Things in movies that don’t make sense...

[MrsWhites]

I was watching Ghost last night, Sam can’t touch/pick up anything but he can sit on a chair?? Took up far too much of my time today thinking about that!

Not movie but tv

How come on the likes of Eastenders or Corrie it doesn't matter how down and out you are you can always afford the pub, you can sit in the pub at any time of the day and no one blinks an eye particularly if you should be working and better yet where do the kids be when everyone else is in the pub? Do they have secret babysitters?

Whenever a character is carrying a suitcase it's clearly empty.

Gravity.

Why didn't highly trained astronaut Sandra Bullock follow orders ever. Not even once.

Virtually everything in Robin Hood Prince of Thieves, but particularly the travelling bit: one minute he's at the White Cliffs of Dover, saying "Tonight we shall sup in my father's house!" (or words that effect) to Morgan Freeman; then he's up on Hadrian's Wall; then (finally) he's at Nottingham, having travelled an additional 400 miles for no discernible reason. In a single day.

In Bridget Jones Baby, Bridget goes into court and when the judge orders a short break, asks to talk to Mark. They are then filmed walking across London streets to enter a second building before starting their talk. Surely Mark needed to stay in the court building if it was only a short break? Why couldn’t they have their conversation there?

I never understood the whole “why don’t Marty’s parents recognise him.” They only knew 1955 Marty very briefly and didn’t take any photos. Human memory is not a camera and very few people have such perfect recall they’d be able to perfectly visualise the face of someone they met briefly decades ago. Plus it’s not like 1985 Marty just dropped out of the sky. They raised him from birth and have spent 17 years looking at him every day, and for most of that time he didn’t look like “Calvin” the guy they met in high school, he just looked like their baby/their toddler/their small child. At what point do you go, “huh our child is starting to resemble that kid we met once.”

Yes, Bridget Jones’s central London flat? How? When she’s an office admin type?
Same as Carrie in SATC. Writes one column a week, lives in Manhattan. And has a designer wardrobe!
Monica in Friends apartment is explained as her aunt’s place. But what about Chandler & Joey? Central
Park!

Oh and in GOT they did pay attention to realistic travelling times in the first series (it takes the Lannister/Stark train three episodes to make the trip from Winterfell to Kings Landing and is obviously a major undertaking). In later seasons characters just teleport all over the place!

A 90-minute thriller that's supposed to be packed with plot, frights, car chases simply can't have the protagonist taking out the bins, having difficulty finding a parking space outside the deserted warehouse where the baddies are waiting, or stopping to go to the loo on the way to the big shootout -- there isn't time, and it's dull.

Somebody has never seen every European arthouse film - or even heard of Mike Leigh, for that matter

In Love Actually, there is absolutely no way the lad would be able to get through all of those layers of security to get to the actual departure gate. If he did manage to get past security in one place, they wouldn't just think "Oh, well, he won fair and square!" without radioing ahead to warn their colleagues at the next stage to be extra alert and give them details of the boy to look out for. Also, he knows the way to the correct gate instinctively and doesn't have to keep stopping to puzzle over any baffling array of signs, screens or nonsensical maps.

Bridget Jones has very wealthy parents doesn't she? I guess they helped her get the apartment.

I don’t think so, her parents are pretty ordinary retired rural-ish middle class types.

Joey and Chandler’s apartment is much smaller and less nice, and for most of the series Chandler had a solid job which it’s implied paid well (and which he actually went to occasionally). He financially subsidised Joey so assume he covered the rent when Joey was between acting jobs.

Somebody has never seen every European arthouse film - or even heard of Mike Leigh, for that matter

Since when did Mike Leigh, or indeed European arthouse cinema, make 90-minute thrillers involving packed plots, car chases and fights, ie the type of standard Hollywood fare I was specifically talking about?

I adore Mike Leigh, and the last time I went to the cinema before lockdown was to a French film festival where I saw Celle Que Vous Croyez (Safy Nebbou, disappointing) and Deux Moi (Cedric Klapisch, pretty much standard CK fare, but lots of artfully humdrum ordinary life, gorgeously filmed -- never has someone going to the pharmacy for an insomnia remedy or buying rice looked so pretty).

Something that’s always bugged me about Crocodile Dundee (the first one): Richard proposes to Sue in front of everyone at her welcome home dinner at her dad’s house and Sue accepts. Mick gets upset, leaves early, gets drunk, gets in a fight, etc. The next day we see Mick leaving his hotel to go walkabout. Then Sue turns up at the hotel to follow him and shouts that she’s not going to marry Richard after all.

