Buffista Movies 6: lies and videotape
A place to talk about movies--old and new, good and bad, high art and high cheese. It's the place to place your kittens on the award winners, gossip about upcoming fims and discuss DVD releases and extras. Spoiler policy: White font all plot-related discussion until a movie's been in wide release two weeks, and keep the major HSQ in white font until two weeks after the video/DVD release.
My pet peeve involves movies set in the past. It drives me crazy when they get the culture wrong.
A lot of the early talkies do this. The story will start during or just after WWI. But the clothing styles are early 1930s. Which wouldn't be nearly as bothersome if women's hemlines hadn't climbed by about a foot during that time.
And while I can't think of an example offhand, I react worst when it's done with music. If you're setting your movie in the '80s, your soundtrack shouldn't include "Baby Got Back."
Not a pet peeve per se, but I'm always amused by movie geography. With a single angle shift or turn of a corner, characters are suddenly miles away from where they were previously. Even when they get it right, it can be entertaining.
Speed
actually does a halfway decent job of depicting the bus' progress through Los Angeles, and the route can be traced on a map, but most of that movie is still well over the border into Ridiculousland for lots of reasons, not the least of which being the notion that the bus could have followed that route at a clip of 55 mph the entire time.
LA geography is also laughable in
Volcano.
The movie more or less shows how places are located in relation to each other, but has silly time dilation effects when people travel from one place to another. Places close to each other take a long time to travel to, and places far away from each other are reached quickly. And the effects of traffic are selectively applied.
And while I can't think of an example offhand, I react worst when it's done with music. If you're setting your movie in the '80s, your soundtrack shouldn't include "Baby Got Back."
The Wedding Singer, which is otherwise a delightful period piece - but how did they let Drew Barrymore get away with the wispy hair and babydoll dresses that no one would have gone near that decade.
LA geography is also laughable in Volcano. The movie more or less shows how places are located in relation to each other, but has silly time dilation effects when people travel from one place to another. Places close to each other take a long time to travel to, and places far away from each other are reached quickly. And the effects of traffic are selectively applied.
Best ever: Rumble in the Bronx, with the snowcapped Rockies visible in the distance across the Hudson River.
Not a pet peeve per se, but I'm always amused by movie geography.
Like how the cable cars run everywhere in SF?
I generally don't care if they don't do legal stuff differently, unless they could have gotten it right without sacrificing something else important to the film. Although, I do hate it when something key to the production is simply impossible, because of exactly what happens in the film. Take certain takeovers -- all the time on the screen people amass secret stakes in a company, and suddenly have a controlling stake. Both SEC regulations and company bylaws are designed to make that impossible in the normal course of events. Because secretly amassing a controlling stake is disfavored!
(Although the NYT or the WSJ did just do an article about how people are getting around that nowadays, but that is new)
Not a movie, but the favorite geography thing in my family was from the Spenser TV series -- a car drove into our local car wash, and drove out miles away.
Like how the cable cars run everywhere in SF?
Oh yeah - you can get
anywhere
in SF on the cable cars.
One of these days I expect to see a movie with cable cars running across the Golden Gate bridge...
I generally don't care if they don't do legal stuff differently, unless they could have gotten it right without sacrificing something else important to the film.
OK, it's literary, but Anthony Trollope used a nice workaround for that once. In an earlier novel, he explained how the hero inherited the land that allowed him to be wealthy enough to support the woman he loved -- and he got the law wrong, even though he'd consulted lawyers beforehand.
So the next time he got into that situation (one doesn't read Trollope for the wide variety of plots), he explained -- and then added something to the effect of, "At least, that's how it was explained to me. Maybe I got it wrong. But I do know that Hero inherited."
Rocky beaches and cliffs in Florida.
I don't watch CSI Miami so I have no idea how accurate that show is or if they've ever filmed in Central or North Florida but the other thing is getting the land wrong. Florida is a fairly diverse state and North/Central FL does not look like South Florida.
The other thing is characters that work at computers but the actors are obviously randomly pressing keys. Especially if they stay on the home row for the entire time they type.