Wasn’t that kinda the whole point of CELLULAR, with Kim Basinger and Chris Evans?
The last time I heard a car backfire, it was around 1998, and the car was a 1961 Ford that I owned. The cause of the backfire turned out to be a spark plug with a too-wide gap-- almost twice as wide as it needed to be. It did sound like a handgun firing, though.
It would be pretty unusual for a spark plug now to lose its gap, and depending on where you live, unusual for a vehicle to take spark plugs that didn’t come pre-gapped-- ie, vintage cars.
One reason I can think of for a backfire is that someone has removed their catalytic converter. They are very expensive, and if it rusts out, some people cut them out, and replace them with a plain piece of pipe. It’s illegal, and you will get caught in any state that does yearly inspections, which I think is every state except Indiana. Where does Vera take place?
The thing about Indiana, is that if you live anywhere outside a city, you hear gunshots every so often, because people shoot at coyotes in their yards. If you are outside the city, and hear a gunshot, there is no reason to call the police, or think a person is being harmed. I don’t personally like it, but outside the city, on private property, it apparently isn’t illegal, and there are a lot of people who don’t have working farms, but keep a couple of animals, because they have chickens for eggs, or they have a kid in 4-H with goats, or they have a horse for riding, and for them, coyotes are a problem.
Personally, I can’t tell a gunshot from a handgun at a distance, but people with more experience tell me they can.
Instead of a backfire, the guy could have said “Yeah, I heard a gunshot, but why would I think someone was shooting a person, and not a coyote after his chickens?”
One Agatha Christie novel has a variation on the divorce theme. The murderess wants to ditch her husband and marry a wealthy British Duke, but the Duke is highly religious and won’t marry a divorced woman with a living ex-spouse. So she connives to murder her spouse so she can marry the duke. I suppose that could work nowadays just as well.
There are a number of movies that turn on Nevada divorces and the “divorce residence industry.” Isn’t Marilyn’s character in The Misfits a Nevada divorcee?
The entire premise of My Two Dads would be obsolete. Both men were awarded jointed custody because paternity couldn’t be excluded for either with the old blood group method. IIRC it the premise actually became obsolete during the show’s run because they did a DNA test, but the results were destroyed without being revealed to the audience or anyone but Judge Wilbur.
Granted even the TOS communicators were actually a lot more powerful than any modern day cellphone on the market. No need for cell towers or orbiting satellites and they can transmit tru solid rock.
Yeah, but she wouldn’t know that. As far as she’d be able to tell, he’s just got a clunky mobile phone that of course works fine above ground in downtown San Francisco.
There were three bathrooms in the house, one for Alice, one for the parents and one for the six kids.
Like others have said, I think the lack of cell phones are one of the most glaring examples in older movies. Kiss the Girls (1997) was on TV the other night. In one scene Morgan Freeman’s pager gives off and the next scene shows him at a pay phone calling the number.
Sort of related:
Heaven Can Wait (1978). Remade today (or soon if the rules aren’t quite in place) Warren Beatty hops into the body of his teammate who was killed…and gets to watch the rest of the Super Bowl from the sidelines due to concussion rules.
Lots of old shorts show 7 year olds being sent to town to run lots of errands for their parents. Nowadays Child Services would be called in a heartbeat.
Christopher Reeve’s remake of Rear Window. His character has a eidetic memory, but he never read any report from his office of events that happened while he was recovering from his accident and found out that the artist doing the sculpture for the new office building was Julian Thorpe?
You just made me think of a good one - the Parallax View starring Beatty. In this film, Beatty is an investigative reporter who stumbles onto a Watergate style conspiracy. During the course of the film, there is one long sequence in which he is on the trail of some shadowy, nefarious agents. He tails them to the airport and watches as they board a plane. He simply…follows them on board the plane. No need for a ticket, no security check, he simply strolls up to the gate and on.
A Stewardess (no, not a flight attendant - a stew) asks him for a ticket. When he doesn’t have one, he simply buys one right there in mid-flight. When he hands her his money, she remarks "Out of seventy dollars…I’ll be right back with your change (!) sir."
While she brings goes to get change (!) for the price of his ticket (not even seventy dollars to fly on a plane!!!), Beatty goes right up into the cockpit and warns the flight crew to turn the plane around - because a passenger has a bomb. Nobody asks who he is, or detains / questions as to HOW he knows that, they simply turn the plane around!
The plane returns to the airport, and Beatty (not wanting to get involved in a police investigation) simply strolls away, blending into the crowd. The flight crew are left stymied as to what to tell the authorities of the mysterious stranger who told them about the bomb on board.
Similarly, there is David Mamet’s 1987 film House of Games. The final confrontation between two characters takes place in an airport. One is supposed to be a passenger on a flight, the other wants to hustle some stolen money back. They discreetly walk into the baggage handling area for a showdown. One character gets gunned down while the noise of jet taking off drowns out the gunshots.
