Orca Bay Images wrote:
What did little mermaid Ariel eat under de sea, if not her own beloved subjects?

And why did all those prey animals celebrate the continuance of the devine-right rule of the apex predator lineage in The Lion King?

Because they didn't have any choice.  They are going to be eaten eventually anyhow.

GRMACK wrote:
"Anaconda" had a bad editing error.

Ice Cube said, "I'm going to put this boat in reverse and get us out of here."

Next scene shows boat going backwards, but the waterfall to camera left is flowing upwards from the river!

In reality, the boat was actually going forwards, but to make it "look like reverse," they edited it backwards and the waterfall goes in reverse as well flowing up the canyon wall.

I just watched it last night.   Something sort of bugged me so I replayed it up a few times and caught it.

No way!!  *dies*

GRMACK wrote:
In reality, the boat was actually going forwards, but to make it "look like reverse," they edited it backwards and the waterfall goes in reverse as well flowing up the canyon wall.

Reversing time... Superman did this in his first movie.

I wish you'd posted this a couple of days ago. I saw Anaconda on TV the other night. Didn't record it, though.

Fred Greissing wrote:
What about Gravity?

That film is so full of totally unrealistic rubbish it's ridiculous.

Utter rubbish and IMO not even entertaining...

Well at least it was a free screener.

Be specific, lazybones.

Lightcraft Studio wrote:
In just about every good-guy vs. bad guy movie, there's a point where the bad-guy has the opportunity to shoot the good-guy. The bad-guy always immediately kills the other characters on the good-guy's side without any discussion or hesitation.... but when they get their chance with the hero they always delay by talking, fiddling, or whatever... which winds up giving the good-guy the chance to somehow get himself out of the situation.

DEP E510 wrote:


I don't need no stinkin' gun, John!

That has to be the ULTIMATE irritation in movies. The bad guy is always a deranged, knee-jerk killer UNTIL it comes to the hero of the movie.

Then the bad guy becomes an orator, or somehow desperate to prove himself in hand to hand combat.

In the movie "The Incredibles" they actually had a name for that.  They called it "monologing".

Lightcraft Studio wrote:
In just about every good-guy vs. bad guy movie, there's a point where the bad-guy has the opportunity to shoot the good-guy. The bad-guy always immediately kills the other characters on the good-guy's side without any discussion or hesitation.... but when they get their chance with the hero they always delay by talking, fiddling, or whatever... which winds up giving the good-guy the chance to somehow get himself out of the situation.

Jules' explanation for citing Ezekiel 25 17 during a hit in "Pulp Fiction" makes for the perfect exception: "I just thought it was a cold-blooded thing to say to a motherfucker before I popped a cap in his ass."

Orca Bay Images wrote:

What doesn't make sense about a movie that compresses days, weeks, months or years into the space of two hours (or in the case of books, between the cover)? It happens all the time in movies and in books, usually to good effect.

Did the movie "Patton" make no sense?
How about "Gone With the Wind?"
"The Ten Commandments?"
"The Godfather?"
"The Longest Day?"

Your complaint about narrative time-compression makes no sense.

Do you actually experience time in such a compressed manner?

No, you don't. Now, if you want to equate movies to dreams, that's fine. But dreams generally don't make sense either.

Al Lock Photography wrote:
Now, if you want to equate movies to dreams, that's fine. But dreams generally don't make sense either.

Mine sure don't -- talk about bad editing, poor writing and low production standards!

heehee

Tropic Light wrote:

Science is self-correcting and subject to scrutiny.

Within the limitations of how we can experience/sense that data.

Which means it has limitations based on our faith in our experience/senses.

Lohkee wrote:
My personal favorite has always been suppressors (silencers) on revolvers.

One of mine too. I also love the tiny 4" long silencers on large caliber pistols.

Can't forget the 12 shot revolver, and the 300 round machine gun mags.

Al Lock Photography wrote:

Do you actually experience time in such a compressed manner?

No, you don't. Now, if you want to equate movies to dreams, that's fine. But dreams generally don't make sense either.

Who the fuck's talking about dreams? Quit babbling.

Does one really need to experience the passage of time in order to go along with a story that involves passages of time? No. Otherwise all those movies I cited (Patton, GWTW, Ten Commandments, Godfather, The Longest Day) and more would not have worked at all.

