When they get to the big firefight and all the thugs pull out full-auto weapons, I’m okay with that, even though it almost never happens here.
I think there’s something similar in the Schwarzenegger movie The Running Man where at the climatic scene footage of his character refusing to follow orders is shown on-screen to the in-movie characters, the same footage we the viewer saw at the start of the movie. I’m not sure why I found that jarring but I did.
Its been a long time since I saw that movie so I may be mis-remembering.
I love the way that they lampshaded this in Star Trek IV where Uhura says “switching to external view” when they’re watching the whale hunt, and Gillian asks “How are you doing that?”
Nobody answers her.
In both the comic book/graphic novel and the movie Watchmen they actually do show you how Ozymandias sees Rohrschach and Night Owl “sneaking up” on him – he has hidden cameras that pop up out of the now. It’s arguably ludicrous (cameras popping up looking out[, away from his Antarctic retreat I can understand. Why the hell does he have cameras looking back in at it?), but at least the source of those camera shots is explained.
Hell, remember when it was originally Metronywoodland?
I just caught an example of this. In Wink of an Eye, Kirk is recording a message describing what has happened to him, expecting Spock to slow it down to an understandable speed. We (the audience) see Kirk in a lab standing at some sort of console, pressing buttons to start and stop the recording, and then slipping the tape into a console where McCoy will find it.
Later, when Spock has slowed the message down and is playing it back, he’s watching Kirk on a screen. It’s pretty much the same shot that the audience saw earlier. It even tracks in on Kirk at the end. Based on some other clues in the scene, there’s really no way a camera could have been in that space capturing the video that Spock is seeing, and no reason for the camera to move dramatically toward the Captain as he finishes.
So yes, it did happen in TOS.
That almost nobody talks about TV, movies, and current events, when in real life, everybody does.
The truth of this is surprising. I attended a first degree murder trial and was startled at how boring it could be. This is life and death , and at times I found myself yawning. Over and over, little nitpicky questions and details. It went so slowly, not at all like on television. where a lot of stuff is cut out.
Selective refraction of light rays, obviously. The same principle behind cloaking devices (invisibility screens).
I’m perfectly fine with time compression, where long periods of time are covered shortly without any obvious cuts that would let it work. So, say, if we hear the bell ring at the start of class, and then hear it ring to end class a few minutes later, that’s fine. Same with time dilation, where they say we have X number of seconds left, and it lasts longer without any obvious slow-mo.
I’m a computer nerd, but I don’t really mind when computers are used in a way that wouldn’t work in real life. I don’t even generally mind the whole “enhance” thing. And those two people on one keyboard just made me laugh–I assumed it was parody. (Music stuff, on the other hand, does bug me more. It shouldn’t be hard to get it right, without it affecting the story.)
Oh, and I’m fine with incorrect early modern English when it’s used as an effect. Same with using too big words or certain words that sound old. It’s fine. And, yes, I’m fine with accented English substituting for a foreign language.
Nothing else is coming to me right now that hasn’t already been said, but I’d say I’m okay with a lot of stuff that seems to really bug other people.
Like in that episode of Batman where Robin has only 60 seconds to live, and it takes Batman five minutes to save him (and the clock is shown ticking in the corner). :rolleyes:
Pharmacists are always depicted as older men who wear those Nehru jacket-type things. Never seen one who did. In addition, on TV or in the movies, doctors always inform family members of a devastating diagnosis or a death in the parking lot, or a crowded hallway. :dubious:
I recently saw a true-crime re-enactment program that was set in New Jersey, and the hospital building had palm trees out in front. :smack:
I remember a Western movie from the 1970s, set a century or so earlier, where a woman was wearing large hoop earrings.
It’s hairstyles that always bug me, like women with '70s do’s in pieces set during WWII, or boys and young men in Westerns with hair that’s been feathered and blow-dried. :smack:
Styling hair with bowls and bacon grease, on the other hand, I find perfectly acceptable.
