Although it was originally managed with templated index cards, it’s generally agreed that J. Edgar’s motivation for establishing the FBI was probably as a pretext for maintaining the Agents In Underwear database.
Hoover loved paper dolls.
Right. You’ll tolerate a lot more outlandishness in Jurassic Park or Lord of the Rings than you will in, say, Giant. (Although a few T. Rex attacks in Giant would be a welcome addition, especially if they shortened the movie.)
I once read this long, argumentative Internet board discussion over the movie Groundhog Day. There was this one guy who just couldn’t grasp the central premise. He kept wondering why Phil (Bill Murray) couldn’t easily break out of his situation by staying awake past 6:00, or breaking the clock, or hiding outside of town, or something. Maybe the fact that the movie was otherwise realistic — as in, there are no wizards or aliens or wormholes to account for any strangeness — confused him on what the “rules” were, on what was possible and impossible within the film.
So a Tom Clancy movie can have satellite images that resolve dandruff flakes on pedestrians’ heads, and we don’t mind too much. We were expecting a lot of silliness anyway, going in. Really, we should just be happy the characters are named consistently and that the sun isn’t purple. Any other resemblence between the movie’s events and real-life events is entirely coincidental. I guess the point I was trying to make in the last post is that sometimes there seem to be gratuitous impossibilities, ones that could easily be re-worked into something much more plausible, while still fitting the movie’s premise.
Of course I’ve never had to write or direct a successful movie, so it’s easy for me to be a backseat driver. Maybe I too would cave in to temptation, to meet a deadline, and throw in the security cameras with infinite resolution, and the computer monitors that project their images onto people’s bodies, and the super secret passwords that can be cracked in less than a minute.
Let he who is without sin cast Sharon Stone.
I’d argue that, for a high-tech action spy flick like M:I:III, super-satellites that can make out amazing resolution on ground objects are as much a part of the genre as FTL drives are for Star Trek. If we were talking about a movie based on a John LeCarre book, it’d be different, but this is more James Bond. Fancy, impossible gadgets are part of the fun.
Well Joe, I’m glad you asked. From what I can tell the ‘cutoff point’ between stupidity and feasability is in the eye of the beholder and their own personal understanding of reality. Since this board is more scientific minded than most people we all see scientific flaws where many people would not. But that is true for any movie with a false premise be it political, scientific, cultural, economical, etc. Whenever you see a war movie I’m sure tons of vets get upset and say ‘thats not how it happened’ and alot of vets were pissed about the movie ‘bridge on the river Kwai’ for example. When the movie ‘colors’ came out crips and bloods got upset and actually started battling more because that wasn’t how LA gangs worked. There are probably many more examples of people with personal experience with something/anything (working in fast food, being a bartender, driving a racecar, etc) who walked away from a movie upset because the portrayal wasn’t realistic even though 99% of the viewers didn’t have the personal experience to know better.
Everyone knows you can’t shoot lightning bolts out of your eyes but how many people have ever been in an LA street gang enough to know that the movie ‘colors’ was bullshit and respond accordingly? And how many people understand DNA synthesis enough to really know about Jurassic park not being realistic? I guess that is why movies consult experts and real life experts for a movie, but sometimes real life isn’t as interesting or as good for the plot as fiction so that is why it happens.
I can handle the nine-year-old girl in Jurassic Park recognizing UNIX (even if she didn’t exhibit any geek tendencies earlier in the movie); what I refuse to accept was Nedry claiming he wrote all three million lines of computer code to operate the park by himself.
I remember reading it in PG , but originally it was in a book called Deep Black by William Burrows , back in 82.
Declan
eeewww!
Fiction? Or non-fiction?
(Genuinely curious; not trying to be a dick)
Um, no, they were using some “Dressy Bessy” paper-doll type site (one of the agents’ daughters liked to play on it) to paste agents’ ID photos on the bodies on the site. There was other stuff about that that was implausible (why would a girly dress-up site include the body of a man?), but it was never suggested that the dress-up program was an FBI database.