I really like the new Battlestar. It’s the one show my wife and I make sure to be home for (when I’m home). It just bugs me when the president is having a press conference and there are like 25 reporters in the room shouting questions and then Lucy Lawless appears out of nowhere as another reporter that is making a documentary about Battlestar. You mean there are more reporters around than in that room? By my guess there is one reporter for every 2,000 people.
Another thing that bothers me is the holodeck in the newer Star Treks. They are forever having trouble with it. You’d think the first time one of the characters from the holodeck came to life they would recall them, but it happened again and again.
[QUOTE=madmonk28]
What are some of the small things that bug you about shows and movies you generally like?
I have three off the top of my head:
In Ronin , Robert Deniro has been shot. He says to his sidekick, Jean Reno, something like “I need a doctor or a veterinarian, someone who can take this bullet out.” Sidekick say, “I can do better.” Then he takes him to this old guy who’s only qualification is that he is a figurine painter with big magnifying glass on a stand and an exacto knife. Deniro then has to stay completely awake and tell them how to perform the surgery.
In what way is that better than some kind of skilled health care professional, who could remove the bullet while Deniro is anesthetized?
[/QUOTE]
This is not to be as snide as it will appear (I assume), but if we didn’t see Reno’s friend and his ronin collection we wouldn’t know why the title of the movie is Ronin unless we were already familiar with the term. But if we were we would wonder why there were so few of them in the movie.
[QUOTE=WhyNot]
My *Firefly *one is different, and I must admit it would never bother me if I wasn’t a Commentary Junkie. But in some commentary or another, the costumer (who does not get enough credit for a FABULOUS looking show, IMHO) mentions that Zoe’s leather thong wrap necklacey thing is meant to symbolize her “ties” to Wash through marriage. Yet in Out of Gas when Zoe first meets Wash in a flashback, (and doesn’t like him at all!) she’s wearing the leather.
Drives. Me. Nuts.
And it’s such a stupid little thing, I really should get over it.
[/QUOTE]
The thong necklace isn’t established as a wedding symbol on-screen. It’s only on the DVD commentary track. It’s not canon. Let it go.
Buffy- No one touches each other unless they were fucking them. And then… only when they were fucking. I don’t know about you guys but I hug my friends, heck even affectionately put my arm around themn while chatting, general platonic sings of affection. None of that. EVER. Not even hand holding by couples. They even made a plot point out of it in season 7.
Deadwood and LOST (or any show that takes place in a set location)- What do these characters do all day? I’m not saying I need to see the boring stuff but a lot of the time there’s no accounting for their activities when the camera isn’t on them.
Wow.
I won’t mention that I really like this show and think the old one fellated with great allacrity.
I’ll just ease on out…don’t mind me…nothing to see here…
[/QUOTE]
And that’s fine too. Then, they should either have made a new show, or not spent time and effort going out of their way to shit on the fond memories of the older show.
[QUOTE=Happy Clam]
Better than this, the implications of even standard transporter use are terrifying. As far as we can deduce, a transporter works by atomising the target, and then constructing them in a new place. This means that every time you use it, you are killed and an exact duplicate of you is created. It may look like you, think like you and even believe itself to be you, but it is in fact a completely new person (imagine if that duplicate had been created without first vaporising you. You’d think it would happen more often.). This also has some interesting applications: want an instant army? Just get a highly loyal, highly trained warrior and run him through the transporter a few times, overriding the “kill person A” safeties. Bingo!
Combine this with replicator technology, and there really should be no concern in the Federation about fleet size- they can make any army they want in hours.
Now, there must presumably be a time lag between the death of the old you and the creation of the new you by the transporter. This takes only seconds, but what if you could prolong it? Say, by forty years? At the age of seventy, you could choose to die, and a new, thirty-year-old you would be created, to carry on your life. People would never die!
[/QUOTE]
The pattern decays in the transporter buffer. As I recall, the only person to manage to do this was CE Scott and that was due to his tinkering with the system.
[QUOTE=Push You Down]
Deadwood and LOST (or any show that takes place in a set location)- What do these characters do all day? I’m not saying I need to see the boring stuff but a lot of the time there’s no accounting for their activities when the camera isn’t on them.