And sometimes the compression makes the narrative all the more effective. Take for example the movie "Hawaii." In one sequence set up to accomplish a roughly ten-to-fifteen year leap in the narrative and to suggest the married couple's long struggle on the island, the couple's young children are shown at a church ceremony. Jump cut to them at the same ceremony, but in their late teens. And the town outside the church has grown from a few huts and shacks to an Americanized town of wooden buildings. One doesn't need to see every building built one-by-one or to see the kids day by day in order to understand the changes. In fact, it's often more effective to leap in time. Certainly more cost-effective, both to the writer, publisher and reader (or movie maker and audience).

Your complaint about time-compression in narrative fails completely.

R  I  K  wrote:
During the final shoot out scene in Reservoir Dogs, Joe Cabot's gun is aimed at Mr Orange.  Mr White's gun is trained on Joe.  Joe's son, Nice Guy Eddie, is pointed at White.

Bang, bang, bang!  Everyone goes down...but who shot Nice Guy Eddie?

Mr. White shoots twice.  He's such a badass, he shoots both Joe and Nice Guy Eddie.

If you slow down the footage, you see that the timing is off slightly (Chris Penn starts to fall a bit before Harvey Keitel's second shot) but that's the real explanation.  Not bad for 8 different practical effects and 4 actors reacting in about a second of screentime--all in a single take.

You can see slowed down footage here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpIPQa32Aug

Orca Bay Images wrote:
The thing that most bugged me (happened in both Ghost and an episode of Star Trek the Next Generation:
Ghosts being able to walk/slide/fall through doors and walls, but not through floors.

In Ghost, a bad ghost got dragged across a floor by other ghosts and on out through a wall.

In STTNG, a ghost-like Romulan slid along a floor and right through the outer hull, to drift forever in space. Ensign Rho could run along floors just fine and poke her head through walls.

In there something cosmically sacrosanct about floors?

this bugged me too.  i guess maybe ghosts are still reacting as if they were still alive and they remember walking, standing on things but they can mentally accpe they are ghosts enough to walk through walls?

As for the Star Trek episode, i had the same thought.  Only thing i could think of is if the gravity fields being created by the floors someone was still able to react on their phased bodies so they could not float through the floors.  other than those guesses, it made no sense. ha

Orca Bay Images wrote:

Who the fuck's talking about dreams? Quit babbling.

Does one really need to experience the passage of time in order to go along with a story that involves passages of time? No. Otherwise all those movies I cited (Patton, GWTW, Ten Commandments, Godfather, The Longest Day) and more would not have worked at all.

And sometimes the compression makes the narrative all the more effective. Take for example the movie "Hawaii." In one sequence set up to accomplish a roughly ten-to-fifteen year leap in the narrative and to suggest the married couple's long struggle on the island, the couple's young children are shown at a church ceremony. Jump cut to them at the same ceremony, but in their late teens. And the town outside the church has grown from a few huts and shacks to an Americanized town of wooden buildings. One doesn't need to see every building built one-by-one or to see the kids day by day in order to understand the changes. In fact, it's often more effective to leap in time. Certainly more cost-effective, both to the writer, publisher and reader (or movie maker and audience).

Your complaint about time-compression in narrative fails completely.

You seem to have an inability to grasp that practical or even effective doesn't equal "make sense".

Time isn't actually compressed for humans.

Vivus Hussein Denuo wrote:
Even in otherwise well-made sci fi movies, in scenes of the space ship traveling through space, you can hear the engine sounds.  I guess sci fi directors in this regard elevate convention over physics.

This was popularized in the original Star Trek series. In the original opening sequence, they did the Enterprise speeding by silently, like it would in space. Unimpressive. They added the "whoooosh" sound, which was scientifically wrong, but much more effective, and kept it.

Eleven years later, Star Wars grasped this fully and had all kinds of sounds occurring in a vacuum, and to good dramatic effect.

Al Lock Photography wrote:
You seem to have an inability to grasp that practical or even effective doesn't equal "make sense".

Time isn't actually compressed for humans.

I'm not understanding this either. So to tell the history of the universe, we need to take 13.8 billion years (more or less) to do so? I mean, that's not how it goes, from a practical, realistic, logical, or artistic standpoint. When Lincoln gave the Gettysburg address, he said, "Four score and seven years ago," to start one of the best (and shortest) notable speeches of American history. He didn't have to detail out every year in real time.

Al Lock Photography wrote:
You seem to have an inability to grasp that practical or even effective doesn't equal "make sense".

Time isn't actually compressed for humans.

In storytelling, very often it is. Spanning time without detailing everything that happened in the mean time is almost a universal factor in storytelling.

What exactly doesn't make sense for you when in a story the narrative leaps ahead in  time? If a novel starts a chapter with "Three months later..." do you scream and hurl the book with great force? When in "Gone With the Wind" the narrative jumped in time, did you ask for your money back?

"Three months later" and other such narrative mechanisms are not only practical and effective, they make perfect sense.

Orca Bay Images wrote:

In storytelling, very often it is. Spanning time without detailing everything that happened in the mean time is almost a universal factor in storytelling.

What exactly doesn't make sense for you when in a story the narrative leaps ahead in  time? If a novel starts a chapter with "Three months later..." do you scream and hurl the book with great force? When in "Gone With the Wind" the narrative jumped in time, did you ask for your money back?

"Three months later" and other such narrative mechanisms are not only practical and effective, they make perfect sense.

You are still missing the point.

Real time doesn't leap.

Justin wrote:

Vivus Hussein Denuo wrote:
Even in otherwise well-made sci fi movies, in scenes of the space ship traveling through space, you can hear the engine sounds.  I guess sci fi directors in this regard elevate convention over physics.

This was popularized in the original Star Trek series. In the original opening sequence, they did the Enterprise speeding by silently, like it would in space. Unimpressive. They added the "whoooosh" sound, which was scientifically wrong, but much more effective, and kept it.

Eleven years later, Star Wars grasped this fully and had all kinds of sounds occurring in a vacuum, and to good dramatic effect.


I'm not understanding this either. So to tell the history of the universe, we need to take 13.8 billion years (more or less) to do so? I mean, that's not how it goes, from a practical, realistic, logical, or artistic standpoint. When Lincoln gave the Gettysburg address, he said, "Four score and seven years ago," to start one of the best (and shortest) notable speeches of American history. He didn't have to detail out every year in real time.

I didn't say it was required or even suggested, just that it doesn't make sense. The very fact that humans do this is one of the reasons so many are so confused about history, have so poor a grasp of geological or historic timeframes, etc.

Al Lock Photography wrote:
You are still missing the point.

Real time doesn't leap.

And you don't understand the most basic concepts of storytelling, such as the need for brevity. Storytelling is not reality. It's a simulation of reality.

I challenge you to write a novel in which there are absolutely no time-compressions in a narrative that encompasses years. Then submit it to a publisher (if you can afford the shipping of said manuscript since it's going to be huge). Not a vanity house. Not a print-on-demand self-publisher. A publishing house that has a vested interest in the quality and saleability of the storytelling. Your manuscript will get laughed right into the slushpile.

As for real time not leaping, when you wake up in the morning, do you need to know absolutely everything that happened while you were asleep? Does not knowing absolutely everything that happened while you slept somehow invalidate or negate the fact that you slept? Does that lack of knowledge invalidate the entirety of your life?

Storytelling does not need to totally reflect reality. It usually suffers if it does.

Please enlighten me as to your reactions to movies such as "Patton," "Gone with the Wind," and stories such as "Rip van Winkle" and "To Kill a Mockingbird."

Al Lock Photography wrote:
I didn't say it was required or even suggested, just that it doesn't make sense. The very fact that humans do this is one of the reasons so many are so confused about history, have so poor a grasp of geological or historic timeframes, etc.

Utter nonsense.

We can't understand anything about The Hundred Years War because we can't study every detail in realtime? Most of won't live long enough to go through all the details.

Vintagevista wrote:
and yet never realized they invented immortality.

(The human species in a nutshell)

*example - The first Dr. goes to a planet - where people were aging in fastime and she starts aging as well - they save her by using the transporter pattern (unchanged) still in the buffer from when she left and use a filter to reject any DNA that has aged as she passes through on return.

And she appears on the pad as the moment she left. . . .

Duh - - Immortality here!!!  But, nooooooo  it's off to another adventure...

Not only immortality, but Riker was reenergized as his own self in a different place through a "reflection" anomaly.

Not only do they have immortality, but you can make as many copies as yourself as you want, with your consciousness at the moment. The possibilities boggle the mind.

