Creek Running North

Not my catch, but my better half’s: was unable to suspend disbelief to enjoy all the shooting and the techno music in The Matrix because of the utter thermodynamic implausibility of using humans as batteries.

For some reason, the first thing that comes to mind is the fictional “Georgetown” metro stop in No Way Out. It just seems so bizarre to go to all that trouble when they could have used any of the real ones.

And when Costner goes down the escalator he ends up in the Baltimore subway, but that’s understandable, since the Metro system is very uptight about filming.

the Metro system is very uptight about filming.

Well, Tim, I don’t really blame them: they had a lot of cleaning up to do after all those explosions in filming Space: 1999.

My brain is too mucked at the moment to identify specific examples at this time; i shall endeavor to come up with some manana: oh wait, today is tomorrow then, dang it.  But.. thanks for the ABF adventure game sponsorship.  It is truly an endeavor of professionals in major league blogging, and the trade to this site is perfect and good for it all.  Pila miye.

And just as a starter, having grown up along the coastline in SoCal/LALA, the never ending scenes of driving from point A to point B along streets that are nowhere near one another, just stupifies those who are aware of the flaws.

Computer flubs, especially the Magical Computer That Can Do Anything, are hardly remarkable.  Yet the one in John Carpenter’s 1982 movie _The Thing_ was memorable.  A character, having discovered that their camp is being attacked by a shape-shifting alien, sits down at what is apparently a desktop PC and quickly calculates the chance that one of the people has been replaced by an alien, as well as the most probable time for the creature to absorb everyone in the world.  And the computer presents this result not as a table of numbers or something, but as a grammatical English sentence.  I mean, wow.  He must have really been a perfectionist to have bothered with that output formatting:

if (time_to_world_takeover >0) then
print “The world will be taken over in $x hours.”
else
print “The world is safe!  The presence of a homocidal alien shapeshifting monster is of merely local concern.”

I’ve probably mentioned my (and probably Joe’s) fave to you already: watching The Duellists, during the hold-your-breath suspenseful climax scene where two guys are stalking each other with intent to kill through a complex of tall grass and ruins in Napoleonic-era France, and having the silence (and the movie-spell) shattered by the song of a strictly-Western-Hemisphere mockingbird.

Not strictly about geography, but certainly geographical:  No one in the movie Raising Arizona sounds like he is from anywhere near Maricopa County, and by “anywhere near” I mean “within a 200-mile radius of.”

Those accents could best be described as lying somewhere between “totally fabricated” and “what dweebs from Minnesota might think West Texans sound like.” What they’re doing having characters living in the outskirts of Phoenix speak that way, I don’t know.

Oh, the magic computer. I think my fave was in War Games, where the megasupercomputer spoke in a bad cheap vocorder accent in Matthew Broderick’s bedroom in Seattle because Matthew Broderick had cobbled together a cheap vocorder to do text-to-speech, and then in the top secret hi-tech Cheyenne Mountain SAC HQ, with billions of dollars of black-arts budget and possible dozens of MEGAbytes of RAM in the room, the computer spoke with exactly the same cheap vocorder accent.

Also: After seeing that movie and Jumping Jack Flash, I started to wonder if people in REAL life would dictate to themselves the email they were typing.

Incinsistencies like that are iritating, but the only one I can think of is where a guy tied his tie twice in a german film. But chemists are so often portrayed wrongly in movies that I have long since stopped remembering.

I grew up in Fairbanks, Alaska.  Pretty much anytime Very Cold Weather is depicted onscreen I must shift my suspension of disbelief into overdrive....

Northern Exposure (set in Alaska, shot in Washington State) was rife with that—which was a pity; you could have some fun with things like ice fog and tires that go square when frozen, etc.  They did try some of that I guess—it just never quite rang true.

I’ve mentioned this in other places, but I was really irritated by how in the most recent Pride and Prej with Keira Knightley they represented the Bennets as actually poor, instead of as a quite wealthy family whose daughters would one day be merely shabby genteel when the time came for another branch of the family to inherit their father’s property.

Sure, they weren’t as wealthy as D’Arcy, because he was equivalent to Richard Branson’s billions, but Mr Bennet’s wealth was at least equivalent to several modern millions in assets.  Pigs in the house corridors?  I don’t think so.

