But you still end up putting the crate in a staggeringly huge warehouse with a bunch of other identical crates, right?
I thought that was just a stereotype! 
I used to be a machinist. The only movie I can think of that really touched on that profession is actually called “The Machinist” (This doesn’t count a brief cameo in October Sky). Despite the name though, machining wasn’t really a major focus of the movie.
What it did show seemed fairly accurate, though. One might scoff at the safety procedures, but they may very well of had more stringent safety rules, and the employees just weren’t following them. I saw people pull some pretty boneheaded things in shop I worked in.
The odd thing is, despite not being an office job, the movie that seem to best represent that place was “Office Space”. The quality manager was like every one of Peter’s bosses rolled into one. I swear if you swap the words “TPS Report” for “Inspection Sheet” in the conversations I had with him it would be near verbatim dialog from that movie.
QM: Yeeeeaaah… You know, I was looking over your inspection sheets for the other night and I noticed you put a measurement of 2.36 when the tolerances for that dimension are only .233 to .239
Me: Oh, yeah, sorry about that I must have put the decimal point in the wrong place.
QM: Yeeeeaaah… OK, see, were really trying to make sure these numbers are right, so if you could, you know, just right down the number that comes up on your micrometer that’d be great.
Me: Yeah, OK, I’ll do that. It wasn’t that I was just writing any number, I actually meant to right down the number on the micrometer.
QM: OK, Yeeeeaaah… We had a meeting on this the other day, were you in that meeting?
Me: Yes, I was in the meeting, its not that I don’t know–
QM: Well, let me just go back over the procedure with you for filling out these inspection sheets one more time.
etc…etc…etc…
And I had 4 more bosses besides him. Which may not seem like a lot, but there were only about ten employees in the whole company.
I wouldn’t want to call it “my industry” but I’ve worked as a server. Hollywood would have you believe tampering with guests’ food is wayyyyy more common than it really is. I’m sure it’s happened, but it’s really not something 99.9% of food prep staff would ever engage in.
Actually, after years of working for the government and hearing stories from family who spent many more years working for the government pretty much killed conspiracy theories for me, because most government conspiracies requires a.) a certain amount of competancy and effiecently and b.) that none of this leaks.
I don’t believe either is possible.
This cracked me up! My 17-year old has one more year until college and I love to listen to her plans. They are straight out of movies/TV. Of course, I think she really thinks that Gilmore Girls is real life, and can’t understand why we don’t live that way. <G>
I think the look and feel of the sets was probably accurate (based on pictures I’ve seen) but Howard obviously found it necessary to punch up the drama and make some of the characters archetypes rather than accurately representing the real personalities. One definite deviation was Jim Lovell himself, who looks nothing like Tom Hanks (Kevin Costner would have been more accurate casting) and was described as being soft-spoken. Not a bad film by any means, but definitely hacked out to appeal to the broad masses rather than carefully crafted to be both accurate and entertaining.
I wouldn’t say that it was “no big deal”–any time you have to do a manual controlled maneuver it is a problem, and since they didn’t have a propulsion profile for the LM flight computer it was kind of seat-of-pants–but it wasn’t as hard to control as indicated in the film. The LM descent engine was only designed to hold the lightweight LM, so the vehicle specific impulse for the LM/CSM system was a lot lower, and precise control wasn’t really all that necessary, they just needed a push in the general direction to catch up to the Earth insertion orbit. There were actually two major correction burns and a couple of minor orientation burns.
Reading the history of the CIA and the personalities who founded the agency, you come to realize that while there are some individual competencies within government bureaucracies, they are massively overwhelmed by political infighting and institutional incompetence. Burn After Reading is far more representative of the CIA than the ubersophisticated “black-on-black kill squads” of The Bourne Identity.
Stranger
Four pages and no defense attorneys?
You often see lawyers asking leading questions on direct examination. You can (and should) do this on cross, but on direct your opposing counsel will object.
