Rudy. When Rudy opens his acceptance letter to Notre Dame (when he finally got in), he’s sitting on a bench in front of Moreau Seminary, overlooking one of the lakes where you can see the Dome. Excited to tell the news to the groundskeeper, he gets up, runs the wrong direction, and magically teleports clear across the Notre Dame campus straight onto South Quad, about 3/4 a mile away.
It’s an excellent use of picturesque scenery, but it’s completely geographically wrong. It cracks me up every single time.
I’m sorry, I can’t remember what movie I saw this in. But I used to live in Toronto. The film was made there. A female villain is being chased by the good guys. She starts out in view of City Hall, cut to her running down King St. in the financial district, six blocks away. Next shot she’s running through the grounds of the Canadian National Exhibition, a couple of miles away, and then she’s running on the shore of Lake Ontario, a mile or so further away from the CNE. All this in the space of a minute!
I was just a kid when I saw it, but I remember thinking, “what kind of moron edited this film???!”
Actually what really amazed me about the crew’s mess was that the different groups sat in the mess, in the same relative position as where they worked. I mean it is one thing to sit with the guys you work with. But to actually sit in the mess in the same relative spot as where you worked in the boat ?
Didn’t hear any Thresher stories. But I did get to hear about a certain tape of a Tautog incident…that never happened
If I thought the incongruity were done on purpose - I’d have gone with it. I think.
However, I’m not willing to give Hollywood any credit when dealing with zoomies. Come on, why is everything radioactive GREEN ferchrissakes? Ever look at a source? (Yes, I used inspection mirrors, and a film of plastic - I’m crazy, not stupid. ) The ones I remember best were those that looked like coils of fat copper wire. Surrounded of course by about 10 lbs of lead.
Another movie that I kicked me out was Jurassic Park. I left when they began talking about their foolproof plan for keeping the critters from breeding. And while I’d just read Glory Season by David Brin, that wasn’t necessary for me to remember parthenogenisis - a process where apparantly healthy and normal female lizards (not all species, of course, but some) can reproduce in the absence of males by giving birth to either haploid daughters, or near clones of themselves. So, if these dinosaurs shared that trait with modern lizards - a jump, but not an impossible one IMNSHO - their plan for keeping the critters from breeding went out the window. And any competent geneticist should know of that.
And worse, the counter for parthenogenisis would have been child’s play: Force all the embryos to develope male, instead of female.
When I’m smarter than supposeded first rate, but not genius, geneticists - I’m not able to take the movie seriously.
Actually even a rudimary understanding of common sense makes Outbreak completely absurd… or so I though until I realized…
Jello Molds!.. Yes Jello Molds. You see the part they don’t tell you is that while they were hunting down the cure they also had Jello mols made in the shape of all the important internal organs… Since the virus had liquified Renee Ruso’s character (I think it was her anyway…) they just poured all of her insides into the molds. That explains how the cure for the virus allowed her to fully recover. Doesn’t it make more sense now?
I thought it was a mac? Anyway, I’m getting fed up of this one. Yes, the film had many flaws, though, I think, it was better than most. But I didn’t think they just plugged in a computer and went. The scientists had been studying the crashed ship for ages, or at least days. Jeff had a few hours to play with that. He worked out their protocols and wrote something to interface with them, and plant a virus.
It might be a bit implausibly fast, but I think it’s reasonable compared to, say, the premise of the film. After all, the aliens are pretty advanced. Perhaps they have intuitive user-friendly protocols.
I went to see Anti-Trust with a bunch of fellow geeks. It committed numerous crimes against common sense, but a couple of the more obscure ones:
In the Climactic Showdown ™, Our Hero and the thinly-disguised Bill Gates are both trying to connect to satellites. All the satellites have IP addresses in the 10.x.x.x range, which means that they’re non-routable, and the packets they were sending would have been dropped at the router.
The thinly-disguised Microsoft campus runs Linux! You see a Gnome screenshot and everything.
