Bad Natural History

[urbpan]

Okay, so when you watch a movie with animals acting like people (you know, talking and such), you must suspend some of your disbelief. I'm okay with that--it has been this way since Aesop.

But these days the filmmakers are mixing in lots of actual Natural History with animals acting like people. For example the fish in "Finding Nemo" look (and to some degree behave) real, but they don't eat one another. In "Antz," there are both male and female worker ants. (This movie, which I am only halfway through, is the reason I'm posting. There's an awful lot that I could say, positive and negative about it, but I need to finish it, and I probably have to watch "A Bug's Life" for comparison, and the go see "The Ant Bully," too.) Even the bug scene in "King Kong," while exciting, is laughable from a Natural History standpoint (beyond even the bugs' great size--I'm talking behavior).

I want to know this, from you all:

At what point does faulty Natural History interfere with your enjoyment of a movie?

Comments

[almeda.livejournal.com]

There's a series of Wizard-In-The-Modern-World books out there that drives me nuts for those same reasons, because it's set in Chicago.

I grew up here. I suspect the author is either asking vague questions of local informants, or lived here for a few years.

The protagonist lives in a neighborhood of wood-frame Victorian houses well within the city proper that are all on limestone bedrock secure enough for him to have tunneled out a sub-basement level beneath his basement apartment.

1. There are no wood-frame houses in Chicago. They were outlawed in the late 1800s. We had this fire, y'see ...
   
2. Points for knowing Chicago's on limestone. However, it's generally about forty feet down. Under the sand and sludge.
   
3. Basement apartments are highly illegal, too.

Et multi alia. ARRRRRGH. Plus the 'get on Highway A, go a long way east, change highways, end up somewhere that seems SO REASONABLE when all you know about it is the map ...' problem.

I kind of like the *plots* and *characters*, but every time the damn guy goes anywhere I have to put my fingers in my ears and go lalalalala while skimming or he drives me buggy.

[brush-rat.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I suspect it's particularly bad for places that have become more or less mythic, like Chicago, New York and Las Vegas. Writers don't feel like they have to do the research because they already know all about those places from previous books and TV shows.

Okay, one more. There's a really ridiculous Clint Eastwood movie called "The Gauntlet" in which Clint has to transport a prisoner form Las Vegas to Pheonix. They cross the border from Nevada to Arizona in the middle of a flat desert. Look at a map. That border is the Colorado river. They actually filmed a bunch of it here and they couldn't get that straight. The killer part is, that it could have made a great plot point, because there are only two places to cross the river into Arizona, so the bad guys could have simply set up camp at those two places.

[almeda.livejournal.com]

It's particularly galling because there are a lot of local shibboleths that he gets *right* -- slang terms for neighborhoods, stuff that you don't pick up from just having rented an apartment in Andersenville for two years. And then he'll have a vibrant Puerto Rican community ten minutes from the airport. ARRRRGH.

Names withheld to protect the guilty. :->

[brush-rat.livejournal.com]

And off I went to look up the meaning of Shibboleth. Thanks, I don't get exposed to many new words anymore. I like it.

[almeda.livejournal.com]

And it's *biblical*.

*pious look*

*giggle*