Whether intentionally or not, what do movies depict or present wrong a lot of the time?
How heavy a full cup of coffee feels. The actors always treat it like the cup is empty. Liars!
This goes for ANY container. I mostly notice empty suitcases.
How big a house an average person can afford.
Another version of this - how big an apartment/house an artist can afford.
Not if you presume they have rich parents.
Yes, and how nice it is, and how ckean it is, and how littke their csr breaks down and how sparkly and well maintained or their workplsce is, or how brilliant their job is despite being an “average, underdog hero”
How big a house an average person can afford doesn’t necessarily precisely track how big a house the average person actually purchases, mind.
I’m so very sorry I set off your well technically trigger.
Your (US) military: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military–entertainment_complex
Basically everything and anything to do with mental health/psychology. People with Dissociative Identity Disorder (or “Multiple Personality Disorder” as it used to be known) do not have “evil” alters. DID is also not the same thing as schizophrenia. OCD is often not focused on hygiene or cleanliness. Antidepressants aren’t “happy pills,” and while emotional blunting is a possible side effect (not the entire point of taking the medication!), it’s often a sign that you’re on the wrong dose or the wrong medication. People don’t typically self-harm because they’re suicidal. Eating disorders don’t always have a focus on body image and anyone of any body size can be affected. There’s no singular mental illness that causes people to be abusive or violent, and mentally ill people are more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators. Etcetera.
Awesome breakdown! You seem to know a lot about the topic so in your words, (or with a source of your choice) would you mind explaining how DID tends to manifest/how it could better be depicted in movies and television?
Well, I don’t have DID, but from what I understand, alters are just people? They might hold some traumatic memories and experiences, but they’re not like…serial killers. I recommend looking up stuff written by people with DID if you’re curious.
Pulling people out of a burning building. In reality the smoke and fire is so bad, you ain’t seeing shit. And I spoke to a firefighter who’d been doing it for 35 years. He said he responded to thousands of burning buildings and the number of times anyone’s been saved out of a burning building? Exactly zero. That always stuck with me.
Though I fully agree with you i do recall this youtube video from a few years ago of a guy running back into his burning home to save his dog and he got him out alive.
If you know exactly where you’re going, and the path is not itself in flame, and the residual heat+smoke have not yet rendered both your path and your patient’s current location unsurvivable, then it is possible.
The movie trope of covering your mouth with a rag and walking through rooms which are actively on fire, trying to find someone who has been inside that same room getting asphyxiated and/or cooked for several minutes is most definitely not real.
I’m pretty sure it’s negative numbers actually, I saw this video once on YouTube where firefighters were carrying people up ladders and putting them inside the burning buildings
I think… That video might have been backwards… Or you were remembering it in reverse? 😂
The heat alone is off the fucking charts, too. These are 1,100-1,500F. Like trying to walk through an oven only 3 or 4x hotter.
Hacking.
tap tap tap I’m in.
Honourable mention is NCIS Dual keyboard
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8qgehH3kEQCute Asian girl with green hair and a side ponytail: “I’m in!”
Six keystrokes later: “Ok I pulled up the floor plans to the building, disabled the cameras and unlocked all the doors.”
that’s a lot of cuts
Not as many as what’s his face jumping a fence in one of the Taken films.
what’s his face
Leapin’ Neeson!
That’s the gold standard for hacking, by far. But this also deserves a mention for pushing the bounds of technology, way ahead of it’s time: https://youtu.be/fQGbXmkSArs?is=Ud3PG9ymvBif7h2T
Thank you for this nugget of GLORIOUS stupidity!
You may enjoy the full 30 min movie: https://youtu.be/bS5P_LAqiVg?is=_W2I155QGzzzlvNh
It’s a goldmine of insanity!
I belive I might just!
Thank you again
FYI the ?is= part of the yt link is extra tracking data for google. You can drop it and the link still works
Righto, fixed it. Thanks!
Years back, I remembered watching the Wargames scene where the computer was trying to “guess a passcode”. Which it was doing remotely. Determining one digit at a time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGNBdjVO04Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7qOV8xonfY
I said, “This is completely ridiculous. That’s not how any kind of real world authentication system works.” Dramatic, yes. Realistic? No, never happen.
Some years later, there was a severe remote exploit for the filesharing feature for Windows 95 and 98 systems. Not only had the Microsoft person who designed the thing stored the password to a share in plaintext instead of hashing it, but there was also a bug where the server’s authentication system could be sent a malformed message and only validated as many bytes of the password as had been specified in the authentication message. Someone promptly went out and wrote an exploit to brute-force access to a share by just asking it to only validate the first byte, try each, get in in at most 256 tries. I look at that and say “yeah, but it also exposes the next byte of the password itself, and those probably persist even after the thing is patched, not to mention the potential for credentials reuse for other things”. I go modify Samba’s smbclient to iterate through the thing, extract the password one byte at a time. I message a buddy who has a Windows 98 machine on the network, “hey, can I break into your machine for a sec?” He comes up “Uh, okay. What are you up to, tal?”
I fire it up and we’re sitting there watching his password be printed on my Linux box’s screen, one letter at a time. I said, “This is exactly like that scene in Wargames that I said could never, ever happen in real life, was just Hollywood. Guess that showed me.” He says, “fucking Microsoft”.
Honourable mention is NCIS Dual keyboard
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8qgehH3kEQTop hacking scene of all time!
I somehow didn’t see that episode. But now that I’ve seen that scene, it is certainly one of the all time UNIXest of Systems
Explosion and gun sounds in spaaaaceeee!
Gun sounds in general. All those action heroes are deaf after that indoors shootout
“Would you like me to wait while you answer that?”
–Steve Carell as Agent Maxwell Smart, after having a training pistol shot right next to his ear in a prior scene.
