New one: I was watching NCIS: New Orleans and the protagonists chased the suspect into a warehouse filled with Mardi Gras floats etc. Doesn’t anyone lock their doors, especially at night? Or have some sort of security or workers or somebody around?
One sees people wandering around empty-but-not-abandoned buildings in TV shows all the time (offices, museums, factories, construction sites) with nary an issue with them getting in or with local security or workers turning up. They can turn on all the lights, start the production line running, have a massive gunfight and no one turns up to go “WTF is going on here?”. Bizarre.
Along with this - foreign setting films should be in that language, but subtitled in English. No movies set in 1800s Asia but the Asian characters all speaking in English.
With respect to that, I wonder if there may be too many people outside of the Dope like my best friend - who flat refuses to watch anything with subtitles - to make that viable?
No question – I’d end the practice of recaps when returning from commercial break. Seriously. I watch a lot of history channel stuff, where this is especially bad, but it’s common everywhere. Sometimes almost the entire show so far is quickly repeated each time the story returns. It’s disrespectful to your serious viewers, as if saying, “if you just tuned in, here’s the entire program you missed…if you’ve been with us from the start, ***** you, we’re going to waste your time rehashing everything you just sat through, and for the sixth consecutive time.”
People who tune in late KNOW they’re coming in in the middle; let them adapt.
I know why it’s done…probably to save content. Who wants to produce 22 whole minutes of icky content, when we could just make 8 minutes and rehash it after every break?
No question – I’d end the practice of recaps when returning…
It’s been at least 30 years that the big head tennis racket has more or less replaced the woody racquet, yet STILL…if there’s a tennis racket prop, it’s a woodie - sometimes with a goofy press clamped around it.
I won’t flat out refuse to watch anything with subtitles, but I find it annoying and actively avoid fully subtitled shows and movies. I rarely engross myself on just the TV show. I’m usually doing other things. Having to read dialog is a huge turn-off. I can handle a little, but not a whole show. Few, if any, shows are worth it to me.
Too true, especially the ones that want to force real life wait times on things. Hey, let’s grind our show to a halt waiting the 20-30 seconds for a modern flat screen to boot up and another 15 seconds searching for a news report. Let’s wait 20 seconds for someone to answer a phone. Let’s have real parking woes. It can work, if the plot calls for it. When it doesn’t, then trying to keep the pacing while enforcing these waits will always be just as contrived as eliminating the waits.
Jewish characters have to actually do Jewish stuff. They can’t just say they are Jewish, or remark that they once had a Bar Mitzvah. They have to mention an upcoming holiday that isn’t Hanukkah, they have to occasionally turn down invitations because they conflict with an observance. If they have kids, they have to send them to Jewish camp and Hebrew school. They have to say either “Shabbes,” or “Shabbat,” not “the Sabbath.” They may not be shomer kashrut (although it would be nice), but they would have to explain in a restaurant that they want something served minus a certain ingredient as a token effort toward keeping kosher. And if everyone else in the group wants pepperoni pizza, or to go to Red Lobster, they have to either be petulant, or say they’ll do something else, whatever is more in line with their character.
This is one that gets mentioned regularly when this topic comes up. And I get that it’s not realistic the way it’s done. But I promise you, if filmmakers ever started doing it “the realistic way”, after you watched it once or twice, you’d be saying, “Oh, so THAT’S why they used to do it the unrealistic way”. 15-20 seconds may not seem like much time, but 15-20 seconds of dead screentime of someone just standing, waiting, holding a phone is an ETERNITY. The movie would come to a stop, along with any sort of pacing.
People say they want realism in their movies, and they certainly do, to an extent. But movies aren’t reality; the vast majority of reality is boring. Waiting around for someone to answer the phone. Driving around the block to look for a free parking spot. You may think you want this type of realism in movies, but I guarantee you you actually wouldn’t.
Goodness Gravy! (Sixiero Style) - really? There’s so much awesome foreign shit out there - Antonioni, Pasolini, all the French New Wave shit, Bergman, to name, like, oh about six trillion others?
So - you’ve never actually sat down and checked out good flicks like that? Get “Seventh Seal” or “Tin Drum”, dude, and you’re off to the races.
Or even (awesomely) fucked-up shit - there’s “Kamikaze '89”.
None of that dreary, depressing dubbed depravity, tho.
Long bridges across seemingly-bottomless chasms will have rails on either side. I’m looking at you, Star Wars. Hilariously lampshaded by Will Smith in I, Robot: “This is bad building planning.”
Nothing says “this isn’t real” like characters giving out 555-xxxx phone numbers.
I’m pretty sure that with a little effort, screenwriters could come up with area codes and numbers that do not exist, and a disclaimer in the credits would hopefully take care of the eventuality that some day the number might exist and jackasses would call it.
Actually, what might actually work is if studios would reserve particular blocks of TN’s, and use them for their movies. And then, when people eventually call into them, they ring to some sort of promotional bit for the movie.
