IIRC, it’s actually the lobby(!) of the Los Angeles Natural History Museum. They just rolled in a bunch of geeky-looking props, then called it a lab.
In both movies and most sitcoms, people always wear shoes in the house, and are always ready to leave.
Armagedon - Well basically the whole movie but my favorite is where Ben Affleks character gets fired and within a day he has his own oil company with his name on the sign and it’s pumping oil like its been in operation for 6 months.
The World is Not Enough - Denise Richards as a nuclear scientist.
Trading Places - Hey! lets just go walk on the Exchange floor and start trading!
Jurassic Park - //hey.its.a.unix.system!: (that and the rest of the three movies)
Alien movies - An alien will always be blown into space when an airlock is opened. The freak-o alien in Resurection even got sucked through a pinhole in the ship. That’s fine except that Ripley can freakin climb 12 feet out of the Sulaco’s cargo hold airlock as the air escapes the gymnasium-sized hold through a damn garage door. Oh and by the way…she has a damn 5 ton Alien Queen clinging to her moon boot!
General Concepts
“genetic memeory” - A person can inherit actual memories
“mission control center” - All computer programmers are strapping men with goatees and hot chicks in business suits. They work in a blacklight lit control room with Jumbotrons on the wall and flat-screens and clocks that say New York, Honk Kong, London, etc and a giant digital timer counts down to whatever event is driving the film (doomsday, New Years 2000, whatever).
“deep cover” - Why is it necessary to send some guy to spend six months living as a street racer/surfer/drug lord/whatever to catch the most brazen criminal in the city?
You know, it actually was a unix GUI in the Jurassic Parks. Obscure one, but existing.
Yeah, but an eight-year-old girl going “Hey, this is Unix! I know this!”??? :rolleyes:
I said nothing about that line. 
Lizard, I don’t understand why you want to be so nasty about this, but I would hate to see this thread derailed so I am dropping the subject.
Huh. Well, color me confused. I figured you actually had a reason for picking up this line of argument in the first place. But whatever.
And for the record, “You don’t know women very well, do you?” are fighting words. Calling somebody ignorant out of the blue and then claiming they are being nasty for responding in kind is disingenuous, at best.
Well, Lizard, this may not be GQ but if you’re going to toss out assumption-laden generalities like “I honestly feel that women don’t enjoy seeing a nude man as much as men enjoy seeing a nude woman.” you need to be prepared to be called on that. Since you didn’t try to pass it off as fact, Lamia couldn’t ask you for a cite, you presented it as a personal opinion and she countered with her own.
I’m amazed of how this brief comment could deviate the thread to a war zone with Lamia and Lizard as main contenders. I’m 98% sure that it was only a macho-joke (just a joke, wasn’t it?). I might have answered: yeah, sure! But… nope! Machismo and feminism always have to provoke one side or another and be an apple of discord. Why don’t you just start another thread in Great Debates? This thread is funny!
Sorry, it would be better here, in Cafe Society, something like naked men and women in pictures or some stuff like that!
in Good Will Hunting, the soppusedly “never yet solved” math problems posted on the blackboard are really easy technical problems - solved thousands of times every year by college freshmen, I imagine.
Drawing all possible graphs with 5 nodes (or something of that sort - I don’t remember exactly) sure doesn’t take a genious to do.
I lost interest in the movie when I noticed that. I was later told I didn’t miss much, either.
maddiesilver writes:
> . . . murderers suddenly confessing on the stand (a Matlock
> classic) . . .
I guess you’re not old enough to remember Perry Mason from the '50’s and '60’s, where the murderer confessing on the witness stand was pretty standard. The show Matlock didn’t invent that particular ridiculous notion. Has anybody in history ever actually confessed on the witness stand?
Good Will Hunting doesn’t make sense in many ways, but we’ve already done a thread on this, and I don’t want to hijack this thread to repeat what I said there.
You’re right. I should always be prepared to be called on my opinion. . . . in Cafe Society. :rolleyes:
Evil Captor, I love you.
How about spaceships effortlessly doing 180 degree turns in space?
