Your most pointless TV/movie/book nitpicks

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Isn't this the same movie that has a big dial on an air traffic controller's main console for adjusting the height of sea level by over a hundred feet?!

No idea. At a certain point, my brain shut off to save itself further injury.

 

[Old Fezziwig]

The second episode of John Adams, the mini-series with Paul Giamatti, has a scene where Henry Knox brings the cannon from Fort Ticonderoga to Cambridge by way of Braintree, Massachusetts, presumably so he can chat with Abigail Adams. Now this at least a thirty-mile detour if you go straight through Boston and back, but, in the episode, he's coming up from the southeast, heading back towards Boston, which is mindbogglingly out of his way. I shut it off, put the DVD back in the Netflix mailer, and put it directly in the mail.

 

[Riley]

In Titanic, Leo DiCaprio’s character references ice fishing on Lake Wissota, near Chippewa Falls Wisconsin.

Lake Wissota did not exist until the river was dammed, years after the Titanic sunk.

Incidentally, I once applied for a job to clean toilets, etc. for a summer at Lake Wissota - and they did not offer me the job.

 

[aco175]

This. I only served in the army for three years, over 25 years ago. Yet it drives me nuts and totally ruins my immersion when shows get easy details about the military completely wrong. Lots of times is is things like not knowing how to salute or where medals go on a uniform, but sometimes it is just missing something that would be obvious to someone with a military background.

I heard that proper uniform metal placement was something that the government did not allow in film at one point, like back in the cold war up until the 90s. The thought was that spies were not smart enough to get a copy of AR 670-1. It was eventually done away with.

 

[Riley]

Oh, and Stranger Things:

1) That’s not a 1970’s-80’s Millennium Falcon in Stranger Things. The engine stickers are wrong.

And,

2) The Bangles’ Hazy Shade of Winter was 1987, and also had no business closing an episode set in 1983.

Great song, and great show though.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

The Bangles’ Hazy Shade of Winter was 1987, and also had no business closing an episode set in 1983.

Great song, and great show though.

I remember that! And yeah, I saw why they wanted to use it, since it was amazing. But the Less than Zero soundtrack the song appears on is still in the show's future.

 

[Riley]

But the Less than Zero soundtrack the song appears on is still in the show's future.

Did anyone actually watch Less Than Zero?

I know more about 80’s movies and pop culture than is probably advisable, but I’d totally forgotten about it and have no memory of ever hearing anyone mention anything about the actual movie, ever.

 

[Umbran]

Okay, but this is the moon. If you want sub-orbital paths filled with near-vacuum, you have the entire surface of the place available. Just build your accelerators out there, aligned to the correct path, and you can fire off cars to your heart's content, no need to build hundreds of miles' worth of precisely-aligned tunnels. Give the cars even the most rudimentary maneuvering thrusters and interlinked guidance software, and you can have several in the sky at once from the same accelerator, shifting to parallel paths to avoid each other and then re-aligning as they come in to the accelerator at the other end.

I dunno, that's not such a nitpick. The words "rudimentary" and "interlinked guidance system" should not be used in the same sentence. Launching and landing flying capsules to fixed entry/exit points is a whole lot more complicated than running a capsule up and down a fixed track.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Did anyone actually watch Less Than Zero?

I did. It was a trendy novel and it was a pretentious movie about druggie yuppies featuring Robert Downey Jr. You didn't miss much.

 

[Tonguez]

In Titanic,

funny you mention Titanic, I remember my grandfather (who was a merchant marine) having conniptions over the scene where the pair are standing at the Bow of the ship, saying “no, that would never be allowed”