Do You Get Upset By Illogical Details In Movies?

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Well, Doctor Who is supposed to look cheesy, I think. It always did, so notwithstanding the better technology these days they still made it look silly. And inconsistencies in Lord of the Rings, well, some are caused by the filmmakers, but any that Tolkien did I figure can be chalked down to it being a big fantasy story. What the heck. Although I did wonder one recently... Would creatures like the Nazgul really hesitate to tear the entire Prancing Pony apart to find out if the hobbits were in a different room? I mean, so Bill Ferny tipped them off, why didn't they slaughter everyone in the inn to make sure, or go after Bill when they didn't get what they came for? Is that beneath the great fallen kings? Is that orc's work? Mind you, that doesn't come anywhere near to ruining the books for me. It just makes me chuckle.

I do find it very hard to watch any LOTR movies, though, anymore. I suspended my disbelief in the theaters, and I am quite good at that or I could never enjoy Kate and Leopold (I like a good mush, not any old mush but a good one, especially where the principals involved do not leap into the sack, but this used a thin skeleton of sci-fi and Meg Ryan's mouth looked very wrong, must've had something injected somewhere). But more and more, as I reread the books, I get angry at the things he changed or left out (Jackson that is). I could make a list as long as my arm of the scenes I would have loved to see on film with the gorgeous music, awesome costumes, great scenery and outstanding cast. And instead we get soap opera acting approaches to Sam and Frodo traveling with Gollum, and Merry with "attitude", and Butterbur... well, he was perfect, but his pub had a pretty severe change in events. And Aragorn, ugh... For five minutes he was Strider the filthy ranger in hooded cloak and long pipe peering creepy from the dark corner and watching Frodo like he stepped right out of the book... And then he's suddenly angst ridden cookie cutter reluctant hero with some cool action scenes and his girlfriend "Xenarwen" who ruins another of my favorite scenes (along with Frodo's seagull imitations, what was that all about?) by waving her little sword and chanting in bad Elvish, whose daddy suddenly thinks she shouldn't have anything to do with Aragorn and is suddenly angry with every human in Middle Earth... Until the end, when suddenly it's King Aragorn. What I've finally seen is that the once seemingly subtle changes Jackson made were in fact huge, sweeping alterations in subtle places... character intent. Theoden was not angry with Gondor. Aragorn was not ambivalent. Elrond did not try to break up his daughter's "engagement". Faramir made the right choice to begin with, not eventually. Frodo would never send Sam away in favor of Gollum.

But there's where I get carried away. Hee.

What I find helps me when a movie goes too far (or not far enough) is downloading the Rifftrax when available. It's done me a lot of good watching the one for Attack of the Clones. What a shame that George Lucas screwed it up so badly by (among the other ways he screwed it up) hiring a guy whose acting might someday be good (I'll give him that) but who simply was not up to the material. He and Padme had absolutely NO chemistry (even as a married couple in the following film) and yet whole huge chunks of the endless story were devoted to putting them into the least romantic scenes ever filmed with romantic intent, each more cliche than the last. But play the Rifftrax alongside, and you hear a guy say, "Here Anakin uses another Jedi power: begging," as well as random comments about how much she likes sand.

And yes, I do notice the little mistakes sometimes, too, though I can let those go better. If it was something that they simply should have found, or obviously ignored because it invalidated their whole plot, it does tick me off. The movie Practical Magic springs to mind as another that used a skeleton witchcraft plotline to paste their chick-flick female bonding/romantic comedy onto. I like a good romance and HATE chick bonding flicks. I can't even remember the end of it, just that there's was some huge dramatic climax with someone hanging from a roof, and the next thing you know, it's Halloween and everyone's happy and you don't even know what happened. Then it ended and my sister-in-law, who later left her husband and declared herself Wiccan and lesbian (mind you, her husband wasn't exactly the sort to inspire heterosexuality in a woman...), said, "Wasn't it good?" and my step-mother-in-law, the compulsive liar, agreed enthusiastically while I gaped and said, "But they never explained... what the heck..." What a waste of two hours.

So, um, yeah... sometimes I do get bogged down in details.

