She wasn’t just showing her ploys! 
In any case, it was hard to think about chess. 
Could have taken her measurements or an old gown for it to be copied from … find someone there who fits in the dress then model it on her … a stretch, I suppose, not likely but still possible.
The one thing no one has mentioned is that *Saving Private Ryan * was a true story. Well sort of. Ok it was inspired by a true story. In Stephen Ambrose’s research for D-day and later *Band of Brothers * he found this story. It later became the basis for the movie. In the same Regiment as Easy Company in Band of Brothers there was a soldier who lost his brothers the same way Ryan did. In fact I believe that the mother did get the two notices at the same time. The soldier was sent home. Beyond that the movie is fiction. There was no daring behind the lines raid to rescue him. An order came down and he was sent back to England. I don’t have my copy of BoB with me so I can’t quote the appropriate passage.
Most movies that have anything to do with the military bother me. The only thing saving Hollywood military movies is Dale Dye. He usually gets it right. I give one example that gets me everytime I see it. In *Broken Arrow * they are fighting on the train. There is an OH-58/Bell Jet Ranger straped down to the flat bed. The main rotor is tied down properly. When they start fighting one of them grabs the tail rotor and spins it around to whack his opponent. They tail rotor and main rotor are both attached to the transmission. If you spin the tail rotor the main will spin. If the main rotor is tied down then the tail rotor won’t move more than an inch or two depending on how tight the tie downs are. In the movie the main rotor doen’t even move at all. This was the helicopter the bad guys were going to escape in so it had to be in working order. What gets me the most is that the film makers had to take the time to detach the tail rotor from the drive shaft to make this work. It wasn’t a mistake it was deliberate.
Which is good, because the movie was set in mid-1700s, which is the 18th century.
I have distrusted Stephen Ambrose ever since I heard him say on Book TV that all missions were on a voluntary basis at the B-24 base he visited in Italy in WWII. He even went so far as to claim that if you didn’t want to go you could opt out and someone else would go.
That would be most destructive of of morale and unit cohesion. Everyone goes in turn and in order except under the most extreme circumstances and those circumstances do not occur on every mission.
I think Ambrose was confusing voluntary missions with the fact that aircrew members were volunteers in the first place. I.e. you volunteered for pilot or bombardier or navigator training. I’m not sure about aerial gunnery. However, once you raised your hand at the original enlistment from then on you were pretty much destiny’s tot unless you could collect brownie points with someone of high authority.
The USAF requirement for height among their pilots is between 5’3" and 6’4" - Will Smith fits pretty well. Fighter pilots tend to be in excellent physical shape (even somewhat muscular) to help deal with the g-forces they encounter (good muscletone helps keep the blood from pooling in the legs - you can’t expect the g-suit to do all the work). Will Smith doesn’t seem that unlikely physically. Here’s my cite. The Navy and Marines have similar requirements to the Air Force - and yes, that was an F-18 our hero was flying in Independence Day.
As for short pilots sitting on a cushion - no, never. The most important measurement is from your butt to your shoulder when you’re sitting, because you have to be securely strapped in to the ejection seat if you have to eject from the aircraft. If you’re sitting on a cushion or a phone book, you’re gonna be in a lot of pain (Let’s see…likely broken pelvis, dislocated hips…well, lots of injuries) from your body attempting to squirt out around the crotch strap when you eject, and you may not survive the experience.
Zev, I don’t think the Raiders bit wa all that bad. After all, you did say that the real prayer was lost. It was my impression that if you don’t know the right bracha for the occasion, you either go to a Rabbi for a ruling, or improvise on the spot. Saying the wrong blessing is better than sying nothing.
What does annoy me is when they screw around with Jewish services. I’m not that religious, but I do know my way around a shul, and lots of times the changes or ommissions they make are just ridiculous. One good example is in Keeping the Faith, a movie I otherwise liked a lot. The big climactic confession scene takes place in synagogue on erev Yom Kippur, and when as the cantor finishes kol nidrei, he stops and passes the service ober to the rabbi for his sermon. This would never happen in real life, if only because kol nidrei is the FIRST prayer of the evening - in fact, its very purpose is to allow the rest to contunue - and no rabbi would stop to talk after 20 minutes, not when they have at least another hour of davinimg ahead of them. I guess its because that specific prayer has a distinctively beautiful melody, but that’s no exuse.
Another movie that amuses me vastly is Rambo III. Now, I know that this particular flick has a lot of reasons why we shouldn’t take it too seriously - like the technology, the acting, the physics, the plot, the unsettling political angle - but the fact that it was filmed in Israel gives me two more sources of amusement:
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All of the Mujahedeen, and some of the Russians, were played by familiar Israeli character actors, all with perfect hebrew accents.
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The film was obviously filmed in the Negev desert; more specifically, it was filmed in the IDF live-fire training area known as Nebi Musa. Which led to a great moment when my unit arrived there in 1994, and our Company Sgt. - a wiry litle guy called Mickey - hopped off the bus, lined us up, took a long drag from his cigarette, swept his arm out across the desert vista and said, in English:
“Rambo… this is Afganistan.”
Drat. :smack: I kept reading “1700’s” as “17th century”. Not sure why.
Sgt Fritz Niland, 501st PIR, 101st Airbourne Division
Believe Ambrose or don’t but this is true.
I’m afraid not, Alessan. Firstly, there is no blessing because the Ark (of the Covenant) wasn’t meant to be opened. It basically sat in the Holy of Holies in the Temple all year and was seen (and not opened) by the High Priest once a year.
Secondly, I’m afraid your rule of saying the wrong blessing is worse than saying no blessing doesn’t really hold true either. If you want to discuss it, I’ll be more than happy to in another thread (it’s kind of off-topic for this one), but suffice it to say that while on some occassions your statement is true, it is not true more often.
Actually, that’s exactly what happens in my shul. We daven Kol Nidre and then the rabbi speaks for a short while and an appeal is made. This is done so that Ma’ariv (the evening service) actually starts after nightfall (whereas the proper time for Kol Nidre is at about sunset).
Zev Steinhardt
The one that always makes me cringe is in action and horror movies when the heros get trapped in an elevator. The baddie tries to get in so the heros pull out everything from revolvers to assualt rifles shoot through the roof. Then have a normal conversation 15 seconds later. No mention of ringing ears, no concern about deafness. I can’t even imagine what a .44 magnum fired multiples times in an metalic walled elevator sounds like, but I’m pretty sure you would notice and mention it, if you wern’t temporarily(or permanently deaf).
Screw remembering how to purl. I can possibly imagine (it takes a great deal of imagination, and hurts) having forgotten how to purl. But I cannot imagine having forgotten how to knit altogether - and being unable to reverse engineer knitted material.
My memory of Matrix part II (whatever it was called) is “they had runs in their clothing.” Perhaps it would be hard and a waste of engineering capacity to make small, tiny, thin needles and thread to resew woven material. Holes in cloth clothing is an odd choice (seeing every other clothing-wearing culture on earth has taken time to mend or discard ripped clothing), still it’s barely believable. But they showed a culture where people had taken the time to beat metal into jewelry, and create glass decorations…there was down time and leisure time, it takes 10 minutes and two thinish, straightish sticks (which are all around them) to fix a run in a knit sweater and bind off the hole. Why, why, why weren’t they darning their clothing???
During the scenes in Spiderman 2 set on Columbia, I spent the whole time pointing out to my sister ‘there’s no payphone there! There’s no classroom in Hamilton that looks like that! Why is he living off-campus - nobody lives off campus!’ and other annoying know-it-all comments.
Most movies with biology in them are really laughable. Even off-handed comments get to me, like in The Matrix, when Neo is told that they’re eating a ‘single celled protein.’ What the hell is a single-celled protein? All labs in movies are far too clean and pretty - think of the spider lab in Spiderman (and no, there ain’t no lab in Fairchild, the Columbia bio building, that looks like that, either), which is huge, clean, high-ceilinged, and doesn’t contain any of the usual lab paraphernalia that someplace doing genetic engineering would have.
All Orthodox Jews in the movies are Hasidic, and speak with Yiddish-inflected accents. English is my first language, Hollywood People, and I sound like I’m from New York. I don’t even speak Yiddish. Neither do any of my friends, or even most of my friends’ parents, although most of our grandparents do. And I’m very, very not Hasidic. No rabbis are ever under the age of sixty or so. Of course, my actual rabbi frequently gets mistaken for a fifteen-year-old by weekend visitors when he gets up in synagogue to speak (he’s really around thirty). The background music for ‘Jewish scenes’ is always klezmer, although nobody of the many, many Orthodox people I know actually listens to klezmer.
