"Sorry, my suspension of disbelief doesn't stretch that far." (Open Spoilers)

Cafe Society
41

I don’t find the lack of accuracy in movie firearms to be unbelievable, given that movie villans are usually spraying from the hip. It’s rather hard to hit anything that way.

Similarly, firing a rifle, even an automatic one, from a helicopter seems to me a very questionable proposition. To begin with, it isn’t particularly easy to hit a target with single shots that is moving laterally across your frontage, even when the shooter himself is stationary and in a supported position. To do so when the shooter himself is on a rattling, vibrating helicotper moving across 3 dimension at hundreds of miles/hour, well, my suspension of disbelief sort of stops there. Now, I stand ready to be corrected on this if anyone has actually done it in real life, but AFAIK hitting a moving target while moving generally requires either a) Computerized fire control and mechanically stabilized guns, such as on ships and tanks, or b) a weapon that puts a bullet in every square inch of a football field every second, such as the gatling guns that helicopters generall use. Now, I can accept the use of mounted machine guns firing tracers, even slow firing ones like the .50 cal, although I gather that .50s are not really used much in this capacity because of its slow rate of fire, but I have never seen or read any accounts of people using rifles to any great effect from a helicopter. To accurately fire from even a moving car would require a lot of practice and experience.

42

I know you’ve already corrected yourself, but I have to note that I would so totally worship a puppy god…

43

In that Die Hard scene, it’s previously been established that the FBI are complete morons.

There’ve been a number of films which poke fun at the ‘hiding behind narrow bit of metal’ idea. True Lies and Wasabi come to mind. In the former, we even see the guy (Arnie’s somewhat pudgy older partner IIRC) kiss the streeetlamp.

44

One of the biggest, for me, is in Die Hard 2, where the terrorists have taken over a Washington DC area airport, and the planes don’t have enough fuel to bingo to any other airports, but have enough fuel to orbit the airport for hours. Given the simple number of air strips in and around DC, this is so far from realistic that I just can’t buy anything else in the movie.

45

Oh, and car chases in, and around, Boston. Where the roads are all wide, uncrowded, and two-way. (Probably the same alternate reality world where a sub can navigate the canals of Venice.)

46

I didn’t see the movie, so I don’t know if that was meant to play for laughs. If it was, I can see it working. Otherwise, it would be the kind of thing that makes me cringe.

-Kris

47

OK, I’ve got my own pet peeve on this one.

Whenever the good guys want to access the computer account of the bad guys, they always use some silly little trick to intuite the password - at max it’ll take like 5 tries to hit on the right combination of birthdates, dead wives names, project codewords, or other significant personally-identifying information. This was exusable in War Games (for example) since finding a plausible password was a major plot point (that led to in-depth research on the life of the software designer) - but in most other movies it just bugs the hell out of me. I’m drawing a blank on some other offenders to offer as examples.

48

I watched an old episode of Walker, Texas Ranger the other day. Walker was in his pickup truck–a Dodge Ram 1500, which was easily pacing the sports car driven by the bad guys–when one of the bad guys smashed out his rear window and unloaded at Walker’s truck with a submachine gun. From a distance of maybe 50 feet, the pickup didn’t get a single scratch, the windshield wasn’t broken, and Walker didn’t even duck.

Have you ever tried to hit a hippo with a banjo? Those things are faster than they look (the hippos, not the banjos)! You’re much better off taking the mouthpiece off of your clarinet and using the main body as a blowgun (finger B-flat above middle C and blow really hard).

I was trying really hard to remember the puppygod in that movie. :smiley:

Have you noticed how many movie and TV watchers will cheerfully watch people beaten up, raped, and murdered; but throw a fit when the puppydog gets it?

49

And when he uses his Zippo on the ground to light the trail of leaking airplane fuel, which then continues to ignite as it follows the dripping airplane fuel through the air towards the plane that has taken off, igniting the plane. Ugh.

50

In The League of Extraordinary Gentlement, we are asked to accept a world with vampires, invisible men, etc. Fine. But I cannot accept that, even in such a world,

  1. The Venetians, unlike the rest of Catholic Christendom, hold Carnival (same thing as Mardi Gras) in July, and

  2. The canals of Venice are wide and deep enough for a submarine the size of a modern aircraft carrier to sail invisibly beneath the surface.

51

Just how long ARE those poles they use to push along the gondolas? :slight_smile:

52

I can’t suspend disbelief far enough to read Tuesdays with Morrie. A book about a man dying by inches bravely facing death and cheerfully wasting his last days trying to mentor someone? Yeah.

The idea sounded hard enough to swallow when I thought it was a novel, but I recently learned it’s non-fiction!

53

No, it was a straight-up action movie, not a comedy.

54

The basic concept and setup of Star Trek in general

I’ll refer to TNG since that’s the only series that I have seen extensively (yeah, despite what I’m about to write below) besides the original which I don’t remember much of.