Only when they break the logic of the film universe, I'm not going to complain about super powers in a super hero movie, for example. What annoys me is when something is either blatantly wrong (bad guy muzzle loads a mortar shell into a grenade launcher in Le Femme Nikita) or inconsistent within the movie itself (timeline in the Silence of the Lambs films and books). As a gun guy I get a lot of material to make fun of from action movies, since film makers will usually go for what looks cool over what's realistic, I don't get too bent out of shape unless it's really egregious. My favorite ongoing mistake has to do with physics, specifically that any bullet powerful enough to literally knock someone over must have a commensurate amount of recoil, it's simply unavoidable. There is a certain amount a designer can offset with muzzle breaks and hydraulic systems, but in general a gunshot cannot actually lift someone off their feet. See Bruce Willis's film Last Man Standing for my favorite application of Hollywood Ballistics, it's pretty funny.

For the most part, I don't care. If something's really obvious, it might be annoying, but it won't taint my overall opinion of the film/TV show/whatever.

The biggest exception, however, are musicals, mainly 50s era musicals. When a couple is walking down the street, and one of them starts singing to the other, it's cheesy, but I can buy it. However, when everyone else on the street suddenly joins in and somehow all mysteriously know the words to the song that the first person was singing as well as knowing all of the choreographed dance moves, etc with no explanation, I get really annoyed. It's probably why I love the episode of Buffy, Once More with Feeling so much. The whole point of that episode is the gang trying to figure out why they're all singing and dancing.

every time that happens, I think of Monty Python and the Holy Grail...and start shouting "Stop that Singing!"...

Okay, I raved enough but I can't stay quiet about musicals. It's a big mystery to me why it is that I can't stand some and love others, but when I hate one, I really hate it. And I hate most of the really big, popular ones. I think it has something to do with cheapness... and cheesiness. If they're prancing and gadding about en masse in a manner that suggests that either Rodgers or Hammerstein or whoever decided that there needed to be a "number" there and came up with one, usually an unbelievable perky one, it just makes me want to scream. I once heard or read, I forget which (and I wish I could find a reference to this) that John Lennon had a similar issue. I believe it was McCartney saying that if they were watching a film and the girl in it would throw her arms out and burst into song, John would be out the door in seconds.

Yet, curiously, my favorite is a Bollywood musical called "Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge" which is as campy musically as it gets. But they do work the songs into the plot, and I like the songs.

One song in a movie that worked, though, even though it had much of what would bug me, was the "Marion the Librarian" number in The Music Man.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnFv29iPACc

He was singing it to tick her off and get her attention. The library was full of teenagers who know him from earlier in the movie and join him because it it's funny to mess with the librarian. She got into it at one point then caught herself and stopped. So there was some thought put into why they were doing what they did. And it always makes me laugh, especially when he jams a marshmallow into her mouth and she spits it off the balcony.

But this is all another category, I guess. Movies that by their very nature do weird things we can't get our heads around. I would expect a lot of Aspies to scratch their heads over musicals. But you never know.

Musicals are like pr0n, except all the action is vertical instead of horizontal. Sort of like Fred Astaire movies, except singing instead of dancing...

Illogical details can annoy me, but only mostly in live-action shows as they should be the ones to make more sense.

I get very turned-off by illogical details in movies. It's probably why I only own about 5 movies total. I actually wish it didn't bother me so much, so that then I could enjoy more movies. But for me, one illogical detail can make the whole movie too silly for me to continue watching, and I'll become instantly uninterested and stop watching it altogether.

I'm not really BOTHERED by irrational stuff per se, I think it's quite fun to notice them.

For me, it shows the quality of the writing and directing if I notice them, but am able to suspend my disbelief.

there is (isn't there always?... a web site out there about 'what they got wrong' in each movie made...things like Bruce Willis calling from a phone booth in 'Washington' marked 'Pacific Bell', etc.

Can't remember the name of it (gettin' old...

I can't stand the musical stuff in Family Guy, but it maybe be largely because I can't stand Peter Griffin (with occasional exceptions... particularly the one where he punched a very masculine woman, quote... Onlooker: "She's going into labor!" Peter: "You mean he's going into labor.").

"The Sound of Music" is on my hit list, too (soooo perky), but that's just the arbitrary nature of it all. You just never know which one you'll love. I don't actually love "The Music Man" in that much of the music is so camp I can't take it. But it has a great story and funny characters, the main one especially. And "Singing in the Rain" is a very good one indeed. It's one of a very few movies my mom says she can watch over and over (she's one who doesn't like to repeat, once she's seen it, she's seen it).