Occasionally a book gets it right, and I have the sense that it was written by somebody who knows what it is to be Orthodox, but never a Hollywood movie.
In an episode of the X-Files, Scully and Mulder go to Rachel Nevada and it shows suburban neighborhoods with big lawns and big trees… hahahahaha. There is nothing in Rachel except the Lil’ Ale’inn place and some trailer homes, constructed out buildings, nearly flat spawling desert all the way to the mountains. Rachel is barley a wide spot in the road.
Another is in the movie Con Air, when the plane is crashing they fly past the Stratosphere, crash through the Hard Rock Guitar on the hotel and then into the Sands Hotel. Not possble unluess they were flying north turned around flew southeast, the turned around and flew northwest again. Another from that movie is the motercycle chase, they are downtown on Fremont street, then go into a tunnel (really long for that matter) and come out by the Debbie Renolds Hotel (now closed). Not possible either considering that the only tunnel is at the airport, way far away from downtown, and it is not that long of a tunnel.
Oh, and part of the chase scene from Lethal Weapon 4 (I am pretty sure it is 4), takes place on the I-215 here between Eastern Road and Windmill Road 
and not in L.A. (Where Mel Gibson is on the table being dragged down the freeway. There are the brown sound walls on either side of the freeway, and then they come aroung the curve and it is the LA skyline. They filmed it before that stretch if the 215 was opened)
You obviously haven’t seen The Frisco Kid! ;j
Zev Steinhardt
Well, being a chemist who works with radioactive materials, I see lots of errors in movies. The one that is most memorable and made me want to leave the theater(oh, I should have…) was in The Hulk where Dr. Banner tries to save his lab cohort, trapped in front of the super-high powered gamma emitting machine. Alas, the doctor, for all his heroic efforts can’t save the poor fool. Being the heroic, leading actor he throws himself in front of the doomed soul to protect him. While we all knew he was going to get blasted by gamma rays, this is just rediculous! The human body is a crappy shield from gamma rays. All the learned doctor was doing was getting himself fried as well.
Spiderman 2 had some rediculous moments, but every time they showed the tritium, I cringed. It’s freakin’ hydrogen, for pete’s sake! True, it’s got a couple of neutrons hanging on the nucleus, but it isn’t some gold, glowing semi-liquid, semi-solid.
And every time the mysteriously pH changing acid blood of the aliens from Alien pops up, my eyes go :rolleyes:
Well sorta. Performing external cardiac compressions correctly on someone who doesn’t need them (like an actor performing a part) could actually cause damage.
ER the tv show usually does a good job of portraying CPR with camera cuts and angle changes. Other shows/movies, not so much. Of course the producers/directors of ER know that anything they show is going to be scrutinized by a very critical audience. They at least try to get it right.
The precordial thump; looks very dramatic on screen but I don’t remember it ever being a part of basic CPR training. It’s probably one of those things that get perpetuated by movies/tv alone.
All that crap bugs me too.
An essential part of the procedure is to shout “Fight, dammit!” while pounding on the chest. Many med students overlook that part.
I was vaguely troubled throughout Master and Commander by the ship’s officers oddly worshipful attitude toward Lord Nelson. The movie clearly took place before Trafalgar, but whenever they spoke of the admiral it sounded like they were referring to some dead hero of ancient myth, not their living, breathing (and probably much grumbled about) commanding officer.
I also thought it was strange that the French ship they were chasing had been purchased from the Americans. Warship technology has always been a matter of national security, and while I could imagine the Americans selling the French some battered old hulk, the idea that they would sell a brand-new frigate with a novel extra-tough hull seemed bizarre.
I found out later that both errors had the same origin: The original novel was set during the war of 1812 and the enemies were Americans, but the movie shifted the action seven years earlier so U.S. audiences wouldn’t have to deal with the idea that the Americans could be the bad guys.
It’s a tribute to how well-researched Master and Commander is that even it’s errors make sense … .
Before the opening credits in Spy Game, we see a photo swoop over Hong Kong harbour with a dateline: Hong Kong, 1992. The swoop clearly shows a completed Convention & Exhibition Centre - which in reality was built for, and only just completed before, the handover in mid-1997. Also, the US embassy is not in the Hong Kong Bank building. There are many others …