Date: Fri, 08 Mar 2002 00:31:16 -0500
From: Steve Smith <sgs at aginc.net>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: papers, please
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>

Samuel Lubell wrote:
>
> At 06:45 AM 3/7/02 -0800, Nicki wrote:
> >I feel the pain when I see computer related things in
> >movies.  "Clear and Present Danger" was painful for
> >the computer related actions and the security
> >violations.  I gave up counting after a while.  Jack
> >Ryan had to have the more wired job in Washington!
>
> A worse computer movie was the Net with Sandra Bullock.  This was painful
> because the computer stuff was central to the movie and they got so much of
> it wrong (mainly because they wanted neat pictures so they wound up with a
> Tetris looking virus and such.

A friend of mine saw "The Net" in Silicon Valley when it first came
out.  When she typed in the bogus IP address, the entire audience burst
into laughter.  Not the effect the director had in mind, I'm sure.  Not
the audience he was making it for, I'm also sure.

But is it any different with anything else?  Cars, for example.  I
surfed past one where they had a bunch of guys in a jacked-up pickup
truck run a guy in a Mercedes off a mountain road after a chase.  I
thought everybody knew that jacked-up pickups don't go around corners
very well, and Mercedeses (Mercedi?) do.

Hey, people go the the movies to *escape* reality.  Directors soemtimes
take it to extremes ...

--
Steve Smith                                           sgs at aginc.net
Agincourt Computing                            http://www.aginc.net
"Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense."