Top Ten Movie TechnoFarts

• Lingering on bad F/X --So you couldn't afford Industrial Light and Magic for your monster, and it's just a guy in a rubber suit. Or it's CGI done by the local Kinkos. That's fine, but for golly sake, don't keep the dang camera on that crap if you don't have to. Look at the "Alien". They did the entire thing with very little footage of old slimy tube-head. Made it more scary, not less.
• Techno-lingo that Sounds like it was Written by a Film School Reject from the 60s --"We've got all the hard drives spun up, and still we can't find the monster!" one guy just said. As if he's got a big crank in the back of the PC where he's spinning up disks. Perhaps there's a little speedometer that tells him how fast the drives are going. Look -- it's simple. Just log into some technical web site and pick up some of the jargon. Don't be an dweeb
• Obviously Fake Props --So you couldn't afford a real rifle. Or maybe they don't let you play with sharp objects. But giving an actor a paint-gun (complete with visible CO2 cannister) and pretending it's an assault rifle? Or a computer room that looks like you got it at a junk sale at the local college? Or those pieces of gear that, judging from looking at the actors, must be made of lightweight plastic? I saw a flick the other week where an evil mutant shows up wearing machine gun belts draped cross-ways over his shoulder -- although there was no machine gun in the entire movie, and the bullets were obvious fakes. Plus he carried it around like it weighed six ounces. Which it did. I saw another movie where they had a machine gun they were shooting at the monster (from the hip, of course. Everybody knows that tripod mounted automatic weapons should be fired from the hip). It was a very unusual device. The guy kept firing at the monster, yet the machine gun belt never moved. No wonder the monster didn't die.
• The Science Laboratory from Central Casting --Ever see scientists go into a lab? Does it have a bunch of stupid beakers with all that different colored water in them? I hate that. It's like scientists everywhere need to keep every flavor of cool-aid handy in case of laboratory emergency. They used to always show those cool Tesla Jacob's Ladders, but you don't get that much anymore. A popular one now is the champagne flute with bubbling water in it. Must be a lot of call for boiling waters of various colors in science. Who knew? "My God man! Bring me a hot beaker of that lime green Jello mix, James, before the monster gets out of these straps!"
• The World Looks the Same Everywhere --This one really gets under my skin. Let's say you have a movie that's set somewhere exotic, like Hawaii, or Indonesia, or the Mideast. You get a couple of landscape shots of the location, but sure enough, within a couple of minutes it all looks like southern California. Everywhere looks like southern California. It's amazing. My kid sister used to love to watch "Dukes of Hazard". It was about moonshiners in the States. Know what it looked like? The South looks just like southern California. It's like the entire world looks the same -- either that or the film-makers figure the audience are dopes. Do your homework, guys. Save some of your rubber monster suit budget, pay the caterer monster less, and go on location. Cut costs somewhere else, or set the flick in southern California. But please, please, please! It's the 21st century. Technology is cheap. Shoot the thing where you say it's supposed to be.






Couldn't the programmer be Johnny Depp?





• Absurd Technology References --If you're a programmer, you must be able to hack in to the cell phone system and find out where the call is coming from, right? I know we do that all the time in programming shops I visit. Or you could hack into bank accounts, which is also a well-known programming skill. It seems that Hollywood thinks that you can't just be Java Joe Sixpack. Nope. If you program computers, you have to be uber-geek, hacker, cracker, and math whiz extraordinaire.

  
  And while I'm at it, ever since "Jurassic Park", when they made Newman the evil programmer, what's up with all of this fat, weirdo, social misfit programmer stuff? Don't programmers write books, play in the symphony, sail, kick-box, fly airplanes, and do everything all the cool people do? The only cool programmer I can remember was Harrison Ford in "Firewall", and that movie had so many plot foul-ups I keep a DVD around out of sympathy for Ford.

  My favorite one of these was in Independence Day. We went through all of that totally cool alien invasion and other stuff just to find out that, guess what, we can actually upload viruses into the alien computer systems! Talk about a major revelation! Not only are there aliens in the universe, they are evil, ugly, they have telepathic powers and want to kill us all, but they're also running an old version of Windows without Norton. You'd think with all those spaceships they could afford the subscription service, but no.

• Bad scene cuts --This is a post-production nit, but I still think of it as a technofart. After all, we expect a scene to have some kind of continuity. That's the way the real world works. I'm seeing scenes where one minute the guy is standing, then he's leaning back, then his hat is tilted the other way, then he's got a six o'clock shadow, etc. Here's a thought: after you splice the scene, try watching it. Before happy hour.
• Sensors that do Everything and Nothing --This may come as a surprise to some directors, but most of the audience understands the difference between a sensor and some kind of computer graphics you paid your 17-year-old to create on his iMac. Sensors have telemetry data -- location, status, temperature, etc. They usually don't send a picture of the item that is being tagged. They usually also don't have animation that shows what the object is doing. Think Google Maps and a pushpin. Maybe a little pop-up list.
• Technology that Works one Minute, then Stops, then Works --This one is so old it's gone past cliche status. There's a car, or a boat, or a computer, or a watch, or whatever. When it's not important, it works fine. Maybe we get to see that sometimes it is flaky (plot alert!). Sure enough, when things get tough, the car doesn't start, the cell phone has no signal, the computer can't get online, etc.The movie Cellular was good for this -- that lady had a phone that miraculously worked for a bit, then not, then worked, then not. It got to the point I was expecting the phone to be possessed by demons or something. But no such luck.
• That Stupid Progress Bar Whenever Something Important is Happening --You can watch people in movies use the computer all day long. They can access Canadian Tax Records, change their school grades, hack into the Pentagon, decode alien speech -- even recreate complex fluid dynamics equations real-time. But the minute they need it to do something important to the plot, which is usually copying a file, that stupid progress bar shows up. Some of these people must be using Petaflop systems in their handheld, but it takes 2 minutes to copy down the names of the three bad guys. This is just getting old. Think of some other tension device.

Bonus: Early signs your movie may be in trouble

• Announcing the plot during the first five minutes
• Quoting dialog before the characters do -- It's not the end, it's just the beginning. You'd better send everything you've got
• Actors who look about ten years older than they're supposed to -- who knew so many seniors in high school actually look like soccer moms?
• Extras look like the movie road crew or relatives of the producer
• People go into scary situations for no rational reason -- here let me check out this dark closet with the evil fog and maniacal laughter coming out of it, okay? I need some shoes
• Actively wishing for the characters to die
• A girl does not take her shirt off in the first few minutes -- oddly enough, the movies that resort to T&A at least realize they're bad, but they'll fight for your attention. If it's bad and they don't even care, good luck with the rest of it

I guess it's fun in Hollywood for writers, directors, and producers to sit around doing god knows what kind of drugs and thinking up and honking around with movie plots. Perhaps after a long partying weekend, some of these plots and cliches make total sense. But please, please, get your technology right. It's not that difficult. And if you screw it up, it's going to tick off geeks until the end of time. We can forgive you a lot, but we're going to have to draw the line somewhere.

Either make the phone work or give it up, Kim
Let's hope it's not Alec again on one of his benders