I, for one, am tired of seeing gross bodily functions on the screen!! How many times do I have to actually see a character vomit? Can’t they just give me a sound effect? And I don’t need to see any character urinate! In ‘Rob Roy’ they needlessly showed Tim Roth relieve himself into a chamberpot and Jessica Lange squat and go next to a stream.
For the love of God, why???
You guys are correct, but while it is true that Luke and Han would not hear explosions when blowing up TIE fighters, neither would they hear the London Symphony Orchestra.
The FX are there for US, not them, just as the musical score is there for us to hear, not them.
Interesting point, though: Remember the TV series Airwolf? In most episodes, the climactic battle sequences had music and no sound effects. The guns were silent, the explosions were silent, the aircraft were silent, but there was this pretty good musical score pounding away on the soundtrack. So it can be done.
You guys are correct, but while it is true that Luke and Han would not hear explosions when blowing up TIE fighters, neither would they hear the London Symphony Orchestra.
The FX are there for US, not them, just as the musical score is there for us to hear, not them.
Interesting point, though: Remember the TV series Airwolf? In most episodes, the climactic battle sequences had music and no sound effects. The guns were silent, the explosions were silent, the aircraft were silent, but there was this pretty good musical score pounding away on the soundtrack. So it can be done.
Magnum .44.
A gun so powerful that it can rip your head off clean, and with a recoil so strong that it can break your arm if you’re holding it “casually”.
Except when it hits the hero. On heros, a .44 round produces just a ‘flesh wound’ that can be treated with Band-Aids. Yeah, right.
Oh, here’s another one: clean deaths. As you know, people SOIL themselves when they die. Ergo, a Rambo movie would be a pretty stinking place to be.
Voyeurism.
KJ wrote:
Explosive decompression is a lot tamer in real life than it is in the movies. The wind trying to blow Ripley out into deep space would have been gale-force, or possibly on the low end of the hurricane-force spectrum, but that’s not enough to rip her arm off. Nor, for that matter, do people explode if exposed to vacuum (like they did in Outland) or have their eyes pop out of their heads (like they did in Total Recall) or instantly freeze (like the doctor said they would in Babylon 5). Their lungs won’t even be injured, so long as they don’t try to hold their breath. The only big danger from vacuum is asphyxiation.
Why it’s called “vacuum cleaner”, if there’s no actual vacuum in there?
There is, isn’t there? Isn’t that why it sucks?
Speaking of Aliens…there is something about the grand finale that always bothered me…Ripley prepares an arsenal to go back into the station and rescue Newt. She straps a flame-thrower to a pulse rifle, takes lots of grenades, even remembers to grab an ample supply of marker flares. Except one thing…an extra clip. She is supposed to be a level headed warrior, and forgets to take any extra ammo? If she had just had one more clip to put in her rifle when she ran out, she could have wasted the the alien mamma and spared us all the third movie.
At least she didn’t follow the why take extra clips when you can take extra guns rationale of The Matrix.
** Also, a train carrying Uranium, when crashed, will result in a horrific explosion (they made a made-for-TV movie about this. But I don’t remember what it was called, because I didn’t watch it, because of the aforementioned impossibility.)*
KJ, this was Atomic Train (watching unbelievably bad movies is my hobby), and it was even worse than you heard. You see, Uranium (according to the movie) is just a more powerful form of dynamite, and produces a bomb-quality chain reaction simply by being set on fire. At least the makers of this turd had the decency to blow up Denver, rather than having the hero save the day at the last second.
Something else that I hate is when the director thinks “character development” means “have the movie come to a halt so a character can sit down and tells his entire life story.” The General’s Daughter was filled with this. So many people just told everything they knew that the movie had about as much suspense as a economics textbook.
–sublight.
One movie that got “non-explosive decompression” right is 2001. Arthur C. Clarke seems to have had a fetish for going outside without your spacesuit – it shows up in at least three of his books. I get the impression that it would be a little more painful than he describes it, but not lethal, as the movies make it out to be. (Although books can get it wrong too – Pierre Boulle, I think, in “Garden on the Moon”, and Martin Caidin – who should know better – in “Four Came Back”.)
Silvio wrote:
Well, as every good gamer knows, it takes a full melee round to eject your old clip, draw a new clip, slap it in, and cycle the action to chamber the first round – but it only takes a half-melee-round action to drop one gun and draw another, leaving you enough time to attack in the same round. (I think there’s a penalty to your to-hit roll, though.)
