In a subsequent post you admit that it happened once so it’s not like you went there frequently and always saw the ketamine sitting out. In fact if you had walked off with the ketamine there’s a good chance someone might have suspected who did it and reported it to the authorities. But even if they ended up having to write it off I doubt very much that that they would be making the same mistake twice. My point still holds that there are proper methods of storing controlled substances and that movie was not accurate in that respect.
I have a section on my website about movies and T-shirts that fall short in my special area of expertise:
It’s called The Loosie Awards – it’s the Bad Bondage Hall of Shame. The opening page is work safe, and so are most of the pages linked to it, but there are a couple of breasts and Sheryl Lee’s butt. So watch out! And the jollyroper home page – definitely not work safe.
I think I once actually tried to count the number of mistakes in this movie, but I gave up because the numbers got overwhelming.
The biggest ones: as you mentioned, the communications. I touched on this in my original post, but here was the other extreme: IIRC the only communications available to all of these airplanes was through the TOWER. No approach control, no center, no nothing except TOWER. Riiiight.
The worst was the whole premise that the terrorists used to threaten people: Oooh, we’ll magically lower the glideslope and the airplanes will fly into the ground. Ummm, no. Not even close. For a normal (ie Cat I for you pilot types) ILS you have a Decision Altitude based on your barometric altimeter. For most ILSs it is 200 feet above the ground. When you reach this altitude if you do not have the airport or approach lights in sight you execute a missed approach.
EVEN IF if was possible to “move down” an ILS glidepath (which is NOT possible short of physically moving the ILS antenna), it would not matter - at the Decision Altitude the aircraft would not see the runway and they would go-around. Period. No loss of life, no “threat” from the terrorists.
Other things: an ejection seat in a C-123? I don’t think so! Ejection seats, when you think about it, require one very important thing: that nothing is in the way of the pilot when he/she starts going up those rails. In fighter type aircraft, the canopy can be explosively jettisoned before the seat starts going up. Another possibility is to have a breakable canopy and penetrators on the top of the seat that break the canopy before the pilot goes through. Still another method (that the Brits seem to like a lot) is to have explosive cord running through the top of the canopy that fires first and shatters the canopy, allowing the seat to pass through.
In any case, there needs to be some way to get the ceiling/canopy/whatever out of the way before the pilot goes through it. (This is one reason why helicopters don’t have ejection seats. I think the Russians built one with an ejection seat, and when you pulled the seat handles the rotor blades used explosive bolts to separate so you didn’t perform a head-ectomoy on yourself when you exited). In the old C-123 that Bruce Willis was in, there was nothing like a removable panel or anything - so, no possibility of an ejection seat.
And I think this movie also had one of those interminably long takeoff rolls that I talked about earlier. You know, the one that takes just long enough for the plot to play out?
The thing is, I actually enjoy watching this movie whenever it comes on TBS or whoever shows it. Of course, I watch it as a comedy, not a drama so YMMV. 
If they wanted to be clever, they should have changed the reported altimeter setting to something that would have put the plane 300 feet lower than indicated. But even then, when I cross a marker on the GS I check my altitude against the plate anyways. Dunno how many other pilots do.
Well, I’m one of those guys too, Berkut. Cross-checking your altitude at the marker would prevent the altimeter-switcheroo. Another thing that would is the radar altimeter that airliners (and most jets) have installed. The DA on an ILS also gives an RA (Radar Altitude), and this can be crosschecked with your barometric altimeter if you missed the marker check.
A classic from Die Hard II. Bruce Willis is enaged in a running gun battle with the terrorists. He dives behind a row of phonebooths, which read…Pacific Bell.
Pretty much anything filmed around LA is a hoot.
Take the TV show 10-8
The police station is the old Northeast division station in Highland Park (near Pasadena) First problem The Sheriff dept does not patrol in HP (city of LA)
The guys are shown during patrol being near downtown (possible), East LA (again posible) and the beach (40 fucking miles away!) :smack: [ul]
[li]CGI planes carying torpedos when bombing airbases [/li][li]Cuba Gooding needing medical attention after a boxing match. His Battleship apparently did not have a medical dept, so he had to go ashore to be attended to by nurse hottie[/li][li]You can shoot down a zero with a tommy gun[/li][li]The US was so short of pilots at the start of the war, we had to draft fighter pilots to fly the Doolittle raid[/li][/ul] :smack: :smack: :smack: :smack: :smack:
I suppose this is possible. However …
I stand by my belief that Ryan’s status wouldn’t have been discovered with such dispatch and he wouldn’t have been withdrawn from combat anyway. The news of the success of the landings would have overridden everything else in my opinion. By the time word trickled down that Ryan’s brothers had been killed nobody would have been listening except the small circle of family and friends.
