer and a Gentleman: Constant change from summer dress to winter dress uniforms and back again, and some scenes with some characters in summer uniforms and others in winter uniforms. The Air Force brass determines when summer and winter uniforms are worn and everyone wears the same thing: it doesn’t matter if it’s 80 degrees in February, if the calendar says winter dress, that’s what you wear.
Maybe the navy OCS forgot to ask the air force about correct uniforms. 
Dewaholic, I was browsing on the Goofs page at IMDB and I found this
Incorrectly regarded as goofs: Although her fingers partially obscure it, the coin that Rose gives to Jack is generally agreed to be a Barber dime, minted 1892-1916. The Barber dime is distinctive because the portrait of Liberty on the head of the coin faces the right, not the left.
Poysyn, thanks for the info. I’m going to find my friend and lodge my foot up her behind. BRB. :mad:
“Cliiiiiiffffff!!!”
Another non-booboo, but interesting just the same: In T2 when the 2000 model mercury man is piloting the helicopter, he’s flying the chopper with two hands and shooting at Arnie with a third hand/arm. Rose is a babe.
Damn it I said be nice.
Mooncrash, a direct-to-video SF flick with Walter Koenig. At one point they’re in hard vacuum and one of them hasn’t put the gloves of their spacesuit back on.
Not mistakes so much as stupid cliches:
Sometime between the present and the perfection of interstellar travel, the science of producing nuclear weapons will be lost. Starships will have to fight each other with hundreds of bursts from beam weapons. And ground targets will be attacked by manned fighters flying strafing runs.
A clone of someone always has not just the physical attributes of the original, but all their memories as well.
Any automobile can be made to explode with one well placed shot from a handgun.
The bureaucratic imbecile who’s disputed the cop/scientist/expert hero’s theory will ignore even the most indisputable proof that the hero was right, right upto the moment that the bureaucrat gets shot/eaten/killed.
The hero can turn on the TV at any given time and within seconds a news special about the focus of the movie will come on.
When the hero is struggling with someone trying to kill him, the girl or hero’s buddy will always look on and never try to help.
Laser bolts move slowly enough for the eye to follow their progress, roughly 30 feet per second.
Even the most hardened juvenile delinquents can be reached by someone sensitive enough to understand them but cool enough to win their respect.
A precocious 11-year old can offer usefull comments or advice on even the most serious and complex situations.
A lone scientist working in a lab in the basement of some university can perfect a revolutionary new technology ahead of the government or private industry.
A computer that’s suffered a total crash will still work well enough to display a message to that effect.
People who are shot either die, are paralyzed, or recover fully after a time in the hospital. They never suffer lifelong health problems or debilitation as a result of near-fatal wounds.
A person can get the living crap beat out of them in a fight, yet somehow rally enough to win in the end.
I noticed the same thing. Here’s what i said in my review:
> I think a more interesting question is the
> pattern of British and American accents in
> the whole series. Apparently a British
> accent is the prestige dialect for the
> Republic and the Empire. That’s why the
> Emperor (who is still Senator Palpatine in
> this film) is played by the British actor
> Ian McDiarmid, why Terence Stamp was cast
> as Chancellor Valorum, and why Peter
> Cushing played Grand Moff Tarkin in A New
> Hope. Consistent with that, most of the
> Imperial stormtroopers speak with British
> accents. On the other hand, the
> inhabitants of Tatooine mostly speak in
> American accents. Annakin’s mother Shmi is
> played by Swedish actress Pernilla August,
> who speaks with a noticeable foreign
> accent. Perhaps this is because she was
> not born on Tatooine and was brought there
> as an adult when she was made a slave.
> Some of the Jedi Knights, including Yoda
> and Mace Windu, also have American
> accents, so perhaps they are speaking in
> the dialects of their home worlds.
>
> Try to figure out the choice of accents
> for the people of Naboo though. Queen
> Amidala speaks in an American accent, but
> her double speaks in a British accent. One
> of her counselors sounds British, but
> another sounds American. Furthermore,
> notice that Anakin/Vader speaks with an
> American accent both as a child and as an
> adult, but when he’s unmasked at the end
> of The Return of the Jedi, he speaks with
> a British accent. I can’t make any
> consistent sense of these choices. Given
> that Lucas hasn’t even straightened out
> the use of American and British accents,
> I’m reluctant to blame him for the
> obscurer accents of the minor characters.
For the full review, go to
http://www.dcfilmsociety.org
and click on Reviews and then on The Phantom Menace.
Speaking of accents, am I the only one who was bothered by the fact that the characters in Heathers, who supposedly live in Ohio, speak in Californian accents.
Must post, must post!
