Phydeaux on 8/8/2006 at 10:40
Quote Posted by Malygris
Jesus, boys. How did you get from Die Hard: Reset (lol scots freakout) to this?
Welcome to the internet.
My point isn't that mistakes made in movies make movies bad. It's that certain mistakes in certain movies make these movies bad.
In the case of the automatic weapons firing blanks with BFDs (lol, irony), the vast, vast majority of people wouldn't even realize this mistake, and in most any other circumstance, I could forgive such a mistake and just "let it go". But in Die Hard 2, it's part of a
major fucking plotpoint. Like Jeff Goldbloom writing a virus on his Mac that somehow works on an alien computer in Independance Day. Again, most people aren't going to notice or care, but anybody with any bit of knowledge in that particular field is going to cry "bullshit!".
And as for the "Glock 7", it's like the movie is going out of its way to purposely assert that it's talking out of its ass. In a scant few lines of dialogue he (or the script, or the technical adviser) spews out a fountain of utter bullshit. They could have completely done without that bit of dialogue, wrote it so he somehow smuggled in the gun some other way, and everything would have been fine.
And it's not just the gun stuff in DH2, if you look at the "Goofs" section on IMDB's entry, you'll find more factual errors and plot holes than you've ever seen in a single movie before. Lots of stuff that I never would have noticed, but surely every air traffic controller who saw the flick would have.
IMO the worst offender ever was in "Sniper 2" with Tom Beringer, when he misidentifies a WWII era rifle. Now, if he'd said nothing, I'da thought nothing. But this is a movie called "
Sniper 2", it's about
snipers, and Tom, a
sniper picks up a
sniper rifle, and misidentifies it completely. Seriously, how do you fuck something up like that? I mean, it's one thing where in "Top Gun" they make up a fictional jet, the Mig-28, which is actually an American F-5s or T-38s. But imagine if they called their own jets F-15s instead of F-14s, or Tom Skerrit said he was flying a Ford Galaxie 500 over Vietnam instead of an F-4. Some mistakes in some movies are simply unforgivable.
Paz on 8/8/2006 at 15:42
Quote Posted by Vigil
the core of Paz's (and, I think, Phydeaux's) argument is that movies
should be trying to get these things right anyway unless they have a good reason
not to, in the interests of not insulting the intelligence of their audience.
Yeah, pretty much.
Obviously there's a case of "by degrees" here. Regarding the NY Subway example; yes, it's fairly unforgivable to have stations in the wrong order or the carriages in the incorrect colour, but not recreating every trackside detail is probably fine. If it's something which, uh, I don't know let's pick a figure, 97.45% of the audience aren't going to even notice, let alone get miffed by, it's most likely no biggie.
By "notice" I mean to also imply *in the context of the film* too. I appreciate that in JAMES BOND 58: THE BONDENING no-one will question the physics when he's skiing off a cliff doing a quadruple twist and landing on the wings of a plane - whereas they would in a film about serious ski competitions which had been fine and normal up until that point.
BUT, I also think in certain instances the style or intention of the film is being used as a cheap get-out clause for laziness and ineptitude. It's not too far removed from saying "what do you expect, it's just one of those shitty kind of films?" Those shouldn't be put up with! Not that everything needs to be arty highbrow, but even a mindless entertainment piece should be written with care, attention and dedication to what is trying to be achieved. Too many mistakes in films reak of "this old bollocks will do, we're only selling it to fucking morons anyway", which is rather insulting.
PigLick on 8/8/2006 at 16:00
well, they are selling it to morons, arent they?
Stitch on 8/8/2006 at 16:11
Quote Posted by Paz
Regarding the NY Subway example; yes, it's fairly unforgivable to have stations in the wrong order or the carriages in the incorrect colour
Dear god listen to yourself man.
Quote Posted by Paz
BUT, I also think in certain instances the style or intention of the film is being used as a cheap get-out clause for laziness and ineptitude.
Or, quite possibly, it isn't laziness so much as the changing of unimportant details so to they play better on screen. Welcome to Hollywood.
I'm not saying Hollywood deserves a blank check when it comes to the treatment of reality. Independence Day's "virus for an alien system" scene was jaw-droppingly terrible, for example, but not once did I look at the system used to upload the virus and grouse that it was a Hollywood fabrication.
Paz on 8/8/2006 at 16:20
Haha, I know, it sounds sad as fuck. But why jar some of the audience out of the narrative unnecessarily with stuff which is easy as hell to get right?
It's like if I write this post with evry other word speld incorrectly. Yeah, it doesn't massively matter, but I can usually manage to spell a bit (not much) better than that - and even though my meaning still gets through, it just looks shoddy and stupid.
I suppose I'm arguing that often these cock-ups DON'T result in the film playing better on screen. I'm not even sure I'm talking about the "realism" issue any more though, so much as just basic errors.
Stitch on 8/8/2006 at 16:23
Quote Posted by Paz
Haha, I know, it sounds sad as fuck. But why jar some of the audience out of the narrative unnecessarily with stuff which is easy as hell to get right?
Because in some cases it works better on film, or because it is virtually impossible to get right. Shit, many movies aren't even filmed in the cities in which they're supposed to take place.
PigLick on 8/8/2006 at 16:40
BOOK CLUB'D
Paz on 8/8/2006 at 16:40
^^^^ Hey, now none of this first bit makes any sense, DAMN YOU!
Alas, the word "become" is unnecessary when assessing my nerdhood :(
That's an annoying argument actually. "Oh what, you actually CARE about STUFF - man, you're so sad". Don't put up with substandard shite! This is why British comedy is currently TERRIBLE. Older stuff had so much attention to delicious details and subtleties and jaksjkasdj this is something different altogether back to films now, hello:
----------------
Anyway, I think we've got muddled, or I haven't explained myself, because I'm not interested in things which are, by definition, "virtually impossible to get right". I'm concerned only by things which are very much possible to get right. Things which are actually harder to get wrong, unless a director/producer is showing such disgust at his potential audience that he/she no longer gives a monkeys.
Filming in different cities is not an issue at all and obviously dictated by what kind of budget the film has or where they're allowed to shoot and so on. It only becomes a problem if the film is supposed to be set in a quaint English village but a large segment is actually clearly taking place in a busy part of the most French part of Paris you could ever hope to find, complete with Citroens flying past every ten seconds. I don't think THAT extreme would ever actually happen, but that's the kind of thing I mean.
You know what, all of this just comes from the fact that a good 50% of any current cinema or television makes me think HOW CAN SOMETHING THIS HORRIBLE EVER HAVE BEEN MADE? Which probably just suggests I'm not a huge fan of the medium as a whole. So there we go. Or maybe everyone feels that way to some degree?
(on the other hand I just watched Neighbours ... BUT I CAN JUSTIFY IT ... slightly)
TheGreatGodPan on 8/8/2006 at 18:03
Speaking of awful fictional depictions of computer systems, did anyone else read Dan Brown's "Digital Fortress". The very beginning when they were mostly talking about cryptography wasn't so bad, but the end with the virus depicted by enemy alien space-ships or something was just unforgivable.
Rug Burn Junky on 8/8/2006 at 19:08
Just for the record, no movie ever gets the NYC subway system correct.
New Yorkers don't give a shit.
