Especially with knives. I love how infiltrators sneak up behind sentries and take them out in total silence with one cut, seemingly with little blood getting on them. Totally ludicrous.
There’s a technical reason for everyone having huge apartments, kitchens, etc (or so I’ve heard): they have to fit all the cameras and other equipment in there, and they need room for alternate camera angles.
The digital image enhancement (i.e. Movie Photoshop) really, really bugs me, because it’s always so integral to the plot. I saw an episode of CSI where they zoomed way in on a photograph and “enhanced” a reflection in someone’s freaking eye to identify the killer! If I wanted to see a story about solving crimes with magic, I’d watch Ghost Writer.
In addition to the sparking computers, the electrical panels whose doors blast open and rain a hail of brimstone into the room. :rolleyes:
Just once, I’d like to be in the can on a transatlantic flight while the evil vapors put everybody else on the friggin’ airplane into a coma.
Then I could be a fabulous hero-type and land an L1011 right on glidescope with a 60 knot crosswind. Of course, I’d have to do this with the help of a very technical but drop-dead-sexy control tower/flight person, who would have to meet me at the jetway as I smoothly taxi to a stop. :wally:
I’ve felt like it several times, but never actually done it.
Cops, Combat troops, and people who really should know how firearms operate show they really have no clue how it works. The tip off is usually when said character decides to pump the shotgun or rack the slide on their handgun a good half a dozen times a single scene, despite the fact that after the first time you do it, you’re just tossing perfectly good ammunition onto the floor.
Idiotic “Elite” Combat Troops/Swat Teams/Special Forces, who usally end up getting slaughtered, despite the fact you would wonder how they got passed their training in the first place.
Somebody might have mentioned it earlier, but in combat scenes, nobody ever bothers to reload.
One other thing bugs me about the movies. Directors who have never picked up a comic book in their lives but think they can make a long standing popular comic book character better by changing their powers, race, origins or costume. Then they try to explain how the superheroes powers work (in the dumbest possible way) when the comics havent revealed it for decades. Then the marketing follows the movie and screws up all the storylines for the comic books.
I’m not sure if you have a specific movie in mind, but this kind of stuff is sort of necessary. If I’m sitting through a movie about something like this, I’d expect such basic bits of knowledge as “what the hell is happening?”
See: Paris, TX; Paris, IA; Paris, IL; Paris, AR; Paris, TN; Paris, KN; Perris, CA.
Ok, I have one: Computers.
First, you had that “Whiz Kids” show with the kid from Little House, involving teen hackers and impossible (at least at the time) technology, and then stuff like that atrocious movie “Hackers”.
Specifically, what I hate is the idea that computers can improve the resolutions of pictures. THE WHOLE POINT OF A PICTURE HAVING BAD RESOLUTION IS THAT DATA ARE MISSING. If you change what was actually captured by the camera, you are just guessing. I’ve seen it sooo many times: Knight Rider, that movie with Hackman and Smith…
Another one: Science fiction starships designers who apparently all woke up one day and said… “hmm, lets run all major power and shield energy conduits around the bridge, and provide no fuses to prevent overloads… not like they need Ensign Smith at the navigation console.”
Also, same starship, same battle, Ensign Smith is killed (ensigns are always killed) when his panel explodes, but moments later, Lieutenant Important Character takes Smith’s place and pilots the ship to safety. Because all the important buttons are designed to withstand an explosion that managed to kill an ensign sitting almost three feet away…
I’ve done this one before. Managed to break the habit before it got too expensive.
Nobody ever pays taxi drivers. They jump out and run, and the cab just drives off, rather than the enraged cabbie chasing them down the street.
It seems that, in Movie World, your value to the government is inversely proportional to your level of training. If a low-level grunt gets in trouble behind enemy lines, they’ll send out a huge task force to rescue him. Elite special forces units, OTOH, are as disposable as Bic lighters.
