Archer wins points just for the reminder that guns are loud. How many times have the various characters had hearing loss from irresponsible gunplay?
It wears it down, certainly. But thrusting weapons like rapiers have limited edges to begin with and a nick or two in a blade isn’t going to be the end of the weapon.
Add to that balance is a personal thing to boot, and frankly you tend to know the moment it is in your hand, at least with rapiers and smallswords.
You realize that a lot of people do that in real life, yes? Take a look at any battle footage of Syria on Youtube. Its mostly done to suppress the enemy.
Never mind the ricochet sound. I want to know why his hat makes a sound like a crashing WWII fighter when it finally falls out of the sky.
Isn’t that what a suppressor is for?
flees
Next we will bitch about how unrealistic car scenes are in movies. Or maybe blunt head trauma.
But seriously, do you think it’s ignorance? Or do movie makers realize that reality would suck, and they make weapons cool and awesome and bad ass and shit like that to entertain us?
Because anything close to reality with weapons, and fighting with weapons, compared to a movie portrayal, seems boring, and the sound is boring.
Accurate gun usage in a movie is not boring 
Way of the Gun was probably the movie that I recall with the most accurate gun usage. A great - lesser known movie.
See Collateral for good examples of “Mozambiquing.”
But that would ruin the time-honored tradition of screaming “NO! WHAT ARE YOU DOING!? JASON ISN’T DEAD! SHOOT HIM AGAIN!” into the screen of every horror movie.
Well I had to check.
Listen to the sound. The shotguns sound exactly like the pistols. Not realistic at all. Not even close. And there is no reverb, no echoes or ringing of the shots off all the stone surfaces. The gunfight sounds nothing like a real gun battle.
It’s why I mentioned the sound aspect. By adding in the sound later, the realism is absent from almost every gun scene. And yeah, I’m also an audio expert, so the sound parts really bug me, as much as the other unrealistic aspects of weapons.
Or Zombieland.
And to keep from getting shot in the face. That’s a really important part of it.
Of course I have to include a link now to the “you can shoot around a corner with a gun with out getting shot in the head” gun now.
photo http://www.leelofland.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/66.jpg
video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9C0FQPk5mv0
website http://www.cornershot.com/
Ummm, actually…
Decades ago I was reading on a Usenet forum a contribution from a sword expert who noted that a Claymore was made to be able to handle the abuse of a side-of-the-blade block or parry (after dispatching the opponent of the moment, one could try to dash away from the heart of battle and bang the bent sword back into shape…) whereas a katana is built differently. One can also use the side of a foil or epee to parry/block, though a foil blade is square/rectangular and one ideally catches an incoming thrust on the ‘corner’ with a slight turn of the wrist and an epee blade is triangular and, again one ideally uses a corner to turn aside an incoming thrust because those corners are tougher and more resistant to bending. On the other hand, a foil blade is often intentionally bent, for various reasons, before the two duelists face off. So perhaps parrying with the flat of a blade is acceptable for foil, epee, and claymore for sure.
In the other hand, the katana and many other similar weapons are made with a bias in the grain of the metal. I’m drawing a blank and can’t think of the proper term right now, sorry. I was at a warehouse and saw a pair of bolt-cutters fall over and the cutting head shattered immediately. I remarked to the warehouse manager that I was amazed that something made to cut through bolts and chain and other thick metals could break so easily. My manager explained that the metal in the head was biased to be strong in the direction that the blades moved, but was (therefore?) extremely weak in the perpendicular direction. Since the bolt-cutters fell over sideways, the impact easily made the head snap. A katana has a similar metal bias to make it strong in the direction of cutting, but not so sturdy against forces against the side of the blade. In fact, we jokingly call the katana a 3-foot razor blade. When you look at a razor blade, it’s very clear that it is strong in one direction and bends or breaks very easily in the other, due to its design and relative (lack of) thickness in that dimension.
Also, since a saya (scabbard) is custom-made to fit each katana, one would definitely want to avoid bending one’s katana because then it would begin sticking in the scabbard and making the infamous draw-and-cut-in-one-motion techniques less smooth, less swift, and perhaps impossible. On the other hand, your basic katana will have a strong “spine” along the back (non-edged) curve that can be used for blocking and better katana will have a groove near the spine that makes the spine itself into something like the top of an I-beam; very strong. My point is that the samurai were supposed to parry/block perpendicular to the side (i.e. parallel to the edge bias) because the blade is strongest in that direction.
It’s been far too long since I’ve had a cutlass or saber in my hands, so I’m not sure about edge- versus side-parrying with those blades.
[QUOTE=Ají de Gallina]
Swords: Edge on edge parrying. That destroys the edge.
