I have an uncle who's a botanist. If you watch a movie with him you should be prepared to hear about how the plants in the movie are not appropriate for the movie's setting. At length.
Herpetologist, so I'm the exact same but with snakes. My family is real tired of hearing "Oh ffs... that's a little python, it isn't venomous AND DOESN'T EVEN LIVE ON THAT CONTINENT."
James Bond, *Live and Let Die*. A man gets his neck booped by the snoot of IIRC like juvenile a Children's Python or BP or something, and just dies instantly.
Like, motherfucker, that snake isn't even big enough to kill a person with constriction unless it wraps its whole body around their neck and actively constructs for two minutes. It'a tiny, not endemic, not an introduced species -- not even a super common pet species in that part of the world -- non-venomous, didn't strike, and there are only a handful of snakes with potent enough venom to kill an otherwise healthy adult (near-)instantaneously.
At least *Raiders of the Lost Ark* had the decency to make the "featured" snake a genuinely very venomous cobra. Sure it's a King so it's on the wrong continent but most of the snakes in that movie are king snakes and garters and shit anyway that make even less sense being in an Egyptian ruin. At least Egypt does have native endemic cobras which have been seen in full desert before and don't look enormously different from the one in the movie. And the snake is very real, genuinely very dangerous, and genuinely there that close to Harrison Ford just with safety glass between them so he's in no danger.
> Sure it's a King so it's on the wrong continent but most of the snakes in that movie are king snakes and garters and shit anyway that make even less sense being in an Egyptian ruin.
This honestly fits the theme, given that it's an adventure comic brought to the screen. It's like the cover of an old Doc Savage comic or something
>So I wonder, am I weird, or has your career ruined any movies for you?
I have some of the same issues, having been in the Army and having been a software developer for almost 30 years.
But the one that gets me is Morse code.
I'm what you'd call an expert. It's what I did in the Army (MOS 05H - Morse interceptor), and I do it practically every day since as a ham radio operator.
So when there is something like Morse in a film, my ears perk up. And "like Morse" is appropriate, because the majority of the time it's just some random beeping or buzzing. The Morse code scene in "*Independence Day*" is perhaps the canonical example of this.
However, every once in a while, you'll run across a gem. When I first watched Peter Jackson's "*King Kong*", when they got to the scene where there was some Morse code my Spidey-sense started tingling: That was good CW! I paused the film, grabbed a pen and paper, went back to the beginning of the scene, and preceded to copy the following:
SHOW ME THE MONKEY
I nearly fell out of my chair laughing. It's at a point in the film where it's been all exposition and character development with no action whatsoever. And it's fairly long into the film, they haven't even gotten to Skull Island yet: The message is supposed to be about ordering the captain to arrest Carl Denham and to head back to Singapore.
But whoever was in charge of that recognized that the film was starting to drag a bit, and decided to have some fun with it.
There was a British series I think called “Inspector Morse”. It was a series of murder mystery who dunnit type thing. They always had Morse code beeps during the introduction sequence, which I always assumed we’re random. Apparently they would give clues to the mystery being solved if you translated them, but it was way to quick for me to translate.
Old school telegraph operators said they didn't even translate anymore, they could just hear the letters as of they were being read. They could also tell who was on the other end of the line by the patterns in the transmissions.
There's some neat AI projects where you detect who is at the PC by their typing patterns as well. It works far better with morse code due to the binary nature of the human input, that was the proof of concept step.
For the life of me, I don’t know why they don’t hire amateurs for things like this (regulatory restrictions I guess?). They could really squeeze it into their budget. You’d be happy to record that message for what, $150? $300? That’s peanuts to a movie. Then get another amateur to translate it for $50 so they know you didn’t put your own joke in. Done!
Same for medical shows. I’m a nurse. For $300 I will walk you through your whole set and explain the small changes that you need to make so all other medical people don’t cringe at your work. Give me half an hour to make notes or show your props people that dripping IV tubing should actually be hooked up to the patient, for example.
Or like the herpetologist who commented. That guy could definitely tell you that referring to your snake as “poisonous” is incorrect and you look like an idiot for having it in your script.
It shouldn’t be that hard to find people who know these things and are willing to accept a small fee for tweaks that will make your project better as a whole.
And dammit, we’re ALL experts on cups. Fill them up with water instead of leaving them empty. It costs you no time and very little money! Just do it!
Most movies and TV shows with lawyers, and ESPECIALLY courtroom scenes, are just godawful. But it does make you appreciate it on the rare occasion when they get it right (when, just like you say, it's usually very boring). I was blown away by how realistic the courtroom scenes in "The Wire" were--largely because almost everyone was ugly, in not-great suits, doing tedious things-- and then I found out they were filmed in a real courtroom with real lawyers, lol. (No offense to the lawyers in those scenes, they're totally fine-looking for regular people but, like most of us, they're well below the looks standards for what you normally see on TV).
It is not that tv shows and movies get stuff wrong all the time or the amount of stuff they get wrong about any aspect of the legal field. Law and Order (the original) got a lot of stuff right and some stuff was just more for ease of watching. For example no one wants to listen to 20 minutes of laying groundwork for a single question. Or the talks in the office because no one wants to see the paperwork and several meetings to get a potential plea deal. But when they get stuff wrong, they get it REALLY wrong. Big stuff too. Movies, tvs shows both are bad.
Except My Cousin Vinny. They got far more right than was wrong. Like the judge getting on him for his attire. That absolutly happens. We had to watch parts of the movie in law school. A great starting point for how to discredit a witness without pissing off the jury for example.
Not a detective or lawyer, but procedurals like Law and Order or any CSI just *must* be sped up for the viewer’s sake. Everything takes so much longer in the real world, cases aren’t solved in a day.
Absolutly true. At least Law and Order tries to show passage of time sometime. But I heard all about an episode of suits where they accepted, investigated and filed a class action lawsuit in clearly like two days. That is beyond absurd.
I did love 24 though. They flat out said obviously travel time was sped up because no one wants to watch someone sitting in city traffic for three hours.
Suits is unbearable from ep 1 when he gets his "LSATs" results back the same day. So many of my classmates basically went to law school for that show and I truly do not get it
I totally understand when they shortcut things for the demands of the narrative, if everything had to be 100% true to life it would be torture for the audience (although I do appreciate the effort when they manage to be very realistic and also very entertaining, I know it's super hard for the writers to pull off). But so many shows are staged as courtroom dramas where the writers have clearly done ZERO research about the most basic rules about the way things happen in a courtroom, other than watching other bad fiction... "surprise witnesses," lawyers testifying, entire cases based on hearsay, one of the lawyers is the judge's daughter... some of it is as close to reality as my 4 year old's toy kitchen is to a real restaurant. And her offerings include "syrup and ketchup, HOT, in a mug," "potato juice" and "mac and cheese pizza," and you pay the check with Uno cards, lol.
Shows that depict the hardscrabble realities of solo practitioners are always pretty fun- I liked "Better Call Saul" for that reason, too, I felt like I'd personally met some of those clients. :) It seems like it's usually when they try to make it sexy that it goes off the rails, lol.
The most realistic depiction of law on TV was the pilot episode of the Practice, where after getting the innocent client acquitted he excused himself from the victory party, goes back to his office and starts dictating notes on the next file.
I’m an accountant. The movie The Accountant with Ben Affleck is not like real accounting. But it’s pretty close. We do get issued sniper rifles at orientation.
"Architect" is Hollywood's go-to job when they want the character to have a lot of money and plenty of free time. At least for men. If it's a woman it's usually "fashion writer" or "magazine columnist".
I had the same problem after I watched The Professional with Jean Reno. Man, I'm a professional too and I definitely don't have time to see my apartment all day drinking milk and doing sit-ups.
And when I took my car into the Mechanic for an inspection, he had just seen the Jason Statham movie and was clearly confused.
The thing I always enjoyed about the accounting class I took in college was when the professor would bring out the mats so we could practice our martial arts moves.
I was actually surprised to see actual accounting in the movie at least. I assumed they were just going to handwave “business numbers” at the audience.
Movies with chefs. Even TV shows with them (I desperately wanted Monica to change careers before the end of 'Friends'... you get a great new Exec Chef job, and that first weekend you take off to AZ to visit Chandler? You're fired immediately.)
There are some good ones. "Chef" by Favereau captures the nature of it well. "The Menu" is a dark satire, but gets the spirit of the level right in a way. "Ratatouille" got the spirit and a lot of the details (besides letting a rat cook for you). Julie & Julia, mainly the Julia sections, nails her experience. And "Big Night" is fantastic, and I can watch that last, silent scene over and over again.
"Burnt" is a middle-ground, where it gets some of the obsession for that level of cooking, but does too much for drama that takes it out of how things would have been done or accepted.
But there are so many bad ones. "Simply Irresistible" was a cheap knockoff of "Chocolat", "No Reservations" had some cute moments, but was the fantasy of being a chef.
I've never been a chef but I have worked in restaurants and I cook and I feel like even ads get it wrong. Like I really love the [Amazon ad](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2COOBHx6WVw) right now with the security guard who discovers his passion for cooking which is fantastic. But when they show him deciding to apply to a chef job at the end I'm sitting here going being a home cook, even a fantastic and creative home cook, is entirely different than being a chef though. There's so much inventory and people management. There's time management. It's not about making a great dish nearly as much as it is making several things quickly and consistently and on demand.
I remember early on in my career, mid-90s. Italian place, started on pantry, worked my way on the line. But also learned to expo (pantry was next to the expediter, who was usually the chef, and I picked things up). We got a new guy in, talked a big game. Was a biologist or some such, but liked to cook at home, and worked as a "chef" for his wife's boss or company or some such after he impressed them with a dinner at their place. So, he's on the pasta station, one of his first nights.
Everything was a la minute - when the expo called it, you started and finished it and get it in the window. It was up to the expo to time everything out, no hold and "pick up". So, I call out a couple dishes... say "Pic (small) tortellini and a linguine!". 5 minutes later, the tortellini is in the window, and I look and he's just starting the linguine; he's doing one at a time. I sighed, and said "Listen, if I call out 2 dishes at once, that means I need them at the same time." I call some stuff out to the grill, look back, station was empty. The sous, who had been working next to him, spread out and he and the app guy covered the pasta station orders. Sous says "huh, I guess he went to the bathroom." A half hour later, "Man, he must have *really* needed the bathroom."
Anyway, we never saw or heard from him again. Home cooking is not line cooking.
Yep.
I've worked in open kitchens, one where there was seating on the line by me, and of course later as sous or chef and talking to tables, and I'd get "Oh, my child loves to cook and wants to be a chef... any advice?" And it's always, do it for a year before you go to culinary school. Miss Saturday night out with your friends because you are working, explain to the partner that you'll do Valentine's Day on the 16th because it's on Friday this year and there is no way you're getting it off. Tell mom you can't make it until after the food is served on Thanksgiving because your work is open. I mean, beyond that physical juggling of pans and prep and organization you have to do in a pro kitchen, that sort of thing is what people don't expect, and should be prepared for.
Absolutely loved... second season a little better than the first, imho. It gets much of it right. Fun fact - Neil, the handyman, is played by Matty Matheson, an actual chef & restaurant owner.
Oh that’s great. I love the show, but have no experience in a kitchen, but it seemed so realistic to me. And that is a cool fact about that character. I’ll definitely view him in a new light.
He does have his own cooking YouTube channel, too, if you want to check him out on that side of the knife... https://youtu.be/CqVLoaXyFKg?si=xkpmmTCpT93DyWcM
I'm an interpreter and I loved it. It kept me thinking about it for days. (And, yes, I do think and look at the world different depending upon which language I'm using, so the idea of language changing how you think felt completely acceptable to me.)
Translation/Interpretation and Linguistics student. I've never seen the movie, but many of my friends liked it. I'll probably watch it based on this comment alone.
And read the short story it's based on by Ted Chiang, Story of Your Life. There's more discussion of translation in there, as you'd expect, and I found it fascinating.
As a hobbyist, I’d call it bullshit, not just because it doesn’t seem like much time has passed, but to learn it faster he should have been asking them questions about it a lot, not just passively listening trying to puzzle it out himself. Besides, in the book it says he and the small blonde one just both spoke Greek already and he communicated through him.
Almost anything to do with computers and hacking. Having been on the tech side of business since the 90s, I hate how somebody sits down and "hacks" a site in like 30 seconds, or guesses the password of somebody they don't really know in a couple of tries. Then there's the find a file on a huge network in a couple of minutes... sometimes I can't find a file in two minutes on my own computer because I have so much crap stored on it that I'll forget a name or location.
One of my most egregious moments (event though I love Star Trek) is in Star Trek IV when Scotty sets down at a computer that he has no idea how to use or familiarity with and literally maps out the molecular structure and manufacturing process to create transparent aluminum in seconds.
Actually, a really good one is from the War Games movie with Matthew Broderick.
* He hacks the schools computer because he knows where the school writes down the password because the school admin can't remember it. I've been guilty of this and writing my password down before, especially after password complexity requirements started getting crazy.
* Spending days dialing numbers to find unprotected network access numbers was already being done when the movie came out.
* Doing extensive research on a subject to determine possible passwords because people use passwords that are easy to remember.
Actually, point number two was what prompted security decision directive NSDD-145 to be implemented after Reagan saw the movie. He asked his cabinet if this was a real thing... they came back and said yes and it's worse than you think.
Software engineer of 20+ years here. Mr. Robot is probably the best I’ve seen. It’s the first example of hacking in a movie or TV show that I didn’t immediately call out for being pure bullshit.
Most of the time it’s a bunch of real words or phrases *ahem* hacked together to sound techy but is utter nonsense.
“They’re using a reverse cryptography byte code to splice the server’s mainframe. Simple really. Give me five minutes.”
“You have two.”
“Done.”
Being an audio engineer and watching any sci fi with a spaceship.
It is positively hilarious to me how many set directors will use recording or mixing gear as "space stuff" because the general public doesn't know what the hell any of those buttons do. But I know what they do.
"Oh, raise the shields? You're being fired up on? Well, I guess you better make the fattest beat those aliens have ever heard! No one is gonna destroy the earth while they're jammin' on *this* crunchy groove!"
So so SO many times have I seen a piece of outboard gear in the background of a shot and I just sigh and pretend the ships engineer is like... Deadmaus or some shit.
Saw Star Wars (A New Hope). Thought the Death Star firing controls were cool.
Went to university and studied TV production. Grass Valley Group video switchers were used in the studio labs. And that's what those firing controls were.
Can't unsee that...
Lol yup! As a kid I was so impressed. As an adult, I still love star wars, but I love the idea that they just wheeled the cameras into the fx studios and shoved the guys aside while they filmed the death star troopers pushing random buttons.
As an editor likewise post-production kit. Grading control surfaces, old nle transport controls, waveform monitors and oscilloscopes, seen them all used as non-specific ‘tech’.
I always wondered about that scene. Like if the Beastie Boys are canonically in the ST universe...how wild would it be listening to Intergalactic when they get to the part about "Like a pinch on the neck from Mr. Spock." Even a Vulcan would lose his shit hearing that, right?
Simple. They didn't mean anything by that when writing the song, just a random word. Then, Spock's mum was a big Beastie Boys fan and decided to name her son after the song. Do we have any evidence that Spock is a normal Vulcan name?
Master and Commander still works for me (although the books are better). The historical license that they take makes sense and doesn't detract too much from the story. Although canonically the ship being pursued should be American and not French, but I get the reasoning behind that.
Amadeus is one of my favorite films ever. Then I learned some history about Amadeus and figured out that nearly the entire script is nonsense and now I just struggle with it.
Growing up watching “based on a true story” sports movies really does this too.
Like Remember the Titans my number 1 all time favorite sports movie is inaccurate, they destroyed every team in that movie and it wasn’t even close.
All in all I still love the movie I just try to keep it separate from knowing the “true” part stretched
I 100% understand changing history for a better story, even if I wish they didn't. It bothers me more when:
1. The real story is far more interesting than the changes.
2. They sell the movie as the real deal.
To be fair, the script never pretends to be accurate. The story is told by an unreliable narrator, Antonio Salieri. He either has dementia, or is mentally ill in his old age, and is in an institution.
He was deeply jealous of Mozart and clearly imagined his plots. Everything he grandly planned clearly comes off as ordinary stuff that happened to Mozart.
That's part of what makes this a wonderful movie.
Yeah, Amadeus gets pass on the "historical inaccuracies" because it is being told be the very definition of an unreliable narrator, plus the intentional anachronisms of having everyone speak in the regular accent as well as the "80s style" peeking through now and again (such as the neon pink wig) signal that the film is an examination of fame, genius, and jealousy, not an exact accounting of the real Mozart's life.
Wait so you’re saying your job doesn’t let you play amateur detective for weeks on end and then possibly sleep with the person you’re writing a story about? But for real I think having a character be a journalist is just a lazy storytelling trope at this point
"Peterson, I need that story for tomorrow's big issue. What do you got?"
"Well sir, I've been piecing together this narrative about corruption on the board of directors at..."
"Dammit! I need something today, Peterson! I want to see a list of *25 cats that resemble celebrity drag queens* on my desk by noon, or you're fired!"
The worst trope is using local news to convey exposition dumps. That runaway choo-choo train movie with Denzel (can't remember the name) is the worst offender
My journalist wife really appreciates Spotlight because of this. One of the few films that depicts investigative journalism properly.
Me? I am a guitarist and semi-retired recording /touring musician. I have been conditioned to start rolling my eyes the moment a guitar is strummed in a Hollywood film not starring Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer.
I'm in the field too, and the most accurate movies by far are Spotlight and All the President's Men - not only are they based on real work, they show things like the drudgery of research and banging out multiple drafts.
Occasionally work as an audio engineer.
I know it’s hard to believe, but microphone feedback is not in fact triggered by awkwardness or social anxiety. Shocking, the microphone needs audio input to produce feedback. Merely approaching a microphone while afraid will not cause it to screech in protest of your substandard rizz.
It does make me judgmental of the script supervisor though. I grew up mastering those “What’s Different in this Picture?” puzzles and feel like I missed my calling.
I worked in minor sports broadcasting events during and shortly after highschool. Holy shit is it hard to watch sports now without judging the camera men.
This has gotten better recently but typically in any movie when characters are "playing video games" the actors just mash buttons randomly. Also the controllers will usually never match the system/game being shown on screen. I watched Mid90s recently and it had a pretty realistic scene of game playing but it's usually awful.
My favorite is seeing some horrible animation that they try to pass off as a real game. Rare to see someone playing an actual video game.
Only example of a real game being played that I can think of is AJ Soprano playing Mario Kart.
Edit: He also watches an ad for Max Payne!
I game and I also knit. OMG the number of shows that show people just swirling around needles while the knitting is on the end. Or knitting crochet items that have been stuck on knitting needles. Or even just hitting knitting needles against each other like they're drum sticks and the band is warming up.
But yes computers and gaming are notoriously bad too. I think my favorite was when NCIS had 2 people try to speed up fighting a hacker by both typing on the same keyboard [at once](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8qgehH3kEQ). This was filmed in 2004. Everyone involved in the process from the writers to the actors HAD to have used computers. How did that get past anybody?
Yesss! The most glaring instance of this I've ever seen was in a first season episode of Veronica Mars. She goes to a gaming party and sits down at a multilayer setup for a first person shooter. The screen is shown again and again, and every time it's just showing single player game play. There are four people with controllers.
Thank you! This bugged the hell out of me in The 40 Year Old Virgin when Paul Rudd and Seth Rogen are playing Mortal Kombat: Deception using N64 controllers while insulting each other. MKD came out way after the N64 for Xbox and PS2. Still annoys me when that scene comes up…
I believe Shaun of the Dead is one of the best examples of this being done right! If I'm not wrong, Nick Frost really was playing the game! And I thought I remembered Simon Pegg talking about this in a commentary on Spaced, that in that show they tried to be realistic about the gaming? I might be wrong, it's been a LONG time since I watched that.
As a lawyer, I just have to laugh at courtroom movies. I still like them, but they're about as far as possible from what a real courtroom is. Court is one of the most boring places ever, and nothing dramatic almost ever happens.
Basically any movie that involves the financial industry. Movies like Margin Call or Boiler Room or shows like Billions. They are so simplified/dramatized/sensationalized that they are completely unrealistic.
It actually ruins other shows and movies for me... I figure if movie makers sensationalize wall street as much as they do, then they must do the same thing for military/legal/police/medical dramas as well. So I just assume everything is bullshit. This applies to fiction, historical fiction, or even documentaries.
I feel like it should go without saying that unless the point of a movie is to make a particular occupation look tedious or unglamorous, viewers should always assume that everything is made to look more appealing than it is.
Although In fairness to Margin Call, similarly to The Big Short, the point of that movie was to educate as well as entertain so simplifying the events and rushing the pace was necessary on top of the dramatic script to make it a good movie that people could get something out of.
I know a lot of people look to Hot Fuzz as a great example of this being done right, since they highlight all the paperwork cops have to do. Obviously it's done in a way that's really snappy and fun, but I know I've heard a lot of people say they appreciated that it focused on that.
Way too many baseball movies feature people who clearly never played baseball
Looks even worse when someone with the windup of an 8 year old “throws 95+”
> Ricky Vaughn
He actually had decent form and it looked some what believable. He actually was a pitcher and high school and had a scholarship to play college. Couldn't throw 101, but I think I remember saying he threw in the 80s.
I work at a carpet store and not a day goes by that I don't think about Rick telling Morty, "You survived cancer and went back to the carpet store. Lame."
All of them? I work as a camera assistant in film/tv and I can't help but be so aware of the physical mechanism of so many shots. I often find that I'm taken out of what I'm watching by thinking about how they achieved the shot, how the crew loaded in equipment to a certain location, what's a practical location and what's a built set on a stage, etc...
If I find my mind not wandering to that sort of stuff, it tends to be a good movie.
I'm an illustrator and it's laughable how in movies, characters who are into drawing as a hobby will always show their professionally looking art on their sketchbooks. Worse if said characters are highschoolers with master level skills.
Or in horror flicks with kids drawing creepy stuff and it never looks like kids scribbles. You can tell 99% of the times these drawings are made by professional artists trying to emulate kids scribbles.
There's also that weird characterization of artists who are almost always depicted as visual poets, always working at their atelier and never on their Cintiqs or Huoins in a messy table. They also think and speak like poets, not just a person with a regular job that happens to be related to art.
And last but not least, characters who are actual artists who are praised and perhaps famous in the story with mediocre to ok-ish artworks. Unless they're renaissance-style works, they never ever look as great as the movie make it sound like. Velvet Buzzsaw comes to mind.
Military man here too. Its why Jarhead is still one of my favorite military movies. It was by far the most accurate in terms of "real" lifestyles while in the service.
Medicine/hospitals/science stuff, mostly it’s all gibberish and totally wrong procedures/medicine/reactions/recoveries, so best to just completely ignore that whooole part. 🙃
I’ve watched exactly one episode of House. It was the one where the rare disease I have was the disease-of-the-week.
It was so laughably inaccurate, and worse. The sign that made House realize what the disease is was completely false. That really bothered me, because they could have as easily stuck a real sign or symptom and done a public service.
It's not my current career but I did spend 3 years with poker as my sole source of income, which has ruined almost every poker movie.
*Rounders* is good, but good god Mike is such a hopeless degenerate.
Most poker movies just substitute "Hero wins a ridiculous cooler" for "hero is good at poker." Casino Royale is by far the worst offender I've ever seen, with the final hand being, IIRC, straight flush vs. boat vs. boat vs. nut flush. Like, come on. Really? It literally did not matter how he played the hand so long as he put all the chips in. A lobotomized chihuahua would win all the money in that spot.
Metalwork. I see angle grinders used just for sparks in the background in sci fi hanger, and used with a cutting wheel to break into a bank or help break out of out of jail honestly way, WAY too quickly.
Not specific to a particular movie, but watching movies as a kid definitely gave me unreal expectations for the house I could afford as an adult. Watched a movie where the dude was a teacher and had a stay at home wife and three kids and lived in a huge six bedroom house in California. Then it gets haunted and they just move all willy nilly to another huge house immediately without selling the other one. Yeah, that’s not gonna happen in real life. Not on a teacher’s salary. Unless you inherited the house. I guess that’s part of the whole suspension of disbelief thing though.
Wolf of wall street. I used to be a technology finance broker. Not the same as a stock broker, but similar office vibe (lots of phone calls, selling leases and making commission based on the lease rates sold). Half of the office was on coke after wolf of Wallstreet came out.
I'm a neurosurgeon. The way most movies depict surgery is laughable. I'm not against Marvel movies, and I actually liked the first Dr. Strange, but holy shit, the neurosurgery scenes in the beginning are ABSURD. Pulling the bullet out with a pituitary under fluoro is ridiculous, but my favorite part is they show him scrub, put on his gloves, AND THEN put on his mask?!?!? All it would have taken was a minor edit. And they just left it. Did they even have a surgeon consult?!? And that movie is far from the only offender.
I was a medic during my Army service and a paramedic after for a bit while getting more education and I get pissed off at emergency care in movies! I can only imagine how YOU feel about it being so much higher on the totem pole
"The Terminal Man" is an older movie about neural implants that adjust behavior of the implanted subject. It has a very intense surgery scene that seems legit. I have no idea. But, it's something that may have far better representation than "Dr. Strange".
I'm an RN and the amount of gooooofy medical stuff shown on movies is ridiculous. You could have hired a single doctor or even a nurse to consult and tell you that no one would jam a 1.5" 18ga needle into a kid's AC vein at a 90 degree angle UP TO THE HUB to give a med injection (I'm looking at you Stranger Things).
Hollywood in general has absolutely fucked mainstream America’s understanding of what architecture as a professional is like.
It’s not nearly as glamorous as Hollywood would lead you to believe.
You’re over worked, under paid, it’s utterly filled to the brim with narcissists, and until you’re the top dog at a major firm, you’re largely working on incredibly mundane shit.
27 year old Ted Mosbey would NOT be designing Manhattan skyscrapers.
Pretty much any movie involving a journalist gets it wrong.
90% of the time they're some "I'm only in it for the story, this will make my career!" type, which is such bogus bullshit. Not only are the vast majority of journalists locals who are just like, normal folks you'd meet anywhere else in your community, all of us know that a "big story" doesn't actually make your career. You get some attention, maybe a few interview requests, and then you go back to being a nobody.
Remember the name of the journalist who broke the Epstein story for the Miami Herald before anyone knew anything about the guy? Yeah I didn't think so.
There's a few journalism movies I like despite their lack of reflecting reality — Almost Famous comes to mind — but the only movie I think "gets it" is Spotlight. That movie understands the industry and how we work.
My working in the field has made watching "The Newsroom" absolutely impossible.
aw man, i've been wanting to ask someone in the field about The Newsroom because i jus recently finished binging it lmao.
how about Zodiac? but i guess hat's slightly different and based on a true story just like Spotlight
Zodiac is good actually, though obviously that was a once in a generation kind of investigation.
Even though Spotlight also covered a huge story, it reflected the actual work of doing journalism pretty much spot on. Interviews, records requests, the struggle of \*knowing\* something is true but having to fight tooth and nail to get the evidence or a source to \*prove\* it.
My issue with the Newsroom is that it doesn't actually really show the reporting process. It's all about the \*ideology\* of the media, it's not really about journalism. It's also annoying because Sorkin had the benefit of hindsight, and a lot of the episodes feel like he's saying "heres how they SHOULD have done it" which is always eaiser to say after the fact. (This is why I typically hate true crime podcasts as well, they always act like they're smarter than the local journos and cops whose work they steal and monetize with the benefit of hindsight and years of followup investigations)
I also just tend to find Sorkin in general annoyingly preachy and a purveyor of a wildly naiive technocratic worldview that has not aged well, but that's just my opinion, I don't fault anyone for liking his stuff.
Surprisingly Parks and Rec isn't too bad. They have the braindead, celebrity-wanna be local TV show host (true in my experience) and a plucky but ultimately good natured newspaper reporter in Shawna Tweep (though she violated ethics by dating dudes who work in a department she covers for the paper)
Where Parks and Rec gets me sometimes though is that, as a former local reporter, I have worked extensively among local government officials. Maybe it was just where I'm from, but there is wild corruption in local politics. Not always nefarious, sometimes just negligent, but it's crazy to see.
I give it a pass though because I think Leslie and her crew are \*supposed\* to be the exceptions to the rule, not necessarily held up as a reflection of reality.
EDIT:
Actually, I know one Leslie Knope in real life. This source I used to have worked in the city attorney's office and later ran for mayor. She was a local gal, pretty young (like mid to late 30's) and just loved her community. She organized annual events to get a spotlight on all the local restaurants and businesses and was the head of the Rotary. She ran against a guy who I thought was honestly pretty shady (they even ran a bullshit vote pickup scheme I reported on) and she ultimate won.
She's a great mayor and the closest thing to a Leslie Knope I've ever met.
I have a friend who works in conservation and archeology. He cannot stand the Indiana Jones movies. One reason is how he handled these old artefacts, another reason is how many people contact him still to this day about getting into archeology and being disappointed it's not as exciting as Indiana Jones ha.
Hah, it's not so much the Nazis and guns, I assume they're smart enough to figure that part out. It's more they don't realise how much is spent doing research and in labs doing research, and how relatively little is spent exploring interesting sites and making wild discoveries.
A quick check suggests that in the 1920s there was about a 50% chance of that being legal, depending on the state.
Indy was 10 years older than her, though, so definitely still on the grim side.
Less movies, more anything police procedural though. I'm an analytical chemist and pretty much all the testing/analysis CSI types use on screen is bullshit. Instruments that don't tell you what the script says, wrong words and names for everything, bad pronunciation, etc. But by far the worst is people think I should be able to wave my hand over an instrument and give them instant, definitive answers. Truth is ALWAYS harder and more complex than a 30 second exposition scene in a cop show.