The McGuffin in Sneakers, the Amazing Machine That Can Decrypt Anything, is also good to get a laugh out of crypto-knowlegeable people.
<Michigan Fan>Yeah! And the time in Rudy when they make it look like Notre Dame isn’t the most despicable force in all of humankind! Or how they showed Notre Dame winning games where the refs didn’t hand them the game on a silver platter! And how bout when they act as if the audience is supposed to root FOR Notre Dame?? Puh-lease! Who ever heard of such a thing??</Michigan Fan>
There was this Star Trek movie where they were in a cave. I laughed so hard during that part I couldn’t breathe, and every time I got control of myself and looked at the screen I started giggling again.
If you have ever spent more than a couple of minutes in a real cave (not a walk-through tour) you will realize how funny it is to see a dozen people in one room, all standing up, in perfect uniforms and makeup. The floors were all level and there was wonderfully perfect lighting everywhere (sourceless, of course).
I have crawled through a few caves, and believe me, those flimsy uniforms wouldn’t have survived crawling through a tunnel on hands and knees, squeezing around tight turns, climbing up chimneys, etc. Their hair would have been dirty and their nails would have been torn. They would have been standing at angles because the floor wasn’t particularly level, there would have been rocks jutting from the walls, there would have been water somewhere, unless it was a desert climate.
Seeing them all so serious and immaculate in perfect grey stone rooms tickled me senseless.
Oh, and I always laugh like a loon when I hear things in space. Or see things like wings of spacecraft flame. Duh, where’s the oxygen, people? Did you guys ever take a science class?
Slight Nitpick: If the movie was The Wrath of Khan, then the cave was purposely excavated within a large planetoid for the use of underground testing of the Genesis project (why they needed to test it underground, I don’t know). Naturally, the people who built the cave would’ve included lights, life support, etc. and made the cave big enough for people to walk around in.
And I think the accepted explanation for things burning in space is that the fire is fueled by oxygen escaping from the holes blown in the hull.
Anything in an industrial setting it stupid. Hello?! Surge protectors and safety release valves people! And don’t get me started on how the critical switch is always across the mouths of flame instead of being handly located near the door.
The lack of safety rails and machinary covers are annoying too. I suppose it gives something for the bad guys to be push over/into.
Still, the crushing pillars bit in Glaxay Quest is a hoot.
Not to mention that no ballet company works out of the Carnegie Library and Museum in Oakland. They might perform in the Music Hall there, but they don’t have their offices there with ballet dancers hanging out in the hallways stretching or huge, oak-floored audition rooms.
Similar to this would be the movie Striking Distance, wherein Bruce Willis and the dad from Frasier come down a hill in Oakland onto Bigelow Boulevard in Oakland and then magically teleport to Homestead and then turn a corner and are suddenly coming through the Armstrong Tunnel onto Second Avenue downtown near the jail. Also, they refer to the Armstrong Tunnel as “tubes” which is only proper nomenclature for the Liberty Tunnels, none of the others.
I remember having major problems with the piece of crud that was Disclosure but I have fought so hard to put it out of my mind that I can’t remember what they were.
It’s not exactly a classic film anyway, but I love Running Scared (with Billy Crystal and Gregory Hines). It’s set in my hometown of Chicago. There’s an impossible car chase scene - I’m not talking about the obvious one, where the cars are racing down the El tracks. I can’t right now remember exactly the sequence, but at some point a car turns from Lower Wacker onto a street that Lower Wacker does not intersect with. But the single most irritating moment in the film is when Billy Crystal assures his aunt that he won’t be late for her funeral: “I will be the first one on line,” he says. Chicagoans do NOT say “on line” unless they’re talking about computers. We say “IN line.”
It’s really really really really embarassing to defend that film…but they’d been studying the ship since it crashed at Roswell.
I’m trying to think of a film where I haven’t spotted a gaping flaw…
