Things your tired of in movies

[Trekker4747]

One thing that really drives me nuts in movies is situations where a character needs to set off a fire alarm to create a distraction or something for him to get away or set of whatever his plan is. So he usually gets a lighter or starts a small fire or something to set off a fire sprinkler.

Now, setting off a fire sprinkler may be enough to set off a fire alarm once the system detects the change of pressure in the line but what it will not do is set off every single other fire sprinkler in the building! Fire sprinklers do not work that way. They only go off in the areas where there is actually fire because there is a piece of wax between the outlet of the sprinkler and it's body. Heat melts that wax.

If all of the sprinklers did go off by just one's wax melting there wouldn't be enough water pressure in the system to effectively extinguish the fire.

 

[cultcross]

Another one, same inspiration: the thing that kills you in a car crash or similar situation (like falling) is rapid deceleration, not the fact that you hit something hard with your weak human skin. Both Batman and Iron Man should be goo on the inside of their suits when they hit the floor from a great height, fancy tech or no fancy tech. I don't see crumple zones and air bags in the Iron Man suit.

Iron Man clearly has inertial dampeners.

Reminds me of those Voyager scripts -

KIM (working his console)
If we [TECH] the [TECH] we might be able to [TECH]


By the way, Iron Man is possibly the first movie who asks us to root for a character who designs and deploys cluster bombs.

 

[Mistral]

Car crashes.

One-can't any of these characters drive? I mean, c'mon. How many cars get in fender benders in a single day? And how many get turned to scrambled eggs like in the movies?

Two-the character who not only survives a collision with a tree at 50+ mph, but who manages to jump out of the vehicle and continue running away from their pursuer immediately. Sorry-I've had traumatic shock in real life and you don't do squat right afterwards but pray you aren't going to die-and that's if you are still conscious.

 

[Random_Spock]

I don't mind post-credits scenes if they're just little easter eggs for the die-hard fans. As long as it's not required to watch a post-credits scene to fully "get" a movie, I'm cool with it.

Same here. I saw a couple of good ones before, one from X Men 3 and one from the last X-Files movie.

The X Men 3 one was interesting to see.

Spoiler: X Men 3

Seeing that Professor Xavier was brought back to life...

And the one from the last X-Files movie... that one was out there , but I still loved it .

Spoiler: X Files movie IWTB

M & S in swimwear in the middle of nowhere in a boat... That earns my seal of approval there. They've earned a vacation after all that they've been through.

One thing that really bugs me... isn't so much in the movies themselves... but whenever a tv network censors stuff. It's one thing to censor a swear word, but it's another thing to take out stuff that was part of the movie originally and then have it not make any real sense, post censor.

And a side note from that, I hate when they cut from a movie for a commercial and when you get back, you're in a part of the movie that has nothing to do with what you were watching previously .

Editing my butt.

 

[J.T.B.]

Fire sprinklers do not work that way. They only go off in the areas where there is actually fire because there is a piece of wax between the outlet of the sprinkler and it's body. Heat melts that wax.

Agreed on the use in movies, but it's not wax, it's a metal alloy similar to solder. Or a glass bulb with liquid inside that expands enough to break the glass at a certain temp.



Justin

 

[RoJoHen]

People being able to guess computer passwords just by looking at the stuff on someone's desk. He's got a picture of his dog on his desk; his password must be the name of his dog!

 

[Dick_Valentine]

One thing that really bugs me... isn't so much in the movies themselves... but whenever a tv network censors stuff. It's one thing to censor a swear word, but it's another thing to take out stuff that was part of the movie originally and then have it not make any real sense, post censor.

And a side note from that, I hate when they cut from a movie for a commercial and when you get back, you're in a part of the movie that has nothing to do with what you were watching previously .

Editing my butt.

Yes, this is an interesting one.
Due to the fact I've only ever seen Robocop on TV and its scheduling here (our TV schedulers seem to think Robocop is some kind of kids movie!) I still have no idea why a light slapping from some felons leads Murphy to suddenly need to be maintained in a Robotic Life support suit!

I get you have to edit that scene but, c'mon, leave us SOME context.
Sadly censors don't usually get their job because they're good with the editing machines once they've made their decisions on what we should or shouldn't see on our behalf!

Another overused effect that's getting on my nerves is a camera trick I learnt in my first year of college on a media studies course yet some movies seem to treat it like it is the most amazing and hard to pull off technique in filmmaking!

I'm talking about when they zoom in while physically moving the camera away from its subject (or vice versa), usually to denote a "Eureka" moment.
I think the first time I ever saw it was in Scrubs but after that everywhere I looked, it was there.

I don't know its technical name or too many examples of it being used off the top of my head but hopefully my description is approaching adequate enough get some other people's brains firing as to what I'm referring to!

 

[Trekker4747]

Fire sprinklers do not work that way. They only go off in the areas where there is actually fire because there is a piece of wax between the outlet of the sprinkler and it's body. Heat melts that wax.

Agreed on the use in movies, but it's not wax, it's a metal alloy similar to solder. Or a glass bulb with liquid inside that expands enough to break the glass at a certain temp.



Justin

I've heard it's wax, it may depend on the particular design of sprinkler, local ordinances and stuff like that. Whatever the stuff is, it's some sort of material that melts with the heat from the fire and when one goes off all of them don't go off.

 

[RoJoHen]

I just learned something about sprinklers.

 

[Tiberius]

People being able to guess computer passwords just by looking at the stuff on someone's desk. He's got a picture of his dog on his desk; his password must be the name of his dog!

