You must be remembering this one from Roger Ebert’s Compendium of Movie Cliches! I love that thing. That’s where I first saw this cliché pointed out, and it bothers the heck out of me every time I see it. And I, too, always think of Sheena and a reporter.
I found a PDF of the abridged list. I can’t seem to get a link to work properly so try googling “Roger Ebert’s Glossary of Movie Terms (Abridged).”
Two problems with the absolute statement you offer here.
Sometime it makes sense for a defendant to testify. If your guy has a good story to tell and the impeachment opportunities are limited, it can certainly make sense to advise him to testify.
Admittedly that’s rare in criminal defense. But what’s not rare is the accused demanding his right to testify, against the advice of his lawyer. This happens fairly frequently.
Bingo. Making a record is a good way to insulate yourself against malpractice suits and Strickland appeals.
In the old days, this would alert the operator that the connection was lost.
(According to my mother, who worked as a telephone operator in the 40s.)
THANK YOU. I rant about this all the time when I see it. Why are you still tending your herb garden? If LE came to me to question me about someone’s murder, even if I didn’t know the person very well, my first response would be “WTF, that nice clerk at the hardware store was murdered? WHAT HAPPENED? OMG! Are you SERIOUS? WOW! I can’t believe it!” Granted, not everyone is as excitable as I am, but murder, that’s a pretty big deal.
I would also need to take a few moments to absorb the news before I started saying things like “why yes, I was in the hardware store buying a hinge last Tuesday, and I did notice the clerk having a heated discussion with another man, wearing a dark jacket with a baseball cap pulled over his face.” Actually, I would never say that, in addition to being excitable, I am not every observant, so I’d never have any information. But I understand why they don’t need to show that on TV.
Another thing that drives me nuts, related to my own field, is stuff about colleges and universities (I’ll limit this to the US). A LOT of things that happen on a college campus are mandated by law, and things that the college does, or doesn’t do, aren’t dictated by an Evil Dean who is doing them on purpose to target a specific student.
Also, the times when a donor or alum makes a big stink about something, and the college changes their policy or approach to the situation … these are few and far between in the real world. Yes, I know everyone has a good story about something that happened at their college because of a crazy donor, but there’s a big element of urban legend going on. These days, there are too many liability and compliance issues at stake to risk trying to appease weird demands from a donor.
I loved Veronica Mars, but had to willfully ignore anything happening with the dean and/or administration during the season at college.
Of course, I realize that for the purpose of the shows, they are just trying to move the plot along and this is an easy way to do it.
Similar to the chess one is poker. If you want to show that a guy in a movie is a good poker player, he always wins the hand, and with a royal flush. First off, royal flushes are incredibly rare: You’re much more likely to win a hand with something modest like a high pair. Second, getting a good hand has almost nothing to do with skill. And third, being a good poker player doesn’t mean that you win every hand; it means that you still get wins and losses, but usually tend to make your wins big and your losses small.
Exactly. Especially older movies that show “great” players playing 5 card draw. There is almost no skill in that game other than bluffing. Winning one hand of 5 card draw is more about luck than anything. Except in A Big Hand for the Little Lady. That was all skill, but of a different sort of course.
I’ve heard that this is a holdover from WWII, of all things. German bombs were mass-produced, down to the colors of the wires inside the case, so if you were attempting to disarm an unexploded German bomb, the whole “cut the blue wire” actually worked. But, of course, unless you’re dealing with an unexploded German WWII bomb, the whole thing is nonsense.
Damn. Now I will.
Binocular light microscopes, which are often shown in TV and movies, are used with the arm way so you can more easily control the focus knobs.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/Optical_microscope_nikon_alphaphot_%2B.jpg
The eye pieces can be rotated around ( not talking about the objective lenses near where the slide goes) to make the shape more “rectangular” for storage and shipping. They really should not be used that way, as your arms will scrunch up close to your body in an awkward posture. Here is picture of it “backwards”. http://2.imimg.com/data2/UP/XJ/MY-1597769/binacular-microscope-250x250.jpg
10+ years teaching intro and advanced microscopy to poor undergrads and graduate students.
