Little mistakes that take you out of the movie

Cafe Society
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We recently got a hankering to watch Surface, which is horrifically written, yet fun to watch, as long as there’s a giant monster on screen eating someone.

There is no limit to the common-sense foolishness in this series (which evidently was killed at a cliffhanger). Characters leap from California to Louisiana and back to California in the span of an afternoon or so (Vermont to New Hampshire would make more sense), which was something we all spotted right away (many were the cries of “wait – he’s back in Louisiana?!”)

Anyone who SCUBA dives, wants to SCUBA dive, can spell “SCUBA” or has been in water will want to wash their brains after a whole sequence where characters drop to about 5000 feet in a bathyscape, and then get their cable cut and are dragged around by two tons of loose steel cable, and yet are popped to the surface in *less than a minute *by a simple inflatable life raft – which not only has the power to teleport them to the surface, but to also suspend two tons of steel underneath, plus encourage through Float Osmosis the bathyscape to also bob like a cork right next to them.

Until it is convenient to sink.

Computers, of course, are able to do their usual magical things, as are cell phones.

Frankly, I’m surprised no one’s done the “No, no, don’t shoot that gun in here – we’re in a metal warehouse and the gun won’t work unless it can contact the Gun Satellite. You pull that trigger now and you might scramble our DNA!” trick

We’re just at the final episode, and we expect there to be *no *resolution at all (although there has been a gun in a metal warehouse, so I’m hoping…). We’ve decided that not only is there no series bible, but that plot elements, the physics of this magical world, and the vast majority of dialogue were all created using a primitive randomizing routine – much less sophisticated than manatees pushing colored balls around.

It’s like Twin Peaks, with sea monsters, but not as well-grounded in sense, science, character, and dialogue.

I’m usually game to let a few things slide by, but I have to draw the line somewhere. I have to draw a line beyond which the crazy mechanics of what I’m seeing on the screen simply can’t be ignored without lots and lots of toilet-vodka.

That line is somewhere behind Surface.

62

In Russia, beaver shits on YOU!!!

63

[quote=“brewha, post:32, topic:486969”]

If a grown man, a woman, and a 13 yo kid were to fall into this hole and magically avoid the walls, they will all have different cross sectional areas - which means different wind resistance, which means different terminal velocitys, which means that they would not may the 1000 mile trip in EXACTLY the same amount of time. Nor would they be able to talk about it on the way down due to the 200ish MPH wind rushing by. QUOTE]

Maybe everyone had magnets in their pockets and the sides of the hole had a lot of metal in them and it was just enough to slow them down…

64

The scene where Dormer almost hits the truck head on to scare the girl is on an Alaskan highway, then boom, they drive into the dump and the girl gets out and starts screaming at him. It’s done for dramatic effect, but the editing made it an unbelievable scenario.

65

I just had an incident (minor) that reminded me enough of one of these cases that I came running back to share it.

My incident involved the fact the the waste basket next to the desk is under a slide-out drawer (plank really) that has a pillow on it so I can rest my arm on it and not get tired while manipulating the mouse. I reached under and lifted the waste basket and when I did I saw a candy wrapper on the floor under it. First I tried to use the basket to pull the wrapper where I could reach it but the wrapper was out of the basket’s grabbing power. So I tried to reach it with my arm and hand without closing the pull-out and found that the wrapper was just out of reach. But I determinedly stretched and wiggled and eventually got the wrapper and life is nearly back to normal. All will be well when I finish this post.

Remember the scene in Strangers on a Train (1951) when Farley has dropped his keys down a storm drain and has to reach through the grating to retrieve them. Hitchcock manages to squeeze several minutes of agony and suspense (since the clock is ticking for Farley to get somewhere important) out of the bit-by-bit approach of Farley’s hand toward the keys. By the time he finally gets the keys his arm has to have extended by a good foot (length) or more. Even as a kid, I called bullshit on that.

Then Hitch uses the same gag in North by Northwest (1959) when Cary is trying to retrieve Eva Marie off the side of one of the presidents’ noses after she slipped and all she’s holding on with is one hand and Cary has to reach for her while holding onto the rocks to keep from falling himself. Another Plastic Man arm trick.

Back to normal after a preview and post.

66

I had a similar problem with Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Towards the end of the movie, when faced with a cloaked enemy ship, Scotty rigs up a torpedo that can home in on the enemy’s heat signature, telling the confused crew (and by extension, the movie audience) “the thing has got to have a tailpipe!”, at which point they all understand.

Somehow, I doubt the crew is that familiar with the concept of personal automobiles using internal combustion engines. Scotty might be educated on centuries old technology, but then again he tried to talk to a 1980’s-era PC back in Star Trek IV, and was confused when it didn’t respond back.

67

Two roadmap-related mistakes have always bugged me in two of my all-time favorite films. In Bullitt the car chase screeched all through San Francisco, but the route was not a feasible route. Very thrilling, but not possible. In the other movie, The Graduate, to see Dustin Hoffman drive from SF to Berkeley on the westbound section (upper deck) of the Bay Bridge ruined it for me. Huh, he drove into SF, how did he get to Berkeley? Anyone not familiar with the roads or streets of the Bay Area wouldn’t pick up on these mistakes.

68

:: shrugging ::

If they’d done TNG-type technobabble involving verteron particles, reversing the dilithium matrix polarity, and the key fact that Kirk’s left testicle is bionic, you’d be complaining about THAT.

And perhaps, during the centuries between now & TOS, “tailpipe” has come simply to be a slang term for “engine exhaust,” no matter the engine type. Words take on new meanings in time. Consider that the word “matrix,” dating from about 1555, originally meant “a mold from which a relief surface is made,” but can now also mean “a rectangular array of mathematical elements.”

69

I dunno, if he had said “plasma exhaust port” or simply “exhaust port”, it wouldn’t have been a big of a deal. But obviously the delivery to the movie audience wouldn’t have been as effective.

I too considered that, but still think that its pure fan-wankery. Does a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier have something termed a “tail-pipe”? An F-22 Raptor? The Tesla roadster? I doubt the term is going to last 20 years, much less 200.

70

Yuck…House…just generally.
They always do horribly invasive, expensive tests (liver biopsy, MRI brain) when what they are actually looking for is usually diagnosed by a cheap and simple blood test. Memorably, in one episode they did a liver biospy on someone BEFORE they did their liver function blood tests…a routine admission blood in any normal hospital, and absolutely essential BEFORE you stick a large needle into a liver. :rolleyes:

In an episode a patient was too unwell to run on a treadmill, but they still wanted to “stress his heart”. So House injected him with adrenaline and almost killed him. Um…we have 2 perfectly good “normal” tests you can do if someone can’t run on a treadmill, that give exactly the same information as an exercise stress test. One is called a Dobutamine Stress Echo, the other is a Myocardial Perfusion Scan. Both are routine practice, and neither involves a significant risk of killing your patient.

I often take my own bloods, do arterial blood gases and insert IV cannulas- I’m good at it too. BUT I’m a lowly SHO (2nd year resident) and my bosses would NEVER do that stuff any more. I do not, however spend time anywhere within a 20metre radius of a microscope or a culture incubator and I don’t operate Xray machines or MRI and CT scanners. That is what the highly trained specialists in the pathology, microbiology and radiology departments are paid a lot of money to do.

More generally:

Any show where someone dying has been shocked out of asystole. You cannot electrically convert asystole to a rhythm with an output. Ventricular fibrillation and ventricular tachycardia, yes, asystole, definitely not.
Any show made in the last 5 years where a 5:1 chest compression to ventilation ratio is used…it’s 30:2 now people.
Also…we’re using biphasic defibs with stick-on pads instead of non adhesive gel pads and metal electrodes now. Those defibs you see on most medical shows are practically museum pieces…

The ALS resuscitation algorithm is easily available, I wish some of the medical shows would use it.

71

According to Merriam-Webster:

So it would seem the term is already in use.

Look, they have to use a term the audience is going to immediately understand, and which won’t interrupt the flow of the dialogue or change the rhythm of the scene.

Moreover, that is how language works.

I am sending this message by striking keys on my laptop in sequence. This process is called typing, a reference to the device known as the typewriter. My 8-year-old nephew has never seen one; my 21-year-old stepdaughter has never used one; and though tI have used a typewriter many times, I have never set type in the sense the device inn question was designed to replicate. Though the technologies in question are extinct or on their way to extinction, terminology that refers to them has lingered on.