I’m bugged by people in movies running from oh-so-poisonous emperor scorpions (often in the desert of all places), screaming hysterically at milk snakes used as stand-ins for coral snakes and people calling millipedes centipedes or calling tarantulas Tarantel (German for Lycosa tarantula) in nature documentaries - which is usually the fault of the German dubbing.  Oooh - and the loud squeaky noises rats, mice and sometimes rabbits make every time they show up on screen.

In Goldeneye (I think) James Bond drives his car through a parking lot in Hamburg, crashes through a window and lands several miles away halfway across the city. Nice one, Mr. Bond.

God, every time I try to explain the bald-eagle/red-tailed-hawk thing, people look at me like I’m crazy.
I’m glad it drives someone else nuts.

Me, I’m a sometime scholar of Islam.  I don’t need movies for cognitive dissonance and irritating factual mixups; I have the news.
That, and as someone ho grew up on mythology and Classical lit, I can’t watch shows like Xena, or similar movies.  They drive me absolutely up the wall, and it ruins the fun most of the time.  (Especially when I’m with my costumer friend, who consistently points out anachronistic fabrics in period films, or that nobody had invented laces yet, etc.  Egad.)

1) Cimino’s having the Deer Hunter boys end up in the Cascades after driving a few hours from Western PA. Although it gave him a more “scenic” and “spiritual” deer hunting scene, it was quite jarring in a movie in which he lavished a lot of attention on the details of the mill town. (Although, in fact, they were filmed in Ohio, and at one point an Ohio highway marker is seen.)

2) The ending of Planet of the Apes with a millions-of-years transformed landscape and coastline, and yet a recognizable Statue of Liberty miraculously survives and is exposed via erosion smack dab on the new shoreline.

Good catch on the WarGames voice, never noticed that one.

(So I’ve started to date the person who is now my husband, and I’m trying him out on old hollywood movies, because it’s sorta my thing, and) Mildred Pierce comes storming out of the beach house (because her husband and her daughter were making out inside) in a huge fur coat and flings herself into the big ass road boat of a car, and she’s turning the key and the engine won’t start and I look over to see how he’s taking this, it being pretty much the highest camp moment of pretty much the ur chick movie, and he’s not just engaged, he’s Clearly Indignant, and he says “That’s not what the engine in that car sounds like”

I have since discovered that many classic films in fact contain cars. FYI.

Where to begin. There’s the scenes in Moonstruck where they walk from Little Italy to Brooklyn Heights to Cobble Hill (where the bakery is) as if they are neighboring neighborhoods, without a friggin’ bridge to cross (one of the most beautiful and photographed bridges around, as it happens).

For anachronism problems, my favorite is the way people ride horses in ancient Greece and Rome with stirrups (I think this happens even in “Troy").

Then there’s the problems with climbing movies, such as the plastic harness buckle breaking at the beginning of Cliffhanger; the weird alpine ascent of El Cap at the beginning of K2, the V20 Tom Cruise move in Mission Impossible, the nitro in Vertical Limit, the bolt belays that rip out in Vertical Limit, the tent at 26,000 feet where you can breathe without any steam or frost in Vertical Limit....

Chris: Surely hero nerd kid was going WEST, not east, hm?  Or else he’d have more problems than just failing to find ponderosa pine.

Stormcrow: The mountains in “The Deer Hunter” were always favourites of mine in the “misplaced scenery” category.  I was going to mention that one ‘til I saw that you did it first.

So I’ll pick the American flags in “Chariots of Fire”.  The movie takes place in the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris.  The American team is there, of course, and there are American flags all over the place.  50-star American flags.

Woo-hoo!  The Return of ABF!

One of the 3 episodes, total, I have watched of X-Files concerned “the mysterious Lake Okoboji” in northern Iowa.  The lake they showed in the episode was obviously somewhere in the Pacific Northwest—the footage was shot at twilight and featured evergreen-clad mountains rising from the shores.  The real Lake Okoboji is basically a glacial indentation on the prairie.  It isn’t mysterious in the least.