Another common place where time is distorted: When two people are having a conversation while walking. OK, that happens in real life, and it’s a nice cinematic technique for putting something on the screen while you’re going through the dialog. But in a movie, the scenery will usually change more than the amount of time would allow. Like, the conversation starts when one person walks past another’s office and asks a question. The other person gets up and follows, and starts answering the question as they’re getting on the elevator. Then the first person replies as they’re getting off the elevator, then they’re a few blocks away, then they’re downtown and pause the conversation long enough to order a hot dog from a street vendor, then they’re in a park, and so on, but the conversation is seamless.
In the 114 posts above this one, I’d say enough has been covered; so I’ll get a little more specific.
I’m sorry, but it doesn’t bother me at all that Jack Reacher is completely different in the books than from Tom Cruise. I really liked the movies and [most of] the books.
While I’m on Tom Cruise. I like [most of] his movies even though I think the Scientology thing is creepy at best.
Oh man, this reminds me! Years ago I was helping out with office equipment and was asked to go investigate what was wrong with someone’s fax machine. When I arrived at the workstation, one woman announced to her friend, “He’s here to fix the printer and the fax machine!”
This gave me the prefect straight line to deadpan, “Just the fax, ma’am.”
I can’t promise it’s never been done, but as far as I can remember, foreigners depicted in movies from Spain either:
- don’t say anything at all, just use body language,
- speak to each other in a foreign language, and may address the strange dark guy in the same or in English,
- speak a few lines in tourist-Spanish,
- or speak perfectly fine Spanish, with more or less of an accent depending on whether the movie wants to make a joke of it. This can include cases where people watching the movie completely miss that both the actor and the character are foreigners; it happened to most of my family with an American in comedy series Olmos y Robles (the actress has the tiniest little accent, the only ones who’d noticed it were Tourist-Office SiL and me, and we’re both used to spending a lot of time dealing with accents).
Subtitles are normally not used: you don’t need subtitles to understand whether the cute blonde bikini-clad foreigner is telling the other cute blonde bikini-clad foreigner+ “my God, what an imbecile!” or “gosh, wish I knew what the heck is this guy saying”.
- Sorry, I’m having flashbacks to those movies from the 1970s where Fernando Esteso spent a lot of time trying to hook up with Swedish tourists. Somebody help me!
Many things about space are fine for me:
Sound in space: necessary for drama, plus of course the camera’s “ear” is allowed to be perfect in regular movies and hear far away things, so why can’t it be pressed against the side of a rocket when in space?
Ships encountering each other “face to face” and right-side up.
“Shields at 20%”. It’s BS, but how else are you going to let the ship take damage while still maintaining a level of peril?
“Transfer power from X” is stupid though, and I note that star trek stopped using it after a while.
Dogfighting in space. In reality, getting close to something else in space, and then staying close, is no mean feat. And I know this from trying to make a 3D space battle game with realistic physics. I wish I had made the same creative decision as the movies 
Aliens being less diverse than humans, and basically sharing a personality trait and culture. And a planet of basically one climate. Otherwise it would be very difficult to write about aliens and tell short stories.
However, if the aliens actually comment on it i.e. Find humans fascinating because of our diversity, that grinds my gears.
One movie I saw where this was NOT the case was the original 1953 film Invaders from Mars. At the end of the film, they set timers for three minutes on the explosives they set aboard the Martian saucer. It seems an interminable length of time before the explosion – they actually used flashbacks and stock footage as “filler”. So I timed the length of the movie between the setting and the explosion, and damned if it isn’t just three minutes!
It’s the only case I know of where they actually did match the times between what it’s supposed to be and how long it plays out on-screen in a movie*. It’s also a lesson on how long three minutes can really be. Kinda like how long a minute is shown to be in the “When I’m 64” sequence in Yellow Submarine.
Or on TV, for that matter. The only other case I can think of on TV is the MASH episode “Life Time”, where they had a clock timer in the corner of the screen to show you how much time remained for them to save a patient’s legs. The timer kept going even when you couldn’t see it, during the commercials, although thsat point may be lost in syndication. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0638346/
Another thing that seems to bother a lot of people is the fact that nobody seems to actually consume the food or drinks they order in restaurants and bars.
I don’t mind because:
- It’s OK to shorthand that “this scene takes place in a bar or restaurant” without actually showing everything people do in those places.
- Dramatic exits are dramatic. Less so if we have to wait for everybody to finish the cheese plate.
- Who wants to watch an actor sit and eat a meal on screen anyway?