What you wrote:
What I read at first:
Several of my pet peeves have already been mentioned, like “Enhance the image!” scenes and characters who have jobs that would require graduate degrees and years of experience being played by early-to-mid 20s fashion models. Another one that hasn’t been mentioned yet is characters who apparently don’t need food.
It’s not that I expect to have scenes showing people eating. If a big dinner scene isn’t important to the plot then I’m happy to assume the characters took their meals offscreen. But sometimes its clearly impossible for the characters to have found time to eat, and if none of them even mentions being hungry then it gets on my nerves.
In Dr. No James Bond ALMOST gets to eat several times, but either refuses or is interrupted. Although with Bond I can manage to suspend my belief enough to accept that maybe he can run on martinis alone. 
In The Da Vinci Code (the book at least, I didn’t see the movie) most of the action takes place within roughly a 24 hour period. Our Heroes are running all over the place to get clues, and neither sleep nor eat or drink anything aside from some crackers and Coke on the plane. I probably would have fainted before getting to the bottom of the mystery, but okay, they were both in a hurry and in danger and didn’t want to stop for a McDonald’s run. But at the end of the book when they’re out of danger and have solved most of the mystery, they continue on to the final location immediately. I don’t buy it. This is far from the only or worst thing wrong with The Da Vinci Code, but it would have taken just one phrase to fix this. Something like “After a brief stop at a fish and chip stand, they were on to…”
Violations of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) make me crazy. The way professors and doctors will just start babbling about whatever thoughts pop into their heads when approached by parents, spouses, or law enforcement … it is maddening. I did like a scene in The Wire where a cop pulls a combo of charming/bullying an aide at a college to get some FERPA-protected information, it was obvious that both the cop and the aide knew the law.
Andy Rooney has an interesting essay called “Sound and Noise”, in which he grumpily tells us the difference between the two. It ends with a little story:
There’s always the contrasting G.I. Joe cartoon approach, in which America’s daring, highly-trained special mission force, tasked to defend human freedom against the world’s most dangerous terrorist organization, has, apparently, one officer: a two-star general whose second-in-command is a sergeant.
That’s because, according to Hollywood, any officer under the rank of Lt. Colonel is a complete and utter incompetent.
Eating is usually boring, and dramatic productions omit that sort of thing.
Any time an actor uses a pistol in each hand, or worse yet, a machine gun in each hand. Stop that. Please. The only exception to this is if its set in the 1800s or so, when pistols were single shot muzzleloaders. I’ve tried this, just messing around… you can’t hit anything, and it takes 5x longer to change a magazine.
Also, any time hollywood deals with radiation or nuclear power, it is an utter failure. I’ve stopped cringing, but seriously… can you guys just once hire a consultant?
Came in here to mention this scenario. Almost as annoying; when the FBI agent or whoever has to ASK the computer tech if they can “enhance the image.” Of course they can! The question is, why didn’t they just do that to begin with? They need an agent to give them the order? Still, WTF, you’re on a TV show, they could probably extract DNA from a blurry image by now if tech has advanced at the same rate in TV land as the real world.
But something about other shows that bugs me sometimes is when there is just a glaring inconsistency. Case in point; Supernatural is one of my favorite shows, and they usually get most of the folklore/legends right, but in one episode around Halloween the brothers Winchester were called upon to stop the summoning of Samhain. And yes, they pronounced it “SAM-HANE”. :smack:
Most of the time, I agree with you. Psychics are often poorly done and boring and I often Groan when I hear the word(One of the things I hated about FEAR was that all the bad guys were “Psychic Supersoldier Clones” which for me was three massive:rolleyes:'s in one) OTOH, if it’s done really well, I don’t mind. The only thing that comes immediatly to mind is River Tam in Serenity/Firefly, but I think that’s because she’s also really messed up by it.
Maybe he was talking about guerrilla warriors who pretty much get all their supplies from stealing from the enemy? That’s the only way that sounds really plausible.
Of course, a lot of guerrillas are supplied by some major power anyway.
Yes, I know that. That’s why I said I don’t expect to see actual scenes of people eating. I just find it annoying when the storyline makes it impossible for the characters to have eaten offscreen either.
It really gets under my skin when they show running sequences. The actor playing the bad guy runs fast enough, the good guy actor is always running in sissy strides. I know it is hard to film the actor up close and have him run as fast as he should be.
Casino Royal clip. 13 seconds in you see a real effort to run as fast as you can in real life. There are countless running shots where the actors are doing a half-hearted run with really bad imitation of pumping arms.
Reminds me of the 4th season of 24 where the bad guy’s first scheme was to melt down all the nuclear power plants in the US at the same time using an internet universal remote.
Yeah…I don’t know where to begin.
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When people in hospital shows especially are told there’s no hope and nothing that can be done and then they’re all, “please save him! he’s my only husband!” or the adorable little daughter comes up and is adorable or whatever and suddenly it turns out that there IS a cure after all and they just didn’t cure him before because… they save all their hard work for people with adorable families?
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This is just something that bugs me- when someone says something and then the scene changes and someone else reacts to it in the new scene, which would be some time later. Like someone in the lab says, “she was pregnant!” and then they cut to the detectives getting out of the car at a crime scene after, presumably, being together in the car for a while on the way there. And as they get out of the car, one of them is like, “pregnant?! she must have been so scared!” and they have the entire conversation like they must have just stopped talking entirely between the last scene and this one.
No it isn’t. Look at the background of the Gotham Cathedral behind them – they jerk to a sudden stop. No excuse – they’re goners
yeah, right.
For me, I can’t get my inner physicist to shut up. No matter how many times I try to convince it that maybe the Star Wars universe has some kind of sufficiently advanced anti-gravity, it screams at me: “Hovercrafts Don’t Work Like That And Neither Do Spaceships!”
In Star Trek, it gets worse because they try to explain it with the hand-wavey technobabble that has no internal consistency. You may as well have just said: “And lo, because the plot said so, they fixed the negative space wedgy and all was well.”
Those don’t bother me as much as chases that don’t make sense. I refer specifically to fantasy series in which a character has enhanced physical abilities having to chase a normal person and not catching them in seconds. I can recall a few times on Angel, for instance, in which the title character and his son – both of whom had superhuman speed and were known to freak people out by moving from one spot to another impossibly fast – suddenly forgot that when chasing someone.
I was talking books with a friend, and she said that she had to put down a novel in the middle because the author used “irregardless”. Because it’s not a real word, and it’s bad grammar, and a writer should know something like that. Meanwhile, I sat there and pretended that I’d never ever made such a gross lexiconical mistake.
Irregardless use would only bother me in certain contexts. It makes my skin crawl when I hear it in the real world, but in dialogue, say, it’s more than reasonable to have a character use it. Likewise, if the story is being told in the first person, it’s reasonble to use in narration. Does your friend insist that all characters in a story speak the Queen’s English?