“Oh, my! Patty’s on her way to the abandoned lighthouse!”
This is something I think about whenever I see an old TV show. And when I read the Old Movies thread, I knew I had to ask about all those old situations.
You know the ones. Perky Co-ed Patty’s on her way to meet Sensitive Quarterback Dirk at the abandoned lighthouse, but when Dirk shows up at Chet ‘n’ Wendy’s Go-Go Watusi Beach Party, they realize that Unhinged Cheerleader Missy faked the note from him so she could kill Patty in a jealous rage. And Chet yells “C’mon, gang! We have to all pile in my old jalopy and barrel along the coast road with one wheel constantly skirting the cliff edge! It’s Patty’s only hope!”
If only Chet could calmly pull a phone out of his pocket: “Hey, Patty? Dirk’s here. No, the note was from Missy. Yeah, jealous rage. Okay, see ya soon.” Cue credits over white vinyl go-go boots dancing in the sand.
I remember reading an interview with Sue Grafton who said that she made a decision to keep her mystery heroine (Kinsy Milhone, A is for All Those Alphabet Books) in 1988 so no one would have a cell phone.
But what other recent ways of doing things would negate important plot points?
Well, off hand, I’d say that access to the Internet and virtually everything everyone knows about everything (along with everything that everyone just thinks that they know about everything) makes quite a number of plots rather pointless.
Heck, answering machines made several murder plots impossible (or highly unlikely).
GPS devices and the rather easy method of employing them to track your spouse’s (or offspring’s) whereabouts also make certain kinds of PI work unnecessary.
I read the original Bourne Identity a few years back. Amusingly, there was a fairly sizeable chunk of plot revolving around them attempting to place an international phone call at a bank or phone company, uh, place thingy, or something, without getting spotted.
About answering machines: they’re not that difficult to plot around. Make the character tired/grumpy/“wanna be left alone” and they’ll just ignore the blinking “1” (and it’s always a blinking “1”, because everybody in TV land clears their messages).
There was a mystery book I read a while ago ([del]I think the title involved Cats, and it was part of a series with titles involving cats[/del] on further review, it was part of the Bernie Rhodenbarr series), in which the protagonist is being shaken down by someone claiming to be in the Mob; he recognizes him from somewhere and then realizes where when he sees him playing a bit part in an old movie. There is then a multi-page discursion on the difficulties of finding out the names of minor actors in movies, involving placing a call to the Screen Actor’s Guild’s office in California and a bunch of other stuff… Reading it, it was impossible not to think that the guy could have figured it out in ten seconds with the IMDB.
Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The movie is supposed to be a romantic comedy but the leads don’t even kiss for an hour and an half. That’s ten minutes after most modern romantic comedies would have ended!
I was going to suggest Night of the Living Dead, but on 2nd thought the basic plot would still be workable today. Barbara & Johnny listed to their iPods on the way down instead of the radio. Their mother couldn’t call them about the strange TV reports she was seeing on CNN because they both turned their phones off to avoid her calling & nagging them (I’ve done this). The landline at the farmhouse is still down/overloaded and unfortunately for everyone the farmhouse is in an area with really shitty cell phone coverage and/or somebody crashed into the local cell tower.
They look at plot holes in films and then make a new ending for a film based on it. The one I enjoyed the most so far is the new ending to Predator: after figuring out that the Predator doesn’t attack the girl because she’s unarmed, all the guys drop their weapons too, and then the Predator comes out of hiding and tries to convince them to hold a gun.
Other movies/stories:
I am Legend: I bet House would have created a cure for the virus in exactly 57.5 minutes.
Nearly every horror movie ever made involving a scientific experiment: A quick search at IMDB would reveal the horrors of say melting a frozen animal from Arctic ice, or cloning humans with animals.
Every horror movie featuring a Jason-like killer: any team of even mediocre CSI’s would have caught the killer in a few days.
I enjoy Kinsey Milhone stuck in the 80’s. I like my gumshoes working the old fashioned way, doing the footwork. Just as I loathe movies with characters staring into a computer screen. I want to know what the suspect’s house looks like when she “lets herself in”, what kind of neighborhood it’s in. Today she could google it, what fun is that?
Well, you could extend it to feature-film length by first showing his search for a boss and a new team. Without a boss to defy and a team to belittle, his superpowers don’t activate.
Or set the story in California and have the rolling blackouts screw with the answering machine.
**Bunny Lake is Missing **would now be over as soon as her mom gave consent to have the hospital (or town hall?) to e-mail or fax Bunny’s birth certificate to prove the child’s existence.
I’d love to see the protagonists finally make it into the farmhouse, only to realize that ::gasp:: it’s the 21st century, and the family gave up their landline years ago!
“What?!? Look at the tea cozy, the doilies–these people should have a… a dial phone! Do you mean to tell me we broke into the ONE farmhouse NOT stuck in the 20th century? Don’t they ever call Aunt Bea or Opie on a big black Bakelite wall-mounted PHONE?!?”
Oh, I thought of a couple just involving competent policemen:
Any sort of national database would reveal either a) a history of arrests/violent crime or b) that the person is using an assumed name. Only at the end do the police reveal that John Cute was actually a serial killer wanted in 45 states and Puerto Rico, as though they couldn’t be bothered in the first 100 minutes of the film.
Speaking of research, if microfiche is so hard to use, why not just a simple google search?
Why do movie police always dismiss victim claims as hysteria (or even worse, female hysteria) and then release the perp, apologizing for a “misunderstanding?” In just about every cop drama, they hold the perp as long as possible while they do a halfway decent investigation. In the movie Suburbia, the police didn’t even try to look around until the last 15 minutes (and the cop was immediately killed by the killer.)
I think the first time I saw this used as a plot device to force characters to use payphones or landlines and/or be unable to get help was in the very underrated The Way of the Gun from 2000. I remember watching it in a theater, thinking both that it was kinda clever, and that I was going to start seeing it in lots of other films using it to artificially create suspense.
House is not a researcher. He never invents anything new. He’s good at diagnosing things no one else can, but whatever treatment he prescribed has always been prescribed by another.
Speaking of modern communication, like cell phones, how many movies or TV shows would’ve run 4 minutes tops if the protagonists (usually a couple) had just communicated, period??
“Sorry to call you on your cell at work, honey, but did I hear you call your secretary ‘Cuddle Fish’ this morning?..”
“Oh, that was Cuttle Fish. We need to buy some for the office. And my secretary is a 60-year-old lesbian.”
“Oh, that would have been embarrassing… if I’d tried to spy on you at work by posing as a big beefy Italian window washer without knowing how to use the scaffolding so I ended up hanging by a rope, then sneak into your office dressed as a nun, only to be propositioned by a 60-year-old lesbian.”
“Yeah, probably would’ve torpedoed the Big Make-Or-Break Business Meeting with the Humorously Silly Ethnic Big-Wigs I’m going into right now… Whew, glad you called!”
Jack: “Oooh, let’s try this position!”
Janet: “Yeah, I’ve never had it this way before!”
Chrissy: “I was going to remain silent, listening to this behind a closed door and deriving all sorts of salacious interpretations, but I decided to speak up for once and ask: ‘What are you two doing in there?’”
Jack: “Moving furniture. What did you think we were doing?”