I think the worst I didn’t quite see was some movie with IIRC Ted Danson. I don’t recall the name, and it was so bad I quit watching after the first 15 mins. The plot revolved around a supersecret computer getting stolen from NASA JSC in Houston by a shrink ray. Okay, given the premise, it’s hard to justify complaints. Nevertheless, the list at the time was so stunning it was mind-boggling. I’ll see what I recall. Offhand, there were mountains in the background of Houston. (Looking just like the California desert. Hmmm). There’s a car chase that starts in downtown Houston and in seconds is in an open highway outside of any urban sprawl. Yeah. The gate for Johnson Space Center looks nothing like any NASA gate. And the security guards stop and check cars of employees. (HA!) There were more at the time, but now I’ve managed to (thankfully) forget them.
In one Bond movie a bad guy is stuffed in a drawer of maggots, where he is presumably eaten and dispensed with. Maggots only eat dead flesh. They are a handy deep tissue infection cure because they will eat only the diseased flesh and leave the healthy tissue.
Oh hell, let me just add ALL Bond flicks. There’s pretty much the required unrealistic events.
I laughed at that line in Jurassic Park, too. UNIX?
Some Michael J. Fox movie I cannot remember right now had a noticable microphone in the theater release, three times.
The Terminator movies. In T1, it is premised that the time vortex will only pass things encased in living tissue. Thus the requirement to travel naked, which shows up in T2. How then did the silver T2 guy make it through the vortex?
MaxTorque said:
Oh goody, Armageddon - got to be one of the worst movies of all times. I can’t believe the people I know who watched it and like it. It was horrible. The script, the acting, the plot, the science, the cliches, the dialog… Everything about that movie was horrible. I paid full price in the theater, and the only reason I didn’t walk out was to see what else they screwed up.
Ugh. The space thrusters to pretend gravity. What exactly were they thrusting? They looked like big fans. In no atmosphere. If they carried their own gas - do you realize how much fuel that would be? It’s ridiculously stupid. It would be 200,000,000 times more sensible to carry thruster packs like the MMU. Give a little thrust to point in the right direction. But no, they want giant fans to point the spacecraft down so it can then drive on wheels. Let’s see, the cruiser is hauling ass along the surface of the asteroid (comet?), and then launches across a crater. In the process it starts spinning in all directions. But then it somehow lands on the other side. How? There’s NO GRAVITY. Somehow those thrusters got lined back up in the proper orientation to instantaneously thrust back to the surface. Right.
Oh, and I loved the scene where they checked out their space suits and thrusters in the big chamber. That’s Chamber A, the thermal/vacuum test chamber used for vacuum and heat/cold testing hardware. It’s neat. But thruster suits?
I loved that one too. They have gatlin cannons mounted on the crawlers. Why? And the pistol in the shelf in the Shuttle was in a chamber without any cushioning. So what, it’s just going to rattle around in that box on launch? Hello. Bang.
[quote]
My favorite is the “gravity environment” created by the spinning Russian space station. The station starts spinning and suddenly there’s gravity throughout the structure, even along the axis of spin. Neat trick. I liked the icicles, too; just how would water “drip down” to form icicles without gravity?
[quote]
Yeah, the space station gravity was great. It just happens to point conveniently out of the plane of the spin. Loads of other silliness in that scene I’m forgetting at the moment. It’s not that roomy, and doesn’t have neat little ladders everywhere.
Those were the upgraded space suits, the ones designed for 30 sec don/doff. The ones that don’t need interior cooling undergarments.
Someone in the oil industry pointed out the horrendous nature of the beginning, where Bruce Willis is running around an oil platform, shooting off a shotgun. Boom. Big fireball.
The Shuttles zooming around like airplanes as they approach the comet for landing.
Hell, it’s probably better to list what they got right.
- That was the actual water tank facility used to train astronauts.
- I mentioned chamber A is actually a NASA facility.
Um, that’s about it.
That movie was just pathetic. It was so predictable. I could practically quote lines before the actors said them. It was typically Hollywood at every turn. There was practically nothing that was unexpected. SPOILER. Even the ending scene where Bruce Willis Sacrifices himself was Hollywood while being anti-Hollywood.
CatInHat said:
That is true. They keep track of things like where the actor places his coke can and how long is the tie tied. Sometimes they are really good. Sometimes they are lousy.
Oh hell, what’s the point?
no doubt! what shell and window manager were they using???
I’m stuck using BASH and KDE. I want my WM to do an animated zoom to a 3D representation of a file I want to run. sheesh.
There is one safeguard known generally to the wise, which is an advantage and security to all,
but especially to democracies as against despots. What is it? Distrust.
– Demosthenes
Joe Cool