[/QUOTE]
We asked the Grandmaster about this when he was demonstrating the details of a technique that involves a hard block against a very hard attack. He nodded and said, "Yes. But you have a better strength against this attack this way. You could use the [spine] but then you risk having your blade bounce away from the attack and into yourself. So you choose: Save your blade, or save your head?
[QUOTE=Ají de Gallina]
Also, every time a character tries a sword it’s the same routine: two or three swings and then declaring “it’s well balanced”.
[/QUOTE]
Our Grandmaster insisted on inspecting any new swords brought to class. My fellow student brought in a $14,000 custom-designed sword and handed it to the grandmaster, who pulled it out of the scabbard, shook it slightly, and said, “Good for you!” Months later, I brought in my $2,700 sword and handed it over. Grandmaster pulled it out of the scabbard, shook it slightly, then smiled and said, “Very nice!” and the more experienced students told me he had never said that about anyone else’s custom sword before, much less smiled afterward. The other student had a tip-heavy sword, made for tameshigiri (cutting demonstrations) whereas mine was intentionally designed to be balanced properly so I could learn normal (non demonstrative) techniques with a real steel blade so that every technique I did would be clean and crisp enough to use in a demonstration. Yeah, our grandmaster could ascertain the quality of a blade without even having to swing it. The rest of us lessor practitioners can do it with a swing or two that helps us feel where the balance is in relation to our hands, which is more important than how sharp the thing is. So those scenes aren’t just showing how fine the sword is; they’re trying to convey how experienced/skilled the swordsman is.
[I found the LOTR Helms’ Deep battle preparation scene particularly poignant: A scared witless kid walks by Aragorn and the Ranger took time to say “Give me your sword.” The kid hands over what is clearly a war-notched sword worth less than a baseball bat, and Strider inspires confidence in the kid by gazing lovingly at it and pronouncing, “That’s a fiiine blade!”]
[QUOTE=Ají de Gallina]
Shooting behind hard cover but without looking. You never waste ammo. Double sin if it’s an auto.
[/QUOTE]
[When two hit men attack Paul and Ben in a junkyard, Ben grabs Paul’s gun and blindly shoots back - he straightens up and sees two dead men]
Dr. Ben Sobel: J-Jelly? Did I do that?
Jelly: No, Doc. That one’s mine. You got the '72 Chevy, and the Amana side-by-side refrigerator-freezer.
–Analyze This
You mean that little tab that sticks forward between the ‘halves’ of the trigger? I thought ‘easing off’ would mean slowly (for lack of a better term) un-pulling the trigger – i.e. shifting the fingertip off the trigger so the ‘safety tab’ is no longer depressed.
What really really annoyed me was watching a broadcast of some national-level karate tournament and seeing a black-belt level competitor performing his kata routine for the judges. He was twirling a katana-shaped toy, rolling it across the back of his wrist, flipping it into the air and doing pirouettes before catching it – oh, and making cutting motions once in a while, as well. It was more like a dance routine or a drum major’s performance. During the one minute I watched him dance, I counted at least thirty instances in which I could have disarmed and/or killed him (even without a weapon in my own hands). Furthermore, no self-respecting martial artist would dare try such flashy tricks with a real-edged katana, not only because it would be dangerous as hell, but because a blade of high enough quality to hold an edge would be too expensive to risk damaging it during the practice sessions. I didn’t bother to stay tuned to see if he won, or who competed after him. It may have been artistic, but it certainly wasn’t martial.
—G!
Sure, but repeated sabre-to-sabre edge-on-edge parries is bye-bye to that blade.
Long article on Edge parries
In movies, balance doesn’t mean anything. There has never been an unbalanced sword in all of movie history, barring an specific plot point.
One thing is suppressing fire, where you don’t aim but shoot in the general direction of the enemy and another is back-against-the-wall over-the-head-shooting.
In Black Hawk Down, one of the characters, an American soldier, played by William Fitchtner, is depicted as going deaf for a long time after someone fires an M-249 SAW too close to his ears for too long.
But Black Hawk Down isn’t your average Hollywood movie.
For me the most annoying was the massacre scene in ‘Last of the Mohicans’, where they were obviously shooting blanks from the muskets.
Which a lot of ‘soldiers’, mostly poorly trained, have a habit of doing even when they are not employing suppressive fire. Sometimes they seem to be firing for the sake of firing.
Seriously, they do this a lot.
It has been a while since I’ve seen that film, but how can you tell, with all the black powder smoke?
You’re going to have some legal problems trying to arrange it otherwise.
At that point, you might as well be complaining that injuries in movies are all obviously fake. Getting actors to submit themselves to real ones would be a tough sell.
I admit my hearing isn’t that great. I particularly thought the motions and other non-sound aspects were very good. It has been quite a long time since I’ve seen it though.
Because they don’t care. And the majority of the people watching the movie don’t either.