What's new

Movie myths (1 Viewer)

Jeff Gatie

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Aug 19, 2002
Messages
6,531


No way you'd call the difference between coke and sugar "subtle". First of all, coke is not sweet, even when cut with "milk sugar". Second, coke numbs your mouth, so that's why they rub it on their gums (not teeth) to test it.
 

Greg_S_H

Senior HTF Member
Joined
May 9, 2001
Messages
15,846
Location
North Texas
Real Name
Greg
I saw another common myth yesterday in a movie called "The Devil at 4 O'Clock": death by quicksand. In this one, the guy was pulled under in seconds. Now, it's possible to drown in quicksand--after all, one can drown in a puddle a couple inches deep--but the human body tends to become buoyant like a cork in real quicksand. Again, the movie version is much more exciting. I can just see realistic Tarzan:

"I say there, old chap! Lend me a vine, chop chop! There's a good lad! I've been bobbing here for hours!"

(Could the above be an illustration of the myth of how the British speak? ;) )
 

Richard_D_Ramirez

Second Unit
Joined
May 21, 2001
Messages
439
Really more inaccuracies than myths:

"Elbow bending" while applying CPR: Years ago in high school, we were taught to "lock" our elbows and have our arms straight while applying chest compressions during CPR. Having the elbows locked applies more downward force than if they were loose. Next time you see CPR on film, take a look at those elbows! More than half the time, the actor applying CPR has their arms at near 90 degrees!

"Orange juice" while playing the violin: One thing that always catches my eye when I see an actor playing a violin in a movie is their wrist position. I was taught not to collapse the wrist while holding the neck of the violin. My teacher would always say, "Imagine placing an orange between your wrist and the violin. If you collapse your wrist, you're gonna squeeze that orange and make orange juice!"
 

ChristopherDAC

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Feb 18, 2004
Messages
3,729
Real Name
AE5VI
Of course, all kinds of things have that numbing effect, amitryptlene [sp?] for instance which I think is generic Elavil. I was once under doctor's orders to crush it into a powder [which is white, by the way] and take a pinch by mouth in order to get a dose very much smaller than the smallest pill. Fortunately I'm not the sort of person who attracts police attention! :D
Just as a side note, I have such heavy whiskers that I shave double: with the grain and then immediately against it. And I still have to shave twice a day if I'm going out in the evening. :frowning:
 

JonZ

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Dec 28, 1998
Messages
7,799
My ex was a nurse and was constantly commenting on how they do things wrong in movies and tv (checking for pulses especially on the neck, CPR, etc)
 

RobertR

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Dec 19, 1998
Messages
10,675
Something as flimsy as a car door or even a wooden water trough will shield you from bullets.
 

ChuckSolo

Screenwriter
Joined
Jun 26, 2003
Messages
1,160
I love it when some bozo on TV puts a silencer on a revolver! They fail to realize that the gap between the barrel and the cylinder makes silencing a revolver next to impossible.
 

Chris

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Jul 4, 1997
Messages
6,788
One which occassionally gets popped:

If you're in a sinking car, your best bet is to wait until water pressure equalizes to kick out the wind, not to try to open the door as it's going down to try and escape.

Another one that gets me in a bigger way is this one.. people automatically throwing water on stove fires.. in many cases, bad idea (especially if a grease fire) yet people do it anyway in the films.
 

TheLongshot

Senior HTF Member
Joined
May 12, 2000
Messages
4,118
Real Name
Jason
One I like to bring up is humans unprotected in a vaccum. The thoughts first began after watching an episode of Farscape where the main character does a "space walk" of sorts, having to leave a ship or get killed. I was thinking that that wasn't going to be possible, that a human wouldn't be able to survive that.

Well, after reading up on that, actually, there isn't much preventing human survival in space. Outside of the lack of oxygen, or being exposed to a radiation source (a sun), it sounds like a human could survive for about a minute or so if they were prepared for it.

So, your blood doesn't boil, your eyes don't bulge out and you don't freeze (only after a very long time.) It particularly makes the ending of "Total Recall" look almost cartoonish.

BTW, I shave against the grain. :D

Jason
 

BryanV

Stunt Coordinator
Joined
Feb 16, 2004
Messages
135
I can see it now, in the next presidential election the country will be divided between those who shave with and those who shave against the grain.

Speaking of space, how 'bout star wars?

Would you really hear all those noises in space?

Would you hear the pew pew of the lazer blasts.

Could they be echoing off of the other craft themselves to provide the sound.

I honestly do not know much about the physics of space.
 

FilipM

Stunt Coordinator
Joined
Dec 12, 2000
Messages
62
Glocks as plastic guns that are undetectable by metal detectors, when in fact, Glocks have a great deal of metal in them.

People being thrown back violently when shot by almost anything. In reality the bullet has most power when fired so thanks to Newton we know that the shooter should be thrown back too if the weapon was that powerful.

Airplanes uncontrolably faling out of the sky the very second their engines cut out.

Cars exploding after even the slightest impact.

Giant gasoline explosions for every sort of bomb.

BTW All true Americans shave with cold water!!!! Shaving with hot water makes eagles cry and apple pie taste bad...

:)
 

Lev-S

Second Unit
Joined
Jun 29, 2003
Messages
324


I'm Canadian so I guess I'll be shavin' with STEAMING HOT WATER!!! :D

I love the popping the magazine out of a gun and then forgetting about the one cartridge left in the chamber, the sounds that punches and kicks make on impact, and the imperviousness to pain that the hero experiences while knocking out goons with said punches and kicks. Only one movie represented the effect of somebody's jaw making contact with your knuckles perfectly: "Hotshots". Cary Elwes and Charlie Sheen "man up", as they play fighter pilots mocking the testosterone-laden "Top Gun", and put in mouth pieces. After yelling back and forth some incoherent threats, they then hit each other only to fall back in pain with one going "my face!" and the other "my hand!".
 

Chris

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Jul 4, 1997
Messages
6,788

One of the best moments in a film is in "Bis Ans Ende Der Welt".. as the nuclear satellite explodes over head, causing an EMP to kill their prop plane engine, one turns to the other and says "It's the end of the world" as the plane glides to the ground and makes a very rocky landing, but sails as it drifts losing altitude. Very accurate, and the way it occurred was time to show the dismay of the characters and the acceptance of what had just happened.

(beautiful film, IMHO, and I'm grateful all the time for the R2 only DVD director's cut 3 disc release)
 

Andrew Priest

Stunt Coordinator
Joined
Mar 1, 2004
Messages
79

Basically since sound is a wave propagated through a medium, and space has no medium at all, there can be no transmission of sound through space. Now sound being generated by a ship could certainly be heard on that ship as the sound propagates through the metal, air, and other materials of the ship. So you might hear your own engines, weapons fire, and hits that you take. Provided they make enough sound to reach you.

A few space related oddities:

Lasers in space as bright and colorful: A laser in a vacuum is invisible as without something to diffract the beam the light simply doesn't stray from the direction of the beam. No light means nothing to see.

Bright planet with stars around it: When looking at the bright side of a planet the stars are not visible. Even to the human eye the planet - or at least Earth - will wash out all but the bery brightest stars.

Big big engines always on the rear of ships: Since it requires as much energy to slow down in space as it does to accelerate, a ship with its main engines on one side would need to turn around to slow down. In order to approach a planet as quickly as possible, meaning maximum deceleration as close to the planet as possible, you'd have to come in backwards.

PS. Lasers wouldn't really 'pew pew' since they are a beam weapon. Probably make very little sound at all since they convey more thermal energy than kinetic.
 

Don Solosan

Supporting Actor
Joined
Oct 14, 2003
Messages
748

I don't know about explosions, but fire acts differently away from Earth's gravity. Instead of jumping up, it surrounds the thing that's burning. That's something that Hollywood hasn't tried. They'd rather blow it to smithereens (probably with a two-dimensional shock wave).

Another of my favorite movie mistakes relates to handguns: filmmakers love the sight and sound of an automatic. Think of the opening of The Matrix: cops stealthily moving up a hallway toward a room harboring a dangerous criminal, guns at the ready. They reach the door and after they kick it in, you hear all of them pulling the slides back to load rounds into the chambers of their guns. Which means they were sitting ducks until after they let Trinity know they were there.

In some movies, characters shuck shotguns a couple of times without firing a shot, simply because it sounds cool. On the commentary for The Mummy, the director talks about being disappointed that handling a gun didn't cause more noise, and the sounds effects crew concocted a bunch of sounds for him.

Or people using guns that are too big for humans, like Jesse Ventura and the mini-gun in Predator. I understand there's a movie where John Wayne pulls the cannon out of a crashed bomber and starts shooting bad guys out of the sky.

Someone else mentioned cars exploding whenever they crash; to Hollywood, every car is a Pinto.
 

Yee-Ming

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Apr 4, 2002
Messages
4,502
Location
"on a little street in Singapore"
Real Name
Yee Ming Lim

IIRC Clarke wrote a story (probably a short story) where this was an issue as well, where the crew had to transfer from one ship to another, there weren't enough suits, and the airlocks couldn't dock, or some other problem. So in the "briefing" the CO gives to his crew, Clarke in effect discusses what really happens in a vacuum to a human body, whilst the "radiation" issue was addressed by having the crew transfer on the far side (from the nearby star) of their ship into the rescue ship. One thing I remember was that instead of holding your breath, the crew were directed to breath it all out instead, IIRC since you can't hold it against the vacuum anyway so it's better to "get rid of it" rather than have it nearly explosively come out of your nose. And they slowly reduced the pressure in the airlock to 0.1 atmosphere before "blowing the hatch".
 

Chris Farmer

Screenwriter
Joined
Aug 23, 2002
Messages
1,496
Another example of intentional bad science analogous to the bent-elbows CPR is found in the Andromeda Strain. One of the characters has an epileptic seizure in response to a bunch of flashing lights. Well, in actuality, the lights were intentionally flashed in a manner that was the absolute least likely to cause such a seizure, for obvious reasons.
 

Rob Gardiner

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Feb 15, 2002
Messages
2,950
I've worked for a private investigator for over ten years and I have observed that the private investigator is one of the most grossly mis-represented professions on the big (or small) screen.

One particularly cartoonish example was Cedric the Entertainer's performance in the Coen Bros' INTOLERABLE CRUELTY. He burst into a motel room, uninvited, with a video camera (complete with mounted floodlamp) exclaiming, "I'm gonna NAIL yo' ass! I'm gonna NAIL yo' ass!"

Even TV shows such as Magnum P.I. get it wrong. Tom Selleck carries a gun (there is no legitimate reason for a private investigator to ever use a gun on the job) and routinely conducts illegal searches of homes after breaking in. (No investigator who wants his client to be able to present the results of his work in court would ever break the law.)

In general terms, investigators are always portrayed as "going undercover" or executing some sort of elaborate ruse to obtain information under false pretenses.

My boss's job consists mainly of contacting witnesses to an incident, explaining who he is, and interviewing them. Also, he contacts government agencies and obtains publicly available information. But these activities aren't the most interesting things to see on the screen. :)

EDIT: Warm water, with the grain on the face, against the grain below the equator (on the neck).
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Latest Articles

Forum statistics

Threads
356,810
Messages
5,123,571
Members
144,184
Latest member
H-508
Recent bookmarks
0
Top