When you don’t mind suspending disbelief

Cafe Society
41

I know, I can hear Harrison Ford, “Kid, it ain’t that kinda show!”, but over time Hogan’s Heroes bugs me. Do all the heroes speak fluent German, or do all the Germans really speak German-accented English? Because episodes seem to have it both ways.

I’d rather suspend my disbelief and think everyone in Hogan’s team was recruited because they already spoke German (even leBeau!) and we’re just seeing it in English for convenience sake, rather than the lowliest grunt German private speaks like ein Englander mit der aggzent.

42

When our local channels added digital sub-channels, our rabbit ears antenna could get a number of “vintage TV” channels (MeTV, Comet, AntennaTV etc). So I tried to watch some shows that I remember watching “back in the day”…

… But the cop shows were almost unwatchable. So many hour-long shows that could’ve been half-hour episodes.

In one overly-long scene, O’Hara, (…U.S. Treasury) pulls up in front of an old courthouse-looking building, and we have to watch him get out of the car, slam his door, walk around the trunk (pausing to get his briefcase out), lock the trunk, walk up the many stairs to the front door. He enters, and we follow him as he waits for, enters, then exits the elevator, says good morning to everyone and finally gets to his desk. He picks up a note, it’s a phone message. Someone wants O’Hara to meet him downtown, so O’Hara puts his coat back on, takes the elevator back down and walks back out the door he came in, down the long steps, around the car, puts his briefcase in the trunk, unlocks his door, gets in, starts the car, looks over his shoulder and waits for a lonnnng Cadillac to pass by, then revs the engine and pulls out of his parking space.

I’d love to tell you who he was meeting downtown, but I couldn’t take it any more. My attention span had given out halfway through that scene, and I couldn’t take another marathon of “driving downtown, stuck in traffic, yelling at a little kid who ran a red light on his Sting-ray™, finding a parking spot, getting out, slamming his door, unlocking the trunk…”

43

I suspend my disbelief that after the first Harry Potter book, no one pulled Harry aside and said, “Why did you even try to get the stone? You almost got us all killed!”

Dumbledore had enchanted the stone to only come out of the Mirror of Erised if the user wanted the stone, but intended to never use it.

Voldemort could have never gotten the stone since all he wanted was to use it. It…was safe.

44

In THFRO, it’s the political officer who switches languages after the word “Armageddon.” Pretty effective.

Another one is from Judgment at Nuremberg. The defense attorney is giving his opening statement in German, it’s a POV shot from inside the translator’s booth, the camera dollies above the glass partition, zooms in to a head shot and he continues in English. Another excellent moment.

45

The problem I had with House was more about what they did and the order they did things in rather than who was doing the tests. They would order things like technetium-99 scans, lumbar punctures, and even do exploratory surgery, brain biopsies, and / or breaking into the patient’s house to search for drugs, and finally at the end they would do a routine urinalysis or blood count and get the diagnosis from a test that would have been ordered in the first 30 minutes in real life.

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I view Jason Statham movies as live action anime, sit back, and relax.

48

I don’t always succeed, but I can shrug at plenty of dubious skill-usage: someone waves their arms onto a stuntman who obligingly falls down, meh, okay, I’ll accept that, if I’m into the movie. Or: someone is touching a paintbrush to a canvas and moving it around? That’s all I need to suspend disbelief.

But one thing that takes me out of a scene is sleight-of-hand stuff where the actor doesn’t do anything. Like, we’ll see the character pickpocket a guy — except it’s obvious that the actor simply had the wallet before he walked past the guy, is all. Or we’ll see the character doing a magic trick — only it’s just the actor saying Is This Your Card while producing an eight of spades that he didn’t actually palm or whatever.

It’s a little thing, but it jars.

49

I love Law and Order and a lot of other catch-the-criminal dramas. The one that I could not suspend disbelief for was BONES. The Star Trek level crime-fighting tech was just ridiculous.

50

It’s pretty easy to suspend disbelief. I know it’s entertainment and not a secret test to show everybody around me how smart I think I am.

51

It’s not that they can’t read a map (though I’m sure some can’t.) These weird and/impossible routes movies take are usually hamstrung by what permits they can get for the days they need vs. the money/time they can spend shooting/editing.

52

Training goes faster if you sing a catchy song in the process:

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(Separate post since I can’t edit the previous one with a YT vid embedded)

My favorite “beyond belief” moment on Bones was during a season arc where they were battling this ‘supervillian’ type who kept outguessing them at every turn. He introduced a virus into their computer system by leaving some evidence at one of his kills that had the virus encoded onto some of the evidence like a bar code. When they took pictures and scanned the pics into the computer, it introduced the virus.

54

When the author tells a compelling story.

I often see something and say “That’s historically inaccurate” but file it away and keep watching.

For example, “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” has a snake that drinks milk as a treat. Snakes don’t drink milk and, if forced to due to lack of water, it can kill them. Nonetheless, this is still one of the top Holmes stories.

55

They also did it for Spanish to English in Clear and Present Danger. Another Jack Ryan film, but interestingly, a different director and star.

For the “why are they speaking English?” question, I always found The Last Emperor handled it awkwardly. When everyone on screen was Chinese, all the characters spoke completely proper English, accented but more or less RP. Whenever a non-Chinese actor entered the frame, all the Chinese dialogue became a rough pidgin.

56

The Antonia Banderas historical action film The 13th Warrior didn’t have a ton to recommend it, but it does this really well. Banderas is a Moor who falls in with a band of Scandinavians, with whom he does not share any language. They spend a couple months traveling together, and there’s a montage of the trip where, as Banderas’ character learns their language, more and more of their dialogue is rendered in English, until by the end of the trip, he’s fully fluent, and the rest of the movie is done in English.

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Jonathan Strange

58

Damn! Ha, those comic book movies are invading my brain.

59

I assumed that @carrps was deliberately conflating
the two things for comic effect. :grinning:

60

Wish I’d been that smart.