Remind me what happens? I can’t remember much of that movie after Giovanni Ribisi first says the word “unobtainium,” which is unfortunately about ten minutes in.
Huh?
Why not? Who would know? Why spend money on a new shotgun blast when there’s a perfectly good Vitaphone recording?
It was called Lank Thompson: I’m a Handsome Actor and also parodied a telephone trope similar to the one mentioned upthread: when making a phone call, never dial, just pick up and start talking!
Thank you! 
the amount of abuse folk can take w/ no abvious harm. ((Heading to the dr this p.m. to have my grotesquely swollen shin looked at - walked into a trailer htch 10 days ago)
No shit. Take a look at the guys’ faces after an MMA or boxing match.
Along those lines, the “hit someone over the head just to knock them unconscious because you want them to stop resisting, or not to see something” trope. I sort of understand why they do it: they want a quick and easy way of having one character subdue another (whom he doesn’t want to kill.) But in real life, there’s no way to calibrate your whack-on-the-head to be just strong enough to cause a mild concussion with a momentary loss of consciousness, while avoiding the risk of an epidural hematoma, which can be fatal.
Not to mention, crack someone over the head and there is generally going to be A LOT of blood!
(Apologies for my subliterate prior post from my phone.) I remember what I think was Daniel Craig’s first Bond movie. At the beginning he was chasing some parkour guy across some construction cranes. Bond falls some ridiculous distance before landing on his stomach across some metal object - and gets right back into the chase/fight. An incredibly minor nit to pick with Bond films, but it caused both my wife and me to comment. Willing to accept some more outrageous fantasy than the indestructible human.
More recently we watched Bryson’s Walk in the Woods (please miss it.) Near the end these two 70-ish old guys tumble 15-20 feet down a near vertical rocky cliff, landing on a narrow ledge of rock. Without suffering a scratch! As someone who shattered his friggin ankle walking down a half-flight of stairs in my own home…
I don’t understand why more movies and TV shows don’t use a choke-out.
The talk of telephone tropes reminded me of this scene in a Marx Bros. movie (I don’t remember which):
They’re traveling on a train that stops in some jerkwater town in the middle of the night. The romantic young hero dude gets off to stretch his legs, smoke a cigarette, whatever.
The old fart station master is inside, talking on an old-fashioned stick telephone.
OFSM: Hello! What? Hold on, I’ll check! [Turns to RYHD] Is there a Tom Smith [or some such All-American name] on this train?
RYHD: [Surprised] Why, that’s me!
What a coincidence he should be standing right there on the platform! And anyway, if he hadn’t been Tom Smith, how the fuck would he know if there was anyone with that name on the train?!? :dubious: 
:smack:
Well . . . you can’t really fault a movie that features a character who packs a flaming blowtorch under his coat.
Especially since the rise of MMA as a niche sport has helped the public realize that it’s actually a plausible thing that happens in real-life fights, not some hokey Vulcan nerve pinch or pro wrestling “sleeper hold.”
And climbing the woven-steel cable of a lifting crane: nuh uh! Don’t try it, guys! Woven-steel cable usually has hundreds of little micro-breaks of the individual strands, and these will cut your hands to bloody confetti.
(Why they did it: an impressive stunt, leading to a fight in a high place.)
I also hated that chase scene because it didn’t have any underlying reality. It was all just disconnected quick scenes. One moment he’s running up stairs. Now he’s on the same level as the guy. Now he’s above. The directions change randomly. He veers off at an angle…but now he’s right behind the guy again.
A decent chase scene will invoke, in the viewer, a sense of a real place, where the segments connect up logically. The Craig movies’ chase scenes never do this.
(Why they did it: it’s DYNAMIC as heck!)
Men who get kicked in the nads and grimace and shrug it off. It doesn’t just hurt; a really solid kick landing there triggers what amounts to an automatic reflex. You legs go out and you go down, unless you’re an Indian fakir or some sort of trained sumo wrestler. I know the intent is to show how super tough the fighter is, but it always prompts me to think, “Huh, another robot/nonbiological.”
Bullets kicking up dirt right in front of a running chararcter’s feet. See, bullets travel forward much, much faster than they drop due to gravity. If bullets are fired at Bob and do not strike him–even if they’re fired low, say, at his knees–the misses will strike many yards behind him, not near his feet. Unless Sarah Palin has mistaken Bob for a wolf while hunting from her airplane. But of course if the bullets strike far behind Bob, they will be out of the camera shot entirely. So everyone in the movies seems to be obsessed with shooting the soles off of Bob’s shoes.
Just once I’d like to see Bob break cover and run alongside a line of puffs of dirt and hear another character say, “Wait, slow down, Bob, they’re not shooting at us.”
All additions in red are mine. 
I thought the same thing about that scene. Watching it, I was struck by how stupid it was; why not just have a radioactive spider bite Bond and give him superhuman powers?
The chase scene at the beginning of Val Kilmer’s The Saint also destroyed my suspension of disbelief. Anyone who’s ever spent time in Moscow will tell you you can’t run from the Hotel Ukraina to Red Square in under 30 seconds!
The US Embassy in that movie, BTW, was actually the Peking Hotel on Mayakovskii Square. Aside from their being fairly close to each other on the Garden Ring, there is nothing similar about them.
To be fair, anyone who has lived in any city in which a movie has been filmed will make a similar complaint. I cannot watch movies set in my home town for that reason.
At the Circus.
The character’s name was Jeff Wilson (played by Kenny Baker). And since the train was transporting the circus troupe that he owned, it’s hardly unreasonable to think that someone on the train would know if he was there, even if they hadn’t managed to get Jeff himself.
NOW it makes sense! :smack:
(Still, you gotta admit it was lucky he just happened to be there! Also, why would the station master ask some random guy on the platform? He apparently didn’t know about the circus troupe.)