[QUOTE=JohnT]
You’d think that of Xander, Willow, Spike, and Giles that at least one of them would start slurring their speech a little bit by season 6, season 7.
[/QUOTE]
Giles is the one who gets knocked unconscious rather a lot and it is referenced often. It’s one of the little details I loved about the show, that they didn’t just ignore that he tended to get knocked out.
I have a coworker who adamantly refuses to see the movie “Knocked Up” because the entire concept of a hot blonde like Katharine Heigl hooking up with someone like Seth Rogen is too much for him to accept. I only complained near the end when Rogen’s character with no work history or experience and no green card (he said he wasn’t legally in the U.S. earlier in the movie!) – not to mention the sticks and buds no doubt floating in his urine sample – gets a web designer job in Los Angeles with no problem whatsoever.
My husband thought it was hilarious that that was the one thing that bothered me.
1.) People need an aliens they can relate to and which can express feeling. People use their eyes and mouths for this. If you take away an actor’s expressive eyes, you’ve hindered him or her. So for relatable aliens we put weird appurtenances around the periphery and leave the emotive parts free.
2.) CGI is expensive and time-consuming and wasn’t good until recently. And it was terrible at conveying emotion.
3.) Puppets don’t look real and have trouble conveying emotion and feeling. Not all puppeteers are Frank Oz. You can get away with comic characters (ALF) as puppets, but don’t try it with a major character. IIRC, babylon 5 had a Praying Mantis-like alien puppet. Looked convincing, but it didn’t last. My theory is that people couldn’t relate to it.
[/QUOTE]
Basic physiognomy, as it relates to emotional connection of the audience with the characters. Humans have a clearly defined face with two eyes situated above a mouth. So do all vertebrates and many invertebrates, such as insects. We are genetically hard-wired to respond to the emotional expressiveness of a human face, and that carries over into our emotional relations with, say, dogs and cats, even though their expressions are different. It would be very hard for us to feel empathy with a character that resembled a giant sea cucumber or something.
[QUOTE=neorxnawange]
I agree with Morbo on the holding the breath thing. Whenever a character goes under water or whatever I always take a deep breath and see if I can match them.
[/QUOTE]
There’s a really horrible example of this in one of the new Star Wars movies. I don’t remember if it was II or III – whichever one where Obi Wan rides around on the big lizard.
Anyway, at one point Obi Wan falls into the water and they cut away while he’s STILL UNDERWATER to another scene entirely – Annikin and Padamame or Panda Bear or whatever the hell her name is discussing their relationship or some crap like that – and then like five minutes later they cut back to Obi Wan and he’s still freakin’ underwater!
Someone straps on a rig for the first time and hops out doing RW (formation skydiving).
Many times the gear shows one metal ring flapping around loose at the shoulder. This is the mainring of the 3-ring release, which is what attaches the main canopy to the harness. The other two rings are part of the main canopy. So this indicates no parachute in the pack.
People talking to each other in freefall. Stick your head out of a car window at 120mph and try to have a conversation. Six of us did it one time on a jump but you have to have your heads together and scream at the top of your lungs.
Freefall that lasts forever. The first big skydiving scene in “Point Break” has about 4:30 of freefall in it. In actuality you get about 60 seconds from 13,500 feet.
Jumper deploys a ram-air canopy and when they land they are suddenly reeling in an old round canopy.
[QUOTE=Pochacco]
There’s a really horrible example of this in one of the new Star Wars movies. I don’t remember if it was II or III – whichever one where Obi Wan rides around on the big lizard.
Anyway, at one point Obi Wan falls into the water and they cut away while he’s STILL UNDERWATER to another scene entirely – Annikin and Padamame or Panda Bear or whatever the hell her name is discussing their relationship or some crap like that – and then like five minutes later they cut back to Obi Wan and he’s still freakin’ underwater!
Worst editing I’ve ever seen.
[/QUOTE]
You can sort of handwave it away as Obi-Wan being an uber-ninja because he has the Force, but…
What bothers me about the prequels is that it pretty much invalidates everything Obi-Wan says in the original trilogy.
[QUOTE=Dewey Finn]
Actually, does anyone say “domestic draft” in the real world? Wouldn’t he be more likely to say, “Gimme a Bud”?
[/QUOTE]
I’d say something like that. “Gimme a Bud” sounds more like a badly written line.
[QUOTE=Troy McClure SF]
…Like, what the hell did he come to do, play Yahtzee?! I can suspend my disbelief pretty well, but this just ruined the whole movie for me.
[/QUOTE]
In reference to Day After Tomorrow.
He had survival equipment with him. I think the plan was to come in and take his son out the same way he came in. Except then they lost it when they fell through that mall skylight. It’s not too absurd to me to think that he’d keep going at that point. He wasn’t the type of character to just shrug and turn back.
[QUOTE=Steve MB]
Peter David, ST:TNG novel “Strike Zone”.
[/QUOTE]
See ? SEE ? ! I said someone would get it !
More of the many things that bother me with Independence Day.
The fighters using air-to-air missles against what amounts to a flying metal mountain. Shields or not, they’d never try such a thing because it obviously wouldn’t work. The fighters probably couldn’t have destroyed a mass of tinfoil that size, much less something more substantial. And note that the City Destroyers were substantial enough to maintain at least some shape after crashing, so they weren’t made out of anything flimsy.