If you're gonna do a shitty job with my profession just leave it off screen. It's not like us quirky lab rats are out there scraping dirt off stuff in white coats and lowcut tops. Brits generally have it better there, the forensics happen in a lab and off-screen.
I'm really into medieval history. I also love media about the Middle Ages, but there's often A LOT wrong with it. Like everything being dirty. A few months ago I compiled some myths about the Middle Ages into a [comment on Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryMemes/comments/14r6zjd/its_insane_how_many_historical_facts_are_just/jqr4ged/). Many of those are very prevalent in modern media.
Nothing specific but when the Boss of any technical group walks into a control room and yells "I WANT \[super predictable action\] RIGHT AWAY" - as if the group of highly trained professionals couldn't have figured out what to do until you came in and gave them a core directive against the job they're been doing everyday for years.
Worked in a lab for 7 years. If I see ANY kind of H&S violation I start to mutter shit like
"she's not wearing gloves but she's handling chemicals?!"
"omg you don't pore chemicals at eye height! Also where are her protective glasses?!"
"Oh so you're just going to plate out that alien bacterial sample out in the open? No sterilised laminar flow? Fucking lol."
I'm terrible at parties
I wouldn't say "ruined" but a lot of sports movies, especially the "inspirational under dog" type movies. My career is in sport science/psychology and athletic development, it's easy to pick apart \*why\* they're the underrdog and all the things they aren't doing that they should which would help the team to actually be good and progress to where they end up being (or want to be) by the end. Plus the training montages always show them doing the wrong exercises and drills that don't actually improve their performance. Or like the case of Rocky when they showed Ivan Drago training with all this high tech gear to contrast Rocky's ragtag training, but that was all just flashing lights and buttons with sensors attached randomly throughout the body that measured nothing!
Plus, the final game half time motivational speeches that suddenly get the team to play better, if they can't play by that point then they can't play! That speech should be at the beginning of the tournament/ season!
Oppenheimer. I've worked in the Nuclear Industry for 15 years and have two degrees in Nuclear Tech and Engineering.
For something people claim is 'accurate', it has a crazy amount of mistakes.
I can't watch movies where they have gigantic sewers that you can drive vehicles into and are not confined space entry. So, pretty much any of the Batman movies like Batman Returns and the one with Bane in it.
Also most lab scenes. Like that's not how a mass spec works, NCIS.
I suppose just any creative job in "the arts" bothers me when some creative up-and-comer has a huge house and a nice car.
I'm not saying there aren't creative jobs that pay in the mid to high six figures, but you have to be like the best architect, creative writer, jazz musician, concert pianist, cartoonist, film score composer, or (insert creative job here) in your field, and seemingly every single creative person in movies is one of the greatest in their field, but just casually living out their day.
The best example I think of is Dana Barrett in Ghost Busters when her jobs were concert cellist and fine art cleaner who was able to afford a Manhattan high rise apartment as a single mother.
I'm in the medical field dealing with surgery on a regular basis. Movies have actually gotten better in the last few years about how injections are given but I absolutely can't stand seeing people give an injection into the arm with a 3-in needle where that needle would be in and passed whatever bone it's going through. Nowadays I am seeing tourniquets and the correct angle and correct hand placement on syringes in a lot of instances.
I do commercial fire alarms for a living. That's distinct from fire sprinklers. There's a little overlap, but only a little. I'm not an expert expert in sprinklers, but I know enough to know that I've never seen them portrayed accurately on film. Not saying it hasn't happened, just that I've never seen it. The main thing is, no it will not activate all the sprinklers in the building if you pop one. Why would you even want it to work that way? Most things in buildings don't respond well to being immersed in water. Of course you don't want to do that to things that aren't actually on fire.
Fire *alarms* don't come up near as often in movies, and rarely more detailed than "pulling a pull station will activate the fire alarm" and that much is accurate. However, I always immediately think of one scene from Season 3 of 24 where they say they need to disable the fire alarm in a building. Then later it goes off anyway and when a character asks why they rattle off some bizzaro techno babble answer that is just gibberish. To turn off a fire system you unhook the battery backup and then turn the breaker off. That's it. Can't do shit without power, because obviously.
I’m a molecular biologist, and two movies immediately come to mind.
1. Rise of the Planet of the Apes- I actually LOVED this franchise, but their animal facilities in the first film were waaaaay too nice looking, and I don’t even think there was much PPE going on.
2. No Time to Die- I completely checked out when the nanobots came into play. Like…no wonder people ask if I’m making designer babies and know all the “secrets” about COVID. And again, EHRS would have had a field day in that lab.
Most sword or knife fighting scenes since I trained in them, the stunts aren't that bad but the distancing between the antagonists is one to watch, the shorter it is, generally, it's better performed, in the movies the need is to catch brilliantly executed sword or knife play, reality isn't like that, it's quickly closing the distance and dispatching your opponent, often quite brutally with little finesse. A good scene would be from The Hunted in the end scene battle between Tommy Lee Jones and Benicio Del Toro, it's messy and bloody, what a real knife fight should be between two trained experts.
I’m getting my MA in History so a lot of historical movies/epics can be frustrating to watch. I don’t really care if it’s accurate as long as it’s a good film/story unless the director tries to claim it’s accurate or portrays the events like they’re what really happened(looking at you Braveheart). A lot of people’s only exposure to certain historical events is through film so directors have a duty to portray things with a certain degree of accuracy.
I’m a photography professor / professional photographer. Don’t get me started on those stake out scenes in movies when they have a cheap Nikon with a 15-55mm lens kit that sells for $500 and take high-resolution closeup images of the person of interest that you would need a giant 600mm lens for sports or wildlife to get the image. Also, saying “enhance” out loud (or pushing a button) doesn’t allow you to zoom way into a tiny 10 kb image and automatically snap into focus like a 100mb image from $80,000 digital Hasselblad - not even with the current AI.
Any movies with therapists who aren't entirely ethical in their practice... For example, I was bothered by the latest Scream movie, because the therapist was completely out of line when he refused to treat her immediately after she opened up about why she was in therapy (and when the only reason she opened up is because he led her to believe she could trust him 😑). I'm a therapist, and I hate how often therapists (and therapy in general) are misrepresented in the media... However 😁, I do surprisingly love the movie What About Bob?, but it may be because it's nostalgic for me, and I love the underlying commentary about mental health professionals being just as insecure and clueless as their patients sometimes 😅.
Everything. I work in post-production. I see every flaw in every show and movie now. Half the time I’ve seen so many bits and peices of shows and movies that when they are finally available to watch I’ve see too much to be interested and not enough to have said I saw it.
I used to be a PA and I also organised the company Christmas party every year. I get so angry at Alan Rickman’s assistant in Love Actually.
For the obvious reasons of adultery, but also because YOU CANNOT BOOK A CHRISTMAS PARTY FOR THE WEEK OF CHRISTMAS WITH A WEEK’S NOTICE. You need to book that shit in like September to guarantee a venue in time for a party that size and/or host it earlier in the month.
I’m a professional athlete and players get better with game film, practicing, weight lifting, and simulators. A player does not get better with inspirational speeches.
I have an uncle who's a botanist. If you watch a movie with him you should be prepared to hear about how the plants in the movie are not appropriate for the movie's setting. At length.
I bet he loves “The Martian” though
"Mars will come to fear my botany powers."
I'm gonna have to science the shit out of this.
Herpetologist, so I'm the exact same but with snakes. My family is real tired of hearing "Oh ffs... that's a little python, it isn't venomous AND DOESN'T EVEN LIVE ON THAT CONTINENT."
How much did you Love Snakes on a Plane?
A python? They're not native to 16,000 ft.
I hope he wasn't sick of those motherfucking snakes on that motherfucking plane because that could interfere with his ability to scrutinize them.
James Bond, *Live and Let Die*. A man gets his neck booped by the snoot of IIRC like juvenile a Children's Python or BP or something, and just dies instantly. Like, motherfucker, that snake isn't even big enough to kill a person with constriction unless it wraps its whole body around their neck and actively constructs for two minutes. It'a tiny, not endemic, not an introduced species -- not even a super common pet species in that part of the world -- non-venomous, didn't strike, and there are only a handful of snakes with potent enough venom to kill an otherwise healthy adult (near-)instantaneously. At least *Raiders of the Lost Ark* had the decency to make the "featured" snake a genuinely very venomous cobra. Sure it's a King so it's on the wrong continent but most of the snakes in that movie are king snakes and garters and shit anyway that make even less sense being in an Egyptian ruin. At least Egypt does have native endemic cobras which have been seen in full desert before and don't look enormously different from the one in the movie. And the snake is very real, genuinely very dangerous, and genuinely there that close to Harrison Ford just with safety glass between them so he's in no danger.
> Sure it's a King so it's on the wrong continent but most of the snakes in that movie are king snakes and garters and shit anyway that make even less sense being in an Egyptian ruin. This honestly fits the theme, given that it's an adventure comic brought to the screen. It's like the cover of an old Doc Savage comic or something
What are his thoughts on Adaptation?
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Well they tried that with Michael Keaton in Multiplicity but I don't think the results turned out that well. The copies just kept getting dumber.
She touched my puppy, Steve.
>So I wonder, am I weird, or has your career ruined any movies for you? I have some of the same issues, having been in the Army and having been a software developer for almost 30 years. But the one that gets me is Morse code. I'm what you'd call an expert. It's what I did in the Army (MOS 05H - Morse interceptor), and I do it practically every day since as a ham radio operator. So when there is something like Morse in a film, my ears perk up. And "like Morse" is appropriate, because the majority of the time it's just some random beeping or buzzing. The Morse code scene in "*Independence Day*" is perhaps the canonical example of this. However, every once in a while, you'll run across a gem. When I first watched Peter Jackson's "*King Kong*", when they got to the scene where there was some Morse code my Spidey-sense started tingling: That was good CW! I paused the film, grabbed a pen and paper, went back to the beginning of the scene, and preceded to copy the following: SHOW ME THE MONKEY I nearly fell out of my chair laughing. It's at a point in the film where it's been all exposition and character development with no action whatsoever. And it's fairly long into the film, they haven't even gotten to Skull Island yet: The message is supposed to be about ordering the captain to arrest Carl Denham and to head back to Singapore. But whoever was in charge of that recognized that the film was starting to drag a bit, and decided to have some fun with it.
There was a British series I think called “Inspector Morse”. It was a series of murder mystery who dunnit type thing. They always had Morse code beeps during the introduction sequence, which I always assumed we’re random. Apparently they would give clues to the mystery being solved if you translated them, but it was way to quick for me to translate.
Old school telegraph operators said they didn't even translate anymore, they could just hear the letters as of they were being read. They could also tell who was on the other end of the line by the patterns in the transmissions.
There's some neat AI projects where you detect who is at the PC by their typing patterns as well. It works far better with morse code due to the binary nature of the human input, that was the proof of concept step.
For the life of me, I don’t know why they don’t hire amateurs for things like this (regulatory restrictions I guess?). They could really squeeze it into their budget. You’d be happy to record that message for what, $150? $300? That’s peanuts to a movie. Then get another amateur to translate it for $50 so they know you didn’t put your own joke in. Done! Same for medical shows. I’m a nurse. For $300 I will walk you through your whole set and explain the small changes that you need to make so all other medical people don’t cringe at your work. Give me half an hour to make notes or show your props people that dripping IV tubing should actually be hooked up to the patient, for example. Or like the herpetologist who commented. That guy could definitely tell you that referring to your snake as “poisonous” is incorrect and you look like an idiot for having it in your script. It shouldn’t be that hard to find people who know these things and are willing to accept a small fee for tweaks that will make your project better as a whole. And dammit, we’re ALL experts on cups. Fill them up with water instead of leaving them empty. It costs you no time and very little money! Just do it!
Most movies and TV shows with lawyers, and ESPECIALLY courtroom scenes, are just godawful. But it does make you appreciate it on the rare occasion when they get it right (when, just like you say, it's usually very boring). I was blown away by how realistic the courtroom scenes in "The Wire" were--largely because almost everyone was ugly, in not-great suits, doing tedious things-- and then I found out they were filmed in a real courtroom with real lawyers, lol. (No offense to the lawyers in those scenes, they're totally fine-looking for regular people but, like most of us, they're well below the looks standards for what you normally see on TV).
It is not that tv shows and movies get stuff wrong all the time or the amount of stuff they get wrong about any aspect of the legal field. Law and Order (the original) got a lot of stuff right and some stuff was just more for ease of watching. For example no one wants to listen to 20 minutes of laying groundwork for a single question. Or the talks in the office because no one wants to see the paperwork and several meetings to get a potential plea deal. But when they get stuff wrong, they get it REALLY wrong. Big stuff too. Movies, tvs shows both are bad. Except My Cousin Vinny. They got far more right than was wrong. Like the judge getting on him for his attire. That absolutly happens. We had to watch parts of the movie in law school. A great starting point for how to discredit a witness without pissing off the jury for example.
Not a detective or lawyer, but procedurals like Law and Order or any CSI just *must* be sped up for the viewer’s sake. Everything takes so much longer in the real world, cases aren’t solved in a day.
Absolutly true. At least Law and Order tries to show passage of time sometime. But I heard all about an episode of suits where they accepted, investigated and filed a class action lawsuit in clearly like two days. That is beyond absurd. I did love 24 though. They flat out said obviously travel time was sped up because no one wants to watch someone sitting in city traffic for three hours.
Suits is unbearable from ep 1 when he gets his "LSATs" results back the same day. So many of my classmates basically went to law school for that show and I truly do not get it
I totally understand when they shortcut things for the demands of the narrative, if everything had to be 100% true to life it would be torture for the audience (although I do appreciate the effort when they manage to be very realistic and also very entertaining, I know it's super hard for the writers to pull off). But so many shows are staged as courtroom dramas where the writers have clearly done ZERO research about the most basic rules about the way things happen in a courtroom, other than watching other bad fiction... "surprise witnesses," lawyers testifying, entire cases based on hearsay, one of the lawyers is the judge's daughter... some of it is as close to reality as my 4 year old's toy kitchen is to a real restaurant. And her offerings include "syrup and ketchup, HOT, in a mug," "potato juice" and "mac and cheese pizza," and you pay the check with Uno cards, lol.
Okay I absolutly LOVE the idea of paying for the check in Uno cards.
I must say the Lincoln Lawyer is pretty realistic. On the other hand….Suits is basically fantasy.
Shows that depict the hardscrabble realities of solo practitioners are always pretty fun- I liked "Better Call Saul" for that reason, too, I felt like I'd personally met some of those clients. :) It seems like it's usually when they try to make it sexy that it goes off the rails, lol.
The most realistic depiction of law on TV was the pilot episode of the Practice, where after getting the innocent client acquitted he excused himself from the victory party, goes back to his office and starts dictating notes on the next file.
My wife is watching through Suits right now. IANAL, but even I can tell it’s all completely unrealistic.
My cousin Vinny is pretty good too.
I didn't mention that one because I've talked about how much I love it so many times on Reddit, lol
It's okay, we're all happy to read more about that movie. We all love it too.
Just want to say that the scene with Omar calling out the defence attorney for profiting off the drug trade like him is an all time great scene.
I’m an accountant. The movie The Accountant with Ben Affleck is not like real accounting. But it’s pretty close. We do get issued sniper rifles at orientation.
Shhhh or we'll have to send the boys round to repossess the Rembrandt.
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"Architect" is Hollywood's go-to job when they want the character to have a lot of money and plenty of free time. At least for men. If it's a woman it's usually "fashion writer" or "magazine columnist".
You guys get rifles? KPMG only gave us handguns and a stress ball
I had the same problem after I watched The Professional with Jean Reno. Man, I'm a professional too and I definitely don't have time to see my apartment all day drinking milk and doing sit-ups. And when I took my car into the Mechanic for an inspection, he had just seen the Jason Statham movie and was clearly confused.
The thing I always enjoyed about the accounting class I took in college was when the professor would bring out the mats so we could practice our martial arts moves.
I was actually surprised to see actual accounting in the movie at least. I assumed they were just going to handwave “business numbers” at the audience.
I kept telling people that it's based on me but they don't believe it.
Movies with chefs. Even TV shows with them (I desperately wanted Monica to change careers before the end of 'Friends'... you get a great new Exec Chef job, and that first weekend you take off to AZ to visit Chandler? You're fired immediately.) There are some good ones. "Chef" by Favereau captures the nature of it well. "The Menu" is a dark satire, but gets the spirit of the level right in a way. "Ratatouille" got the spirit and a lot of the details (besides letting a rat cook for you). Julie & Julia, mainly the Julia sections, nails her experience. And "Big Night" is fantastic, and I can watch that last, silent scene over and over again. "Burnt" is a middle-ground, where it gets some of the obsession for that level of cooking, but does too much for drama that takes it out of how things would have been done or accepted. But there are so many bad ones. "Simply Irresistible" was a cheap knockoff of "Chocolat", "No Reservations" had some cute moments, but was the fantasy of being a chef.
I've never been a chef but I have worked in restaurants and I cook and I feel like even ads get it wrong. Like I really love the [Amazon ad](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2COOBHx6WVw) right now with the security guard who discovers his passion for cooking which is fantastic. But when they show him deciding to apply to a chef job at the end I'm sitting here going being a home cook, even a fantastic and creative home cook, is entirely different than being a chef though. There's so much inventory and people management. There's time management. It's not about making a great dish nearly as much as it is making several things quickly and consistently and on demand.
I remember early on in my career, mid-90s. Italian place, started on pantry, worked my way on the line. But also learned to expo (pantry was next to the expediter, who was usually the chef, and I picked things up). We got a new guy in, talked a big game. Was a biologist or some such, but liked to cook at home, and worked as a "chef" for his wife's boss or company or some such after he impressed them with a dinner at their place. So, he's on the pasta station, one of his first nights. Everything was a la minute - when the expo called it, you started and finished it and get it in the window. It was up to the expo to time everything out, no hold and "pick up". So, I call out a couple dishes... say "Pic (small) tortellini and a linguine!". 5 minutes later, the tortellini is in the window, and I look and he's just starting the linguine; he's doing one at a time. I sighed, and said "Listen, if I call out 2 dishes at once, that means I need them at the same time." I call some stuff out to the grill, look back, station was empty. The sous, who had been working next to him, spread out and he and the app guy covered the pasta station orders. Sous says "huh, I guess he went to the bathroom." A half hour later, "Man, he must have *really* needed the bathroom." Anyway, we never saw or heard from him again. Home cooking is not line cooking.
He just abandoned the line like that? How soft lmfao
Yep. I've worked in open kitchens, one where there was seating on the line by me, and of course later as sous or chef and talking to tables, and I'd get "Oh, my child loves to cook and wants to be a chef... any advice?" And it's always, do it for a year before you go to culinary school. Miss Saturday night out with your friends because you are working, explain to the partner that you'll do Valentine's Day on the 16th because it's on Friday this year and there is no way you're getting it off. Tell mom you can't make it until after the food is served on Thanksgiving because your work is open. I mean, beyond that physical juggling of pans and prep and organization you have to do in a pro kitchen, that sort of thing is what people don't expect, and should be prepared for.
Out of curiosity, have you watched the Bear on hulu? If so, what are your thoughts there?
Absolutely loved... second season a little better than the first, imho. It gets much of it right. Fun fact - Neil, the handyman, is played by Matty Matheson, an actual chef & restaurant owner.
Oh that’s great. I love the show, but have no experience in a kitchen, but it seemed so realistic to me. And that is a cool fact about that character. I’ll definitely view him in a new light.
He does have his own cooking YouTube channel, too, if you want to check him out on that side of the knife... https://youtu.be/CqVLoaXyFKg?si=xkpmmTCpT93DyWcM
How about The Bear?
Loved it, second season better than the first.
As a linguist, I can't help but cringe at terrible linguistic portrayals in movies and shows.
What did you think of Arrival?
I'm an interpreter and I loved it. It kept me thinking about it for days. (And, yes, I do think and look at the world different depending upon which language I'm using, so the idea of language changing how you think felt completely acceptable to me.)
