This is my last Hollywood rant -- I PROMISE!!!

[zombienerd]

Just to play devil's advocate for a minute here;

After spending 8 years in the Marines and now a few years carrying the M9 on a professional level, I can tell you this for a fact. The US military knows less about sidearms than Hollywood does.

I have never carried with a round in the chamber on a Federal installation.

Did you serve post 9-11?

After 9-11, every watchstander on deck in Norfolk, VA was Condition 1 with the M9 and M500. Magazine in, round chambered, safety on. The M-14's on watch were kept in condition 2 (Mag inserted, no round in chamber)

It wouldn't make sense (to me) that the marines were C2 when the Navy is C1.

 

[Phil DeGraves]

Hollywood is ENTERTAINMENT not EDUCATION.

Which just makes one wonder why actors testify before Congressional Committees on topics they've made movies about. Totally ridiculous!

 

[GEM]

To explain the world to politicians who don't read books or newspapers?

Also, how come nobody recognizes Superman as Clark Kent in the movies - if I take my classes off, no one fails to recognize me?

Just read two books where the heroes pulled back the hammer on their Glocks to make the point that they were ready to shoot.

 

[Phil DeGraves]

Just read two books where the heroes pulled back the hammer on their Glocks to make the point that they were ready to shoot.

Just like the guys that flip the safety off their revolver to prepare to shoot, (The Taking of Pelham 123; the movie was better than the book) or "expertly hold the wrist of their shooting arm with their support hand." (Relic).

 

[30mag]

I don't buy that excuse. I think that movies should strive for realism. That's what separates a good movie from a great movie. A movie wouldn't show a guy driving a car with one hand up his ass and the other hand in the ashtray. Because that's not how you drive a car.

ROFL.

 

[30mag]

And, let's not forget the classic "jump it in the car and slam it in park"
Just watch, anytime anyone is driving a column shift in a movie, they always shift the lever UP... into Park.

 

[30mag]

Not to mention the enormous explosions that are a result of every car wreck EVER.

If cars really exploded like that in real life, other than the Pinto, I'm pretty sure we would have bigger problems than guns here in America... oh, what's that?
We do have bigger problems than guns?
Oh... well... crap.

 

[yeti]

Don't ignore the nuclear hand grenades. Fun with 100 lbs of c-4 in a convenient hand held package.

 

[yeti]

And it would be remiss of me not to mention mans recently discovered ability to out run and jump explosions. Nothing more exhilarating than having been blown up and outrunning the blast. I guess Churchill would have put it "having been blown up and missed".

 

[Sinixstar]

Which just makes one wonder why actors testify before Congressional Committees on topics they've made movies about. Totally ridiculous!

So Charlton Heston was a moron who knew nothing about guns, correct?

 

[RPCVYemen]

I think that movies should strive for realism. That's what separates a good movie from a great movie.

I'd like to humbly suggest that you are out of your mind.

Sound of Music? Mary Poppins? Apocalypse Now? Lord of the Rings? Take a list of the top 100 movies of all time, and verify your claim about realism.

What is the return on the extra cost of training actors and maintaining realism in a movie? $0 What would a reasonable business man invest in a process that returns $0?

Most moviegoers are concerned with the characters motivations, interactions, etc. Why and when a character tries to kill another character is in general much more important than the details of the mechanism.

Mike

 

[yeti]

Sound of Music? Mary Poppins? Apocalypse Now? Lord of the Rings? Take a list of the top 100 movies of all time, and verify your claim about realism.

WAIT! WAIT! Wait! Are you saying the Austrians did not break out in spontaneous inappropriate singing in the days surrounding the Anschluss?

The hills are alive, with the sound of NAZIs..............................

 

[98C5]

Jeepers Creepers had to have the most car gaffes I have ever seen/heard. It was like a 9 speed manual that shifted by itself with BOTH the girls hands on the steering wheel.

Back to the gun gaffes though. I always make fun of the sound effects when watching these movies. Some studios do really well others are so off the mark. Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark had one of those 22 shot revolvers.

Then again, we are all gun people here, so we'll notice these errors. Just like my brother is a copy editor for a magazine. He tends to correct my emails for grammar.

 

[Golden Hound]

People are missing my point about movie realism big-time, but it's probably my fault for not making it more clear. So I'll attempt to do that now.

I have been a huge movie fan for all my life. It was once my dream to go to Hollywood and become a great director, though I abandoned that when I realized how damn hard it would be. But my passion for movies, and my very critical eye for analyzing them, remains, and always will.