I don’t agree but differences of opinion are what makes horse races.
Omaha and Utah beaches were pretty much isolated from each other by flooding along the Vire (I think) river. Numerous 101[sup]st[/sup] Airborne Division troopers drowned as a result. Even without the flooding the walk would have been a distance of about 15 miles or so through territory that was controlled by an enemy that was alert by this time. And the sensible course would have been to give the job to the 4[sup]th[/sup] Infantry Division that landed at Utah beach and made first contact with the paratroops of the 101[sup]st[/sup] at about noon on D-Day (The Longest Day, Cornelius Ryan) and this site says that linkup between the 4[sup]th[/sup] and 101[sup]st[/sup]was secured by late afternoon.
And this site agrees with my description of the ending.
A quote: “The second part is more an American classical movie than the mirror of the Normandy History and the end is totally a modern western.”
I’ve spent more words on this than it’s worth, I suppose, and if anyone enjoyed the movie great. However, the mythology about WWII has to stop somewhere.
The Juneau was lost on 13 November 1942. D Day was 6 June 1944. That’s about 19 months.
And the public reaction for the loss of the Sullivan brothers was during 1943. Remember the ship was christened in April of 1943. Also, 1942-1944 is still the same Congressional Class. So, if the Rep for the Sullivan’s family’s district is the same rep for the Ryan family’s district - it’s going to be a shit storm squared, no matter when the news comes out.
I wonder how much fun a movie would be to watch, (especially the SciFi types), if Hollywood stuck absolutely to reality??
It CAN be done. But, usually it requires a couple of things that Hollywood isn’t willing to do: Real research, and clever writing to educate the audience. Personally, I don’t think either is impossible - just unlikely. There’s little percieved market for smart SF, I’m afraid. 8-(
Kindergarten Cop
It’s rare for cops to go undercover in schools. When they do, it’s narc work or property crimes in high schools, not tracking down people who disappear with their own kids.
Police do not go undercover in schools without the full knowledge and cooperation of the school principal and/or administrative officials in the local school board (although that information may be shielded from the staff).
It is unheard of for police officers, most of whom don’t have college degrees, to masquerade as teaching staff-- ESPECIALLY in early childhood.
It would have been easier, from an investigative POV, to have Arnold’s character pose as a school safety patrol officer, janitor or parent volunteer and gain surveillance of parents/students that way. Most kindergarten teachers have teaching assistants; he could have been one.
What the hell was an L.A. detective doing in a school in Oregon?
Daddy Day Care
As a male in early childhood education, I can tell you most parents wouldn’t feel so damn comfortable leaving their children in the hands of one man with no training in early child care, in a private home – let alone THREE men.
Most parents would still have been tripping over themselves to get into the exclusive school.
School of Rock
Most school districts I know of have protocols in place to prevent just anyone showing up at a school claiming to be a substitute teacher. They have to present a current school district identification card, their own state driver’s license and produce a call-back-number describing their assignment. No administrator would have taken this information from a substitute reporting to work, they would have referred the sub to the school secretary.
Also, I forget what the rate was quoted for substitute teaching, but sounded awfully high to me.
Field trips using school buses are carefully budgeted, because gasoline and bus driver’s extra pay (which is time plus mileage in my district) have to be accounted for. Either the teachers raise this money, or the school or district pays out of their funds. This is usually done beforehand. Bus field trips are not approved by school principals; they’re approved by administrators downtown. So without being paid for and without school board approval, the bus should not have shown up. There would have been no battle of the band ending.
A field trip is not like the scheduled bus ride to and from school. THERE ARE ALWAYS ADULTS PRESENT FOR FIELD TRIPS. No school bus driver would risk their job taking a busload of children – with no parents or parent volunteers – (and without being signed off at the school!) off-route to the teacher’s home to pick up the teacher. I grant you, a small class of students might have conceivably snuck out the building onto the bus. The bus would never have left the campus (not with the driver, anyway.)
Do you know of any where they, or any market, has made a good effort and produced something realistic?
I mean, I think we’re all so used to hollywood’s silliness that most of us just tend to ignore it and try to get into the intentions of the movie, rather than allow ourselves to get too caught up in bs flag mania.
But I’d be very curious to see one that did stay away from cliches, just to compare it.
