Glee, yes I got the joke originally. Guess my debator instinct just gets the better of me from time to time. I’ll try to shove that urge back down from where it came.
Lamia, nope. No minors. You can double major. Heck, you can triple major if you’ve learned how to stop sleeping. But you can’t minor in anything.
Now, so I don’t singlehandedly hijack this thread, here’s another movie flaw. Hollow man. Somehow everyone in this movie developed superhuman strength at the end. The woman was in a room with below freezing temeratures for so long so would have no motor control whatsoever, yet managed to perform complex tasks to escape. The man was not only freezing to death but also unconcious from a head wound! Guess what? He was just fine five minutes later.
Kevin Bacon was beaten up, bloodied, SET COMPLETELY ON FIRE and he came back for seconds. Ya-huh?
Oh, if I “ruined” this movie anyone, I really didn’t. Just don’t go see it.
The Abyss: Underwater drilling rig? Excuse me? We’ve been drilling in 20,000 ft of water since the 60’s using the DSDP (deep sea drilling project). The deepest oil well drilled commericially was in 9,100 ft of water off the coast of Brazil. At least it was nice and light in the inky oceanic depths.
Armaggeddon: Gravity works like normal for Bruce Willis, but some of the others can fly in their little buggy if the plot demands it
Well, I have to rail on the worst. See, apparently NASA has been developing this magical tent fabric behind our backs. What you do is get one crashed rocket, put the miracle tarp up next to it, make a sorta-kinda tent looking thing, and have a lot of plants inside.
Per the magical name, this tarp will be able to keep the Martian atmosphere out of the tent. Yup, you heard me. That little piece of fabric will be able to seal off the entire area and withstand the atmospheric pressure that would result from the different atmospheres inside and out of the tent.
I just couldn’t believe it when they took off their helmets in there. Then there was the guy’s face freezing when he was exposed to the vaccuum of space, but that’s not as bad as the magical tarp.
At the UW-Madison we have cerificates. The registration folks say that they are like minors but I’m not really sure how they compare.
The biggest problem with Armaggeddon is that there is no asteroid in the solar system as big as Texas. Besides it is a case of serious overkill. A asteroid just 10 miles across would cause a mass extinction. You certainly don’t need one that is hundreds of miles across to hit the Earth in order for serious damage to be done.
One thing that always gets me is how diesel big rigs become runaway vehicles when the brake air line is cut (like in License to Kill). As a safety feature, the brakes are designed to come on when air pressure drops below a certain level.
As a fan of Douglas aircraft (my dad flew 98 missions in an A-20 in New Guinea and the Phillipines), the Invader will always be the A-26 to me, leaving B-26 to the Maurader; however, the newly independent Air Force redesignated the A-26 as the B-26 in 1947, when they dropped the Attack category (until the 60s). Maybe John’s character’s father was a Korean vet. Or something.
The most beautiful and subtle nit (yes, I think those adjectives can be applied) I know of was in Interview with the Vampire.
The little girl and her adopted mother (I forget their names) are executed by being imprisoned in a tower open to the sunlight. As the sun rises, it is depicted shining full into the (vertical) tower. This means that it is directly overhead. However, the sun can only ever be directly overhead from locations between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. Paris is substantially north of the Tropic of Cancer and therefore the sun can never be directly overhead there.
And how can we forget everyone’s favorite, Jurrassic Park?
The inaccuracies are too many to mention here, however two stand out as being the most heinous:
Those were notVelociraptors. Velociraptor stood perhaps 3’ tall and weighed all of about 35 pounds. Even aside from the size, they were completely wrong. Closer to Deinonychus, perhaps, but still way off in size. Granted, following the release of the film, Utahraptor was discovered, which was about the right size and shape, but I ain’t giving this one to Spielberg. He goofed big-time (but then, so did Crichton…).
The Magical, Flying Tyrannosaurus. During the inital T. rex attack, we see the brute lumbering through the non-electricrified fence; mayhem and a wee bit of carnage ensues. Then, Grant and Lex are knocked over the edge of the area where the T. rex came from. Suddenly, it’s a huge ravine! So…how did Mr. Tyrannosaur get up there to bust through the fence in the first place…?
Oh…and lest I forget, most of the species in Jurassic Park were from the Cretaceous!
Johnny LA - thanks for judging all sci-fi fans by the example of a few who get a little (or sometimes a lot) too “into it.” The rest of us really appreciate it.
