Being an aviation nerd, pretty much anything ivolving airplanes in movies bugs me.
A good example is the newst Die Hard. (No major spoilers, you can see this in the trailer) Maclean is being chased by an F-35 and they show it “locking on” it’s “heat-seeking” missiles to the truck he’s in. According to every screen they showed, that F-35 is loaded out for air-to-air ONLY (they actually follow through with this as the F-35 somehow manages to fire an air-to-air missile at a ground target). And the little symbol they show is the reticle for the gun, and has nothing to do with missiles. Yeah, it’s a Die Hard movie, and sure, the F-35’s doing things it would never do in real life, but it would have taken the same amount of time to make it have weapons capable of shooting something on the ground and making the symbology correct, which would only improve the movie, and could be corrected in about 5 minutes by someone who has some idea of it (or has picked up a video game in the past 20 years).
Yeah, that’s what I meant…both characters are stopped right before they can.
Although there definitely are shots fired in the beginning when the raptor grabs that worker. I don’t know if they’re gun-guns or tranquilizer guns. The guy dies, though.
Most of Tony’s malapropisms are “cute” or funny and not nearly as glaring as Little Carmine’s monsters. One I can recall was when he probably meant to say something like, “…and do you deign to tell me now…?” but what came out was more like, “…and do you Dwayne to tell me now…?”
Another one that requires me to spell better than I can is when Melfi has made some point about “Cap d’Antibes” and Tony passes that data along to either Junior or Livia as something like “Captain Teebs.” As I recall, many of his bloopers are from his sessions with Melfi.
My favorite from the entire show, though, is when Tony and Bobby are scarfing down some monster plate of slop at a diner (may have been after a hit or something) and Bobby mentions that Quasimodo was “the Halfback at Notre Dame” in some context that was equally bizarre.
Carmine and Little Carmine both had some horrendous gaffes. When Carmine says, “There’s no stigmata” about seeking therapy, for example.
Oh yeah. Bobby thinks that Quasimodo predicted something (confusing him with Nostradamus). He then goes on to say that isn’t it a coincidence that there’s a hunch back of Notre Dame AND a halfback of Notre Dame. That one was rather cute.
I’m always bugged by courtroom dramas where the defense lawyer has a seemingly hopeless case, and is almost sure to lose, when, just in the nick of time, s/he either figures out some little technicality that conclusively proves the case, or somehow manages to extract a confession out of a witness right there on the stand. Bonus suck points if s/he has already concluded his/her closing argument and has to beg the judge to let him/her present this final piece of evidence. Then s/he wins the case and is lauded as being a fabulous lawyer. No - if you were a good lawyer, you would have built a good case before trial, not at the last second. Has a trial ever turned around at the last second like this in real life? I doubt it.
Another similar movie cliche. One character call the other on the phone and sez, for example, “Scully, you better get down here. You have to see this.” (The X-Files was a chronic offender.) Of course, half the time this happens, by the time the callee shows up, the caller is dead or missing. In every case, it would be much quicker to just tell the person on the phone what’s going on.
Sorry, but I do get tired of all these nitpicking threads that start merely because someone says something is “unrealistic” because it is outside of his experience and I got off a cheap shot because I was in a bad mood. I do try to stay away from these threads for this reason.
I think though, there is an important underlying issue: that “realism” is somehow always good. This was a particularly egregious case of someone not understanding what drama was all about and getting snarky and superior about it. If you (as the poster does) eliminate dramatic license in the name of “realism” – a very slippery concept – then there’s no point in fiction at all.
It seems like Law & Order episodes always hinge on the prosecutor bullying a witness until they get so angry that they drop their guard and blurt out some startling confession. Does this ever happen in real life?
Here’s a peeve I haven’t seen before. Consider how much debate occurs around our place in the universe, the existence of a soul, etc. In lots of movies aliens or ghosts or angels appear and are proven to be true, but they aren’t shown as changing anything. Think Ghostbusters II. the existence of spirts has been demonstrated, but no one gives a crap. Think Oh, God. It’s a massive failure of nerve, the unwillingness to explore the consequences of the story. 2001 is a rare exception.
Your bad mood aside, you are missing the point. I have no problem with the drama in Chinatown and it is among my favorite movies. Nor do I take issue with the acting jobs by any of the actors – for the most part. I also praise Polanski for an excellent job of directing (and even acting in a small but significant role). The point that annoys me is that I sense that Huston (with or without Polanski’s okay) decided on reading the script that “Gittes” is pronounced “Gits” in spite of being informed by Gittes himself that it is “Git-tess.”
You can describe me in whatever terms you like to feel superior, but the issue was not what you have pretended it is. Your smugness is disgusting. I have nothing further to say to you, nor in response to any more of your condescension.
The thing that kills me are their work habits. I regularly pull in 50-60 hours a week at work, but L&O people just kill me. They’re at it when the sun rises. They’re at it late at night. Claire will be talking to Jack at the end of a long day of questioning suspects and cross-examining bad guys and she’ll mention how she has 43 briefs to fill out when she gets back at the office (and that’s before the opposing Attorney slips her the Blue Motion of Death).
I really like it when the DA’s, in an apparent attempt to fill every waking second with their careers, end up doing police work: “Here, let’s send Abbie down to the crackhouse and see if she can find another witness in 24 hours.”
I’m glad they enjoy their jobs and all but on coming from somebody who has been there, all those late nights at the office… they’re just not worth it. Go home, crack open a beer and watch the Yanks, why dontcha? The bad guys will still be there in the morning.
Well, I don’t know about startling confessions, but bullying can work if you use it right. An old boss of mine liked talking about one time when the accused was using his mother as an alibi. The sweet old lady was going on and on, and it looked like the jury was eating it up. My boss was convinced that a lowlife like the accused couldn’t have been raised by someone who was really as saintlike as the mother was acting, so he browbeat the hell out of her. It would have been disastrous if she’d started to cry, but instead she starting ragging on him like the tough, lying old harridan she was, and the jury saw through her act.
In general, though, I dislike the impression that you get from movies and TV shows that everything hangs on brilliant cross-examination, not on getting your ducks in a row for examination in chief.
In a like wise, when a family of four (or more) sits down to dinner, they all sit on the same side of the table. TV is more guilty of this than the movies, of course.
And when characters on the phone finish speaking, they just hang up without saying goodbye.
My pet peeve is those “walk & talk” scenes, where the characters are walking along 2 by 2 and successfully carrying on a four part conversation. In my experience in such conversations, the 2 people in the back can never quite hear what the people in the front are saying, and so are forced to continually say, “Huh, what’d he say?”
I really find this on X-Files. I mean, I’m watching it now, from the beginning. Even though Scully has seen SO MUCH she is still just as disbelieving! I mean she
held an alien baby in her hand! What more proof does she need?
And yet episode after episode it shows her barely changing her mind. And all these people who know that The Truth Is Out There, act like nothing’s changed - even though they know aliens are real. I have a hard time believeing nobody sits there and goes WOW.
Not to mention conspiracy! But I guess I should be on an X-Files website, huh? Ok, last thing - I don’t believe in conspiracies because I simply do not believe that all the people that are putated to know about The Truth keep their mouths shut. I know human nature, and that ain’t it.
