Car chases is another one - not the chase itself, but how quickly the pursuer can catch up to a fleeing car…
Second car can leave 5 or 10 minutes (or more) behind the escaper, and seconds later catches up :dubious:
Assuming escaper at 100mph, in 5 minutes he covers 8.3 miles, to make this up in, lets be generous and say 10 minutes, the persuer would have to be travelling at around 150 mph…yeah realllly
Here’s another one. I hated her in that movie. That whole movie should have been called “Lois’ Story” and not Superman Returns. She made it the most angsty & emo piece of crap ever.
The hero goes to visit the woman he’s only met once but suddenly cares for deeply; he’s carrying flowers of course. He rings the bell, bashes the knocker … but there’s no reply. Does he think she’s gone shopping, or gone to visit friends, or sitting on the toilet, and so wander off, maybe leaving a note with the flowers?
No, he opens the door and shouts “Hello!?” a few times, a ridiculous, puzzled look on his face as he walks around uninvited throughout her apartment … and then he Sees Her Body. Well, her legs sticking out from behind the kitchen table, usually.
If anyone walked into my place shouting “Hello!?” they’d be most unwelcome, even if I was recently murdered.
Seriously, when I was a kid I thought that this must be how people do it in the USA - if no-one answers the doorbell, you just walk in shouting “hello”.
I often think foley artists should be kneecapped. Face punches don’t sound like that <swish-slap> sound they almost always use. Hit a raw steak. That’s about what they sound like. And they hurt. We’re talking swollen knuckles and hairline fractures. You don’t just shake it off if you hit someone in the jaw hard enough to knock them off their feet. (That’s another dumb movie convention anyway. Punching to the face is stoopid.)
Swords and knives don’t make a <schwinnggg> when you take them out of their sheaths. If they do, you seriously need to get rid of that metal-on-metal problem or your edge is going to be screwed up in no time. And they don’t make metallic sounds when the light glints of them. Stop that.
People getting in car wrecks that destroy the car, and then walking away from them with at most a scratch. Can you say “concussion,” “whiplash,” and “shock”? I knew you could.
And speaking of concussions, people get knocked out all the time in movies with no lasting ill effects. That’s a not insignificant brain injury right there. You’re going to be seeing double, nauseous, extremely sensitive to alcohol, have light sensitivity, maybe some odd amnesia effects and behavior changes. If you get bumped in the head again, you’re probably going to the hospital for observation at the least, and maybe an inter-cranial shunt so that you don’t die from brain swelling.
While we’re at it, knocking out the bad guys with a single punch, or a blow to the back of the neck is just dumb. Sometimes, yes. And then sometimes the guy is going to turn around and educate you on how hard it is to actually knock someone out. Forcefully. At length. Besides, if you hit one of the right spots, or hit hard enough to actually knock out with one hit you also stand a good chance of killing the person, not just knocking him out.
Another thing that bothers me every single time is when the bad guy kills himself so that the hero/heroine doesn’t have to soil their lily-white hands. The one that sticks out the most in my mind is when the guy attacking Jodi Foster in Panic Room throws himself on the knife she was holding in plain view in front of her. “Hi, I’m a Bad Guy™. I have an overwhelming urge to impale myself on sharp objects whenever I’m in the presence of a Protagonist™, but only at critical junctures. I’m trying to work it out in therapy.”
I can’t stand when lovers awake in the morning in bed together and start getting it on, open-mouthed, without brushing their teeth. Ewwwwww!
Every combat scene in just about every movie or TV show ever made, with very, very few exceptions.
Whether it’s hand to hand or with guns or whatever, it seems to me that we have become so used to fight scenes having no realism whatsoever that we generally just accept that the hero is never hurt, the bad guy always is, the hero could hit a pea at five hundred yards with an air pistol while running while five bad guys can’t hit him with uzis at ten yards, a gigantic alien or monster can slam the hero into rocks or trees but do little more than knock the wind out of him, and so the list goes on and on.
Almost any movie that is otherwise set in a world where humans are humans and physics are physics drives me nuts as soon as the fighting starts. So much of it is just laziness and surrender to cliche.
Usually I’m pretty forgiving of most of the blaring examples offered up in this thread. 555 numbers or phony computer operating system screens are kind of standard fare in most films. The only movie that I can actually recall ruining my suspension of disbelief was The Transporter 2 starring Jason Statham. Standard action fare, you know, just a fun popcorn action flick, or so I thought. I saw the first one and it was decent enough, and I’ve always been impressed by Statham’s very physical sequences and martial arts background. I’m also hopelessly in love with big German sedans, so I really liked the fact that he drove a BMW 740 in the first film and stepped up to a big Audi A8 W12 in the sequel. Such a timelessly classic, elegant and modern design, and truly well-filmed in this movie. I think it’s the only thing I actually remember about the film, to be honest. Problem was, he puts the car through an absurd amount of abuse. Chases, crashes, jumps, you name it. After all this, the car still glistens like it’s fresh from the wash. No damage to the suspension or anything, despite enormous leaps from buildings and crashes through walls, as demonstrated in this clip. This scene doesn’t even feature the part where, upon learning that there’s a bomb attached to the bottom of this Audi, he proceeds to take it up on a jump with only one side of the car’s tires hitting the ramp, launching it into air where it spins on its axis as it soars past a crane with a hook that just manages to knock the bomb off the undercarriage as the car spins back around and lands perfectly right side up and keeps on going. I tossed my hands up in the air in frustration at the stupidity of seeing one of my favorite vehicles turned into what was essentially a cartoon car performing stunt tricks that no one could do in a million years. I wandered off mentally, and perhaps physically, after that scene and don’t actually remember anything from the film besides that obnoxious, ignorant stunt.