Oh – and changing ammunition clips requires both hands.
When I’m all dressed up and the floor is sticky no matter where we sit. I hate that. Also Dolby surround sound annoys the hell out of me.
What do I hate in films themselves? Not much outside of Sean Connery. That accent is a killer.
That’s not true. There are many Italian-Americans in western Pennsylvania. In fact, one of the town’s other names is Little Italy, I believe.
It’s nice having Italians as our school lunch ladies…they can make one hell of a pasta lunch…
The useless heroine who stands around during the final battle has already been mentioned. But what I hate even worse is a heroine being made out as a strong, independent character for the first three quarters of the movie, only to collapse into spineless jelly at the end. See * Kings Row * and * Touch of Evil, * two vastly overrated films.
The action heroine isn’t always noncontributory in the final battle anymore (witness * Men in Black *). It does bug me, however, that she is rarely allowed to finish off the bad guy by herself; the hero must help her. See * The Hunted, * where the heroine, kneeling right behind the bad guy with a sword in her hand, doesn’t cut him down, but instead ** throws the sword to hero Michael Lambert, ** who then cuts the bad guy down! Instead of killing the villain easily, she had to pull a maneuver with a 90% chance of failure, just so the hero could look heroic! Argh!!!
I think historical inaccuracy is overemphasized. The most important thing a movie must do is tell a good story; if it’s an historically accurate good story, so much the better. I loved * Braveheart, * warts and all. And * Braveheart’s * historical inaccuracies are nothing next to those a certain Mr. William Shakespeare commits in * MacBeth, Julius Caesar * or * Richard III. * Those plays are lousy history lessons, but they are still wonderful dramas and almost universally acknowledged as such.
Don’t get me wrong, I do like movies to be historically accurate, but lack of accuracy is forgivable when the story works.
Also, the degree to which inaccuracies bug me depends a lot on whether the gaffe is being used to promote some ideology and how I feel about that ideology. For instance, I was very annoyed at * The Thin Red Line * for portraying the native Solomon Islanders as peaceful flower children who have nothing to do with World War II, when in real life the Solomons tribesmen were close allies of the Americans and British and large numbers of them risked their lives against the Imperial Japanese Army. I was annoyed not just because it was inaccurate, but because it was patronizing and because it was yet another attempt to perpetuate Rousseau’s “noble savage” myth.
On the other hand, it’s quite possible that a lot of the slaves who joined Spartacus’ army were doing it for rapine and plunder rather than for freedom, but I’m very sympathetic to the pro-freedom ideology, and I really don’t mind Kubrick emphasizing that motive in * Spartacus, * regardless of how historically accurate it may be, so long as we remember that it’s a story about an ideal and not an actual scholarly work of history.
A few more:
Actors’ breath isn’t visible in winter scenes.
Getting shot by a gun is relatively painless so long as it’s in your shoulder
Beeps and whistles for every action a computer generates (at least before computers started adding sound effects to those actions)
Writing a letter as quickly as it is narrated aloud
For American movies: when people native to non-English-speaking countries speak English even between themselves, with so little as only the appropriate accent (or non-appropriate accent for that matter)
That any metropolitan city has streets so empty during the day to facilitate a car chase
Even though he was the director, I don’t think Kubrick was as responsible for the overall look, feel, and philosophy of Spartacus. Compare it to other Kubrick flicks – it’s the odd man out. No control of the music, the usual Kubrik touches, they’re all gone. Spartacus is, I think, a Kirk Douglas film, and I suspect he had more say than Kucbrik. A telling point – Kubrick usually has a hand in the screenplay – but not in Spartacus. Dalton Trumbo wrote, basing it on a book by Howard Fast.
If you want a very different take on the Spartacus Story, then read Arthur Koestler’s “The Gladiators”, and imagine if THAT had been made into a movie.
By the way, don’t get me wrong – Spartacus is one of my all-time faves. But you’re probably right about the historical accuracy (Richard Adams said the same thing in “The Plague Dogs”.) But, to quote a playwright friend of Peter STone’s: “God writes lousy theater.”
Instantly fatal gunshot and knife wounds (especially when shot or stabbed in the abdomen!) really bug me.