Not always true. I subbed in Texas during this last spring semester. And not once was I asked to provide any ID. All I did was sign in on the sub list and was sent off to the classroom. I subbed in a variety of schools from the elementary level to HS.
In fact, several times when going to a school I hadn’t been to before, I got lost, or went to the wrong door and ended up wandering up and down halls to find the office TO sign in, and though several other teachers and staff would pass me, hardly anyone thought it alarming in the least that a strange adult was wandering the halls of their school.
I did get a few “may I help yous” but it was all pretty casual and trusting imho. Also, although I teach PE at the university level, I do NOT have any childhood education experience whatsoever. Nor do I have experience teaching any other subjects but physical fitness. My qualifications, according to the lady who hired me, were based on the technical writing and science skills from my main job as environmental prj mgr.
Granted, I’d had to fill out an application at the school district prior to getting call outs. But no one checked to make sure that I WAS in fact THE canvasshoes who was signed up to sub within their school district. For all they know, I could have sent some nutso in to pose as me.
Almost any movie portraying psychotherapists is either laughable or disgusting. In fact, my study group had to institute a “three-times-only” rule for hitting the pause button during Mr. Jones or we would never have made it to the end.
- Psychotherapists, whether psychologists, social workers, psychiatrists, or others, appear on film as overly warm and over-involved (the minority) or complete idiots.
- Psychotherapists are depicted as unethical. I have known a lot of therapists over many years, and very few of us have had sex with a client, hit a client, let a client in our car for no particular reason, thrown a book at a client, deliberately broken confidentiality, thrown a client out a window, etc.
- Psychotherapy is generally depicted as idiotic, exploitive, or dangerous because neither general intervention theories nor ethical standards are followed.
K-PAX stands as the most outrageous example in recent years; it’s hard even to narrow it down to specific scenes for my ethics classes because there is so much depiction of psychotherapists/psychotherapy, and so little of it meets standard of practice. One egregiously bad scene depicts the psychotherapist engaged in this sequence: Pulling out a tape of a client session while he’s at home–I’ve never worked at a hospital where therapists could take tapes home, though I suppose this could happen. Pulling out said tape from a unlocked drawer. Listening to said tape in a home office with no door (and thus, with aforementioned unlocked drawer, violating HIPAA, state laws, and professional ethics right and left. Playing said tape loudly enough to awaken family members. Inviting his wife to listen to the tape. Doing so while their children are able to hear. Referring to the client by name and identifying characteristics. Speculating about the client’s suicidality to family members.
Texas: another proud example why No Child Left Behind is doomed.
Seriously, they don’t check out subs at the school site there? Wow.
They were doing ID checks on subs in Atlanta back in 1999, and up here for ALL SCHOOL PERSONNEL within three days after 9/11/01.
In the movie Tomb Raider, there’s a part where Angelina Jolie is in some part of Siberia with a bunch of Yakut-looking natives (not sure where, exactly; I wasn’t watching the movie very closely). Anyways, a little native girl asks Angelina (or vice-versa, I forget) in Russian where she’s going, and the other responds “Krateru”, which is translated “to the crater”. This means the script writers obviously didn’t bother asking a Russian speaker, but just looked in a dictionary and got the first translation for “to the crater” that they saw; as “krateru” is in the dative case (“I’m giving something to the crater”) rather than the accusative case which it should be in (“I’m going to the crater”). It should have been “v krater”. Grr.
Where the heck were you teaching? I teach in Texas, and last year, I supported my family by way of sub work. They did a complete background check, required three separate forms of ID, and generally acted like they were pondering whether or not to trust me with atomic secrets.
I now work at another school, where they did the same thing when they hired me. And parents often come to school for meetings during the day; seeing unfamiliar adults is no big thing, although they are supposed to stop by the office and get a nametag. If they don’t, though, I have no power or responsibility to stop them.
It didn’t occur to me upon first reading, but whistlepig is completely right. But I’ve never seen anything where it occurred to me that the person in the movie was actually supposed to be mentally retarded or autistic. Some little catch in my brain simply kicks in and whispers, “This is Dustin Hoffman, pretending to be autistic,” and I’m able to watch the movie…
I’m reminds of the furor generated by The Davinci Code…it incited several theologans to take a point by point dis-assembly of Dan Brown’s book. The reality is: If he’d stuck to common aggreed-upon fact, it wouldn’t have been a very interesting story. Since it had facts scattered about the book liberally, it made for a pretty good read.
I didn’t even bother finishing the one ‘fact and fiction’ behind the book document as it was a dull read and reminded me of a rabid star trek fan.