But why don’t we see the scene when she calls it off with Richard? It jumps from her saying ‘yes’ and sipping the ring on, straight to her chasing Mick across Manhattan and declaring she loves him.

Really pisses me off.

why Marty McFly's parents don't ever recognise him in the present as the guy who originally set them up

At the very least, you’d think his dad would have questions about parentage...

John Travolta's character goes to the loo several times in Pulp Fiction - and something dramatic and/or disastrous happens while he's gone each time.

Also In the Sixth Sense, did he not realise he was dead? Literally no one speaks to him the whole film apart from the annoying kid. Not even his wife. My husband and kids are pretty good at ignoring me when I nag them to do stuff, but if it had gone on for days I might wonder if something was a tad off.

The whole point of The Sixth Sense is him not knowing, uh-hum, his current status. Spoiler alert etc etc. The little boy character talks about all the dead people he sees, who don't even realise they're dead.
Incidentally, when that film first came out, my sister had seen it and told me it was great and that "it had a big twist at the end." So I sat down to watch it imagining what big twist would be coming later, saw the first scene and thought to myself "A-ha - wouldn't it be a big twist if Bruce's character died in this bit?" Watched the whole film thinking about that and noticing all the ignoring and his wife's grief and only speaking to the little boy and knew I was right long before the dramatic twist ending. God damn my sister.

Also when Calvin Klein underwear became a thing, Marty's mum would surely have had her memory jogged?

Mine is phone signal. Noticed it initially in y Gwyll/Hinterland because it was filmed where I live. At the time it came out I didn't have phone signal in my house, but they're running around after suspects in heavily wooded valleys and on remote mountain tops and never, ever fail to get a signal on their phones.

Monica in Friends apartment is explained as her aunt’s place

Grandma’s place.

Also when Calvin Klein underwear became a thing, Marty's mum would surely have had her memory jogged?

In real life people have the same name as celebs all the time. I went to school with a couple of people who have the same name as current-era celebs. You just go "oh huh I knew someone with that name once."

Modi of Trolls 2.
They live in a big Island full of other trolls but when they fled the Bergen in Trolls 1 they never found these lands? And the Bergen never found them even though cook search for like 20 years?? And no other lands have Bergen's or equivalent?
And why don't the classical music trolls sing?

Plesky

I know - I was just being silly They are indeed two very different genres - and I know for a fact which one I prefer. Nuts In May has to be one of the best films ever made - and just about nothing ever actually happens in it!

Having already moaned about Love Actually, I realise that Richard Curtis films aren't really heavily based in fact or plausibility - as long as they have a great deal of posh swearing gratuitous nudity and an idiot called Bernard in them, it's all good - but the already arbitrary-sounding rules of time travel in About Time don't even adhere to themselves!

Also, in The Boat That Rocked, even if we ignore the whole matter of informed consent (as the film did), how would the girlfriend really not notice that the rather corpulent middle-aged man she was expecting to have sex with was actually a slim, very young man - just because it was dark?

When the police come round to question you about a brutal murder you are completely disinterested and carry on washing the car/putting the shopping away

@WeBuiltThisBuffetOnSausageRoll

Plesky

I know - I was just being silly They are indeed two very different genres - and I know for a fact which one I prefer. Nuts In May has to be one of the best films ever made - and just about nothing ever actually happens in it!

Oh, just a moment me of not catching tone. I adore films where nothing happens. Especially if they're French and involve Daniel Auteuil looking seedily into the middle distance while drinking coffee, or Charles Berling slicing tomatoes in a moody way in close-up.

And I love Nuts in May. The amount of drama generated by whether sausages should be cooked on a fire in contravention of campsite rules is a thing of beauty.

Any number of god awful Christmas movies about the American Santa mythology - Elf, The Santa Clause etc.

They all rely on the premise that cynical, jaded adults no longer believe in Father Christmas, but Father Christmas is real in the world of the film.

Where the fuck do these people think the presents are coming from?

They’re also sick-makingly mawkish but that’s by the by.

I do need to give a shout out to Medium though, the premise of a psychic working for the police is a bit 'out there' especially as she so often mistakes things; BUT, but, big BUT the only TV family that fills the dishwasher, makes / changes the bed, has a modestly sized house and basically normal life.

Yes, absolutely. And Joe pulls his weight with family life (very unusual in US TV/films I find).

My bugbear is detectives going to confront serial killers with no backup. I am always shouting at the telly, "Wait for backup you moron, this won't end well." Except it usually does end OK of course, because they can't kill off the lead character.

Any film that involves time travel is maddening. I hate time travel plots. It completely ruined the Avengers saga story arc for me - SO many plot holes once time travel is introduced to the mix.