Contradicting Popular Opinion
A.K.A.
An Enquiry Concerning Why Your Favorite Movie Sucks
I’ll start with some pimping.
Brad has a thing which references Sororiety Babes in the Slime Ball Bowl-O-Rama, which is essential b-movie viewing based on title alone. If I remember correctly, the flick don’t make a lot of sense, and it has little muppet things (that look kinda like the Hobgoblins) that speak in Barry White voices. Man I love that title, though admittedly not as much as Over-Sexed Rugsuckers From Mars.
Mikey is doing the weekend box office stuff, at least for now. Eventually, I will have to break it to him that his first name is spelled wrong.
The columns of Whitcomb, Closs, Coates, Schwob, etc. have not yet returned from journeying towards the edge of the Earth. They are presumed to have fallen off. In six months, their next-of-columns will be sent a condolences and a ham.
In other news, I’m wondering what ads are on this page. Are you pumping Iron as GWB? Or perhaps staring at the magic cleavage of Scarlet J.? Man, she’s made the transition from actress to vapid movie star in record time.
And one more random bit Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, Sam Raimi, Scott Spiegel, Holly Hunter and Fraces McDormand once shared an apartment.
I love Frances McDormand. She delivers one of my all time favorite lines in the movie Darkman. “If you’re not going to kill me, I have things to do.”
She’s also one the few actual ACTRESSES to win the best actress Oscar in the last 15 years. I mean, c’mon. Julia Roberts and Halle Berry? Is that what you academy types consider Best Actress material? At this point it is just a little gold thing that they give out to movie stars, especially if she makes herself less attractive than normal.
Wait, shit, I’ve a column to do still, eh?
A Broad Enquiry
No, this won’t be a continuation of the actress rant. I would never call a skirt a broad. What do you take me for? No, this is more about some general and some specific things that films do to increase their suck.
You see, every movie has at least a little bit of suck to it. I love the movie Spider-Man, but I don’t love it in such a way that I don’t see its flaws. There are a ton of little continuity problems with the flick. There are plot holes. I mean, there is no possible explanation for Peter Parker’s ability to make his Spider-man costume. He’s poor and has never shown any sort of tailoring ability. Maybe it comes with spinning a web.
When we love something as adults, and not as children, we are able to acknowledge flaws. That which we know well, we tend to see the flaws more easily. A minor irony that.
Anyway, back to the suck.
A lot of the time the suck springs from absolutely shitty physics. Movie makers seem to have no clue about things as simple as Newtonian mechanics. I’ve already done a column on how f*cked up every space film is. (at least every one not called 2001) You can find that here.
But even on Terra Firma we tend to f*ck shit up royally. Probably the simplest thing, something every child knows, is wrong in nearly every film ever made. Quite simply, light travels faster than sound. Much faster.
How do movies f*ck this up?
Every movie thunderstorm has thunder and lightning occur simultaneously. C’mon. Is this the director’s fault or the foley artist? Hasn’t anybody in Hollywood ever counted to see how far away the lighting is?
You know, you see the light flash, and you count. For all intents and purposes we can consider the speed with which we perceive the lighting to be instantaneous. Sound on the other hand travels at 1/6 of a mile per second. So if you count to twelve after the lightning before you hear the thunder, the strike was 2 miles away.
See we are learning today!
And if movies f*ck up something as common as lightning and thunder, you can only imagine how much they f*ck up guns and explosions. Things just explode in movies. All the time. They just explode. I’ve known a lot of folk who’ve been in car wrecks, flipped cars, this that and the other. I’ve never known any of these accidents to result in a huge explosion. What the f*ck?
Remember when they had to recall all those trucks? That is because they were built so that a collision might cause an explosion. The gastank was built outside of the frame. Most cars are built so that they won’t explode on impact.
Otherwise, why bother with seatbelts and airbags?
And guns, oh my god and guns. In the nineties every action movie had multiple scenes of folks firing automatic weapons. Machine guns = all the rage. But they didn’t seem to know much about anything gun wise.
Our hero cannot just stand there and hold down the trigger. Guns like that tend to get really hot if you are firing in large bursts. Furthermore, with common rates of fire, if you hold down the trigger you will be afforded 3 seconds of bullets.
Seriously.
An Uzi fires 600 rounds per minute. That is ten per second. How long is your 30 round clip going to last if you hold down the trigger?
If you up to a MAC10, then you’re even more screwed. Those bad boys fire at 1000 Rounds per minute. You’d be empty in less than two seconds.
Of course in movies this never seems to be a problem. The bullets will just keep on coming. And when they hit, look out! In movies it seems like bullets cause people to fly backwards, through windows, over railings into the air, up against walls, all sorts of nonsense.
In real life, however we have some things called action-reaction and conservation of momentum. Since this is NOT a physics column, let me put it as simply as possible. Provided the bad guy and the good guy have about the same mass, the amount that the bad guy flies back from being shot should roughly equal the amount the good guy flies backwards from shooting.
If anything the good guy flies back a little more due to wind resistance. This is true even with the mighty shot gun.
Movies always ignore the kickback. House of the Dead has a skinny little actress firing two desert eagles with no noticeable kickback. Not that that is in any way a good, or even a watchable movie; I just wanted to point out the height of idiocy. Well, actually, the height of idiocy would probably be Eraser which features HAND HELD rail guns. The rail gun is firing shots at nearly the speed of light. They fire it like it were a nerf gun.
The only movie that I remember actually bothering to pay attention to kickback is the original Men in Black with the “Noisy Cricket.”
If you check out the The BOX of TRUTH you can see a lot more of the reality of guns. Basically they take pictures of shooting stuff and what happens. (Motherf*cker am I eloquent or what?) You can learn a lot from that site. Things like a handgun can’t shoot a lock open, a rifle will go through body armor like nothing, walls and steel doors don’t stop anything more powerful than birdshot, and shooting stuff is fun.
I’ll also point to Intuitor’s bad movie physics, a site which I hope I haven’t plagiarized too too much. They’ve got a nice experiment showing cigarettes to be rubbish as lighters. Sorry Sin City and Usual Suspects fans.
But hey, as I said, every movie has at least a little bit of suck to it. Zathura, a movie I positively reviewed, has bad physics at every turn, but it can get away with it as they are consistent within the context of the story. The bad physics also fit in with both how the kids would imagine space to be, and the throwback Buck Rogers-ness of the flick.
Same thing goes for The Incredibles. The story is great, even if the physics are dreadful. Hey it is a cartoon about super-heroes, you can’t ask for much in terms of real world accuracy. Actually, there is a weirdest bit of suck in The Incredibles: in one scene Helen is on the telephone. We see her shadow, but not the telephone’s. That’s just freaky. I noted a similar flub in A Beautiful Mind. In that flick, they used CGI to put leaves onto trees, but not shadow leaves onto the shadow trees. An understandable oversight sincethe shadows aren’t terribly prominent. But I don’t understand how this happened in The Incredibles, where everything is computer generated.
But hey, it doesn’t wreck the movie. In fact, it is probably one of the top five super-hero movies ever. Plus in contains one of the greatest sequences of the last 10 years of movies, that being “the 100 mile dash.” That sequence puts to shame 99 percent of action movies.
I’m tired now. I’ve been rambling. Chalk it up to a ferocious and impromptu dance party with my daughter, who at the tender age of two is already a big fan of the Foo Fighters.
So what have we learned today? A little ’bout physics and a lot about guns.