Very rarely will a lawyer ask a question on cross that he doesn’t already know the answer to. Also, it’s very rare indeed that a witness will break down and admit they’re lying on the stand.
Finally, and this is a biggie on shows like Law and Order, the lawyers are not allowed to wrap up examination of a witness with a little zinger that isn’t actually a question. That kind of stuff is for closing arguments, not for testimony.
Ha, I can think of quite a few. But then my dad’s a doc and my moms a nurse 
and several of their friends match the same description.
And some of my buddies who are docs as well 
Everyone knows SWEDISH doctors and nurses are quite different than American ones. I’ve seen movies that prove this.
F. Lee Bailey once asked his friend and colleague Erle Stanley Garner (the creator of Perry Mason) if he’d ever actually seen a witness break down and confess on the witness stand. Gardner laughed, and said, “Of course not,” even though it happened all the time in his novels.
Bailey says he’s seen it once, only once. And he wasn’t the lawyer who made it happen. He just happened to witness it once as a spectator.
In War of the Worlds, the aliens are taken out by a virus. Independence Day is a rehash of War of the Worlds. The aliens in Independence Day should be taken out with a virus.
A friend who works as a paralegal pointed out to me that on lawyer shows, it always seems as if they get a case and then they’re in court a day or two later. IRL it would take weeks or months. Also, they never show the paralegals working day and night to help prep everything and get it filed on time.
I’ve worked in multiple businesses, so:
Password cracking: In the movies, the “hacker” always parks in front of the computer and starts trying passwords–and invariably hits it in a few tries. Granted, I’d try the OEM’s default password (if I knew it), and a few common ones (People still use “password” or their username. Incredible!). But in the real world, cracking passwords typically happens through social engineering, Trojan horses, or finding the password written down somewhere.
Writing: Novelists in movies always seem to pick their own titles and cover pictures–even first-time novelists. Newspaper reporters create their own headlines, too. This is rare in the real world. And you notice nonfiction writers in movies never seem to spend time on their research? And their desks aren’t filled with stacks of books, files, papers, pictures, and such? My desk is never clear when I’m in the middle of a nonfiction book.
Law: I’m not a lawyer, but I’ve worked on software development for the legal field and worked with a lot of lawyers, court reporters, paralegals, and judges. Watching court scenes in movies and on TV makes me want to stand up every second question and yell OBJECTION! Half the questions they ask wouldn’t be allowed by a real judge.
Yeah, they’d flee (most of the time), but that doesn’t mean there’s no attraction. When I was teaching at a community college, many of my students were fairly close to my age. I was single, and there was quite a bit of temptation.
That sentence made me laugh!
The one time I had to break a password-protected file, it took me two days. And that was with hints.
When I had to reverse-engineer the protocol of a specialized device from a competitor so our equipment would work with it, it took me MONTHS with protocol analyzers, custom logging and analysis software, soldering irons, custom cables, and a whole bunch of brain-hurting mathematical analysis. Somehow, bad guys can do this in a couple of hours.
Seven short hours after I posted the above, I went to see Up, which was rife with…helium cylinders. It was different than the above scenario, obviously, because the gas cylinders were actually integral to the plot, but I got a laugh out of it anyway.
Reminds me of an episode of Stargate SG-1, in which, while being instructed on the color-codes to disarm an alien bomb, the disarmer-in-question notices that -all- of the wires are yellow. He quips that the bomb is defective, and wishes to lodge a complaint if / when they make it home.
Hey, the complaints were about Live Free or Die Hard… I’d say one of the real pleasures about the original Die Hard, and one of the things that makes it stand out as an action movie, is that you don’t need to turn your brain off for it.
Yes, but just to be as accurate as possible, the Martians in H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds are taken down by bacteria, not by a virus.
I still have to turn my brain off for Die Hard. I don’t know of a single human that can fall 10 feet down an elevator shaft and catch themselves by their finger tips on the floor below.
Scientists label their tubes.
There is no such thing as an antivirus.