People discussing medically private information and lawyer-client privileged information in front of …well, everybody.
Cases going to court the very next day after they are filed.
The assumption that all college professors make a huge salary and have nothing to do at home but sit around and read.
Cars exploding into a ball of flame from a single (or multiple) bullets… then again Michael Bay would be unemployed and working in a fast food joint if not for this trope.
Or my favorite 70’s movie trope: cars driving off the road, rolling down a cliff, and then exploding.
The hills of southern California must be littered with landmines for that to happen.
Speaking of that was I the ONLY person ever to be taught to downshift and where the parking brake is?
“Oh no, the brakes are dead and I’m going down a steep hill! What should I do? Oh I know! I’ll stomp on the brake until I fall off the edge of the cliff.”
Okay you may lose your transmission throwing on the parking brake but that’s better than crashing.
Except real smokers do try this. But yes, it is usually not effective at being sneaky.
The Mentalist has taken this to new heights. At least when they were centered in California, it made some minor sense to always check in with their headquarters in Sacramento. They’d occassionally go on road trips that took all night or whatever. But the latest season has Jane paired with the FBI, at Austin. Except they go all over the place. Okay, several have at least been in Texas (Houston, Dallas, El Paso).
The first story - a disappearance in New York City. So Jane and the crew load up and fly to New York, go interview the wife and building, then fly back to Austin, then realize they found more information, so fly back to New York City. WTF? The FBI doesn’t have an office in NYC that they could borrow for a couple days?
I thought that was a backhand, at least the gesture my American friends made when saying “bitchslap” was.
Or flying off the road, exploding in midair, and then rolling down the cliff! Sometimes the SFX man hit the button a little too early! :rolleyes:
I’ve read that some pilots were so terrified of being trapped in a burning plane, or indeed a crashing one, that they wanted to be able to bail out quickly.
The sound isn’t in space, it’s in the pilots’ headphones, or the ships’ speakers, and such. There are apparently radar systems today that give the user audio feedback. Brian Daley (among others) had this one figured out decades ago. In the excellent radio drama version of Star Wars: A New Hope, Han Solo mentions to Luke as they’re about to man the Falcon’s guns, that the headset will give him an audio representation of what’s going on.
It doesn’t always work properly, especially when under attack!
As an EMT, I’ve assisted with several codes with one of the local “band-aid stations.” They may have 3-4 nurses working a shift, and we were stationed at that hospital as our quarters. Most of the codes we worked with them (that ended with death) ended with the doctor saying some variation of “alright, let’s stop. [Looks around room to everyone working] Are you all satisfied that we did everything we could?” If the answer was yes, it was called. And the time we spent could be anywhere from a few minutes to (in the case of a special-needs child who died in his living room floor at 11 years old) well over an hour and a half.
You won’t fall because you’re looking behind you. You’ll fall because you’re a girl.
Here’s a youtube link of that scene, and now that I’ve seen it with this in mind I can’t unsee it. You’ve now ruined most studio recording scenes for me. Jerk! hehheh.
I was watching an movie last night (Doomsday Machine) in which the Earth blows up after launching a spaceship to Venus. The crew of the ship is watching the Earth blow up through the telescope, which also transmits the sound of the explosion as well as video of tidal waves along various coastlines.
Have you ever dropped a real pistol or revolver onto the floor?
It doesn’t much matter if it’s a wood floor or a tile floor or a linoleum floor. Most all floors result in the same kind of noise.
It’s a heavy thud. It sounds very similar to dropping a large rock onto the floor. Most handguns are surprisingly heavy to people who have never held one before.
But on TV, it sounds like they dropped a tin badge. It’s a very tinny sound and it sounds nothing like the sound when you drop a real gun.
It’s most disappointing for me in Steven Seagal movies. Not because I think he is a good actor or that he makes good movies. I don’t. I think his movies are all pretty weak and unfortunate (except for Under Siege which was a lot of fun). But all the action involving guns in Seagal’s move is very realistic. They way they look when they are fired. The way they seem to recoil. Most everything about firearms, Seagal seems to get it right. But not the way they sound when they are dropped onto a floor.
I don’t understand. Why can’t filmmakers get this small thing right? It seems like it would be such a tiny detail to get right.
Does anyone know why they always seem to get it so wrong?
A minor error that never fails to annoy me: when a character is carrying a suitcase which is obviously empty.
The worst example was a low-budget tv series being filmed in the marina where I lived. I watched the actors walk down the dock toward their sailboat and each one was carrying a big honkin’–and obviously empty–suitcase.
Maybe in the next scene the skipper told them to get those stupid space-hogging suitcases off his boat.
A very similar error is when people pretend to drink a cup of hot coffee that is obviously an empty cup. To see that, just measure the time it takes for someone to take a real cup of coffee and lift it from the table to their mouth. Then see what it’s like with an empty cup. If actors are so smart about pretending to make things look real, why do they lift an empty cup to their lips very quickly when they would never do that with a real coffee?
Two cops going up the walkway together and knocking on the door. I’m waiting for the show where the door opens and the suspect starts shooting.
Cops always approach a door from different angles to avoid this.
Wasn’t shooting thru a door a plot element in Serpico?
Same goes for “oh noes, the accelerator is stuck ! I’m forced to drive like a madman and swipe any number of fruit stands !”. How about you shift to neutral instead, genius ?
But I came back for one that’s been mentionned on page one : shocking flat lines. No. Look, Hollywood, very no. Bad ! It’s called a defibrillator. There’s a mnemonic trick to that name : you use it when people are, in point of fact, fibrillating. That’s, like, the exact opposite of a flatline. In fact, the point of shocking a heart is to stop it. Temporarily. You’re not Frankensteining a stopped heart back to life, I’m sorry.
Then my work here is done. 
My car is deadlocked by the remote. Without it inside the car it is not possible to open the doors from inside. Also the windows deadlock after half a minute so you wouldn’t be able to climb out of a window either.
There is a button that locks the doors so they can’t be opened from the outside but can still be opened from inside. That button is inside the car, obviously.
I’ve ranted elsewhere on the use of fifty-star US flags in anything set before 1959. But why the hell does History Channel use Maple Leaf flags for Canadian forces on WWII battle maps? Do they not know or care that that flag wasn’t adopted until 1965?
And while we’re at it, History Channel, get your translations straight, fer Chrissakes! Panzerfaust (Germany’s answer to the bazooka) means “armored fist,” not “tank fist.” :mad: