The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #135578   Message #3092847
Posted By: josepp
10-Feb-11 - 08:02 PM
Thread Name: BS: Do small errors in books, film &c matter
Subject: RE: BS: Do small errors in books, film &c matter
I remember a US movie called "Gung-Ho" where an American baseball team plays a Japanese team. With the score tied in the 9th, a batter on the American team hits an infield pop-up. As the Japanese shortstop camps it under ready to catch it, an American baserunner deliberately plows him over, circles 3rd base and scores. Hooray! The Americans win!! The problems is, of course, that the baseball rulebook clearly states that a runner cannot touch an infielder in the act of making a play or the runner is out. Even if the fielder backs into him as he's running and he tries his best to avoid him, doesn't matter. The runner is out. Yet nobody on either team seems to know this rule. Without that rule, baseball would look like hockey. Real umpires must have been watching that yelling, "WHAT?????" Not to mention that the Japanese actors in the movie spoke very slow Japanese with an accent!! Imagine watching a foreign movie where the English guy can barely put two English words together and even then you can barely understand his very un-English accent.

In some made-for-TV movie, these people in 1870s America are at a political speech and a band starts playing a strain of Joplin's "The Entertainer" which wasn't published until 1902.

In "The Titanic" you can see the ocean and the ship perfectly well at night. Trust me, out of the ocean, you can hardly see your hand in front of your face even with the moon out. You can't see it at all when the moon isn't out. There's no way you can see that much on the ocean at night as in the movie.

Likewise, why do they always show people crawling through ventilator shafts that:

a) Are shiny aluminum on the inside when within a week they are covered with thick black dust that feels like greasy fur.

b) You can see where you're going when you can't see shit even if you had a flashlight because everything is black.

c) They never encounter a ventilation fan motor in their way nor does a fan ever seem to kick on while they are crawling around in there.

d) What ordinary building has ducts big enough to crawl around in? The ones I crawled around in were for ventilating a big boilerroom on a ship that had to suck out a large volume of hot air on a continuous basis so the space wouldn't get too hot for human habitation. No ordinary building would have anything like that and it wouldn't take the weight of a human being inside it either.