Oh and the “zzzoooooommmm” sounds bug me too.
In EOTS, there is the implication that they can go to satellite images IN THE PAST and see what the satellite saw. The implication there is that we have satellites recording every square inch of the earth, 24 hours a day. A truly ridiculous idea.
The fact is, we have satellites that can resolve pretty fine details. But they can only do it by being positioned to view that exact spot. Stuff happening 100 ft away will go unrecorded.
You would need millions of satellites to record even the large cities at all times.
A woman did that last week here in Edmonton. She needed emergency surgery to re-attach her arm, and was cut in many other places.
Grain dust in suspension in the air IS an explosive. A powerful one. Many grain elevators and flour plants and such have been blown to smithereens by dust explosions. What makes an explosive ‘explosive’ is its ability to oxidize very rapidly. So explosives like gunpower have their own oxidant. Without that, the material can only burn on the surface where it interacts with air. Grain dust in suspension is surrounded by air, and burns fast enough to cause an explosion.
Another pet peeve: People who outrun explosions. Typically a fireball coming down a hallway or something. Sorry, but if it is slow enough that you can outrun it, it isn’t an explosion.
One of the worst movies for unreality had to be “Die Hard 2”. The list of gaffes, continuity errors, outright errors about known facts, etc. is very long. For example:
[ul]
[li]The C-130 Hercules does not have ejection seats.[/li][li]You can’t rotate a big knob and ‘lower’ the Instrument landing beam.[/li][li]A key plot point was that the jets couldn’t fly anywhere else because of fuel requirements. In reality, from Washingon DC a large jet could divert to Miami if it had to.[/li][li]Another key plot point was that no one could take to the aircraft in the sky, because the terrorists controlled the tower. But of course, the terrorists didn’t control the area control center, other towers, the myriad flight service stations in the area, or the dozens of aircraft parked on the ground…[/li][li]The action takes place at Washington Dulles airport, but all the phones had “Pacific Bell” written on them…[/li][li]Jumping from the wing of a 747 about to take off will kill you, dead.[/li][li]The whole plot hinges on the terrorists somehow knowing in advance that a major transfer would take place on the same day as a freak once-in-a-decade snowstorm.[/li][/ul]
And the list goes on…
And an honorable mention for injection new, unreal cliches into movies has to go to John Woo. It seems every movie now has to show the hero diving through the air while shooting two guns cross-armed at people 100 ft away and shooting them right through the heart. Man, that’s annoying.
Thanks, Topaz! It’s good to be loved! 
You left out:
1)grenades with 30-second fuses (giving McClain enough time to strap into the nonexistent ejection seat and punch out)
2)submachineguns that can fire blanks full-auto then, with a switch of the magazine, fire regular ammo. Uh-uh. A semi or full auto firearm can only cycle with blanks if you block off the barrel to give it enough pressure to cycle. You do this either by using a prop barrel or by fastening a blank adapter to the end of the barrel.
3)lighting the streaming fuel from the 747 and then having the flame climb up the stream into the air to detonate the jet.
4)The “Glock 7, made from porcelain (!) that can go through airport metal detectors” Holy Christ.
What a horrible, horrible movie.
Oh, and I meant “Talk to the airplanes”, not “Take”. It was a crucial plot point that no one could get through to all the aircraft in the sky because the radio in the tower was under control of the terrorists. At the screening I went to, you could actually see people in the audience looking at each other and murmuring when that plot point was unveiled. Everyone picked up on that silliness.
And here’s another one: The aircraft needed the instrument landing system because there was a huge storm and they couldn’t land visually. But then, there’s a scene where a reporter says, “I can see the airplanes circling overhead.” Uh, if SHE can see THEM, THEY can see the ground.
I’ve seen better film in soap dishes.
What really annoys me about these types of errors is that they just scream, “We here in hollywood think our customers are STUPID!”. All of the errors I mentioned about could have been fixed trivially, without changing the plot at all. But you just know somewhere someone said, “Ah, don’t worry about it. The idiots in the audience will never notice.”