As for the Kessel Run, maybe it’s a goof and maybe it isn’t. Who cares? It’s a goof in the middle of a good movie. It’s not as bad as the Roman soldiers running down the hill wearing running shoes and wristwatches in Spartacus.
Go back an read what I wrote. Or read it again here:
I said “I’ve met many”, which is a far cry from saying “All science fiction fans…”
As for the “parsec” line, obviously a lot of people care. As I said before, there are mistakes in movies and this is simply one of them.
And as long as I’m posting, there’s a small compass in a box of Cracker Jacks in Contact. They no longer put toys in Cracker Jacks. Just printed stuff. They’re afraid some kid would choke on an actual toy and they’ll get sued. The commentary on the DVD admits it’s a mistake.
Remember Ray Harryhausen’s 1964 adaptation of H. G. Wells’ The First Men in the Moon? Realizing that nearly everyone knew by then that there is no air on the Moon’s surface, he put all the Selenites underground in air-tight caverns. He also outfitted his Earth men with deep-sea diving suits. This would not work in real life because the suits had no insulation of any kind and also had neither air-conditioning nor heating; the men would either be frozen solid in the shade or roasted like a turkey in the sunlight. (I’m not sure if they even had an air supply.) But that wasn’t even the most egregious mistake. After establishng that the Moon’s surface has no atmosphere, his men went out in deep-sea suits WITHOUT GLOVES!!! Even though I was only seven or eight years old when I first saw it, I knew it was a gross error.
Other than that, it was a pretty good version of the novel. They even depicted a modern-day Moon flight fairly accurately five years or so before the actual event, though it was a United Nations expedition of Americans, Soviets and Brits.
Maybe they were trying to imply a medical discovery a few years ahead that we don’t yet know of. Kind of like the recent revelation that gastric ulcers are caused by a certain bacteria, not simple stress. Ten years ago the biotic theory was considered a crackpot idea.
That’s not to say the fanciful schizophrenia-by-virus idea should’ve been added to the movie. It didn’t add enough to the movie to warrant to potential for confusion and disagreement. It was pretty much a throwaway line.
Or maybe I’m giving the screenwriters WAY too much leeway. Maybe they did think schizophrenia’s a viral condition. Yikes.
Sorry, dude, but I’ve lived on a gravel road for about 10 years, and you CAN peel out on a gravel road, and it WILL make that noise. Here’s how.
You get a gravel road.
This road only gets new gravel every 6 months, ensuring that the gravel is given adequate time to erode and crumble.
Said road is driven on alot, compacting the gravel.
It rains.
Many people drive on the wet gravel road.
Ground dries out.
Now, the gravel is very compact and appears to be a chip-and-seal road. It still has loose gravel on the top, but under about 1/2 inch is a very compact surface.
You can peel out on this all day long, leaving long black tire marks. A road in this condition gets HUGE potholes, though.
Yeah, it seems complicated to describe, but then, when you think about it, so does walking. These conditions would surface at the beginning of every summer, and only be cured by the first freezing rain, which would again crumble the road surface.
It showed nothing of the kind whatsoever. U-571 was pure fiction; there was no operation of that sort conducted by anyone during the war. It was not supposed to be taken as historical truth.
Flashdance-the girl just does a break-dancing, or whatever dance routine and gets right into ballet school…at age 18.
D’uh! Most people who are dancers spend almost their entire life studying dance-from childhood on. By 18, most girls would’ve been semi-professionals, I believe.
Not too mention that the Pittsburgh School of Ballet, where she supposedly got in, is a VERY good school-no way someone could just walk in and audition just like THAT.
Living in Oblivion is a film about making a film. Several times, the “take” being called does not match the take number written on the slate. Since the film is about things tht happen on a set, is it a mistake? Or is it a subtle joke? They never mention the erronious number on the slate.
It’s possible Crunch. When they say Nit-Pick, they ain’t fucking around. Get this one from Ferris Bueller:
Quote: “When Ferris is in the bathroom at the restaurant, he’s talking aloud. When he leaves the bathroom, his father comes out of a stall. Maybe his father is deaf, because he didn’t even act like he heard Ferris’s voice. I would think a parent would recognize his own child’s voice.”
Did this person even watch the movie, or just that scene? A little lesson in breaking the fourth wall is in order for this doorknob.