No, the point is that if you can give approximate time in different ways depending on the situation. That difference in approximating can easily account for a pregnancy.
No it’s not.
He has every right to feel self-righteous and superior to everyone else because he’s a genius and probably the most respected doctor on the planet and he solves the problem 99.99% of the time.
But there’s no way in hell I’m gonna let him dump a wheelbarrow full of 'You are such an idiot…" on me (or my kid).
–G!
The prosecution on most shows really have weak cases. Most of them are circumstantial and they heavily depend upon the defendant taking the stand and then shredding his/her credibility thus convincing the jury to vote to convict.
An example: An older L&O episode showed a Canadian woman who was a serial killer by proxy. They had limited direct evidence that she had the people killed and, in one instance, she committed a murder that wasn’t even in their jurisdiction and for which they really had no proof. Had she not testified, there’s a strong likelihood that she wouldn’t have been convicted with the evidence arrayed against her.
Instead her attorney put her on the stand where she completely devolved and showed herself to be a petty and vindictive person who the jury could easily imagine had three people killed and killed a fourth herself. This was so transparent that it really weakened the narrative and strained credibility.
Most defendants (especially guilty ones) don’t testify in criminal trials. They certainly don’t testify when its clear to their attorney that they would make an unlikeable defendant or they would be savaged by the prosecution.
Yes, it almost always works out in the end, but first he nearly kills you. For all we know the TV shows that are aired are only about the patients that live, there could be huge pile of unused scripts or ‘lost episodes’ where the patient dies.
Someone who does not want to get caught smoking is sneaking a cigarette in the basement or bathroom. They hear someone coming, put out the cigarette, open a widow and wave their hands a little to disperse the smoke. The other person comes in and has no idea the smoker was smoking.
Wrong. it takes quite a while for the smoke smell to disappear from the air and from the smokers hands, hair and breath.
And porn where the woman moans persistently even when nothing is happening, or when she’s the one making someone else happy. Hint: Knock that shit off while you’re only sitting down on the couch, pulling off your panties or giving a handjob. You’re just being stupid and annoying, and I’m turning off the sound.
And for animal noises, the infamous Wolf howl. I’ve spent a bit of time in areas populated by actual wolves. I’ve never heard that noise in real life. Well, perhaps in town from someone’s dog…
I can only imagine what silly assed noise would be played repetitively on screen in a film made by aliens - to signify Humans were around.
My kid went through the DARE program and became fanatically anti-smoking. Demanded I stop smoking. I snuck upstairs to the half-bath on a rip-roaringly windy day to sneak a cigarette, standing at the window, like a 12 year old! No problem! ? Well, she was standing outside the door and said in a voice dripping with bitterness: “you aren’t fooling me. I know what you’re doing in there.”
The incredible amount of physical abuse some folks can withstand during a fight or after an explosion or when they are in a car crash. James Bond surviving in his Aston Martin in Casino Royale, or when Tom Cruise gets slammed into a car and gets right back up in Mission Impossible: III. I love this scene from The Other Guys.
Okay, so I gotta ask this one 'cause it’s been bugging me for almost 20 years:
In 1995 (pre-Patriot Act) the movie Seven came out. One of the key plot points was that Morgan Freeman’s character pays his librarian friend to do a search of secret librarian records to find out who’s been borrowing books with biblical themes (or something like that) and gets a list of people to start questioning.
So that kind of list borrowers by key words ability actually existed?
–G?
The zoo here borders downtown, and so fire stations and a hospital. One can walk through the zoo on a kind of boardwalk, looking down. The wolves are in their own big wooded habitat, and every time an ambulance or fire truck goes by on the main street nearby, there is a ghostly, eerie chorus of “…woooooOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooo” coming from the wolves.
There are a few flamingoes here, too, on temporary loan. Whenever a low flying plane goes overhead, they all look up in a group and watch it go by, their little heads turning, all leaning to the side as it disappears out of sight 