There are different degrees to which a movie can violate the laws of real life. Obviously a superhero movie or a Sci-fi film like The Matrix is going to have a lot of violations of the laws of physics, gravity, time perception, et cetera. These things are generally okay to violate in the context of a fantasy movie - because the philosophical assumption at work here is the idea that different theoretical universes might have different rules of physics or time than our universe. Or that a super-being might be able to do things that we humans cannot, or that events may be able to take place in a virtual-reality computer simulation of life that could not happen in actual life.

All of this is fine. I don't think that all movies should only be about real life. Of course there is a place for fantasy, sci-fi, et cetera.

However - there is NO EXCUSE for having guns in a movie not work the way actual guns work. No excuse whatsoever. It is not justifiable on the grounds of it being fantasy or sci-fi. A gun would not randomly go "CHH-CHH!" without the action being operated in the "Matrix universe" any more than it would in the real universe - because the guns are the same guns. If it was some kind of made-up laser blaster, that would be a different story. But when a character in a fantasy movie has a shotgun that EXISTS IN REAL LIFE, I expect that shotgun to operate the same way it would IN REAL LIFE regardless of whether or not the movie is in a fantasy setting.

Here's an analogy that will maybe make it easier for you to understand. Say there was a Matrix type sci-fi movie with a character who was Italian. But every time this character talked, he said things like "yabba dabba dobba bobba hobba gobba." And everyone else went on referring to his speech as being in the Italian language. This is simply not acceptable or justifiable in any way whatsoever. You can't just say, "it's a sci-fi movie, so his Italian doesn't need to be real Italian, it can just be made up gibberish." It doesn't work like that.

Certain things need to be realistic EVEN IF THE SETTING OF THE MOVIE IS NOT REALISTIC. Say Bruce Willis, in Action Movie X, pulls out a pack of cigarettes, sticks one of them in his mouth backwards, lights the filter end, and starts puffing away at it as if this is totally normal. This is not acceptable. "It's just a movie" is not an appropriate justification for this. That is not how you smoke cigarettes in real life, and if it were to happen in a movie, regardless of whether or not the overall context of the movie is true-to-life, it would be absurd.

And a gun randomly going "CHHCHH" is just as absurd.

I don't think I'm being overly hard-to-please or unreasonable here. I think that the guys who make movies should try to have the details of real-life objects be as realistic as possible. As I have said before - it's what separates the great movies - movies like Full Metal Jacket - from the mindless, mediocre "popcorn flicks."

 

[Coyote3855]

Mcall911 says "Such things remind me of the old Westerns where the shooters "threw" the bullets from the barrel of their Colt SAA's, as if such a practice gave the bullets extra velocity."

Apparently there is some reason for this behavior. In his book "Sixguns," Elmer Keith recommends this practice in situations where a precise sight alignment is impossible. He used this technique when shooting at a running coyote from the back of a running horse. I've also heard but cannot quote a source that lifting a cap and ball handgun briskly back over the shoulder dumps the cap fragments out of the action. (?) My favorite from those same old Westerns is when the bad guy ran out of bullets, he would throw his SAA at the good guy. Or even the good guy would toss his handgun in the rocks if the villian got the drop on him. My dad would visable wince at the potential damage to a good gun.

 

[yeti]

And why did the bad guys always throw their empty guns at Superman? You'd think, after you shot the guy 6 times, with no visible result, throwing a perfectly nice revolver, at the man of steel, would be uselessly redundant.

 

[Justin]

Here's an analogy that will maybe make it easier for you to understand. Say there was a Matrix type sci-fi movie with a character who was Italian. But every time this character talked, he said things like "yabba dabba dobba bobba hobba gobba." And everyone else went on referring to his speech as being in the Italian language. This is simply not acceptable or justifiable in any way whatsoever. You can't just say, "it's a sci-fi movie, so his Italian doesn't need to be real Italian, it can just be made up gibberish." It doesn't work like that.

They do that in movies all the freakin' time. Up to and including hiring people who can mimic the sound of a particular language without actually knowing how to speak the language itself.

What most people who nitpick movies don't understand is that even in films that strive for a particular level of realism, it's never going to be perfect simply because the process of creating a film makes it impossible to be perfect. Anyone who's ever spent even a moderate amount of time on a location shoot for even a low-budget production understands that film making is a collaborative art form requiring the input and talent of dozens, if not hundreds, of people and that often times it is impossible to simply go back and re-shoot a scene because there was a technical inaccuracy that only nerds on a gun forum are ever going to notice.

This is certainly not a reason to excuse away abysmal firearms handling, but frankly there's absolutely no reason to get so bent out of shape over inaccuracies in movies in television. It's entertainment. If you want proper gun handling, turn the idiot box off go dry fire. Or make your own error-free movie.

 

[Golden Hound]

They do that (speak fake languages) in movies all the freakin' time. Up to and including hiring people who can mimic the sound of a particular language without actually knowing how to speak the language itself.