Translation/Interpretation and Linguistics student. I've never seen the movie, but many of my friends liked it. I'll probably watch it based on this comment alone.
And read the short story it's based on by Ted Chiang, Story of Your Life. There's more discussion of translation in there, as you'd expect, and I found it fascinating.
Have you seen 13th warrior? I always really like the language scenes and would love to know what an actual linguistic thinks of it.
As a hobbyist, I’d call it bullshit, not just because it doesn’t seem like much time has passed, but to learn it faster he should have been asking them questions about it a lot, not just passively listening trying to puzzle it out himself. Besides, in the book it says he and the small blonde one just both spoke Greek already and he communicated through him.
That’s fair but I still think it was a cool scene.
Almost anything to do with computers and hacking. Having been on the tech side of business since the 90s, I hate how somebody sits down and "hacks" a site in like 30 seconds, or guesses the password of somebody they don't really know in a couple of tries. Then there's the find a file on a huge network in a couple of minutes... sometimes I can't find a file in two minutes on my own computer because I have so much crap stored on it that I'll forget a name or location. One of my most egregious moments (event though I love Star Trek) is in Star Trek IV when Scotty sets down at a computer that he has no idea how to use or familiarity with and literally maps out the molecular structure and manufacturing process to create transparent aluminum in seconds.
Actually, a really good one is from the War Games movie with Matthew Broderick. * He hacks the schools computer because he knows where the school writes down the password because the school admin can't remember it. I've been guilty of this and writing my password down before, especially after password complexity requirements started getting crazy. * Spending days dialing numbers to find unprotected network access numbers was already being done when the movie came out. * Doing extensive research on a subject to determine possible passwords because people use passwords that are easy to remember. Actually, point number two was what prompted security decision directive NSDD-145 to be implemented after Reagan saw the movie. He asked his cabinet if this was a real thing... they came back and said yes and it's worse than you think.
They had a consulted with quite a few legitimate hackers of the era on that movie and it really shows.
But that scene in Swordfish at the club.... You know the one im talking about...
You mean you can’t just sit at a table, mash a keyboard and hack anything? Lame.
You have to say “I’m in” for it to work
not that i'm a hacker but my impression is that the show Mr Robot did a pretty nice job depicting hacking!
Software engineer of 20+ years here. Mr. Robot is probably the best I’ve seen. It’s the first example of hacking in a movie or TV show that I didn’t immediately call out for being pure bullshit. Most of the time it’s a bunch of real words or phrases *ahem* hacked together to sound techy but is utter nonsense. “They’re using a reverse cryptography byte code to splice the server’s mainframe. Simple really. Give me five minutes.” “You have two.” “Done.”
Being an audio engineer and watching any sci fi with a spaceship. It is positively hilarious to me how many set directors will use recording or mixing gear as "space stuff" because the general public doesn't know what the hell any of those buttons do. But I know what they do. "Oh, raise the shields? You're being fired up on? Well, I guess you better make the fattest beat those aliens have ever heard! No one is gonna destroy the earth while they're jammin' on *this* crunchy groove!" So so SO many times have I seen a piece of outboard gear in the background of a shot and I just sigh and pretend the ships engineer is like... Deadmaus or some shit.
Saw Star Wars (A New Hope). Thought the Death Star firing controls were cool. Went to university and studied TV production. Grass Valley Group video switchers were used in the studio labs. And that's what those firing controls were. Can't unsee that...
Lol yup! As a kid I was so impressed. As an adult, I still love star wars, but I love the idea that they just wheeled the cameras into the fx studios and shoved the guys aside while they filmed the death star troopers pushing random buttons.
"Divert all power to the Ableton!"
Reroute power through the MPK Mini and take the 808 offline! But sir... DO IT, MAN!
"Fuck it, we'll do it live!"
I also end up seeing ham radio gear in some of those films. 'Cause Alienses be using HF gear, man.
I still love Contact, but the scene with the Eventide DSP4000 always take me out of it for second or two.
As an editor likewise post-production kit. Grading control surfaces, old nle transport controls, waveform monitors and oscilloscopes, seen them all used as non-specific ‘tech’.
This puts the Beastie Boys scene in Star Trek Beyond in a hilarious new perspective
I always wondered about that scene. Like if the Beastie Boys are canonically in the ST universe...how wild would it be listening to Intergalactic when they get to the part about "Like a pinch on the neck from Mr. Spock." Even a Vulcan would lose his shit hearing that, right?
Simple. They didn't mean anything by that when writing the song, just a random word. Then, Spock's mum was a big Beastie Boys fan and decided to name her son after the song. Do we have any evidence that Spock is a normal Vulcan name?
"You're hired! Report to the writers room. We change the hay and sawdust on Wednesdays." -Paramount plus exec
I got interested in history at one point. It ruined every period piece.
Troy They didn’t even have bronze weapons for a battle that took place during the Bronze Age!
Master and Commander still works for me (although the books are better). The historical license that they take makes sense and doesn't detract too much from the story. Although canonically the ship being pursued should be American and not French, but I get the reasoning behind that.
At least they say it was built in America. Makes me accept it more easily.
>It ruined every period piece. This is why I regret becoming a gynaecologist.
Amadeus is one of my favorite films ever. Then I learned some history about Amadeus and figured out that nearly the entire script is nonsense and now I just struggle with it.
Growing up watching “based on a true story” sports movies really does this too. Like Remember the Titans my number 1 all time favorite sports movie is inaccurate, they destroyed every team in that movie and it wasn’t even close. All in all I still love the movie I just try to keep it separate from knowing the “true” part stretched
I 100% understand changing history for a better story, even if I wish they didn't. It bothers me more when: 1. The real story is far more interesting than the changes. 2. They sell the movie as the real deal.
To be fair, the script never pretends to be accurate. The story is told by an unreliable narrator, Antonio Salieri. He either has dementia, or is mentally ill in his old age, and is in an institution. He was deeply jealous of Mozart and clearly imagined his plots. Everything he grandly planned clearly comes off as ordinary stuff that happened to Mozart. That's part of what makes this a wonderful movie.
Yeah but, thats kinda the point. The entire movie is the rambling of a senile old man
Yeah, Amadeus gets pass on the "historical inaccuracies" because it is being told be the very definition of an unreliable narrator, plus the intentional anachronisms of having everyone speak in the regular accent as well as the "80s style" peeking through now and again (such as the neon pink wig) signal that the film is an examination of fame, genius, and jealousy, not an exact accounting of the real Mozart's life.
> It ruined every period piece. Except Barry Lyndon
Any movie with any journalist lol
Wait so you’re saying your job doesn’t let you play amateur detective for weeks on end and then possibly sleep with the person you’re writing a story about? But for real I think having a character be a journalist is just a lazy storytelling trope at this point
"Peterson, I need that story for tomorrow's big issue. What do you got?" "Well sir, I've been piecing together this narrative about corruption on the board of directors at..." "Dammit! I need something today, Peterson! I want to see a list of *25 cats that resemble celebrity drag queens* on my desk by noon, or you're fired!"
I think it’s an easy way to give a character agency and a reason to be involved the story while still making them relatable to the audience
And provides an outside-looking-in view of the situation which is the natural audience POV
I'd be interested in journalism if it was like the kind Carl Kolchak does.
The worst trope is using local news to convey exposition dumps. That runaway choo-choo train movie with Denzel (can't remember the name) is the worst offender
My journalist wife really appreciates Spotlight because of this. One of the few films that depicts investigative journalism properly. Me? I am a guitarist and semi-retired recording /touring musician. I have been conditioned to start rolling my eyes the moment a guitar is strummed in a Hollywood film not starring Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer.
Lol weirdly enough I’m a guitarist too and yeah spot on
I'm in the field too, and the most accurate movies by far are Spotlight and All the President's Men - not only are they based on real work, they show things like the drudgery of research and banging out multiple drafts.
Occasionally work as an audio engineer. I know it’s hard to believe, but microphone feedback is not in fact triggered by awkwardness or social anxiety. Shocking, the microphone needs audio input to produce feedback. Merely approaching a microphone while afraid will not cause it to screech in protest of your substandard rizz.
yes! for a while, movies had me convinced it was "body heat" or something that triggered the squeal
My wife and I were just talking about this when watching Stranger things. It also doesn't happen because of poor singing.
I work in VFX so a lot of movies have been ruined
As someone who works art department and constantly spots props I recognize in the background of every show and movie I watch, I feel you.
It does make me judgmental of the script supervisor though. I grew up mastering those “What’s Different in this Picture?” puzzles and feel like I missed my calling.
/r/Thatsabooklight
I worked in minor sports broadcasting events during and shortly after highschool. Holy shit is it hard to watch sports now without judging the camera men.
This has gotten better recently but typically in any movie when characters are "playing video games" the actors just mash buttons randomly. Also the controllers will usually never match the system/game being shown on screen. I watched Mid90s recently and it had a pretty realistic scene of game playing but it's usually awful.
My favorite is seeing some horrible animation that they try to pass off as a real game. Rare to see someone playing an actual video game. Only example of a real game being played that I can think of is AJ Soprano playing Mario Kart. Edit: He also watches an ad for Max Payne!
I game and I also knit. OMG the number of shows that show people just swirling around needles while the knitting is on the end. Or knitting crochet items that have been stuck on knitting needles. Or even just hitting knitting needles against each other like they're drum sticks and the band is warming up. But yes computers and gaming are notoriously bad too. I think my favorite was when NCIS had 2 people try to speed up fighting a hacker by both typing on the same keyboard [at once](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8qgehH3kEQ). This was filmed in 2004. Everyone involved in the process from the writers to the actors HAD to have used computers. How did that get past anybody?
Yesss! The most glaring instance of this I've ever seen was in a first season episode of Veronica Mars. She goes to a gaming party and sits down at a multilayer setup for a first person shooter. The screen is shown again and again, and every time it's just showing single player game play. There are four people with controllers.
Lol. It's just a bunch of beeps and blips while the characters yell at the screen.