Continuing with the prairie theme, my other favorite is the depiction of Mankato, MN in Little House on the Prairie.  I’ve been to the real Mankato and it isn’t in southern Colorado (or wherever the location was).

As a native Noo Yawka, I always notice how they totally screw up the subways.  The most prominent example for me is the episode of the show “Rhoda” where Rhoda gets married.  As it so happens, although it was clear from the show that Rhoda lived on the Upper West Side, the building they used for the exterior location shots was on the Upper East Side.  [For those concerned about the geographic veracity of the Jeffersons, they really did move on up to the East Side.  The building used for those exterior location shots is about two blocks away from Rhoda’s.]

Anyway, so for her wedding episode, they show Rhoda get on the subway at 72nd and Broadway.  The 7th Avenue IRT (aka the 1, 2, 3, and 9 trains, which use red backgrounds for the numbers) is the only line that runs at that station.  However, as she’s waiting for the subway, you see a subway with a white number on a green background pull up.  That can only be the Lexington Avenue IRT (aka the 4, 5, and 6 trains), a train line that runs up the East Side.  In fact, it would be the closest subway line to the exterior location shots’ building.

I happened to have lived in the building they used for the exterior location shots.  So I can also tell you there’s no way Rhoda and Joe could have lived on the 9th floor.  There were only 6 stories.  Sadly, also no Carlton the doorman.

Barry, thanks. fixed.

Charles, that was Visalia, CA.

In Speed, Keannu Reeves opens an access panel in the floor halfway back along the aisle of the bus to go down under it and try to disarm Dennis Hopper’s evil explosive device, but of course, buses don’t have or need access panels there (and on the subject of evil explosive devices in movies, is there some OSHA regulation that requires evildoers to equip each and every one of them with an LED that counts down time left before intended explosion? I’ve never been able to figure out the functionality of such a display except to let any good guys who might show up know exactly how much time they have left before they have to cut the red wire, … or is it the blue wire? If I ever turn to evil: no LED, suckers! BWAHAHAHA!).

watching movie heart attacks (or any hospital-type scenes) with a coronary care nurse...[clear!] :c) similarly, I remember enjoying Quest For Fire in the company of three (count ‘em! three!) social workers.

or commercial kitchen shenanigans, e.g. Frankie & Johnny, for that matter. or any movie/teevee show where minimum-wage earners live in, say, trendy lofts in New York, or beach-front bungalows in LA, or Honalulu.

This isn’t exactly a scientific mistake, but it grates on my nerves every damn time. 

I love Star Trek (which of course has many awful science problems from which to choose), but hearing William Shatner/Patrick Stewart intone “...to boldly go where no one has gone before!” makes me cringe.

It’s “to go boldly”, people!  Did NONE of the writers on the original series have a Strunk and White’s around?

I grew up in Fairbanks, Alaska.  Pretty much anytime Very Cold Weather is depicted onscreen I must shift my suspension of disbelief into overdrive....

I grew up in Anchorage.  Don’t even try to watch ABC’s new “Men in Trees”.

I don’t have one of my own but…

JP Stormcrow said:

“2) The ending of Planet of the Apes with a millions-of-years transformed landscape and coastline, and yet a recognizable Statue of Liberty miraculously survives and is exposed via erosion smack dab on the new shoreline. “

Personally, I love the Spaceballs explanation of that incongruity.

Robert M., Strunk and White are overrated.

I tend to notice the Chicago flubs in movies since I live here. If Harry and Sally (in When Harry Met Sally) are heading to New York from the University of Chicago, located on Chicago’s South Side, why are they driving southbound on North Lake Shore Drive? That’d be the route from Northwestern, not the U of C.

The Fugitive makes up El stops for sport. I worked across the street from one of ‘em, which the filmmakers labeled the Balbo stop and decided was adjacent to the Hilton hotel, which was over a mile away from that station.

And in that Sandra Bullock movie, While You Were Sleeping, how on earth does Bill Pullman always manage to find a parking spot large enough for his big furniture delivery truck right in front of her apartment building? I can suspend my disbelief only so far. They also take a walk along the Chicago River and somehow quickly end up in her residential neighborhood. (Must’ve edited out the scene where they get in a speedboat and take the Lake Michigan shortcut.) (And I apologize for mentioning this movie.)