 

[TheSeeker]

One that occurred to me whilst watching Iron Man today - characters who wake up in hospitals and immediately pull off any leads, pull out any IVs and NG tubes and generally do similar things that are really stupid.

You know, that one has always bugged me too.

 

[Aldo]

Any action movie where a character is hot in the leg, arm, or other non-vital area and is able to fully function. Best example I can think of is when Cage's character in Con-Air is shot in the arm and is still able to play an active role in the climax of said film.

 

[Trekker4747]

As someone who wears glasses it always bugs me in movies when someone's glasses are knocked off of them and we then see them squinting and stumbling around, usually grasping at the air on the ground, trying to find them.

Not having your glasses on doesn't render you blind it just makes things very, very blurry. It should be fairly easy to find your glasses if they're knocked off your face and if you can't then you've likely have such terrible eyesight you should be considered legally blind which, naturally, would hinder many aspects of a normal life.

 

[Caliburn24]

As an addition to the gun thing.

I'm tired of endless ammunition. I fired pretty much every standard small-arm and crew served weapon the Army has in my time in the service, and various other weapons as a civilian.

Watching Rambo blaze away on a 50 cal. at the end of the movie for what seemed like minutes(With a 100 round ammo box) was laughable. The cyclic rate on the M2 would have blown his load in 10-12 seconds.

Assault rifles and sub-machine guns are even worse. With a standard 30 round magazine(as almost everything in TV and movies are) on full automatic you'll click empty in 2-3 seconds. I can't remember the last time I saw a movie or TV show get this fact correct.

 

[Mr. Adventure]

Even though I understand the point of it I sometimes get tired of seeing the shot of the gun skitting across the floor when it's wrested loose during a fight.

Also, sometimes the foley guys go a little overboard and tires screech every time a car moves or stops even when moving slowly.

In a related note, in the movie Doom when the camera switches to the guy's point of view for a few minutes, that took me out of the movie completely. Hated it, ruined the movie for me.

Well, cmon, it was DOOM after all...
[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nV5NF2sPN8[/yt]

As someone who wears glasses it always bugs me in movies when someone's glasses are knocked off of them and we then see them squinting and stumbling around, usually grasping at the air on the ground, trying to find them.

Not having your glasses on doesn't render you blind it just makes things very, very blurry. It should be fairly easy to find your glasses if they're knocked off your face and if you can't then you've likely have such terrible eyesight you should be considered legally blind which, naturally, would hinder many aspects of a normal life.

Until I succumbed to the mighty laser I was in this situation whenever something happened to my glasses and I didn't catch the general area they landed.

 

[Orac Zen]

Cars (or vehicles of pretty much any description) that explode on impact with anything whatsoever, or when shot at, or whatever. It simply doesn't happen - except in movies.

I agree with the poster who mentioned car tyres that squeal on any surface. Hell, according to movies and TV car tyres would probably squeal on glass (if anyone was dumb enough to drive on glass, anyway).

Goodies who can shoot a pinhead from any distance, as opposed to baddies who couldn't hit the side of a building from 5 metres away - unless the goodie is hiding behind something, in which case the baddies are suddenly able to group their shots with near-perfect precision.

 

[T'Girl]

On a related note: Revolvers that shoot seven, eight, ten or twelve rounds without reloading.

My father owns a Taurus model 608, eight shot .357 Magnum revolver.

. . . Also all the easily accessible, easy-to-crawl-through ventilation ducts that you never see in real life.

Would you really want to lose Helen Noel crawling on her tummy in the ventilation duct during Dagger of the Mind?

Car tires screeching - on sand and gravel.

Cars making dramatic, tire screeching turns, and you can see the tire marks on the pavement where either there were multiple takes, or the driver practices the move a few time before the camera shot was made.

 

[cultcross]

Car tires screeching - on sand and gravel.

Cars making dramatic, tire screeching turns, and you can see the tire marks on the pavement where either there were multiple takes, or the driver practices the move a few time before the camera shot was made.

Related to this one, when people walk across a beach or desert, and they're walking in existing footprints going the same way. Stargate SG-1 was particularly bad at this.

 

[Trekker4747]

Until I succumbed to the mighty laser I was in this situation whenever something happened to my glasses and I didn't catch the general area they landed.

Well, you probably didn't get on all fours and fumble around like a blind person. You probably squinted, searched, looked around and tried to find them. It's happened to me more than a few times and usually it's just a matter of, well, looking for them as I would any other object.

But in movies or TV shows usually it's like the person becomes blind and gropes around for them and, many times, they usually search right around the very glasses they're looking for until their hands actually touch them. You can't tell me any glasses wearing person wouldn't be able to see their glasses that are right in front of them until they make physical contact.

This, of course, may exclude octogenarians with pop-bottle thick glasses with 20/100 vision without them.

 

[Andrew_Kearley]

Another overused effect that's getting on my nerves is a camera trick I learnt in my first year of college on a media studies course yet some movies seem to treat it like it is the most amazing and hard to pull off technique in filmmaking!

I'm talking about when they zoom in while physically moving the camera away from its subject (or vice versa), usually to denote a "Eureka" moment.
I think the first time I ever saw it was in Scrubs but after that everywhere I looked, it was there.

I don't know its technical name or too many examples of it being used off the top of my head but hopefully my description is approaching adequate enough get some other people's brains firing as to what I'm referring to!

A dolly zoom. Sometimes called a Hitchcock zoom or Vertigo zoom, because Hitchcock used it to denote Jimmy Stewart's vertigo. It was fresh and unusual then. It was still cool when Spielberg used it in Jaws, but it probably has been overdone since then.