I just saw Catch Me If You Can recently and a scene near the end got me thinking about this topic. In the scene, Tom Hanks’ character pushes a button which seemingly causes a big Heildeburg four-color press to stop running, which in turn causes a lot of checks to go flying into the air as if someone had let them go over a fan (which is probably what they DID). As somene who has spent a little time in the printing business, I know of several things wrong with this. For instance you don’t print checks one at a time in the size that we are used to handling them, and the size shown in the movie scene, but rather on a large sheet from which they are subsequently trimmed. Especially on a big press such as the one shown in the film. Secondly, stopping the press by pushing a button wouldn’t cause the printed sheets to go flying into the air, rather everything would just stop.
This had me recalling a scene in another film that depicts an activity I have had experience with. The film is Cinema Paradiso, a great movie, and one of my favorite all-time films. In a beautiful moment, the old movie projectionist moves the little window through which the film is projected to the screen in such a way as it is now also projected out the window of the projection booth and on to the side of an adjacent building, so all the townsfolk who couldn’t get into the theater can see the film for free. Only a carefully positioned mirror (or two) and perhaps an additional lense could accomplish what was depicted. Anyway it’s a great film, and you should rent it tonight if you haven’t seen it.
I know what artistic license means, I’m not really faulting the film makers, just pointing out these impossibilities.
So the question is, what things have you seen in movies that are just plain wrong and you know it from personal experience? (Aside from dirty movies, where stuff is always going on that couldn’t happen to you in real life if you lived to be 100.)
Most movies have a problem with showing firearms being used correctly. People run around with their fingers on the trigger all the time, continually rack/pump the slide on the gun(despite the fact this is just ejecting your ammo supply onto the floor), using the guns as pointers(Plan 9 from outer space even had a cop who kept using his loaded revovler to scratch his head).
Oh, and elite SWAT/military teams that most of the time are total dumbasses and easily get killed.
I saw a movie about some folks taking horses to Canada. This guy has to kill some of the horses, so he takes out his .45 automatic, jacks the slide and shoots the first horse, then jacks the slide and shoots the second horse, then jacks the slide and shoots the 3rd horse, etc. I guess when he was done he went back and picked up all the unfired rounds and put them back in the magazine.
Dang randwill, Ive got a four color and a six color Heildeburg press on our production floor now and I didnt even make the connection of the flying checks and large printed sheets. I guess people need to be explicitly shown what the heck is going on. If what can truly happen, happens on the movies, Tom wouldve hit the red emergency stop button and all the rollers will immediately stop and …nothing. No one in the audience (who didnt have any knowledge of the printing industry) will know what those presses were doing. I guess the flying checks were like the visual version of a big arrow that explains to the audience what is going on.
Anyone really tried to jump thru a plate glass window? Unless you want a quick trip to the emergency room with hundreds of lacerations, dont do what Hollywood always does and jump thru a closed window to escape. Throw a chair first …or the bad guy.
Another press gaffe: In The Paper, with Michael Keaton and Glenn Close, there is a big argument over whether they should “Stop the Presses!” The argument is over getting the key to the securely locked box that holds the Stop button. Any such device must be easily accessible in case of emergency (body part caught in the press, for example). Duh!
“Catch Me If You Can” had other things that irritatted me. I am a pilot, so I tend to notice aviation-related problems. Near the end of the film, when DiCaprio and Hanks are returning to the U.S., Leo points out the window of the plane at LaGuardia and comments on using “runway four-four.” There is no such thing. Runways are aligned magnetically. Divide the magnetic alignment by ten and you have the runway number. So runway 9 would face toward 090 degrees (east). No such thing as a runway 44.
A much more horrible one to me was in “Lake Placid” though. Near the end they have a helicopter landed in the lake, and when the non-pilot sitting in the cockpit was told to start it, the instructions were “its fuel-injected. just turn the ignition.” I almost had an anyeurism. A jet engine is, technically fuel-injected, but not in that sense. The sequence of events needed to start up and get the helicopter airborne take a couple minutes, and are much more complicated than just turning a key.
The most irritating thing about these and many others, is not the mistakes themselves, because many of them are just a convenience for the sake of consumption by the uninformed public. The problem is when they go out of their way to do it wrong, when the right way wouldnt be difficult to work into the script. Makes me wonder if they spent any money at all on research into the subject matter.
I thinks it’s very considerate of psycho bombers to only use two wires in their explosive devices, and to make sure one is red and one is blue. I mean, if they were both blue how the hell would the hero know which one to cut?
Also, people never have to drive around for twenty minutes looking for a parking space, they just pull up wherever they want and leave the car there.
And you can hot-wire any car, including BMWs and Mercedes, in about 10 seconds.
There’s a scene in Three Kings that plays with this: One of the guys pistol whips a baddy and his gun goes off. The George Clooney character yells “Keep your finder OFF the trigger!”
The thing that bugs me to hell is when car gas tanks explode like a freaking nuke if you as much as rear-end them. It ain’t easy to make a car gas tank explode and when it does it basically just bursts into flame 99% of the time…no huge fireball.
One of my gearhead friends is constantly pointing out to me things the movies get wrong with automobiles… even in movies like “The Fast and the Furious”, where you think they’d really make sure they had done their research. For example, in F&F, the filmmakers mis-used the term “double-clutch” in dialogue. In Terminator 3, the T-X steals an automatic convertible and drives off in it, while the car acceleration sounds that go with it are those of a manual transmission.
And let’s not forget the Matrix : human beings as batteries. Yeah, that’s got to be real energy efficient.
Oh, most of the gun things annoy me. When guys shoot constantly without reloading. Holding your gun “gangsta style.” Guys who can blaze away with full auto in anything resembling an accurate fashion. The complete lack of recoil in most movies.
And I’m not a huge gun person, I just play a lot of CounterStrike…
Oh, I was watching Sleepy Hollow the other night and while most of it seemed to have no problems that I noticed, at one point the heros are trapped inside a burning windmill. They get out and it explodes around them.
Okay, this is an abandoned windmill in 1799. HOW THE HELL DID IT EXPLODE?
I think there were even bags of flour(?) still in the windmill in Sleepy Hollow, though it’s possible I’m mixing it up with the windmill scene in Army of Darkness.
True, although I don’t believe there would be a huge fireball, as with manufactured explosives. Plus, I know from personal experience that sometimes a buidling that is on fire can burn so hot that air pockets inside it can become super-heated, causing what looks like an explosion from the outside. Something like grain dust would definitely magnify this effect.
Plus, HPL, they did posess an explosive in 1799: black gunpowder. It’s not as powerful as modern stuff like Semtex or TNT, but a few pounds or more will still make a terrific bang.
Regarding grain dust, when I was in the 4th grade here in New Orleans (1976), the grain elevator here blew up. It was across the river and a couple of miles from where I was attending school, but the windows shook and we could feel the explosion. We could see the black smoke coming from across the river. Since I was not watching the grain elevator at the time it exploded, I didn’t see whether there was a fireball, but it was a pretty powerful explosion.
To answer the OP: Something I’ve noticed in a lot of movies based on video games or comic books is the prevalence of weapons other than guns. Somebody is always using a sword, or shuriken, or throwing knives, etc. Hey, if that stuff was more effective than an M-16, then the U.S. Army would using it instead!
Swordfights where the people obviously have no idea how to use an actual sword. They just wave it around and hope for the best. And there’s a few scenes in Highlander I’m thinking of…