But they don't do that in a great movie. They didn't do that in The Godfather.

See what I'm getting at here? Some movies are great, some movies are just mediocre. Some movies make a profound statement and others are just marketing schemes to sell toys or get people's asses in the movie theater eating snacks. The difference between these types of movies is the amount of effort that the director, actors, screenwriters, set design people and everyone else put into the movie.

frankly there's absolutely no reason to get so bent out of shape over inaccuracies in movies in television.

I'm not getting bent out of shape so much as I'm simply being a discriminating consumer of the arts. Movies can be more than entertainment. Great movies are ART. Crap movies with no realism are "entertainment."

I wouldn't sit and listen to a band play a concert full of wrong notes for two hours because it's "just entertainment." I want, at the very least, competence enough to not play wrong notes when I listen to musicians. Stupid gun errors are "wrong notes" in movies, and they lower my estimation of the movie and the people involved with producing it.

David Lynch - creator of Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr. - is one high-profile director whose movies I consistently like, and he consistently displays realism with regards to firearms in his films and in Twin Peaks. In Twin Peaks they even talk about the new model Beretta pistol that the FBI has been issued and David Lynch himself, in a cameo as the FBI bureau chief, visits the town of Twin Peaks to present Agent Cooper with his new pistol and explains all of its features in detail. That show also had a scene where the sheriff's department begins a new program of pistol range training after one of the deputies has a negligent discharge. THAT is the sort of gun realism that I wish there was more of.

 

[heavyshooter]

As far as modern TV fair goes, "The Unit" comes as close as anything to doing it right, most of the time. Heck, they got pinned down and actually ran out of ammo the other night!

I agree whole heartedly. They clearly have a good advisor on the show.

 

[heavyshooter]

I think that movies should strive for realism. That's what separates a good movie from a great movie.

Yes, because The Matrix wasn't one of the most ground-breakingly awesome films ever made due to a lack of realism.

Justin, you have to admit that there is a fundamental difference between fiction and science fiction.

In addition to that, the whole point of the Matrix is that they are NOT in the real world. Morpheus makes this crystal clear when has asks Neo the defining question, "You thinks that's air your breathing?" If the air isn't real, then the guns can't have a much hope. Their minds dictate reality according to the reality violating program of the Matrix; that's like the whole point of the movie. If my mind desires an infinite clip capacity -- Abra Cadabra -- bring on the agents. They are literally denying reality. I love that you chose that example because it is self-refuting. In fact, I would be so confident (or arrogant) as to say that all other examples will be equally self refuting. Bruce Willis and Sylvester Stallone do not have the freedom of a reality altering computer program. Fiction vs. Science Fiction -- Let's keep the straw men to a minimum brethren. Compare Apples to Apples. Please.

 

[heavyshooter]

Hollywood is ENTERTAINMENT not EDUCATION.

I beg to differ. I am amazed by how regularly the "entertainers" are seen as the most respected political philosophers of our day. More to the point, the entertainers willingly assume that role. Sean Penn, Rosie O'Donald, Oprah Winfrey, George Clooney, and many others are not speaking as entertainers. They are speaking as lobbyist and they are being heard.

 

[heavyshooter]

I think that movies should strive for realism. That's what separates a good movie from a great movie.

I'd like to humbly suggest that you are out of your mind.

Sound of Music? Mary Poppins? Apocalypse Now? Lord of the Rings? Take a list of the top 100 movies of all time, and verify your claim about realism.

Watch the Straw Men guys. Again I must point out that you are comparing Apples to Oranges. The Lord of the Rings does not represent itself as realistc fiction; Die Hard does. The beast in The Lord of the Rings are referred to as mythical. The Die Hard Glock is not. As we proceed with the discussion, lets not obligate Golden Hound to the reality standard of flying nannies and hobbits. Are you kidding me! It cannot be that hard to catch his point.:banghead: With all due respect.

 

[Golden Hound]

Thank you, for understanding what I'm trying to say.

If there were a movie about a magical gun that could do all sorts of krazy tricks, that'd be one thing. Then, maybe, there could be an excuse for the gun goofs. But in a movie where the guns are ostensibly the same ones used in real life - regardless of what genre the movie is, whether it's fantasy, sci-fi, action, or whatever - the guns should operate the way they do in real life.

 

[Sharps-shooter]

yabba dabba dobba bobba hobba gobba

That is just awesome. Never in my life have i laughed so hard at complete gibberish.

Once i saw this show called dirty sexy money, and the guy had this side by side shotgun, and he racked the slide on it, or it somehow made that sound. That was funny. I try not to let that sort of thing ruin it for me, but I do consider it bad storytelling-- glaring inconsistencies.

 

[Golden Hound]

Thanks, it's good to know I can do at least one thing right - gibberish!