Well, it is a space station, so all the air is recirculated. Plus, you’d expect the Empire to be all about sterility, which is easier in a drier climate.
If anyone ever finds me slumped on the floor without a pulse, I hope they start CPR instead of just touching my carotid and saying, “He’s dead.” Really. In my long-ago EMT training, we were taught that there were only very specific instances where a non-physician could declare someone dead, and for good reason (I remember rigor mortis being one of them).
Not seen Transporter 2 but I have seen the first one and thank you for reminding me of one of my pet peeves.
Why is it that movies (made with the US market in mind I would assume) where a car is supposed to be a high performance/sports car of any sort…do we have to have shots of the driver jumping on the pedals?
I realise that most US cars are automatic and that manual cars are probably considered to be “performance/sports” cars but that is one thing that really gnaws at me. Perfectly good car chase and here we are with shots of the drivers feet jumping on the clutch, brake, accelerator…why? The Transporter did this very obviously and I seem to remember that Ronin was another one too.
By the way, anamnesis, I think the original Transporter handled the car getting realistically bashed up pretty well. It’s been a while since I saw it though.
Oooh, the one that pisses me off in this category more than any other is ferrets. Ferrets are VERY QUIET animals, the only sound they make habitually is an amusing (and almost inaudible from more than a couple feet away) chuckling sound when they’re playing, aside from a piercing squeal when they get hurt (which is hard to do, as ferrets are notoriously tough skinned.) So why is it that every damned movie in which a ferret appears (I’m looking at you Beastmaster, and you too, Kindergarten Cop) there’s this nonstop irritating chittering that sounds like a herd of squirrels on meth? Stop it, just stop it!
My peeve about chases is that when the bad guy runs the light at an intersection, going 100 or whatever, there is always some clown who enters to be hit by or narrowly avoided by the pursuing car. Right - no one is smart enough to stop and look to see what the hell is going on.
Speaking of traffic. Whenever there’s a scene of people stuck in traffic, or even just traffic scenes in general, they always fill the soundtrack with way too many horns honking. I’ve been stuck in traffic many times and I rarely hear even one person blow their horn. What would be the point? How would that make traffic move any faster? Yet Hollywood thinks that everyone in a traffic jam is leaning on their horns all the time.
Sports scenes. Almost all of them are so bad they’re laughable.
And historical movies where characters from centuries past are way too clean, their teeth way too white, their skin way too soft.
True … Office Space handled traffic jams much more realistically. No horns honking, just the lane(s) you’re not in being the only ones appearing to make any progress, with even an elderly pedestrian on a walker making better time than the traffic. 
IIRC, he gave Hans his Beretta 92F which will go “click, click, click” on an empty chamber. What I wondered about was why Hans, a supposedly professional terrorist, didn’t notice that the chamber indicator on the slide was showing an empty chamber. Also, why he didn’t rack the slide to eject the possible dud round before trying to fire again?
I have counted a minimum of four references to Office Space which is a movie I am fully willing to suspend all disbelief toward, since I have lived the movie in real life and it takes no imagination at all to get the payoffs involved.
Ron Livingston is so perfect for that role that even in Band of Brothers and the recent series Standoff he’s just another minor variation of Peter Gibbons. Milton needs a stapler as a substitute Oscar.
I used to be a chef. I hate when the hero or villian runs through the kitchen in the restraurant or hotel and is totally ignored by the staff. This would not happen! In the otherwise excellent Minority Report, when this happened it really took me out of the film. Or in another favorite, The Rocketeer, the hero just puts on a waiter’s coat then walks up to the kitchen and grabs a tray of food and takes it to a table. No chef yells at him, no one asks who he is, no one stops him, and this in a supposedly 4 star nightclub.
The only film that got the behavior of a chef right was Under Seige, 
That is the proper straight way to have sex. One must always have a sheet between themselves and the other. Otherwise chaos insues as the devil shows up and pokes one in the butt with his pitch fork. 
What’s been bugging me lately – albeit on TV – is also a computer thing. Apparently, for miraculously enhancing photos (addressed upthread) or zooming in, or doing anything else for which normal computer users would use a mouse, the techs type. And not just a quick “Ctrl-r” or something, but 20 keystrokes. To zoom in one level.
Very annoying, especially since such a large portion of society knows (or should know, at least) how to use basic photo software.