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Movies and television shows are full of blunders, some more noticeable than others, and each with their specific guild of victims. Ornithologists fume when British period dramas are overdubbed with American birdsongs. Government employees will tell you that the supposed main White House staffer in Contact has a nonexistent job. Archeologists hate movie shipwrecks, and marine biologists are already mad about the zombie sharks in the upcoming Pirates of the Caribbean installment, which, as cartilaginous fishes, should not have ribs—even ghostly ones.
But these are merely occasional grievances. There's one group of experts who can barely flip on the television without being exposed to egregious, head-on-desk mistakes: chess players.
"There are a ton of chess mistakes in TV and in film," says Mike Klein, a writer and videographer for Chess.com. While different experts cite different error ratios, from "20 percent" to "much more often than not," all agree: Hollywood is terrible at chess, even though they really don't have to be. "There are so many [errors], it's hard to keep track," says Grandmaster Ilja Zaragatski, of chess24. "And there are constantly [new ones] coming out."
[...] Peter Doggers of Chess.com notes another Dramatic Checkmate move: the felled king. "Tipping over your king as a way of resigning the game is only done in movies," he says. (See Mr. Holland's Opus, in which Jay Thomas slaps his king down after being owned by Richard Dreyfuss).A normal chess player will just go in for a good-game-style handshake. "This falling king thing has somehow become a strong image in cinematography," he says, "But chess players always think: 'Oh no, there we go again...'"
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by danmars on Thursday March 23 2017, @03:25AM (1 child)
100% agree. My area of highest expertise is in identity documents (driver's licenses, IDs, passports). When there's a spy movie and there's a spy waiting to see if his fake passport makes it by the border guards, and there's a clearly camera-based device with flatbed scanner-style lights moving around inside it, actual border or TSA people (and I) notice but nobody else is likely to. And when every single character ever has a license you can see and it's clearly completely fake or an ancient version of a card, only the people from that state who are watching closely (and I) are likely to ever notice. It's just the nature of having expertise and being around people who are clearly just faking it. That's what suspension of disbelief is for, anyway.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 23 2017, @08:29AM
there's a clearly camera-based device with flatbed scanner-style lights moving around inside it
That's an ancient technology called a photo copier. It was used to create a piece of paper with the details of who passed through for archiving. It didn't actually check anything, though, that was done manually by the guards.
As such, it may just be a simple mistake by an older film director, who remembers passing such a border back when they still used photo copiers, and expects modern technology to be an evolution of those.