1)All aliens are humanoids (OK, casting and FX constraints; Pass)

2)All non-exotic alien species can communicate with each other; not only that, but English happens to be the lingua franca. What happened to Mandarin, Spanish, Let alone alien languages? (OK, another Pass, but a fundamental suspension of disbelief required).

3)In TNG, they greet each other using ‘Good Morning’ and the like, and use Earth style time (14:30 hours). What meaning does “morning” have on a starship always located in dark space? Why is time measured in hours and days? If someone tries to explain this away using circadian rhythms, that won’t work. The circadian rhythm developed in response to Earth’s environment, mainly light. There was a human experiment conducted in the 70s/80s where subjects were kept in windowless rooms for some time, and their rhythm changed to a cycle of 25 hours with peaks and dips every couple of hours. Of course, even Roddenberry probably saw this, considering the concept of stardate that is used. (OK, a minor quibble considering the other travesties, so a grudging Pass)

4)You sometimes have episodes where some mysterious phenomena occurs, and you see the major characters firmly proclaim that there is no such thing as the ‘supernatural’ or ‘ghosts’, and yet you have ‘the Q’ a “natural” entity which is omnipotent and omniscient, and various other entities that can do various fantastic things. Just what does “supernatural” mean on this show? (No Pass on this one)

5)Seems that there is a universal morality present in the Federation. Sure, there are quirks here and there among species, but the basic foundation seems to be Earth-based Christian-influenced secularized morality. If I may presume that morality of a civilization is shaped by the evolutionary experiences and adaptations, then such a common ground is unlikely, at the very least. (No Pass; seems like a self-affirming strategy of the writers)

6)Art. Music - either classical or “mambo”. Was no music made on Earth between the 20th and 24th century? Most popular music today doesn’t seem to be 16th century music. Forget that, what about rock or pop or electronica? What about television or radio or video games? Is recreation on the 24th century limited to poker games & bar lounges? Holodeck seems limited to serious simulations, for the most part; that too for the senior staff. ((Yeah, yeah, licensing & royalties. Somewhat of a Pass)

7)How does warp travel work? Don’t they ever collide with some objects while travelling at 1000 times the speed of light? (Sure, some technobabble is to the rescue, so Pass).

8)“Prime Directive” - to not interfere with the “natural evolution” of a primitive species (sub-Warp). What’s ‘unnatural’ in this Trek universe? I suspect the PD is meant to prevent inducing huge shocks in the outlooks of primitive cultures, but there’s nothing unnatural about that. (No Pass)

I’m bored now, so no more analysis.

Basically, the concept is only superficially plausible, but it’s average entertainment.

55

Well, the pilots of most of the planes didn’t know that they weren’t talking to the real controllers. ATC told them to enter a holding pattern, so they did. A few planes were reached over the airphones, and those diverted to their alternates. And it’s said that the blizzard had socked in and closed other major airports, so we never know how far away is the nearest open airport.

That movie had flaws (including one huge one), but I never thought this one was particularly bad.

56

Robot Arm, you do realize that within 90 minutes flight time from Dulles (I think the airport in the movie.) there’s Reagan, BWI, Wilmington, Richmond, Norfolk and several smaller commercial airports. I think Newark’s in that range, too. This is completely discounting the various military strips within the same general area. Some of which can handle things like C-5’s. No matter how bad the storm is, I cannot imagine any weather pattern that could close either BWI or Reagan, or Pawtuxent, or Quantico, without closing Dulles, too. And, again, even with just an hour’s notice - doing a bingo to Newark, especially, is very easy on most transatlantic flights. (I know that at least one of the pilots on the board has mentioned that this movie is one that gets watched for the humor of all the flight things that they got wrong.)

And, remember, at this same time in the movie, there’s a big point being made about how the only airport that can contact those planes in orbit around Dulles is the hijacked Dulles control center. No matter that the phones are working well for other purposes. So, why can’t they call the control centers in, say, Reagan, and have the flight controllers there tell the pilots to bingo to other strips? AIUI it’s normally bad form for one ATC to ‘step’ on another’s frequencies, but in a FUBAR like this, it would be easily done.

Frankly, it’s a major East Coast/West Coast dichotomy, written by people who’ve never driven, nor really looked at a map of, the distance between airports in the DC area. I might be willing to buy that kind of scenario with, say Sacramento (Assuming I could buy the blizzard…), but not anything around DC.

57

For what? I haven’t read the thread because I don’t know what’s being spoiled. It’s all well and good to warn of open spoilers, but if I have to read the thread to see what’s being spoiled, it’s kind of useless.

58

No, of course it’s not useless. Read at your own risk, is what **Skippy **is saying, since there may be spoilers from many different movies. And if you get spoiled on a movie, it’s your own fault.

59

What do you want him to do? Re-edit the title every time someone posts a spoiler to another movie?

60

Dude, I lurves my MBP, but if WE can encrypt our military communications, donthca think the aliens can too? (Unless their encryption was programmed in our equivalent of COBOL and all their COBOL programmers were wiped out soon after their y2k crisis.

and puppygod puppygod puppygod!