[/QUOTE]
(bolding mine)
Actually, that sounds exactly like what you’re saying. I’ve never watched Lost, so let’s go with Deadwood. Al seems to run a bar. Seth is the sheriff and helps with a hardware bidness. Sol runs the hardware business and the bank. The whores probably don’t need an explanation. Doc is a doc. Jane is the town drunk. etc., etc., etc. They actually all seem to have plenty to do. I really don’t care to watch Al fill out orders for booze or haggle over exchange rates for the gold he takes in. I don’t need to see Sol rubbing one out in the back when Trixie is in one of her moods.
Count me in for another vote that the new BSG much better than the old.
[QUOTE=NoClueBoy]
Thru out Trek, the transportersconstantly have/cause problems. For a peice of equipment that important, you would think they could do better.
One of the silliest transporter mishaps occurs in The Big Fucking Whales From the Past movie, Trek IV. After locking on to Admiral Kirk, theenergy beams is just about to start, as indicated by the high pitched whine, and Gillian jumps on Kirk to get beamed up too. WTF? The transporter was tagging Kirk. Are we to assume that they habitually include enough of a fudge factor to allow for a WHOLE OTHER PERSON to get picked up in the beam?
Why, what’s to prevent a horrible accident from happening? Like creating a double at the remote location, or splitting a person into good and bad halves? The implications are frightening.
:dubious:
[/QUOTE]
The way I look at that, the transporter signal picks up a small field around the person being beamed and if it detects a life-sign it extends to pick up that person also so as not to accidentely kill them. Or something like that. :)…sorry… :dubious:
[QUOTE=DrDeth]
And that’s fine too. Then, they should either have made a new show, or not spent time and effort going out of their way to shit on the fond memories of the older show.
[/QUOTE]
That’s like shitting on a pile of shit. I mean really, nostaglia aside- The original BSG is kind of lame. Especially after they started ripping off old movie plots for episodes.
[QUOTE=Otto]
The thong necklace isn’t established as a wedding symbol on-screen. It’s only on the DVD commentary track. It’s not canon. Let it go.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=me]
My Firefly one is different, and I must admit it would never bother me if I wasn’t a Commentary Junkie…
[/QUOTE]
Oh, I know! I know! It’s just that I’m a part-time costumer (community/college/Ren Faire) and I relish those moments when the costume director actually gets to do cool stuff that no one other than I and 12 other people in the US care about. I love that a little scrap of leather can speak volumes about characters and their relationship, even if the actor is the only one to know it. (Like the amazing detail of the costumes and sets of LOTR - most of the work isn’t even seen by the audience, but it affects the actors, the camera crew and everyone else involved - and THAT shows up on camera!)
sigh
Sorry, I’m ranting. Miss Purl McKnittingham and **Faeriebeth **would understand. sob
[QUOTE=Zeldar]
This is not to be as snide as it will appear (I assume), but if we didn’t see Reno’s friend and his ronin collection we wouldn’t know why the title of the movie is Ronin unless we were already familiar with the term. But if we were we would wonder why there were so few of them in the movie.
[/QUOTE]
It’s not that Reno took him to the guy’s house. It is that when Deniro says he needs a doctor, Reno says “I have something better.” He didn’t say, “I can’t take you to a doctor, but I know some place safe.”
For the record, if I get shot, a hobbyist is not better than a doctor. It is much much worse.
In Paddy Chayefsky’s screenplay for The Americanization of Emily, Cmdr. Madison, the James Garner character and lead, is a cynical, buck-the-system kind of guy up against a mindless WWII Navy bureaucracy that assigns him to get killed in combat for the sake of public relations.
I assume it was to placate any combat veterans in the audience that a gratuitous backstory was added making Madison a Marine vet of Guadalcanal, ie: giving him a past as a “real man,” and not some slacker with civilian values. In which case, presumably, he would have had no cred to resist getting killed for the good of Navy PR.
[QUOTE=MaxTheVool]
One of my absolute favorite movies is The Iron Giant. Which I will hear no criticism of. Except that I really don’t like the extended laxative sequence. It’s just out of place, and beneath the rest of the movie. When I recommend this movie to people, I wish I could give them an edited version missing that whole part.
[/QUOTE]
Likewise, **Two Weeks Notice ** is a lovely little romantic comedy except for the pooping in the motorhome scene. Gratuitous and icky, and didn’t belong in that movie.
I also am pissed as hell that Josh sold out and killed off 1/2 a happily married couple, as you know the rule is in Hollywood that you can’t have a happily married couple. Rat bastard sell out. :mad: Look, I love the idea, the humour and the characters, but this went too far.