The use of one nuke against one ship - and then giving up. If you are faced with species extinction, and one nuke doesn’t work, you try ten or a hundred. You try them in time-on-target salvos, you try them in sequence, you bury them and see if the ship is vulnerable from below. No point in worrying about fallout if you’re all gonna die anyway.
This Big Giant Ship falling and NOT killing everyone from the shockwave.
The pathetically weak Giant Beam Cannon of Doom those ships had, which managed to approach what we can do with a much smaller ICBM from much farther away.
[QUOTE=Sampiro]
Any war movie or action movie where a hero is shot in a limb (leg or arm either one) and keeps running towards or away from the bad guy. Mel Gibson and John Wayne are the worst offenders- dude, if you’ve ever had a bullet in your leg, you’ll know that you don’t keep running, and that’s especially true in Civil War/Westerns where the slugs could be .57 or better and amputation was pretty much a given if it shattered bone.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t agree on that one. Adrenaline can keep people running with horrific and eventually fatal wounds. Criminals shot by 12 gauge shotgun 00 buck have kept running and shooting for several minutes while battling the police. Unless someone is hit in a load-bearing joint such as the knee or hip, or is hit in the central nervous system, it is very possible for them to be so hopped up on alcohol, drugs or even just plain adrenaline that they ignore a grievous wound.
[QUOTE=delphica]
…This could all be resolved in about 10 seconds if the bride said “he’ll eat anything we eat when we fast for Lent” - the Greek Orthodox fast is strictly meatless, and Greeks still entertain with elaborate meals during Lent so they’d have plenty of options.
[/QUOTE]
AFAIK the Greek Orthodox Church doesn’t consider fish meat, but Ian almost certainly does.
[QUOTE=Pochacco]
Anyway, at one point Obi Wan falls into the water and they cut away while he’s STILL UNDERWATER to another scene entirely – Annikin and Padamame or Panda Bear or whatever the hell her name is
[/quote]
“Oh jesus, he’s crying!”
At some point after he falls in, when they cut back to him a rebreather can be seen, the same kind of device he and Qui-Gon used when traveling to the Gungan city in Ep 1. I would imagine he got that thing in quick as he could, though why he just happened to be carrying one around I couldn’t say. Jedi motto is “Be prepared,” I guess.
[QUOTE=silenus]
As an extension of Chao’s comment - Just about any explosion that involves massive fireballs. Doesn’t anybody watch the news? Go to Youtube and look up “IED.” Watch our ordinance people detonate these things. Did you see any flame? No. So why does that grenade the Bad Guy threw at Our Hero erupt with a fireball that would do Krakatoa proud?
[/QUOTE]
A variant on this - the seemingly automatic assumption, in many a historical movie, that cannons always fire shells that explode with massive fireballs when they hit anything.
[QUOTE=Sampiro]
I won’t spoil it with specifics, but Tesla’s invention in The Prestige was something I couldn’t buy. Just made the movie enter the realm of fantasy or dream more than sci-fi/thriller.
[/QUOTE]
That was the entire point. Tesla has “invented” real magic. The theater owner who hosts the big show says so explicitly. The point of the movie is that Jackman’s character is so fixated on revenge that the discovery of real, actual magic is just a tool to get one over on Christian Bale’s character.
I don’t know about the green card, but it’s not remotely difficult to find a job in the software industry that doesn’t drug test. Hell, if the video game industry instituted mandatory drug testing, there wouldn’t be a video game industry.
[QUOTE=Quercus]
I guess I don’t mind the ‘I’ll have a beer’ thing; since obvious and gratuitous product placement bothers me even more than suspensions of disbelieve that minor, I’m OK with erring on the side of genericness.
[/QUOTE]
A very cold, manly and refreshing Budweiser please!
Re asking for “a beer”: I bartended for 10 years and I would never just give someone a beer without making some remark like “Is Mich draft okay?” Because then you give this guy who can’t be bothered to say, at the very least, “A light on tap” a bottle of Molson and he says, “Oh, I actually wanted a pint.”
Then you, the bartender, can either tell him tough - and so start an argument or a guarantee of no tip - or dump the beer you just poured/opened.
Maybe things are different now and bartenders can read minds better than I could.
[QUOTE=Miller]
I don’t know about the green card, but it’s not remotely difficult to find a job in the software industry that doesn’t drug test. Hell, if the video game industry instituted mandatory drug testing, there wouldn’t be a video game industry.
[/QUOTE]
But he’d never worked before in his life! He’d lived off an insurance settlement! And what did he show them as his example work, the “Cumming Soon” mockup?
All those scenes in Skinamax movies where the guy is clearly humping the small of the woman’s back, or the outside of her left buttock. C’mon, people, put Tab A SOMEWHERE near slot B. We know you’re not really doing it, and that’s OK, but don’t do it so sloppily that it forces us to snigger at you.
RE: Total Recall
What took me out of the movie is that in the Mars base, where nothing structural is likely made of wood, where no one in their right mind () would want to open a window, Arnie busts loose and grabs a… a… a fire axe. I could never understand that.
Also…
Magnetic Plate Glass. (I can’t find the Bad Astronomy link right now, else I’d have credited him with the phrase).
Riding a motorcycle in the rain/dust/at speed without a face shield, goggles of any sort, or squinting into the wind (all while holding a conversation with a fellow biker/badguy/stranger in a convertible next to you).
Blatant product placements. I have no problem with brand names showing up in the background, but two-to-three second commercials or logos calculatingly staying in frame quickly dispels suspension of belief.
) would want to open a window, Arnie busts loose and grabs a… a… a fire axe. I could never understand that.