I’m in complete agreement on the military uniform problem. Why are people so baffled by uniforms? You can get the correct regs at any surplus store, or hire a veteran for a couple of hours and he’ll show you how to do it!
HINT: Not everyone in the Army is in the First Cavalry Division or the 82nd Airborne. Not everyone in the Air Force wears pilots wings. Nobody in the military wears their uniform jacket unbuttoned. Ever.
One thing that really gets me is military headgear. If you’re wearing a hat indoors, it means you are carrying a weapon. Otherwise, you take the damned hat off as soon as you enter a building. Outside, unless you’re on the flightline, you put a hat on as soon as you’re out from under the doorframe. A hat on the flightline WILL get sucked into an engine and do several thousand dollars of damage to an aircraft. Why can nobody get this straight?
Don’t even get me started on the Iron Eagle movies - makes TopGun look like a training video…yeah, any 16 year old kid who can fly a Cessna can single-handedly defeat an entire middle-eastern air force in a single (stolen) F-16. Happens all the time. And what the HELL is Louis Gossett wearing!!! I saw a commercial for one of the sequels where he has a Colonel’s rank pins on his shoulders, and an enlisted man’s “US” pins on his lapels! And an ARMY nametag on the flap of his breast pocket (which is where the name tag goes, in the Army. In the AF, it rests on top of the pocket flap.)
You posted ‘Back to the Future II:
If I had to pick the single worst inaccuracy from this trilogy, it would be when Old Biff steals the DeLorean, goes back in time, changes the past, and then returns to the future to drop the car back off! You can’t. You just changed the past. Doc and Marty are either stranded there in an alternate reality or completely wiped from existence. Either way, they’re screwed.’
I thought you time-travelling types were supposed to keep your existence secret.
After all we 21st century Earthlings don’t have time-travel, so we don’t know what the effects would be.
As for WWII, I think you American chaps did recover an Enigma machine. But, as Johnny L.A. says, the film showed a real-life British operation (which came first).
I understand there’s going to be a film about escaping from Colditz (supposedly impregnable German POW castle). Naturally (hey, I understand Hollywood economics ) there’ll be an American lead, even though there were no Americans at Colditz.
Actually, if you’ve read the novels, Han Solo did NOT make a mistake. The idea was to make the Kessel Run by going as close to the Maw Cluster (black hole cluster near Kessel) as possible, without getting sucked in. In other words, to find a shortcut!
In the movie Stargate, my husband and I both wanted to scream when the supposed elite military units who went through the Stargate cocked their guns about a DOZEN times. By the time they were done, I’m surprised that they had any shells left in the weapons. That Foley artist went crazy and should’ve been put down. This pet peeve seems to prevail itself in lots of movies.
Well… When the movie came out, there were no novels of it! Therefore, any attempt to explain Solo’s remark as “finding a shortcut” is suspect. I think the author was a “truefan” who wanted to fix the inconsitenccy in his “religion”, so he concocted the shortcut explanation.
There was a lot of stuff in the scene to show that Solo was a cocky pilot. Having Harrison Ford spot that line was not necessary. Also, anyone who lives in a universe where space travel is commonplace would know what a parsec is. Even a farmboy from Tatooine.
We’re talking about a movie here, folks. Not something real. But I’ve met many science fiction fans who live their lives by what they see and read (rent Trekkies to see what I mean). It’s beginning to sound like an argument with fundies. “Oh, you don’t know! You see, the interpretation is this…” But it’s only a movie. And movies are usually written by non-technical people who often grab words that sound “techie” without knowing that they mean. “Parallax second? Obviously a measure of time!” says the writer. Continuity errors happen all the time. Filmmakers tend to be artists, not scientists.
As for Lucas’s explanation quoted above, I see two possibilities:
He put the line in to show Solo was a BS artist, and then neglected to have him called on it. That is, he put something absurd in his movie, and then gave no indication that it was supposed to be absurd. There was no indication in the film that the line was intentional. That’s sloppy filmmaking.
He didn’t know what a parsec is and used the line anyway. After the film was released, someone pointed out to him that a parsec is a measure of distance and he concocted the old “Oh, I did that on purpose” line to save face.
I’ve worked on a few films and I think the more plausible explanation is #2. He screwed up, then tried to cover it up after the fact. Then Star Wars became so amazingly popular that truefans started covering up for him.
So for this thread, and for the movie that was released in 1977 before all of the books were written, Han Solo’s line is a mistake.