[/QUOTE]
Hollywood rule? I assume you’re not familiar with Josss Whedon’s other shows. The first rule of Buffy and Angel was that no couple could ever be happy, ever. I’m surprised Zoe and Wash lasted as long as they did
Oh, and the new BSG is the best TV SF since Babylon 5.
The “Out of Gas” episode of Firefly was probably my very favorite episode of what was definitely my very favorite show ever. But having Mal inject himself in the heart with a shot of adrenaline was just stupid. (It was marginally more justifiable in Pulp Fiction; at least that charcter was actually unconscious. You can’t be in cardiac arrest and be walking around the place, or even painfully limping around the place.)
It was actually probably kinda stupid for the doctor to have to do that to Zoe; a deep space transport ship–even a down-on-its-heels old boat like Serenity–is exactly the sort of place likely to have a fairly idiot proof Automated External Defibrillator.
Oh well, the AED doesn’t work for all kinds of cardiac arrests; just fibrillation, so I guess maybe Zoe was doing something else than fibrillating. But it still made no sense for Mal to do that to himself.
Boromir takes far too long to die after he’s turned into The Human Pincushion by the Uruk-Hai’s arrows in The Fellowship of the Ring.
Virtually every admiral in any incarnation of Star Trek is either nuts, power-mad, stoopid, or all three.
How could the three Precogs detect murderous intentions everywhere, throughout the entire country, when the Pre-Crime project was extended (as proposed) in Minority Report? They seemed pretty damned busy, just monitoring the Washington, D.C. area.
In Dune, if the Fremen dream of creating a lush planet on Arrakis were realized, wouldn’t that kill all of the sandworms, end their supply of spice, and totally undercut their culture?
Why wouldn’t the Nazis and the Vichy administration in Casablanca simply give orders to all border guards to promptly arrest anyone presenting the letters of transit?
Actually, Xander and Willow were shown being platonicly affectionate with each other a couple of times. After they got caught making out in S3, their platonic displays of affection became something of a plot point.
[QUOTE=MEBuckner]
The “Out of Gas” episode of Firefly was probably my very favorite episode of what was definitely my very favorite show ever. But having Mal inject himself in the heart with a shot of adrenaline was just stupid…Oh well, the AED doesn’t work for all kinds of cardiac arrests; just fibrillation, so I guess maybe Zoe was doing something else than fibrillating. But it still made no sense for Mal to do that to himself.
[/QUOTE]
Mal’s not a doctor and probably has no medical training beyond simple battlefield dressings and the like. He saw Simon shoot up an IIRC unconscious Zoe and revive her. Now he’s almost unconscious and needs to be revived, so he imitates what he saw the doctor do. His action actually makes perfect sense. Now if you want to bitch that super-genius doctor Simon screwed the pooch, that’s something else again.
[QUOTE=Otto]
Mal’s not a doctor and probably has no medical training beyond simple battlefield dressings and the like. He saw Simon shoot up an IIRC unconscious Zoe and revive her. Now he’s almost unconscious and needs to be revived, so he imitates what he saw the doctor do. His action actually makes perfect sense. Now if you want to bitch that super-genius doctor Simon screwed the pooch, that’s something else again.
[/QUOTE]
Mal’s not a total idiot, though–he was a combat soldier, for years, and presumably has some notion of proper first aid.
More to the point, if he did try it, I don’t think it would work. He’d be more likely to kill himself than to do any good that way.
[QUOTE=Elendil’s Heir]
Boromir takes far too long to die after he’s turned into The Human Pincushion by the Uruk-Hai’s arrows in The Fellowship of the Ring.
[/QUOTE]
IANAD, but I disagree. Boromir was a healthy, buff warrior in the prime of life. If none of the arrows severed an artery or did catastrophic damage to a major organ, it could take a while for him to bleed to death. Don’t ask me for a cite on this, but there are people who have endured worse wounds than that and survived without any medical attention.
[QUOTE=Elendil’s Heir]
How could the three Precogs detect murderous intentions everywhere, throughout the entire country, when the Pre-Crime project was extended (as proposed) in Minority Report? They seemed pretty damned busy, just monitoring the Washington, D.C. area.
[/QUOTE]
Simple. They use the same brain-damaging process that was used to create the first 3 Precogs and carry it out on a more massive scale.