The word book originally meant " a set of written sheets of skin or paper or tablets of wood or ivory." It went on to mean " a set of written, printed, or blank sheets bound together into a volume." In a few generations it will mean “a lengthy work of text composed in or converted to digital format for display on a computer screen or handheld device.”

Terms obsolete in one sense linger on in others. Trek occasionally refers to phasers and disrupters as “guns’ too.”

72

I meant to say, about the cardiac arrest stuff.

You might think those mistakes don’t matter- but if you have people watching you work on their relative, who has arrested, and they’ve seen someone shocked out of asystole on TV the night before, and you aren’t shocking their relative who has just flatlined, and who then dies, and then you give the “despite doing everything we could speech”…

Well, can you see how it might appear as if you just weren’t trying hard enough?
Or that you were doing something wrong?

Cardiac arrests are almost always inaccurately portrayed on TV and in the movies, and yes, sometimes it really does matter.

73

Again, I understand that language evolves, and archaic words often stick around. But words like “typing” and “books” tend to stay the same because a more applicable word never really stepped in to much fanfare.

Contrast that with a Saturn-V rocket. The exhaust gasses go out the tail of the craft. But who in their right mind ever called that section a “tail-pipe”?

74

How common is it for the defibrillator and other treatments to save someone? I heard a statistic that only 20% of people who have heart attacks while already in the hospital survive (can be resuscitated from the attack, I think it meant, not died later), and I don’t know if that means the rate outside is even worse, or the folks in the hospital already are so bad off that the next heart attack wipes them out?

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“The bad news is: after that, the Captain wants to water ski!”

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irishgirl, I recommend politedissent blog. Author, Scott is actual medical doctor and writes mostly reviews of House episodes and comic books. With pointing out all factual errors - and always repeating that you don’t shock the flatline. Very good reading.

77

Didn’t ruin the movie, but was a definite speed bump. In “Star Wars”, during the scene where the speed of Hans Solo’s spaceship was being discused, someone asked a question sort of like this. “Isn’t this the ship that made it to the XXXX System in 23 parsecs?” Problem, of course, is that a parsec is a measure of distance, not of time. Sort of like saying, “Wow, you drove from Seattle to Bellingham in only 90 miles.” Whenever I remember “Star Wars” this is the first thing I think of.

About as bad as some idiot reporter calling a shotgun a rifle.

78

In Kill Bill, the Bride refers to the Crazy 88s as “yeah-KOO-zuhs” (with a plural “s”) when the Japanese pronunciation should be an evenly-stressed ya-ku-za (with no “s”). You know, kind of like the spelling of the word, yakuza. What makes it unbelievable is that earlier in the movie she is portrayed as speaking fluent Japanese.

79

No movies in particular, but…

Every time someone is doing something on a computer, everything is always done using the keyboard. No one ever uses a mouse.

Whenever there is a scene of someone parking, they always manage to find the most prime parking spot. Either right in front, or right across the street, of the place they want to go to.

80

Oh yeah, we don’t get most of our arrests back…but, you know, we try:)
The 20% survival, is, I think for the immediate return of circulation at the arrest, it’s only about 10-15% survival to hospital discharge.

Out of hospital arrests are worse…what CPR mostly does is buy time until you can get drugs and a defib, CPR by itself will rarely re-start a heart. You also have to remember that an out of hospital arrest with a miraculous recovery might not actually be an arrest at all- panicked people wihout medical training might have difficultly feeling a pulse and so start CPR on someone who merely fainted. In contrast, sometimes people will try to resuscitate someone who has clearly been dead for some time.

Most out of hospital cardiac arrests (not in a trauma situation) are caused by massive heart attacks, strokes or brain aneurysms…a lot of those people just aren’t going to come back, no matter what you do, because they no longer have functioning hearts or brains.

In hospital, causes like electrolyte imbalance, septic shock, blood loss and cardiac tamponade are often causes of arrest, and thankfully, they are slightly more treatable, if you can buy time with CPR ,for the drugs and fluids to work.

I’m currently working in cardiology, and I’ve only completed 3 death certificates in 3months. I usually have 15 inpatients at any time, with an averge stay of 3 days, 50% of whom will have had a heart attack- we really don’t lose many.