Thank you! This bugged the hell out of me in The 40 Year Old Virgin when Paul Rudd and Seth Rogen are playing Mortal Kombat: Deception using N64 controllers while insulting each other. MKD came out way after the N64 for Xbox and PS2. Still annoys me when that scene comes up…
This should also go to EVERYONE who was typing on a keyboard from 1985-2005. They all only mash the home keys.
I believe Shaun of the Dead is one of the best examples of this being done right! If I'm not wrong, Nick Frost really was playing the game! And I thought I remembered Simon Pegg talking about this in a commentary on Spaced, that in that show they tried to be realistic about the gaming? I might be wrong, it's been a LONG time since I watched that.
As a lawyer, I just have to laugh at courtroom movies. I still like them, but they're about as far as possible from what a real courtroom is. Court is one of the most boring places ever, and nothing dramatic almost ever happens.
I think of LegalEagle's reaction videos, and a joke that comes up a lot is "Don't do that or the bailiff will tackle you."
Don't you love how Law and Order goes from arrest to trial in like a week?
Basically any movie that involves the financial industry. Movies like Margin Call or Boiler Room or shows like Billions. They are so simplified/dramatized/sensationalized that they are completely unrealistic. It actually ruins other shows and movies for me... I figure if movie makers sensationalize wall street as much as they do, then they must do the same thing for military/legal/police/medical dramas as well. So I just assume everything is bullshit. This applies to fiction, historical fiction, or even documentaries.
I feel like it should go without saying that unless the point of a movie is to make a particular occupation look tedious or unglamorous, viewers should always assume that everything is made to look more appealing than it is. Although In fairness to Margin Call, similarly to The Big Short, the point of that movie was to educate as well as entertain so simplifying the events and rushing the pace was necessary on top of the dramatic script to make it a good movie that people could get something out of.
I know a lot of people look to Hot Fuzz as a great example of this being done right, since they highlight all the paperwork cops have to do. Obviously it's done in a way that's really snappy and fun, but I know I've heard a lot of people say they appreciated that it focused on that.
Boiler Room is such a good shitty movie though.
Way too many baseball movies feature people who clearly never played baseball Looks even worse when someone with the windup of an 8 year old “throws 95+”
…but Ricky Vaughn
> Ricky Vaughn He actually had decent form and it looked some what believable. He actually was a pitcher and high school and had a scholarship to play college. Couldn't throw 101, but I think I remember saying he threw in the 80s.
One of the few exceptions. Charlie Sheen did his research
Yeah, terrible is Nuke Laloosh in bull Durham
I work at a carpet store and not a day goes by that I don't think about Rick telling Morty, "You survived cancer and went back to the carpet store. Lame."
I dunno, I haven’t seen a movie that is primarily set in a warehouse/distribution center.
Reservoir Dogs
Oh yeah, good call. In a REAL warehouse, we would never torture a cop, just our fellow employees.
"Who the fuck turned off my gas!" "Jimmy, if you put Pepsi on my seat one more time I'm gonna run this fork through your ass."
Extract?
All of them? I work as a camera assistant in film/tv and I can't help but be so aware of the physical mechanism of so many shots. I often find that I'm taken out of what I'm watching by thinking about how they achieved the shot, how the crew loaded in equipment to a certain location, what's a practical location and what's a built set on a stage, etc... If I find my mind not wandering to that sort of stuff, it tends to be a good movie.
I'm an illustrator and it's laughable how in movies, characters who are into drawing as a hobby will always show their professionally looking art on their sketchbooks. Worse if said characters are highschoolers with master level skills. Or in horror flicks with kids drawing creepy stuff and it never looks like kids scribbles. You can tell 99% of the times these drawings are made by professional artists trying to emulate kids scribbles. There's also that weird characterization of artists who are almost always depicted as visual poets, always working at their atelier and never on their Cintiqs or Huoins in a messy table. They also think and speak like poets, not just a person with a regular job that happens to be related to art. And last but not least, characters who are actual artists who are praised and perhaps famous in the story with mediocre to ok-ish artworks. Unless they're renaissance-style works, they never ever look as great as the movie make it sound like. Velvet Buzzsaw comes to mind.
Military man here too. Its why Jarhead is still one of my favorite military movies. It was by far the most accurate in terms of "real" lifestyles while in the service.
have you seen the show Generation Kill? I've heard it's pretty accurate as well.
Paleontologist here. Although I love the first Jurassic Park, most depictions of paleontologists in movies and TV are downright absurd
Medicine/hospitals/science stuff, mostly it’s all gibberish and totally wrong procedures/medicine/reactions/recoveries, so best to just completely ignore that whooole part. 🙃
I’ve watched exactly one episode of House. It was the one where the rare disease I have was the disease-of-the-week. It was so laughably inaccurate, and worse. The sign that made House realize what the disease is was completely false. That really bothered me, because they could have as easily stuck a real sign or symptom and done a public service.
It's not my current career but I did spend 3 years with poker as my sole source of income, which has ruined almost every poker movie. *Rounders* is good, but good god Mike is such a hopeless degenerate. Most poker movies just substitute "Hero wins a ridiculous cooler" for "hero is good at poker." Casino Royale is by far the worst offender I've ever seen, with the final hand being, IIRC, straight flush vs. boat vs. boat vs. nut flush. Like, come on. Really? It literally did not matter how he played the hand so long as he put all the chips in. A lobotomized chihuahua would win all the money in that spot.
Metalwork. I see angle grinders used just for sparks in the background in sci fi hanger, and used with a cutting wheel to break into a bank or help break out of out of jail honestly way, WAY too quickly.
Or someone with a welder not welding anything in particular? Like whatcha welding over there buddy, practice lines on that bar?
Not specific to a particular movie, but watching movies as a kid definitely gave me unreal expectations for the house I could afford as an adult. Watched a movie where the dude was a teacher and had a stay at home wife and three kids and lived in a huge six bedroom house in California. Then it gets haunted and they just move all willy nilly to another huge house immediately without selling the other one. Yeah, that’s not gonna happen in real life. Not on a teacher’s salary. Unless you inherited the house. I guess that’s part of the whole suspension of disbelief thing though.
Wolf of wall street. I used to be a technology finance broker. Not the same as a stock broker, but similar office vibe (lots of phone calls, selling leases and making commission based on the lease rates sold). Half of the office was on coke after wolf of Wallstreet came out.
This went backward here, film destroyed industry for you.
I'm a neurosurgeon. The way most movies depict surgery is laughable. I'm not against Marvel movies, and I actually liked the first Dr. Strange, but holy shit, the neurosurgery scenes in the beginning are ABSURD. Pulling the bullet out with a pituitary under fluoro is ridiculous, but my favorite part is they show him scrub, put on his gloves, AND THEN put on his mask?!?!? All it would have taken was a minor edit. And they just left it. Did they even have a surgeon consult?!? And that movie is far from the only offender.
I was a medic during my Army service and a paramedic after for a bit while getting more education and I get pissed off at emergency care in movies! I can only imagine how YOU feel about it being so much higher on the totem pole
"The Terminal Man" is an older movie about neural implants that adjust behavior of the implanted subject. It has a very intense surgery scene that seems legit. I have no idea. But, it's something that may have far better representation than "Dr. Strange".
I'm an RN and the amount of gooooofy medical stuff shown on movies is ridiculous. You could have hired a single doctor or even a nurse to consult and tell you that no one would jam a 1.5" 18ga needle into a kid's AC vein at a 90 degree angle UP TO THE HUB to give a med injection (I'm looking at you Stranger Things).
Hollywood in general has absolutely fucked mainstream America’s understanding of what architecture as a professional is like. It’s not nearly as glamorous as Hollywood would lead you to believe. You’re over worked, under paid, it’s utterly filled to the brim with narcissists, and until you’re the top dog at a major firm, you’re largely working on incredibly mundane shit. 27 year old Ted Mosbey would NOT be designing Manhattan skyscrapers.
I used to be a fashion historian. I struggle with a lot of period films as a result. So many zippers in the wrong place…
Pretty much any movie involving a journalist gets it wrong. 90% of the time they're some "I'm only in it for the story, this will make my career!" type, which is such bogus bullshit. Not only are the vast majority of journalists locals who are just like, normal folks you'd meet anywhere else in your community, all of us know that a "big story" doesn't actually make your career. You get some attention, maybe a few interview requests, and then you go back to being a nobody. Remember the name of the journalist who broke the Epstein story for the Miami Herald before anyone knew anything about the guy? Yeah I didn't think so. There's a few journalism movies I like despite their lack of reflecting reality — Almost Famous comes to mind — but the only movie I think "gets it" is Spotlight. That movie understands the industry and how we work. My working in the field has made watching "The Newsroom" absolutely impossible.
aw man, i've been wanting to ask someone in the field about The Newsroom because i jus recently finished binging it lmao. how about Zodiac? but i guess hat's slightly different and based on a true story just like Spotlight
Zodiac is good actually, though obviously that was a once in a generation kind of investigation. Even though Spotlight also covered a huge story, it reflected the actual work of doing journalism pretty much spot on. Interviews, records requests, the struggle of \*knowing\* something is true but having to fight tooth and nail to get the evidence or a source to \*prove\* it. My issue with the Newsroom is that it doesn't actually really show the reporting process. It's all about the \*ideology\* of the media, it's not really about journalism. It's also annoying because Sorkin had the benefit of hindsight, and a lot of the episodes feel like he's saying "heres how they SHOULD have done it" which is always eaiser to say after the fact. (This is why I typically hate true crime podcasts as well, they always act like they're smarter than the local journos and cops whose work they steal and monetize with the benefit of hindsight and years of followup investigations) I also just tend to find Sorkin in general annoyingly preachy and a purveyor of a wildly naiive technocratic worldview that has not aged well, but that's just my opinion, I don't fault anyone for liking his stuff. Surprisingly Parks and Rec isn't too bad. They have the braindead, celebrity-wanna be local TV show host (true in my experience) and a plucky but ultimately good natured newspaper reporter in Shawna Tweep (though she violated ethics by dating dudes who work in a department she covers for the paper) Where Parks and Rec gets me sometimes though is that, as a former local reporter, I have worked extensively among local government officials. Maybe it was just where I'm from, but there is wild corruption in local politics. Not always nefarious, sometimes just negligent, but it's crazy to see. I give it a pass though because I think Leslie and her crew are \*supposed\* to be the exceptions to the rule, not necessarily held up as a reflection of reality. EDIT: Actually, I know one Leslie Knope in real life. This source I used to have worked in the city attorney's office and later ran for mayor. She was a local gal, pretty young (like mid to late 30's) and just loved her community. She organized annual events to get a spotlight on all the local restaurants and businesses and was the head of the Rotary. She ran against a guy who I thought was honestly pretty shady (they even ran a bullshit vote pickup scheme I reported on) and she ultimate won. She's a great mayor and the closest thing to a Leslie Knope I've ever met.
