Here’s one: a character is a teacher, and is shown in class lecturing, either to establish the subject or to introduce some plot point. The lecture the teacher is giving is a rudimentary introduction to the subject, when it’s supposed to be the middle of the semester or school year.
My girlfriend and I are watching Breaking Bad. We’re only in the second season, and the show has already been guilty of this a few times. In the first episode, Walt is shown defining chemistry to his class. I thought “oh, it must be the first day of school.” But something happened later in the episode (I’ve already forgotten what) that establishes it’s supposed to be winter or spring.
Other examples that come to mind are Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. However, I don’t remember off-hand if there is anything in these movies that states the time of year, so I suppose it could be the first day of class in these cases.
Just saw another contrivance that annoys the shit out of me, as it’s bought and paid for by RJ Reynolds. Guy is in a police station, lights up a ciggie, the interviewer sez “you can’t do that here” and the guy sez “what are you gonna do, arrest me?”…Fuck yeah, that’s exactly what they’re gonna do.
Hanging off a precipice, hundreds of feet (at least) up in the air. Protagonist is hanging onto the edge by a hangnail, antagonist is walking about on the edge that protagonist is hanging onto. Always ends up well for the protagonist. The Star Trek reboot had at least two of these scenes.
High speed car chase on wrong side of an Interstate. Miles and miles of near misses, openings in oncoming traffic appear with regularity throughout the chase all at high rate of closing speed.
Recently seen, too often seen: protagonist is running after antagonist in one of those rooftop chases. Antagonist makes the jump. Protagonist doesn’t, but ends up hanging by a hangnail, or more exactly, by the tips of their eight fingers.
The laws of Physics say the result would have been more along the lines of “smudge on floor down below”.
Agree about the general observation, but disagree about the specific example. I can find plenty of examples of a 1940s reference by a white Southern man to a black man as “man.”
In fact, this view of yours probably qualifies as a trope of some kind itself: that the past uniformly displays the most odious characteristics, so a woman in an office in the 1950s is subjected to a veritable barrage of pinches on the ass, invitations to motels, and in-office rape attempts before lunch every day. If realism is the goal, then it’s in arguable that women in the 1950s had a worse time in the office environment than exists now, but the cartoonish view that every moment was a living landmine of attacks isn’t realistic. Most offices were like most offices today – certainly a general tone of “a woman’s place” that doesn’t persist today, but not an barely-concealed threat of Caligula-ish proportions.
There was a thread a few months ago about being transported back to the 1950s. One poster was aghast, thinking that if she married, everything she used to own prior to marriage will wind up in her husband’s name, not hers. I explained that while such laws did once exist, by the 1950s every state had eliminated them.
Boolie Werthan was certainly not a paragon of enlightened racial thinking. But at the same time, he wasn’t someone who would call an older man “boy,” at least the Boolie in the 1987 New York version. I suppose if the Australian tour somehow rewrite Boolie as more base, you’d have a point, but I infer that your comment arises from the simple connection of the time and location of the play.
A defensible mistake. At one time, the entire state of New Jersey was 201. Burgeoning population required several changes, and Bernie’s old enough to remember pre-1958, especially if he learned area codes as a kid, like I did. At ten, i was fascinated with the area code schemes and could tell you area codes for most major cities.