You'd think this would create empathy, not the reverse...

[bellatrys]

Apropos of everything, you'd think - well, I would, but maybe that's just me being weird - that someone who had had the experience of dealing with a bunch of really scary stalkers/threateners in the past due to using one's real legal name online, would NOT conclude from this that everyone else in the world ought to be subjected to the same dangers

Comments

[sethg_prime]

There ought to be a category in the Emmy and Oscar awards for Least Contrived Plot.

Several friends of ours have raved about The Gilmore Girls and we finally borrowed (or had pushed on us) DVDs of the first season. After seeing the premiere, my wife and I were like, "OK, so this poor-by-TV-character-standards woman applied to send her daughter to a ritzy Connecticut prep school, and was surprised by the tuition bill? And she didn't apply for financial aid? What planet did the authors of this script live on?" I can suspend disbelief in vampires and werewolves and FTL, but not that.

That might be the greatest boon to film quality

[bellatrys]

There ought to be a category in the Emmy and Oscar awards for Least Contrived Plot.

Attaching some kind of tangible, competitive award for Aristotelian Plausibility and continuity standards - that could be a really good thing.

I can suspend disbelief in vampires and werewolves and FTL, but not that.

Indeed! Just like with Nora Roberts' novels - the failures of both basic mythological research and having any idea about actual business and workplace life/culture or basic home ec (aside from furniture refinishing, which she apparently *rocks* at and can describe pretty plausibly) make the parts which are *supposed* to ground the "magical/mystical" bits the least realistic! It's the stuff that's *supposed* to be taking place on *this* earth, under *this* sun, and not in Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, which is (so often) the least believable. (If it *was* supposed to be Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, it would explain so very, very much...)

That gets me, too

[deiseach]

The example that sticks out for me was the tv series "Grace Under Fire", in which we are given a blue-collar divorced single mother.

Okay, nothing wrong with that.

Except she's supposed to be working-class and - given her situation - struggling (working poor). But - she lives in what, to me anyways, looks like a nice and indeed pretty fancy house (detached, with plenty of yard room); her job (working at the local oil-refinery) obviously supports a good standard of living. Yes, oil workers can make good money, but those are the guys who work on off-shore platforms.

Suffice it to say, it didn't strike me as credible :-)

It's an example - to quote the "Simpsons" episode where Mo gets plastic surgery and finally gets that part on the soap opera he applied for way back - of 'tv-ugly, not real life-ugly': this is television poor, not real-life poor.

Re: That gets me, too

[sethg_prime]

If I recall correctly, Grace was supposed to be a struggling single mother in the US, in the South. I'm from that region, and there's nothing unusual about a struggling family there living in a detached house with a yard. What was unusual was the size of the house; I remember a pretty standard "sitcom family home" set. It would have been more realistic to have Grace and her kids living in a much smaller and older house or in a trailer. If the show was stuck with the set it had, they could have made it look old and not so recently renovated and had Grace renting one floor of a large old house, with another family living in the same building

[smurasaki]

*raises hand*

I thought Disney's Atlantis ripped off Stargate(1994). Strangely, the people I saw both movies in the theater with didn't seem to notice. Even after I complained about the exact same irritating things.

Er...was there really pig surfing in Attack of the Clones? Please tell me he was exaggerating. Or have I just done a really good job of blotting out the prequel trilogy?

[richardpilbeam]

It was more like giant flea-surfing.

[smurasaki]

Not an improvement.

as you see, there is some debate among naturalists

[bellatrys]

as to whether the Shaak of Naboo should be considered as resembling more a Terran pig, tick, or flea - but yes, there was a scene of him trying to ride one standing on its back, which I can't find any stills of, but is described in this scene transcript here. There are also other references to it, nearly all negative, under the search string Anakin + pig + surfing (or + riding)...