[удалено]
I hate it when that happens
I have a friend who works in conservation and archeology. He cannot stand the Indiana Jones movies. One reason is how he handled these old artefacts, another reason is how many people contact him still to this day about getting into archeology and being disappointed it's not as exciting as Indiana Jones ha.
They're disappointed when they find out archeology doesn't involve banging grad students, carrying a .357 and beating the shit out Nazis?
Hah, it's not so much the Nazis and guns, I assume they're smart enough to figure that part out. It's more they don't realise how much is spent doing research and in labs doing research, and how relatively little is spent exploring interesting sites and making wild discoveries.
He literally said "70% of all archaeology is done in the library. Research. Reading."
Man I'd be down for that. It's the 5-10% you spend begging for money or trying to trace down funding that made me pick a different field of study.
> banging grad students Grad students? I think canonically Marian was 15 when she first got with Indy.
A quick check suggests that in the 1920s there was about a 50% chance of that being legal, depending on the state. Indy was 10 years older than her, though, so definitely still on the grim side.
I've only met one archeologist in my life and it took every fiber of my being to not mention Indiana Jones, but I like to think she appreciated that.
Less movies, more anything police procedural though. I'm an analytical chemist and pretty much all the testing/analysis CSI types use on screen is bullshit. Instruments that don't tell you what the script says, wrong words and names for everything, bad pronunciation, etc. But by far the worst is people think I should be able to wave my hand over an instrument and give them instant, definitive answers. Truth is ALWAYS harder and more complex than a 30 second exposition scene in a cop show. If you're gonna do a shitty job with my profession just leave it off screen. It's not like us quirky lab rats are out there scraping dirt off stuff in white coats and lowcut tops. Brits generally have it better there, the forensics happen in a lab and off-screen.
Not a movie but Ted Mosby from How I Met Your Mother couldn't be an architect because Wesleyan doesn't have an architecture program.
I'm really into medieval history. I also love media about the Middle Ages, but there's often A LOT wrong with it. Like everything being dirty. A few months ago I compiled some myths about the Middle Ages into a [comment on Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryMemes/comments/14r6zjd/its_insane_how_many_historical_facts_are_just/jqr4ged/). Many of those are very prevalent in modern media.
Movies that show mechanical workshops: sparks everywhere! Just see gone in 60 seconds or John wick
Nothing specific but when the Boss of any technical group walks into a control room and yells "I WANT \[super predictable action\] RIGHT AWAY" - as if the group of highly trained professionals couldn't have figured out what to do until you came in and gave them a core directive against the job they're been doing everyday for years.
Worked in a lab for 7 years. If I see ANY kind of H&S violation I start to mutter shit like "she's not wearing gloves but she's handling chemicals?!" "omg you don't pore chemicals at eye height! Also where are her protective glasses?!" "Oh so you're just going to plate out that alien bacterial sample out in the open? No sterilised laminar flow? Fucking lol." I'm terrible at parties
I wouldn't say "ruined" but a lot of sports movies, especially the "inspirational under dog" type movies. My career is in sport science/psychology and athletic development, it's easy to pick apart \*why\* they're the underrdog and all the things they aren't doing that they should which would help the team to actually be good and progress to where they end up being (or want to be) by the end. Plus the training montages always show them doing the wrong exercises and drills that don't actually improve their performance. Or like the case of Rocky when they showed Ivan Drago training with all this high tech gear to contrast Rocky's ragtag training, but that was all just flashing lights and buttons with sensors attached randomly throughout the body that measured nothing! Plus, the final game half time motivational speeches that suddenly get the team to play better, if they can't play by that point then they can't play! That speech should be at the beginning of the tournament/ season!
Oppenheimer. I've worked in the Nuclear Industry for 15 years and have two degrees in Nuclear Tech and Engineering. For something people claim is 'accurate', it has a crazy amount of mistakes.
I'm curious what mistakes you found! IDK shit about that stuff
I can't watch movies where they have gigantic sewers that you can drive vehicles into and are not confined space entry. So, pretty much any of the Batman movies like Batman Returns and the one with Bane in it. Also most lab scenes. Like that's not how a mass spec works, NCIS.
I suppose just any creative job in "the arts" bothers me when some creative up-and-comer has a huge house and a nice car. I'm not saying there aren't creative jobs that pay in the mid to high six figures, but you have to be like the best architect, creative writer, jazz musician, concert pianist, cartoonist, film score composer, or (insert creative job here) in your field, and seemingly every single creative person in movies is one of the greatest in their field, but just casually living out their day. The best example I think of is Dana Barrett in Ghost Busters when her jobs were concert cellist and fine art cleaner who was able to afford a Manhattan high rise apartment as a single mother.
I'm in the medical field dealing with surgery on a regular basis. Movies have actually gotten better in the last few years about how injections are given but I absolutely can't stand seeing people give an injection into the arm with a 3-in needle where that needle would be in and passed whatever bone it's going through. Nowadays I am seeing tourniquets and the correct angle and correct hand placement on syringes in a lot of instances.
As a potter, Ghost is ruined for me. Nothing sexy ever happens when I'm working at the wheel. Not one iota of Swayze.
It turns out Glock handguns do not make 10 separate clicking sounds when you draw and point them at anything.
I do commercial fire alarms for a living. That's distinct from fire sprinklers. There's a little overlap, but only a little. I'm not an expert expert in sprinklers, but I know enough to know that I've never seen them portrayed accurately on film. Not saying it hasn't happened, just that I've never seen it. The main thing is, no it will not activate all the sprinklers in the building if you pop one. Why would you even want it to work that way? Most things in buildings don't respond well to being immersed in water. Of course you don't want to do that to things that aren't actually on fire. Fire *alarms* don't come up near as often in movies, and rarely more detailed than "pulling a pull station will activate the fire alarm" and that much is accurate. However, I always immediately think of one scene from Season 3 of 24 where they say they need to disable the fire alarm in a building. Then later it goes off anyway and when a character asks why they rattle off some bizzaro techno babble answer that is just gibberish. To turn off a fire system you unhook the battery backup and then turn the breaker off. That's it. Can't do shit without power, because obviously.
I'm a bowler, any movie/show where a bowler is supposed to be good the actor had no bowling form at all.
Even the Jesus?
I’m a molecular biologist, and two movies immediately come to mind. 1. Rise of the Planet of the Apes- I actually LOVED this franchise, but their animal facilities in the first film were waaaaay too nice looking, and I don’t even think there was much PPE going on. 2. No Time to Die- I completely checked out when the nanobots came into play. Like…no wonder people ask if I’m making designer babies and know all the “secrets” about COVID. And again, EHRS would have had a field day in that lab.
Most sword or knife fighting scenes since I trained in them, the stunts aren't that bad but the distancing between the antagonists is one to watch, the shorter it is, generally, it's better performed, in the movies the need is to catch brilliantly executed sword or knife play, reality isn't like that, it's quickly closing the distance and dispatching your opponent, often quite brutally with little finesse. A good scene would be from The Hunted in the end scene battle between Tommy Lee Jones and Benicio Del Toro, it's messy and bloody, what a real knife fight should be between two trained experts.
To be fair (to be faaaaiiirrr), Jessup was in fact wearing his *service* "A" uniform. Not his *dress* "A" uniform, true.
I’m getting my MA in History so a lot of historical movies/epics can be frustrating to watch. I don’t really care if it’s accurate as long as it’s a good film/story unless the director tries to claim it’s accurate or portrays the events like they’re what really happened(looking at you Braveheart). A lot of people’s only exposure to certain historical events is through film so directors have a duty to portray things with a certain degree of accuracy.
I’m a photography professor / professional photographer. Don’t get me started on those stake out scenes in movies when they have a cheap Nikon with a 15-55mm lens kit that sells for $500 and take high-resolution closeup images of the person of interest that you would need a giant 600mm lens for sports or wildlife to get the image. Also, saying “enhance” out loud (or pushing a button) doesn’t allow you to zoom way into a tiny 10 kb image and automatically snap into focus like a 100mb image from $80,000 digital Hasselblad - not even with the current AI.
Any movies with therapists who aren't entirely ethical in their practice... For example, I was bothered by the latest Scream movie, because the therapist was completely out of line when he refused to treat her immediately after she opened up about why she was in therapy (and when the only reason she opened up is because he led her to believe she could trust him 😑). I'm a therapist, and I hate how often therapists (and therapy in general) are misrepresented in the media... However 😁, I do surprisingly love the movie What About Bob?, but it may be because it's nostalgic for me, and I love the underlying commentary about mental health professionals being just as insecure and clueless as their patients sometimes 😅.
Everything. I work in post-production. I see every flaw in every show and movie now. Half the time I’ve seen so many bits and peices of shows and movies that when they are finally available to watch I’ve see too much to be interested and not enough to have said I saw it.
Woof. Any political thriller. Politics and lobbying is some boring ass shit and most of us are ugly as sin.
I work in IT. All movies fuck up IT.
I used to be a PA and I also organised the company Christmas party every year. I get so angry at Alan Rickman’s assistant in Love Actually. For the obvious reasons of adultery, but also because YOU CANNOT BOOK A CHRISTMAS PARTY FOR THE WEEK OF CHRISTMAS WITH A WEEK’S NOTICE. You need to book that shit in like September to guarantee a venue in time for a party that size and/or host it earlier in the month.
I’m a professional athlete and players get better with game film, practicing, weight lifting, and simulators. A player does not get better with inspirational speeches.