Oh, boy, was he strict. Harvey Korman, 1927-2008
I remember watching him on the Carol Burnett Show, trying not to laugh at something Tim Conway had done or said. That was as funny as the rest of the stuff.
Category Archives: Movies
We Have Top Men Working On It
Top . . . men.
No, not the Ark. It’s Indiana Jones and the Conservation of Momentum at what looks to be a new physics-y blog, Built on Facts
Haven’t seen the new movie, so I’ll just take their word for it.
Life of Riley
I’ve seen the movie National Treasure a couple of times (and it was on again recently) and while I enjoyed it, there are a few things that bugged me about it. Two physics-related, and one, not so much.
1. Why use a green laser to set off the temperature sensor alarm? Green is easy to see, and could have been noticed by anyone in the room. What would have been better is an infrared laser of the same power — the heating would have been pretty much identical. But since Riley was looking through the viewfinder of his camcorder, he would have been able to see an IR beam! Camcorders filter IR for the recorded signal, but tend not to do so for the signal going to the viewer. You can try this with a TV remote, and see it flash in the viewfinder of your camcorder or digital camera. So he could have heated the detector with a much lower risk of detection. Riley’s a techno-geek, so he should have known this.
2. They lucked out with the shadow of the steeple of Independence Hall. The sun’s relative location in the sky varies with the time of year, both vertically and horizontally, due to the tilt and orbit of the earth. This means the shadow would have traced out an analemma, which I have previously discussed. That the shadow pointed to the correct brick was fortuitous. There should have been some clue in there about time of year, and some mention of how to correct for that.
3. Jon Voight being so pissed off. His “all it will do is lead to another clue” anger would have been more believable to me if anyone in the family had ever figured out a clue before, and especially if he had failed to solve a riddle where others in the family had succeeded. As it sits, though, it only made sense for him to think the first clue was a fake. But once it was solved, he was proven wrong.
Bad Chocolate
No, not the powdery, chalky stuff.
I noticed that Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was on today. Now, movies have a lot of bad physics in them, and I generally don’t let that get in the way of the movie enjoyment. But … there’s the scene where Augustus Gloop falls in the chocolate river and gets stuck in the tube leading to the marshmallow room. First there’s the “the suction’s got him” remark. That’s only a minor nit; suction is due to the absence of pressure the way we’ve defined things, so low pressure doesn’t suck — higher pressure blows, as it were. But that’s just starting the sloppy physics. Willy Wonka next explains that “terrific pressure is building up behind the blockage” and that will get him out. But that’s not the case — at least not at the time it’s stated. There’s no flow anymore, so the pressure can’t be building up. The chocolate is still flowing in the other pipes, and the river is at atmosphere. (and under those conditions, the pipe had better not be more than about 32 feet tall, since that’s all a one atmosphere pressure difference will get you). At best, what can happen is that the pressure in front of Augustus is dropping.
Now, Grandpa Joe declares that Augustus will leave the way a bullet gets shot out of a gun, but what we see is Agustus shooting up, but the chocolate lags behind. It shouldn’t happen that way. Unless Augustus is particularly flatulent (and this is never proffered as an explanation, though with his diet it’s not a bad conjecture), the gap behind him will be a vacuum, and at best the tube in front of him is at vacuum as well (though we hear him yelling, so that can’t be the case as long as we can hear him). There’s no force to propel him faster than the chocolate. Certainly not like a bullet in a gun, where you have rapidly expanding gas exerting a force.
And I won’t even get started on “fizzy lifting drink.” I’m switching over to “Cool Hand Luke”
Just don't show it
Censors wagging the dog
OK, for the Nth time in recent memory, there was a movie on cable, with which they just shouldn’t have bothered. If you’re going to show Blazing Saddles but are going to blip out every instance of words like “nigger” and “faggot,” just don’t bother. It’s a satire about bigotry. It loses a whole lot in translation when you try and clean up the bigoted speech.
Similarly, if you are going to show The Jerk, either leave “blowjob” in it or cut the whole damn scene. It’s pointless otherwise.