I work from home at an often painstaking but boring job. The advantages or disadvantages of this—considering your point of view—are that I day drink and watch more TV than I ever have in my life.
For two years of college, I lived abroad with no TV. When I came back, I finished my final two years broke in a basement room, again, with no TV.
For a good chunk of my time in NYC, I lived in relatively cheap apartments and rooms with no TV and didn’t really care. I worked at night and watched baseball games at bars on the weekends, and other than big games or the playoffs, I could live without baseball, hockey, and the NBA.
I didn’t want a TV when I finally got an apartment, but my mom wanted a new one, so I took her old one right before the pandemic, and it helped me to work from home. I’m used to some chatter from working in office buildings, and in the beginning, I finally saw a few really good shows like The Americans.
Music was out at first because it makes me want to drink, but I quickly ran out of decent shows and settled for anything that wasn’t too rotten, but in the midst of all that crap, there were a few shows I just couldn’t stomach.
Keep Breathing
The actor is gorgeous, and the show was middling at best, but what I couldn’t get past was that after nearly a week in the wilderness after her airplane crashed into a lake, she still looked like a supermodel. She’s collecting wood, and even dives back into the lake to retrieve something, but despite all of this, and still stuck with only one set of clothes, she looks amazing. Perfect hair, perfect makeup, and remarkably clean.
I camp for one day in a forest and I look and smell like shit. Even after camping near a lake where I could clean myself, on my way home after three or four days, I noticed a noxious odor on the train, like a combination of body odor and wood smoke.
After a few minutes, I realized it was me.
Meanwhile, this woman still looked perfect. No leaves in her hair, no dirt under her fingernails.
This woman is my type. She’s probably everyone’s type.
But I was constantly distracted by her magical cleanliness.
127 Hours
I enjoyed this movie, and like the main character, I used to go camping or hiking on a whim without telling anyone where I was going.
My problem is that after 127 hours, the main character actually has less facial hair than he did in the beginning.
Had he been shaving while one arm was trapped by a rock?
Several shows and movies about prison, soldiers or Westerns have the same problem, and once you notice it, you can’t helping seeing it.
I know most branches of the military require soldiers to shave. During WWI, is was to increase the efficacy of gas masks, and it’s generally considered to help morale, but there are tons of war movies where people are captured or don’t otherwise have the opportunity to shave, and in almost all of them, no one grows facial hair.
After months in solitary confinement, like in The Shawshank Redpemtion, Andy comes out with a little bit of stubble, or for most men, a three day beard at best.
127 hours is a little over five days. Shock and trauma can alter your physiological processes, but you’re not going to emerge with less facial hair than you started with.
Most movies are shot out of sequence, but they also have makeup artists.
You see this in Zombie movies and movies where people are stranded alone, too.
Men and women are living under constant stress and hyper-vigilance, but the men’s goatees remain perfectly coifed and women somehow find the time to shave their legs and armpits.
Computers Never Break or Crash
People are hacking away at impossible speeds, or coding away at school or work, and they never have random system failures.
I have to use Windows for work, and our platform is constantly fucking up, or a server farm that’s supporting us crashes, and it typically happens at the most vital moments.
But not in the movies.
A character may wander out of cellphone range, or they might encounter a firewall they slip by in seconds, but their phones and computers never just conk out for no good reason.
This is probably due to corporate funding, as no company wants their product portrayed as an unreliable piece of shit, but the entire premise of perfect computers implies that we’re incompetent idiots.
In the last iteration of Star Trek movies, everyone is a genius. They’re all impossibly good at their jobs, and when there is a problem, there’s an external cause they identify and fix.
Not only are the computers and engineering perfect, so are the people. They never make boneheaded mistakes.
They’re supposed to be heroes, but it would be humanizing if for once Spock said “I accidentally hit Control F-12.”
Sulu makes one error in the first new movie, but it’s more of a plot device that ends up saving them from being slaughtered and highlights their inexperience. Still, it was refreshing to see someone make a stupid error, no matter how unrealistic. Sulu’s job is to fly the damn ship, so it’s unlikely he’d make a mistake during a standard procedure he practiced for countless hours in simulators, but it does happen, and I’m glad that it did.
More common errors have been pointed out repeatedly, but leave a comment if you’ve noticed pettier mistakes that feel like a scratch in your mouth you can’t stop tonguing.
To be fair, they were all largely geniuses in the original "Star Trek", too, except for Captain Kirk....
Lost wasn't a great show, and it had a lot of the magical grooming problems you mentioned, but I appreciated how Matthew Fox lost weight over time.