This of course couldn’t take place in this day and age, but to be fair I’ve always felt it was quite a stretch that this could take place even in 1987. I’m sure even then, there were security procedures to prevent just anyone from strolling into the baggage claims area. And someone ought to have been on duty, if even just to prevent folks from wandering in and stealing stuff. And certainly by 1987, there would be security video cameras at a high security area of an airport!
I re-watched The Breakfast Club the other day, which I hadn’t watched since it first came out.
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Most public schools would immediately expel anyone who brought a weapon to school nowadays. I suppose there could be some leeway, since it’s a flare gun, but I can’t imagine a public school risking it. AMH’s character would have probably been sitting in a jail cell rather than in detention.
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Taping someone’s buns together could go either way. There are probably some schools that would expel or at least suspend for a violent attack, but EE’s character is a jock, so he might just get detention in a lot of schools. I’ll put this one as a maybe.
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No public school would allow a bunch of kids to be unsupervised in the library all day. That’s too much of a potential liability. I suppose you could argue that the principal is a renegade and plays by his own rules, but, I think the whole scenario is pretty implausible nowadays.
For another film, my friends and I were at a bar when Night of the Living Dead (original) came on the TV. The scene came on where Linda is trapped in the car just after her brother has been killed. We started cracking jokes:
“OnStar. What is your emergency?”
“I’M BEING ATTACKED BY ZOMBIES!!!”
Well, since a lot of cars don’t have OnStar, it’s still a plausible scenario, but I’m gonna throw it out there anyway.
I just saw an episode of Law & Order where part of the investigation was to find a liquor store the suspect had visited. The clerk said he gave the guy quarters, so the detectives checked the LUDs on the pay phone across the street.
Of course, L&O ran for so many years I saw episodes where pagers and cell phones were just as integral to the plot as that pay phone.
They had a proctor, whom they ditched somehow, although I don’t remember how. Back then, I remember thinking “Way to be back next Saturday.” Now, he’d probably call the police. I haven’t seen the movie since it came out either, but didn’t they ditch him to get some weed one of the kids had in his locker? Hello, jail.
I have a 20-year-old car, so I don’t even have automatic headlight shut-off, but I do have a cell phone.
Still, I think people born after 1990 would “get” Night of the Living Dead. A lot of them might be scratching their heads over Breakfast Club.
Not to mention the one characters cigarette burns. Where is the mandatory reporting and CPS? about two years away.
North East England – supposedly Tyneside and Northumberland, though the geography’s a little… fictionalised (enough to be occasionally baffling to those of us living here).
I do hear quite a few backfires, due to the current fashion for after-market exhausts among boy racers hereabouts, but the actual exhaust noise is usually almost as loud – you wouldn’t be in any doubt as to its source.
Not many coyotes in rural Northumberland, but foxes or badgers, yeah. Though how often you’d hear a gunshot is going to vary with location – in one place they might be fairly commonplace, but ten miles away you could live for years and never hear one. For a towny in a holiday rental cabin, I can see it not being their first assumption.
My favorite example of this is from a book, rather than a movie or TV show, but DEAL! In the original book of The Bourne Identity, Bourne at one point desperately needs to speak to someone in America. He’s in Europe, so he has to go to the phone company office to get them to place an intercontinental call for him. But he’s hiding and can’t be seen, so it turns into this elaborate scheme in which the woman he’s with goes in and arranges for the call, and then Bourne has to use distraction and general Bourneyness to get himself into the booth where the call gets connected without anyone seeing him.
It’s just a joke, but the scene in Airplane where the reporters run to the pay phones and knock them over is badly dated.
Yeah-- I love the TV show Lou Grant, and I can think of only one episode where the plot actually pivots on something badly dated, but all the typewriters and reporters using payphones probably look silly to anyone born after 1985.
There was one episode where the newsroom is switching to desktop computers over typewriters (they all have yellow and green monitors and keyboards, and appear to be hooked up to one large mainframe), a couple of people are enthusiastic, most are skeptical, and one or two outright refuse.
Of course, there is a power outage, and work comes to an abrupt halt-- except for one guy who pulls out a portable manual typewriter. And there’s one reporter who loses an entire story because everything got wiped out when the power went out-- they guy had his notes on the computer as well, because he “trusted management” who told him to rely on the computer for everything.
Somehow, I guess, the power outage wiped out the mainframe’s memory, and there was no capacity for people to keep backup disks, or the guy who lost everything had been entering data for days without saving.
Also, from about 1969-1981, there seemed to be some requirement that every sitcom have an episode where a computer screwed something up, and a manager refused to override it, because “the computer can’t be wrong.” Usually it had to do with someone receiving a bill with a misplaced decimal, so they were being billed hundreds of dollars, when they really owed forty or fifty. Those episodes are laughable now, and not for the intended reasons.
South Dakota doesn’t do yearly vehicle inspections anymore.
Waves
Hi, neighbor! I’m an Indiana boy, born and raised. And Kentucky doesn’t do yearly inspections, either.