(Goofily enough, that scene features a slow motion CGI bullet flying through the air… With the casing still on lmao)
mawp… mawp…
MWOP
Ok, Archer!
Bruce Willis would agree
The relaxed position of mammalian eyelids leaves them open. Muscles must contract to close for the eyes to be shut. Dead creatures cannot contract their muscles so their eyes remain open after they die.
You cannot shut their eyes for them by closing their eyes with your hand. Morticians place contacts in cadaver’s eyes while preparing the body for a wake. Those contacts grip the inside of the eyelids so that they remain closed.
This is why some cultures have funerary traditions in which objects are placed over the eyes.
TL;DR: you and your loved ones won’t close their eyes when they die.
I don’t remember well if it was NakedGun, Loaded Weapon or Hot Shots where the eyes of a body stayed open until it was hit in the face.
This is a really big one. I have to revise all of my heroic self insert fantasies where i cover up a dead person’s eyes
Like when you’re at the bank and a bank robber shoots a bunch of people and then you jump out from cover and start covering all the corpses eyes super fast.
Sex and relationships in action movies.
The whole “hot chick gets horny for the hero after a traumatizing couple of hours” thing gives a pretty messed up view of relationship building.
This one definitely turned me off the first Terminator movie. I mean I know it’s critical to the plot but it still makes me roll my eyes.
The 80s and 90s were rife with that trope. I don’t know if modern action flicks are as bad.
I remember Speed made a joke about this at the end. A crack about “Relationships built on life threatening traumas don’t last” or something lol
And it was proven by Speed 2 I guess.
Or as comedian Kyle Kincaid said, the idea that the action hero could still get it up.
Driving and video games. Separate. Not driving IN video games lol
I dunno I get upset about how long people face each other talking while one of them is allegedly in control of the vehicle. Don’t get me started on seat belts and head rests!
Most dishonest about? Hard to say, since movies are dishonest about virtually everything. (As escapism, that’s what we want.) But a big one that comes to mind is proceedings in courts of law.
In real life, a court case is excruciatingly procedural, spread out over months of correspondence and brief hearings, and the vast majority of them never go to trial. And for the few that do go to trial, there are never any intense, witness-stand confrontations, or inspiring speechifying by the plaintiff or defendant. No attorneys shouting, “OBJECTION!”, across the room.
I know of two friends of a friend, one of whom signed a reverse mortgage on his house with some scammers who promised that he could live the rest of his life there, but then who turned around and filed to evict him. Clearly influenced by dramatic courtroom scenes in TV and movies, he seemed to think that “court” meant that he would be able to show up and give the judge a moving soliloquy about being a righteous, disabled veteran, and prevail. The judge did his level best to help the guy out by almost insisting on appointing a guardian ad litem (free attorney!), but he refused. (Sadly, he died before it went to trial, and the scammers kept the house.)
The other one got sued by a credit card company over a charge that was obviously bogus (i.e. from a swimming pool contractor in eastern Europe, which is just who you’d call in the midwestern U.S.), but they had the same mental script: Show up in the courtroom and speechify to the judge. They didn’t even respond to the summons and complaint, and the company won by default judgement.
It’s maddening.
I sat on the jury for a murder trial last year (maybe 2). It was impressive how inept both the defence and prosecution seemed and how flat out sloppy it all felt.
I had the same observation on an assault case.
The story Foxfire, Esq on Royal Road is written by a lawyer, and goes into all kinds of detail about the processes they go through, and just how long things take.
Also goes into a little detail about what kind of legal adjustments the system makes for superheroes, because it’s a superhero legal drama :p
Never heard of it, but it sounds interesting. Thanks!
Millennials/gen Z with their phone sound on. I get it’s to fill otherwise blank space in the sound, but we’re not texting with the click-click-click-click.
Early PCs didn’t play beep-boop sounds when you typed or when displaying a letter on the screen either, so join the crowd. I mean, people would have shoved a screwdriver through the speaker diaphragm if they had to listen to that all day.
If you go all the way back to teletypes, okay, there was an impact sound, and computer keyboards were significantly noisier up until membrane and rubber domes became popular, but that’s about as far as reality takes one.
Loudness of gunshots. Every action hero would be deaf.
Archers being told to “hold”. Nobody’s holding a +100lbs warbow.
Sprinklers. In the vast majority of cases they react to heat - not smoke. They only go off individually rather than all at once and the water inside the pipes is black ink-like rust water sludge, not clear tap water.
Also another plumbing related: you don’t need a huge wrench under the sink and drains are not pressurized so there’s no water spraying anywhere when you mess with the p-trap.
Also archers being told to “fire”
as firing didn’t exist until gunpowder, the instruction wouldn’t make sense. Like telling a soldier now to “activate the positronic tacyons!” instead of “fire”
Loose!
Injections always annoy me. Shanking people in the neck with ridiculously fat needles. Or how bout Pulp Fiction where they stab her through the sternum? Also going in the arm, but the angle’s totally wrong and they’d basically be stabbing right through the vein lol
In pulp fiction it’s an adrenaline shot directly to her heart. It is actually a legit medical treatment, but pretty rare / last resort.
Or how bout Pulp Fiction where they stab her through the sternum
Lol, i didn’t think about it until now, but that doesn’t make sense you’re right.
Yes i don’t think laypeople know how much care has to be taken with injections
Happy endings. Although I like them anyway, because I’m trying to escape from reality a bit by watching.
You can have a happy ending! Just wait until a nice moment, and declare it’s the end!
Anything happening after is a separate story :D
True! I sorta did that with The Matrix. I read reviews for the second movie and multiple people were regretfully saying they wished they had stopped at #1. So I’ve never seen any of the sequels.
You just gotta make sure you do the appropriate hands gesture and offer a big tip :>