Al Lock Photography wrote:
I didn't say it was required or even suggested, just that it doesn't make sense. The very fact that humans do this is one of the reasons so many are so confused about history, have so poor a grasp of geological or historic timeframes, etc.

But of course it makes sense.

If you want to understand the life of Napoleon, you read about the important parts. If you relive the life of Napoleon, minute by minute, you'll be dead at the end, never having had the time to learn about anything else.

Orca Bay Images wrote:
I can't remember if it was "Mission to Mars" or "Red Planet," but in one of those Mars movies around 2000 in which a big setpiece sequence was a mini-meteor puncture of the ship's hull, causing the ship's air to leak out.

That scene would make sense except that the crew was near the point of passing out from lack of oxygen when they finally found the leak and patched it... including crewmembers in pressure suits but without helmets.

First thing any aircrew will do when there's loss of cabin pressure is to secure their own air. Can't save anyone else if you're passed out. And the first thing these astronauts would do is put on their damned helmets.

But they didn't......... And then the scene when the dude spurts his product placement item into the cabin to see where it floats..... To find the hole.

Justin wrote:
Not only immortality, but Riker was reenergized as his own self in a different place through a "reflection" anomaly.

Not only do they have immortality, but you can make as many copies as yourself as you want, with your consciousness at the moment. The possibilities boggle the mind.

I'd never thought of that till I saw that Riker episode but the copy had it's own personality not Rikers.......... That was the bit I found strange.

Surely if it was an identical copy right down to the mind/soul it would have been a walking mirror image and have the same thoughts and words as the original too. Imagine that.

Orca Bay Images wrote:
And you don't understand the most basic concepts of storytelling,

Just because it is a basic concept of storytelling doesn't mean it makes sense.

You seem to have a problem wrapping your head around this. Human brains are capable of perceiving things in odd ways. They don't need to make sense. That is the point.

Justin wrote:

But of course it makes sense.

If you want to understand the life of Napoleon, you read about the important parts. If you relive the life of Napoleon, minute by minute, you'll be dead at the end, never having had the time to learn about anything else.

No, it doesn't make sense. Just because humans do it, doesn't automatically mean it makes sense.

As demonstrated by your comment about Napoleon. It is ridiculous to believe that someone could understand the life of Napoleon by simply reading about the "important" parts. Who defines what are the important parts? Are you claiming the "unimportant" parts didn't have an impact?

Al Lock Photography wrote:

Just because it is a basic concept of storytelling doesn't mean it makes sense.

So storytelling makes no sense to you. It must save you a lot on movie tickets and books.

I've asked several times if those cited movies don't make any sense (and how) because they compress time and you just avoid the question. It's pretty obvious that you can't explain your stance. You apparently could make no sense from "Gone With the Wind," "Patton," "The Godfather" or "the Longest Day." Could you please mention a few movies that *did* make sense to you?

Al Lock Photography wrote:
As demonstrated by your comment about Napoleon. It is ridiculous to believe that someone could understand the life of Napoleon by simply reading about the "important" parts. Who defines what are the important parts? Are you claiming the "unimportant" parts didn't have an impact?

So there's nothing to be learned from the life of Napoleon Bonaparte because you don't know what he ate for dinner on May 5th, 1814?

Mike Collins wrote:
Heard this recently.  In "Terminator" both Kyle and the Terminator show up nude since they said only living tissue can time travel. So why do they both have hair?  Hair is dead.  The endoskeleton is also not living tissue so how was the terminator even able to travel in the first place?

One of the least bothersome examples. It was explained in the first one. They couldn't send robots back through the time machine so they built living tissues around the endoskeleton.

Since hair has DNA I would assume it would pass the test.

JonPhoto wrote:

One of the least bothersome examples. It was explained in the first one. They couldn't send robots back through the time machine so they built living tissues around the endoskeleton.

Since hair has DNA I would assume it would pass the test.

So how did the liquid metal terminator in the 2nd movie move through the time machine? It's bothersome alright

AdelaideJohn1967 wrote:

So how did the liquid metal terminator in the 2nd movie move through the time machine? It's bothersome alright

I agree with that example but is unrelated to the terminator model series 800 with living tissue built around it for the first movie.

The best explanation of the model T-1000 being able to go back in time which you referred too is the mimic properties of the metal alloy give it the ability to mimic tissue properties. It's a stretch but it's also a movie. Doesn't bother me too much.