Movies magic comes from the suspension of disbelief

[BigV]

I love watching movies. We have hundreds of them at home. We also rent ones that don't have sufficient replay value. With the KidsofV in the house, we get a wide range of movies, comedies, action, scary, cartoon, drama, romantic comedy, buddy films, documentaries, the list goes on and on. In another thread, there was a discussion about a movie and the talk turned critical, not in a "boy, that sucked" kind of way, but in a technical way. The people were talking about how this or that particular aspect of the movie snagged their attention in a way that detracted from their enjoyment of the movie.

For example, wolf said,

How shall I say this ... you don't want to be sitting next to me whenever there's a movie about a nuthouse on ...

And Clodfobble said

The sound design in Sin City sucked ass harder than any theater-release movie I've ever seen.

These examples reminded me of movies I've seen where some artistic license has been taken and based on my professional expertise, I *know* that can't happen. Downer man. F'rinstace, in Swordfish, where that fella is told he has like 30 seconds to crack the FBI databank, or whatever--my fragile little bubble of disbelief burst when he won through. Uh, yeah.

Certainly there are goofs in movies, in fact, imdb.com has a section in their capsule reviews dedicated to goofs, like "driving down the road, window open, hair swirling, the driver looks at the picture on the dashboard. Where the tachometer reads 0 rpm." Haw haw. Those can be funny too, or jarring.

I can let a lot of stuff go by unchallenged in the movies. I no longer wonder "when do they eat or go to the bathroom?" like I did when I was a little kid. I can watch an hour of Wile E Coyote getting mauled by the most egregious violations of the laws of physics and never flinch. But some movies just don't make me believe. I'm interested in what kind of movies have you seen that you just can't get into because the spell was broken or cast improperly in the first place.

[glatt]

Armageddon. The whole mission to the asteroid where they have to drill a hole and blow the thing up. It could have been an interesting movie, but the whole space mission blew the movie for me.

I can suspend reality for a movie like Star Wars which doesn't pretend to be real, but when a movie attempts to be realistic and fails, it is very noticable.

Apollo 13 proved that you can have a scientifically accurate movie and still be very entertaining.

[Happy Monkey]

A project I toy with doing when I have far too much free time is to go through Independence Day scene by scene, saying for each event that occurs:

Even if we accept everything up to this point, the next scene makes no sense!

[Undertoad]

I made the mistake of watching Die Hard 2 with two pilots.

"Why don't they just go out to another plane and radio the circling jets from there?"

"Of course the beacon doesn't work like that at all."

and lots of "Haw, haw, now that is totally impossible!"

[Clodfobble]

Yeah, my husband's a network administrator. He starts ranting ANYTIME there is a plot point in anything involving "hacking."

[BigV]

The Core. I think it's action-drama but it's farce for me. Really.

[Happy Monkey]

A friend of mine who saw the new Batman movie says it's too realistic. The realism and believability of the origin story throws the goofyness of the underlying premise of Batman into sharp relief.

[lumberjim]

Kevin Costner cast as Robin 'ood.

pah leez

[wolf]

One thing that blows an otherwise good movie is when the film is set somewhere I know, but filmed somewhere else.

This is more common in made-for-TV movies, which we know suck ass anyway, but they should at least try, you know? There was a movie made of the Susan Reinert murder, based on Joseph Wambaugh's book. His research was good, his description of local stuff was, as I recall, dead on (sorry, pun not intended), but the movie version was made in Canada ... they didn't even try to fake the PA license plates on the cars right. The movie was otherwise well done.

Same for the Hunt for the Unicorn Killer. Set in Philadelphia, filmed in Toronto.

I've been to Toronto and liked it ... I just never realized that the city was so bland it could pretend to be anywhere. Except Toronto, apparently.

I also have a hard time with movies based on books that I have read and really liked. It's very rare that what made the book wonderful translates well to the screen.

There are a lot of good movies about mental hospitals ... Cuckoo's Nest and Girl, Interrupted, to name two. But every now and again there will be technical details, stuff like, "they're doing the restraint wrong", or "no therapist in their right mind would ever do stupid shit like that" (then I realize that I have berated stupid therapists for doing just that shit, often within the last week or so).

Sometimes even horribly bad movies, though, have a teensy something that cheers me. Even that horrible waste of film called "Blair Witch 2" ... you know that scene in the very beginning? The one in the mental hospital that really doesn't have much to do with the rest of the movie ... the forced feeding? That's a scene for scene remake of a segment from a documentary about a State Hospital in Massachussets called "Titticut Follies", except the one in TF was a real forced feeding of a real patient ... and the orderly who was doing the whole procedure with the cigarette hanging out of his mouth, dropping ashes in the patient's face? Really in the documentary.

Doctors demanding wrong dosages of the wrong meds irk me ... which is one of the reasons ER is high on my favorites list ... they get a psychotic patient, they restrain him right, and the doc calls for "Vitamin H".

Not that there are a lot of them, but movies about Suicide Hotlines tend to overdramatize things, even the ones that I liked.

[Silent]

Most war movies. Or any movie that has full auto weopon fire that hits nothing.

Pearl Harbor holds a special space in my contempt file. The liberal use of 60's vintage destroyers and air combat at ranges of 20'

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by wolf

One thing that blows an otherwise good movie is when the film is set somewhere I know, but filmed somewhere else.

Yeah. I can't think of any right now, but I've seen several movies supposedly set in DC, where the characters suddenly hop on a New York style subway.

[Clodfobble]

I don't recall whether there were any nuthouses in it or not, but I remember being really impressed with Drew Barrymore's depiction of a manic depressive in "Mad Love." It was spot-on the way my stepmother used to act when she was having an episode.

[wolf]

Oh yeah, pistols that never run out of ammo ... or shoot down helicopters.

And lead bullets that make sparks when they hit metal things. And plastic things. And pillows.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Squealing tires on dirt roads; thugs on motorcyles terrorizing people in cars by riding next to them kicking the car; motorcycle gangs on dirt bikes; almost any portrayal of nuke plants; etc, etc.

[Lunaephiliac]

Originally Posted by wolf

One thing that blows an otherwise good movie is when the film is set somewhere I know, but filmed somewhere else.

They did that in a crappy movie called Extreme Days. It was supposed to be in Yakima, but in one shot, the L.A. skyline was clearly visible in the background. (Yakima is in Washington)