The bad guys always drive european cars (merc, bmw, porche), the hero drives an american car. Mostly a very rare muscle car from the 70’s. If the villain escapes with an european sportscar like a porche 911 or a ferrari, the cops and hero can keep track of him in ordinary cars.
A note on soap-opera time: Back when I was working three shifts, two weeks on each, some of the women would have their soap on every day. Just before a rotation one time, some character’s husband was murdered someplace across town. When I came back to the same shift FOUR WEEKS later, she still hadn’t heard he was dead.
One thing I notice is that when somebody has been hanging on for that dying conversation with the hero, they can hold their head up until it collapses to one side at the moment of death.
There’s a frickin’ movie called Paris, Texas. I know it exists. I can’t imagine a situation coming up in a movie where you’d be unsure if they were talking about France or Arkansas, but it’s just the name of the phenomenon. Actually, that’s exactly the idea: it would be clear from context that the characters are discussing Paris, France, but the writer would feel the need to spell it out for you. In case you’re the type who expects the characters to see the Eiffel Tower in Tennessee, or who thinks that just because there’s a Paris in Kansas, they’re just as likely to be discussing that one as the famous one.
On TV shows, I can’t stand revisionist biography. Writers: these characters are your livelihood- keep notes on what’s been said about them just as if they were real people.
Example: On an early episode of ALL IN THE FAMILY (one so early that Edith was still wearing pantsuits and giving Archie what-for when it was called for), reference is made to Archie’s sister Alma and his brother Fred. Later that season, reference is made to a very recent visit by Archie’s father (he was never on the show, but the visit was supposed to have occurred within the last few months.)
In later episodes, Archie is referred to as an only child. His father died many years before. Later, Archie’s brother Fred is resurrected, but Alma’s gone for good. Likewise, Edith’s sisters (referred to but never seen) are disintegrated and her cousin Maude is referred to as the closest thing she ever had to a sister.
On the Jeffersons, sometimes George is from Alabama and sometimes he’s from Harlem. On (the godawful) BOY MEETS WORLD, Cory (is that his name?) meets Topanga in the first season, then later there are flashbacks to when they met as small children, and his best friend is originally a middle classed kid whose sisters make an appearance and whose mother is Italian but later he’s a kid who was abandoned by his mother as a baby and grew up with his dad in a trailer. The character Maurice’s age changes a couple of times on Northern Exposure (he goes from being 50 to 60something back to 50s, though N.E. was usually excellent about referring to plot elements introduced in other episodes so I’ll let this one slide), sometimes Samantha Stephens is old enough to remember Sir Walter Raleigh but in other episodes she wasn’t born yet when the American Revolution happened, and most of egregious of all in one episode Fred Flintstone meets an old college buddy (he pounds rock for a living- why would he have been in college? plus while they never specifically said he didn’t go, I just can’t see him as ever passing and admission rock test).
Another thing about TV houses that drives me nuts- they’re designed by M.C. Escher. The Brady Bunch house looks like a maybe 1700-2000 sq. ft split level on the outside but is in fact 16,000 sq. feet on the inside with a staircase that goes up on the wrong side. George Jefferson’s apartment has 4 BR, but where are they? They can’t be to the left of the hall because that’s the balcony, and they can’t be to the right because that’s Bentley’s apartment. The staircase on FAMILY TIES was just bizarre, the Cunninghams had a front door and a back door on the same side of the house (and an entire long wall with no windows or doors), the Golden Girls sometimes had a guest room and sometimes had to bunk up and again had a much larger house inside than outside, and All in the Family’s house on the inside looked nothing like the outside shot.
Mark Bennet artwork for your perusal:
I had a policeman in my office last year who wanted me to clean up an image from a surveillance camera. He thought it would work just like on Matlock or some goddamn thing.
Bells rang at my school (the University of Wisconsin-Madison). With the exception of “power lectures” (75 minute lectures, rather than the usual 50 minutes) or labs, all classes did start and stop at the same time. If you were in one of the exceptions, the bell-ringing was a bit annoying, but livable. The only classrooms that didn’t have bells were usually close to faculty offices.