Fatale Abstraction

It's amazing the crap that the film industry gets utterly WRONG. Then again, when someone has a budget that is millions of dollars, you would think they would bother to pony up - I dunno - say, a $1000 or $5000 consultant fee to ask a seasoned expert to analyze technical things in their films which make the film-makers and prop people look like idiots.

I have this weird spatial sense , and I rarely get lost. It amazes me when someone driving the car can't remember which way we are supposed to go. I know about 20 good ways to get between A and any other point in Dallas. So when the Discovery Channel did that fictionalized "documentary" on a category 5 tornado hitting Downtown Dallas (Par-tee!), I watched with interest. Apparently, the city emergency services were in our hideous City Hall (a structure strange enough to be featured in Robocop) which is at the South side of downtown on Marilla Street. A guy--let's call him Bill--is a city meteorologist, but his wife (Jane) is in a pickup truck which breaks down east of downtown under the I-45 overpasses which are the eastern border of downtown. Bill is hanging on and trying to hold down the fort at City Hall, but Jane calls and is freaking out, so he runs out and hops in his car to save her and their wee bairn. However, when he is shown hauling ass toward her, he inexplicably is on I-30 by the Sylvan exit, which is about 3 miles west of downtown proper. Anyway, it just drove me nuts that instead of going the 1-ish mile (I'd take Young or Cadiz from City Hall to I-45) on outer downtown thoroughfares, he'd drive off practically to Fort Worth to get the scenic vista of tornado-meets-downtown on the way back in. SO, yeah, someone should have paid ME to help them line up their shots in a way that made sense. Yeah, I know. Nobody cares.

You see why I'm not good at cleaning house?

Husband is an engineer-type, and I've always enjoyed the snorts of derision that issue forth from his person when corny, got-it-wrong-to-the-degree-of-bullshitty-stuff on computers is used in movies - One of the most special of which was that tard-fest called The Net starring Sandra Bullock. SB has been in some real stinkers, but she's always fun to watch, so why not? Anyway, there's some "computer" stuff in that movie that is beneath pitiful - worth it for the unintentional giggles, alone!

Then there's Billy Bob Thornton's (horrid, in my opinion) much ballyhooed Monster's Balls. At one point, the inveterate racist BBT has come around to realizing that he's attracted to Halle Berry, whose husband he's just executed at the penal facility at which he works. He has a real Barney Fife moment when he takes HB's car to a mechanic for repair. As he's walking away from the garage--the big man--BBT sends all credibility(?) to hell when he says to the mechanic "Be sure to check those plugs and points." Now, her car is a late 80s/early 90s ride of Asian extraction. All production passenger cars are made with electronic ignitions, these days, and there ARE no points. Made after the 1970s? Pretty much no points in that dog. The points to which he would be referring if the car had points, would be breaker point distributors. The bps controlled the flow of the 20-40 thousand volts of electricity from the battery and ensured they were distributed to each spark plug at the right time. Advent of electronic ignitions mean that points is one less thaing Billy Bob Thornton has to worry his purty little haid about. Someone shoulda told him.

Next there's something in War Of The Worlds that just sticks in my craw and it has to do with the whole electromagnetic pulse, which happened at the time the aliens were beaming down. No one has seen anything but lightning, but all cars stopped working because of EMP. Tom Cruise is walking by an auto repair garage and a guy is standing by a minivan holding up a blackened starter:

Helpless mechanic: Ray, can you believe this? Starter's fried, whole damn thing!
Tom the Omniscient: Well have you tried changing the solenoid?

OK. There's a lot here to discuss here. First of all, the solenoid was actually ON the starter he was holding up, so if the "whole damn thing" is fried, well, that would include the solenoid, right? Anyway, at the suggestion of Tom, neighborhood Ombudsman, the mechanic has a Eureka! moment and turns to get back to work. Later in the film when getting out of town fast seems prudent, Tom drags his kids back to that garage where they hop in the now-functional minivan and ride off into an uncertain world. I realize that this is a movie and the premise is already incredibly thin, etc., suspension of disbelief and all that, but puh-lease! There are some universal truths that one has to ignore to buy this kind of premise in a film.

Perhaps the principal idiocy of the film is that a guy like Ray, that character, would stop to see what's going on with a mere alien invasion rather than finding his precious vintage Mustang Fastback where his teenage boy had abandoned it on the road. Let's be honest - he'd be out finding his car before saving babies from a burning hospital.

Another of these truths is the fact that anything in your car with a coil (starter coil, ignition coil) or a computer would be fried by the EMP. This means you can't just run into a shop and grab another one off the shelf and replace it and heigh-ho the vehicle back to life. Unless your car runs on Yabba-dabba-doo Caveman power a la Fred Flintstone, your chariot will not respond to your command after exposure to an EMP. Would-be escapees like the hallowed Tom & entourage would be well-served to keep a rickshaw in the garage. Bicycles? I could respect an escape on bicycles. How about an off-roading mountain bike chase? Mountain bike chases are underdone in modern cinema, aren't they? I've never seen one.

I KNOW, I just spoil everything, don't I? You'd laugh if you knew the crap films I find utterly wonderful. Am I being too picky?