In the movie Se7en, the crazy dude (Kevin Spacey) has shelves of notebooks filled with his crazy ramblings. Although you only ever see a page or two, the notebooks were actually produced, each page done by hand!
Yes, for instance, members of a black cavalry unit were part of the Battle of Lincoln. It surprised me that “Young Guns” included this detail, yet left it completely unremarked upon within the movie. Especially since, even to this day, you rarely see black people in Westerns.
I was just rewatching Earth versus the Flying Saucers the other day, and experienced a moment of delight. Our hero is out on his patio with his wife; a jeep pulls up, and a soldier gets out, comes across the lawn, and hands him an urgent message.
The moment of delight: As the camera watches our hero reading the message, in the background we can hear the jeep driver grinding the gears a bit and then driving off. Some sound guy cared enough to finish off the driver’s “story”, and with a bit of humor, yet! 
In the Charge of the Light Brigade, 60s version they actually move forward a lot of the way “At the walk”, instead of galloping for an incredibly long distance.
Also you hear the harness jingling.
At the end of the Great American Snuff Movie, the victim of the serial killer just collapses when shot, incredibly believable.
People shot dead don’t get thrown backwards, or throw their arms in the air.
They just fall like puppets with their strings cut.
No emotion.
Plus a lot of Saving Private Ryan.
Schindlers List, when they shoot a prisoner, the person behind drops as well.
The Charge of the Light Brigade (60s movie) is actually pretty sound all round. It showed Nolan’s ostracism, the confusion in the orders and all the rest very well. Hell, even the animated bits are in a contemporary style!
I really hope they weren’t stenciled with “Auto Ordinance Co.” That would be sloppy indeed.
Not exactly realistic, per se… but in True Lies, when Ahnold commandeers the Harrier jump jet, the only thing the pilot says is something like “Hey, you have to sign for that!”, which is *exactly *what a military man would say (or at least think) under the circumstances. Do what you want, but first cover my ass.
I looked it up and you are correct. Thanks!
This may be the ultimate in pedantry, but Linotypes from the very beginning set fully justified type. It’s actually very hard to set ragged-right text on a Linotype, or at least it was until they added a quadding device that would allow for automatic ragged or centered text setting.
For that matter, when hand setting type, it’s just about as easy to fully justify as it is to set ragged as you have to have the spacing exactly right either way. The only difference is where you insert the spacing.
This is a favorite of mine - the Air Traffic Control scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The actors nailed the delivery of an ATC controller perfectly. I’m especially impressed by this line (clip is cued up):
“Air East Thirty One, descend and maintain flight level three-one-zero…break. Alleghany triple four turn right 30 degrees immediately…traffic twelve o’clock two-zero miles opposite direction - Air East jet descending to maintain flight level three-one-zero, over.”
- “Flight level 310” not “31 thousand feet”. The term “flight level” is used above 18,000 feet in US airspace, where all aircraft must use the common altimeter setting of 29.92 so everyone’s altimeters are synched up at high altitudes where the airlines and other fast planes operate.
- “two-zero miles”, not “twenty miles” (lessens chance of garbled comms).
- “Break” tells everyone listening on the frequency that the controller is done talking to Air East 31 and that everything that follows is directed to someone else, in this case Alleghany 444. It’s used in time-critical situations such as this where the controller has to get a lot of info out fast in one actuation of the microphone switch. “Over” tells everyone the controller is now done talking and he’s releasing the mic switch so others can talk on the radio.
Sorry for the lecture, but it’s just really cool to me how Spielberg lets the scene play out realistically (well, except for the spaceship, of course.)
Another good example is from The Incredibles! It was pretty funny to see all this mostly-correct comm used in such a wild scene.
- “Buddy spiked” = whoever’s shooting at me, you’re radar locked to a friendly.
- “Angels ten, track east” = I’m at 10 thousand feet, eastbound
- The military uses the term “knock it off” to cease airborne training for safety of flight issues, but since she’s unsure who’s firing on her “abort” or “disengage” works fine, IMO. She made all these calls on “guard”, which is a common freq that all military aircraft, ATC and many airliners monitor, so they go that right, too.
- The Fasten Seat Belt sign sitch is even in the typical place for a jet of this type!
In a Futurama episode, one of the writers just went out and wrote a new, novel, formal mathematical proof that what Farnsworth was saying was true. All for all of a few second shot on a computer screen. I’d call that getting a tiny detail right when a lesser writer would have just made up some mumbo-jumbo.
That really is the best Onion book. So dense with text, there’s alway some new little thing to discover.
In The Social Network, there’s a scene where Mark downloads a bunch of photos for his Facemash site, and narrates the methods he uses. Everything he says, and everything shown on screen, makes perfect technical sense and is totally in context for what he’s doing. Even the creator of wget concurs.
I think the tech stuff in the remake of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo was pretty spot on too.
eta: Here’s the scene.
In the Social Network, they used correct jargon whenever Mark was recollecting and technobabble when other (non technical) persons were deposing. Nice touch.