Actually, there was one, and it appeared several months before the film did. (Movie novelizations were still something new in the paperback novel world. Now, the books are released only a week or two before the film premieres. Or it was a shrewd move on Lucas’s part to release the novel so early, to generate interest. It worked on me!) It featured a cover painted by Ralph McQuarrie depicting Luke, Leia, the droids and Darth Vader’s helmet as background. It was subtitled “From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker,” as if it were one episode of some previously-existing series. While the author was given as George Lucas, I believe it was actually ghost-written by Alan Dean Foster. (I think he also ghost-wrote the novelization of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but he became so popular from adapting Animated Star Trek, he has never had to ghost-write anything more.)
Unfortunately, it’s been so long since I last read it, I can’t answer the “Kessel run” question. I’m not sure if the line was in the novel, or, if it was, how the author handled it.
I have mentioned this before, as a HUGE pet peeve of mine.
I hate when a cannonball hits something and the something blows up, as if the cannonball were an explosive device of some sort. It’s NOT! A cannonball is just a big hunk 'o lead. The only way it might cause an explosion is if it landed or crashed into some sort of magazine.
Cannonballs were used to knock holes in things through sheer force, not by explosion! Aaarrgghh! I mean, I can sort of deal with it on Bugs Bunny, but no place else.
Well, actually, they did use exploding cannonballs, especially in mortars. Check out Last of the Mohicans to see it in action. I agree with you for the most part though. They seem to do it alot more often in pirate movies and other period naval warfare then they do in other types of movies.
My peeve is that, when an historical movie is filmed, the movie’s hairstylists don’t seem to be able to duplicate historically correct hairstyles. This is less of a glaring problem nowadays, but in years past, you could tell when a movie was made just by looking at the hairstyles (and sometimes even the costumes) of the actors in the historical piece. I mean, women wearing flips in “From Here To Eternity”? (Must have been filmed in the early sixties). Flappers wearing collie-muzzle bras and full skirts? (Lots of movies about the roaring twenties were filmed in the '50s.) Come on!
If you’re thinking of “Out Tonight,” that does not happen “right after” Mimi shoots up. Mimi shoots up after “Light My Candle,” because she gets the heroin back from Roger… (“Do you want to dance?” “With you?” “No… with my father!”) She then goes to shoot up and has plenty of time to recover - through “Today For You,” “You’ll See,” “Tango Maureen,” and the whole visit to Life Support.
Moreover, a musical is permitted to have characters sing and dance as a metaphor for how they are feeling, not as a true representation intended to make you believe that homeless people really can achieve perfect harmony.
And are you saying that a film camera doesn’t use a battery? When Benny says, “And it’s with great pleasure on behalf of CyberArts that I hand you this key,” Mark replies, “I have no juice in my battery.”
Benny tells him, “Reshoot!”
And then Roger says cynically, “I see, this is a photo opportunity.” Not once is the word “video,” “taping,” or “tape” uttered during the entire show, and having seen Rent over thirty times, I can confidently assert that there’s never a sense that this is anything other than film. As to where he gets the money to develop it - perhaps he hits Tom Collins’ reprogrammed ATM, at the food emporium, and punches in ANGEL a few times - eh?
What about porno movies where all people do is move from one sexual encounter to another for 90 minutes straight. Come one people! Like we are supposed to believe that…
OK, OK, so no one knows how time travel will affect things, but it is still an inaccuracy. Science fiction has the greatest leeway of any genre, because they can create an entire universe where our scientific laws and principles hold no meaning. This I can accept. But once their universe is created, it must be strictly adhered to. Deviation from it is as gross an violation as the military wearing the wrong clothing.
In BTTF, they’ve set up the premise that when they change the past, the “old” future ceases to exist. If that’s true, then Doc and Marty must cease to exist the moment Biff goes back in time.
The implication is the Jim Cameron and Disney animated versions, respectively.
My pet peeve: people being held at gunpoint with a Guv’mint .45 auto (1911-style) with the hammer down–it’s a single-action. Pulling the trigger with the hammer down WON’T DO ANYTHING!
You posted ‘Science fiction has the greatest leeway of any genre, because they can create an entire universe where our scientific laws and principles hold no meaning. This I can accept. But once their universe is created, it must be strictly adhered to. Deviation from it is as gross an violation as the military wearing the wrong clothing.’
Yes I fully agree with that. I just saw the chance for a joke - hope you don’t mind!
Do they call minors something else, or do they not have any equivelant program at all? My school has “concentrations”, which as best as I can tell are identical to minors at other schools. I often call my concentration a minor because it takes less time and people are more likely to understand what I mean.
) there’ll be an American lead, even though there were no Americans at Colditz.
